• Weaponizing Everything, Including Lawyers And Balloons: China's 1999 Manual For Defeating America
  Weaponizing Everything, Including Lawyers And Balloons: China’s 1999 Manual For Defeating America

  Authored by Austin Bay via The Epoch Times,

  During its North American aerial odyssey, The Big Chinese Balloon passed within intel-gathering distance of ICBM silo fields, strategic bomber bases, key global logistics hubs (Charleston for example), and major Army and USAF headquarters.

  

  The balloon wasn’t just blowing in the wind. Its calculated military itinerary tells reasonable Americans and Canadians—reasonable being a qualifier that excludes media influencers and politicians bribed or blackmailed by communist China—that the balloon was spying on critical North American defense installations.

  Which means it had a War Mission. Note I did not write “pre-War”; I wrote “War.”

  I’ll explain why in a moment, but first due praise for The Wall Street Journal’s Feb. 20 article titled: “China’s Newest Weapon to Nab Western Technology—Its Courts.”

  According to the report, U.S. and EU officials “accuse China of using its courts and patent panels to undermine foreign intellectual-property rights and help Chinese businesses. They say China is focusing such efforts on industries it deems important, including technology, pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals.”

  Beijing has weaponized its legal system to steal technology.

  Beijing’s lawfare is calculated and synchronized. According to the Journal the EU is suing China for attempting to bar European companies from protecting their patents in courts outside China. One company official lamented: “It is puzzling that so many cases went wrong at the same time.”

  Actually—it isn’t puzzling at all.

  At the bottom line, communist China is fighting a war to dominate the world. In pursuit of that goal the Chinese state has weaponized every technology, media, and means of personal and organizational interaction.

  

  Informed minds assure us the study titled “Unrestricted Warfare” and published by the People’s Liberation Army in February 1999 isn’t a war plan. I’ll agree it isn’t a step-by-step plan, but it is a thoughtful and deadly intellectual guidebook China’s communist leaders are using to defeat the United States and establish a Chinese-mandated international order.

  The authors are Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. When they wrote “Unrestricted Warfare,” both men were People’s Liberation Army Air Force colonels. Qiao later made major general.

  Chapter 2 discusses full-spectrum warfare.

  Its title in English: “The War God’s Face Has Become Indistinct.”

  Translation: In China’s long war with the United States, weather balloons and lawyer jargon are weapons that can degrade American capabilities.

  The chapter lists several types of warfare that China can use to attack and harm the United States without risking a military counterattack.

  Start with Drug Warfare.

  The authors add this comment on pushing drugs: “obtaining sudden and huge illicit profits by spreading disaster in other countries.”

  In 1999 it was one of Qiao’s and Wang’s speculative options. In 2023 fentanyl is savaging American society.

  Beijing’s delivery system for this weapon in Drug Warfare? Mexican cartels.

  Here are some other Qiao and Wang options with their comments in parentheses.

  • Psychological warfare (“spreading rumors to intimidate the enemy and break down his will”).

  • Smuggling warfare (“throwing markets into confusion and attacking economic order”).

  • Media warfare (“manipulating what people see and hear in order to lead public opinion along”).

  • International law warfare (“seizing the earliest opportunity to set up regulations”). The use of courts to steal technology is another wrinkle.

  • Resources warfare (“plundering stores of resources”). China’s attempt to gain control of Congo’s cobalt reserves involved crooked contracts and bribery. That is white collar plundering.

  • Economic aid warfare (“bestowing favor in the open and contriving to control matters in secret”). Controlling matters in secret hints at bribery, blackmail, and intimidation. The concept goes hand in glove with resources warfare.

  • Cultural warfare (“leading cultural trends along in order to assimilate those with different views”). Beijing has spent billions influencing Hollywood and social media. American teenagers love the China-sourced TikTok app. But TikTok and similar apps are potentially routes for spying and disseminating psychologically and socially destructive propaganda.

  TikTok is being banned by some states. We can fight back.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 23:40

• Victor Davis Hanson: The Ukraine War's Prelude To What?
  Victor Davis Hanson: The Ukraine War’s Prelude To What?

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

  The Ukraine mess is daily looking more like the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, a meat grinder that took 500,000 lives. That three-year conflict became a savage proxy war and prelude for the belligerents of World War II…

  

  The Ukraine battlefield is proving a similar laboratory of death. New lethal weaponry and tactics are introduced, modified—and always improved—from drones to guided missiles to internet-fed artillery. 

  Likewise, a similar pre-global war lineup of the eventual adversaries is emerging in preview of a much larger, much scarier war to come.

  The first mission of Ukraine, the aggrieved victim of a peremptory Russian attack, was simple survival. 

  But now that it has been armed to the teeth and its soldiers proved far more capable and heroic than Putin’s once-feared Russia, Kyiv now seeks to push back Russians to their 2014 Ukrainian acquired borders.

  Next President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has announced that the third stage will be to eject every Russian from 2013 Ukraine. He promises to reabsorb both the Crimea and the Donbas.

  That is an ambitious goal that might require preemptive attacks inside Russia and on the Black Sea.

  To accomplish the last two missions, Zelenskyy needs a blank check of support from a United States that can neither control its own borders nor maintain its critical infrastructure and is $33 trillion in debt.

  Americans are not only to supply the money and arms to fuel Zelenskyy’s counteroffensives, but to sign onto a dangerous anti-Russian agenda that is not necessarily synonymous with one that is in the best interests of the United States.

  As far as Russia goes, Vladimir Putin knows his attack was a costly mistake. It was predicated on the assumption that an appeasing, doddering Biden and a U.S. military humiliated in Afghanistan would always remain passive.

  Yet Putin still believes that his blunder will not have been a fatal one if he can still destroy much of Eastern Ukraine, institutionalize what he gained in 2014, fracture NATO, propagandize the war as an existential cause of saving Mother Russia from a corrupt West, and reconfigure a new alliance with China, Iran, North Korea, and perhaps Turkey and India.

  As far as the United States goes, the Biden Administration sees America’s interest as largely defined by a proxy war to defang Russia. To paraphrase, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, America will pour limitless arms into Ukraine to so weaken Russia that it will have to stay within its current borders. 

  Washington blithely dismisses all of Putin’s existential threats as empty nuclear saber-rattling—on the Pentagon’s assurance that wounded, cornered, and growling tigers can always be assumed to remain predictably docile.

  Biden, whose family influence-peddled with Kyiv for a decade, has radically reversed his initial course.

  No longer is Biden offering a free ride out of Dodge for Zelenskyy or dismissing any worry over a “minor” Russian invasion.

  Biden instead now sees saving Ukraine and punishing Russia as his one shot at a redeeming accomplishment for an otherwise failed administration.

  The once-pacifist American Left has embraced Ukraine as its “I told you so” proof that Vladimir Putin was really the monster that it could not find guilty in its various Russian collusion concoctions and laptop disinformation hoaxes.

  The NATO nations are acting uncharacteristically defiant given the war is on their borders. They rightly fear a victorious Putin would be vengeful and not satiated.

  Yet their “you go first” shipment of hodgepodge weapons to Ukraine, as well as their embarrassment over their past suicidal energy polices and slow-motion disarmament, remind us that Europeans in NATO before the war could not keep the Russians out, the Americans in, or the Germans down.

  China believes it can be the real winner of the war.

  Its rivals and enemies are weakened the longer the war continues. The West is depleting its arsenals. It is tiring of the cost. Rival Russia is bleeding, selling Beijing cheap oil and begging for its weapons.

  Neither Europe nor America, China believes, will want to repeat another proxy war—say, one over Taiwan—against a nuclear power with far more leverage over the West and far greater wherewithal on the battlefield.

  Iran is selling drones to Russia.

  Tehran expects a desperate Putin to sell it all the enriched uranium it needs, prevent a preemptive strike on Tehran, and end Moscow’s Syrian wink-and-nod policy with Israel.

  India, like Turkey, likes newfound cheap Russian oil.

  It feels a proximate Russia and China are better entertained than a distant and provocative, but increasingly internally divided and weakened, United States.

  Turkey is suddenly booming with cheap oil and a big arms appetite from Russia.

  It feels rich and illiberal China and Russia both fear Turkey’s export of Islamism and seem better allies than the loud-talking but declining West.

  North Korea sees only positives in Western distraction in Ukraine.

  It counts that its nuclear recklessness is seen as a valuable irritant by both Russia and China.

  The longer this preview war goes on, the surer will follow the nightmarish main attraction.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 23:00

• Even JPMorgan Is Lashing Out At Ridiculous Seasonal Adjustments In Key US Data
  Even JPMorgan Is Lashing Out At Ridiculous Seasonal Adjustments In Key US Data

  It has become impossible to be an economist or data-watcher (and thus strategist, investor, pundit or analyst) in the US: the reason is that seasonal adjustments have made virtually every data set a load of garbage, with little relevance to the real world. 

  Consider the latest nonfarm payroll number, where the seasonally adjusted print came at a shocking 517K, but only thanks to a near record seasonal adjustment factor which transformed a 2.5 million decline into a blowout gain which had a profound impact on market – and Fed psychology.

  

  Or what about the latest retail sales, which also shocked to the upside, but only after generous seasonal adjustments – which are based on just some excel modeling (and a few political taps on the shoulder) converted the traditionally weak January into a blowout month.

  

  It’s not just plain vanilla economic data: it now appears that arbitrary – and massive – seasonal adjustments are also hitting the weekly DOE oil inventory report: the past two weeks, when we saw near record inventory builds, were nothing more than the figment of some excel spreadsheet’s imagination because as the chart below shows, that’s when the DOE Crude Oil supply “adjustment” factor was one of the highest on record.

  

  Which brings us to today’s weekly initial jobless claims report, which once again surprised to the downside, and despite wave after wave of mass layoffs (and severance), it magically dropped to four-week lows, once again underscoring just how “wonderful” Biden’s economic policies are as they translate into such a great labor market.

  

  Which of course is horseshit only this time, it’s not zero hedge, or even UBS, but the largest US bank that is calling the bullshit on the increasingly ridiculous, politicized GIGO that comes out of the admin.

  In a note from JPM’s Dan Silver, the bank’s economist points to the stubbornly, laughably low initial jobless claims, especially when considering directly tabulated reports of layoffs which in January just hit a multiyear high (according to Layoffs.fyi)…

  

  … and politely says that “some alternative seasonal adjustments of the initial claims data show some less favorable changes in filings from recent weeks than the official figures.”

  

  Here, JPM is merely echoing Goldman, which several weeks ago also found that initial claims are unrealistic, and that when looking at credible, state-level WARN mass layoff notices initial claims are far higher.

  

  It’s not just JPM and Goldman, however: three weeks ago, UBS also joined the fray, and showed that yet another data series – Job Openings – is either intentionally or accidentally inflated, and that  when look at third party data, the real number of job openings is about a third of what the monthly JOLTS report indicates.

  

  What is especially funny is that banks no longer merely observe how the data no longer fits, but are making it into a type of personal crusade to expose the grotesque levels of BS emanating from the Biden admin. Case in point, another UBS economist just a few days ago published a report asking (rhetorically) if the NFP report is overestimating job gains.

  

  But it’s not just the sellside: both the Philadelphia Fed and the BLS itself (!) recently found that the monthly NFP data is useless. Here is UBS economist Jonathan Pringle explaining why:

  he Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week that the net change in private sector jobs in 2022Q2 was -287K. In contrast, in the monthly employment report, private nonfarm payroll employment (NFP) is estimated to have risen 1.045 million! The former estimate comes from the BLS’s Business Employment Dynamics (BED) data. The latter comes from the monthly establishment survey data, NFP, the data series that usually makes the first Friday of every month an exciting one for financial markets and economists (in good ways and bad). Plus, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia staff published a paper last month estimating NFP overstated the employment gains in 2022Q2 by more than 1 million (link here). If BLS and Fed researchers say NFP was wrong, could there be some truth to that? We think so…

  

  And here’s why:

  In late September, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) revised down estimates of private wage and salaries sharply. The initial estimates are based on NFP and average hourly earnings. Those monthly estimates are replaced with a 1 to 2 quarter lag as more accurate tax records become available. The tax records are also the source data to which NFP is eventually benchmarked. The Q1 wage and salary estimates based on NFP were too strong. That large downward revision to Q1 income data was a signal that NFP might be overstating the strength of job gains. The Q2 tax records then revised down wage and salary estimates further.

  

  How big is the data discrepancy between the real data and the published monthly NFP report? Here’s the answer to that too:

  QCEW data then showed more weakness than NFP too: The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) is also derived from those tax records, generally assumed to be an accurate assessment of payroll employment due to the fines employers incur for failure to properly report to the states’ unemployment insurance systems. The data covers roughly 95% of employees in the US. It is the NFP source data, in a sense. However, the data is released with a lag.

  The QCEW data shows that in the 12 months ending on June 2022, job growth was 5.7 million. The current published change in NFP is 6.2 million. Plus, NFP is set to revise up by roughly 500K as of March 2022 at the annual revision to be reported next week. We expect that the upward revision reflects the strength in 2021. We expect that NFP went from understating employment strength in 2021 to overstating it in 2022.

  And this is where the seasonal adjustments come in:

  If the BED and QCEW point to Q2 weakness, why alter that story? Because of what we see in the BEA data and seasonal adjustment. The BEA revisions to the wage and salary data point to more overstatement in 2022Q1. In addition, the QCEW data is difficult to adequately seasonally adjust. Consider the detailed, disaggregated seasonal adjustment for the monthly employment report, and still there are periodic problems. Our guess is the estimates of 400K to 1 million jobs too many, or overstatement, in the monthly NFP data, were likely spread over 6 to 9 months. We’ll know better when we get the QCEW Q3 data in a month.

  

  Of course, if UBS knows this, and JPM knows this, and Goldman knows this, why not just call out the BS? Simple: the Biden admin has until February 2024 to come clean, which is when the official corrections to all the data errors will be revealed, as UBS concludes:

  … Unfortunately, what we, the BLS, and the Philly Fed staff see as overstatement in 2022, will not be corrected until February 2024.

  In other words, there will be another 12 months of randomly fabricated data meant to serve just one narrative – a political one – instead of representing the true (sad) state of the economy. The problem is that the Fed, and the market, are both using this flawed, seasonally manipulated adjusted data to make monetary policy and capital allocation decisions; decisions which in retrospect one year from today will be proved to have been dead wrong.

  By then, Powell will be long gone, Biden – having collected the big guy’s share for another 12 months – will be on his drooling way out to some tropical island paradise, but since the BLS continues to misrepresent the true state of the labor market, Fed funds may be in the double digits, leading to a historic implosion of the US economy. The only question then will be whether said gutting, like the global covid emergency and economic lockdowns, was orchestrated and by whom.

  The full UBS report on payroll “ovestatement” can be found here for pro users.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 22:20

• Facing "Unprecedented Challenges" And Soaring Rates, PIMCO-Owned Landlord Defaults On $1.7 Billion In Office Mortgages
  Facing “Unprecedented Challenges” And Soaring Rates, PIMCO-Owned Landlord Defaults On $1.7 Billion In Office Mortgages

  Amid the recent record surge in interest rates, the residential housing market may have frozen – as the gap between bids and asks stretches to unprecedented levels – but it is hardly in freefall, courtesy of several years of ultra-low rates which allowed homeowners to lock in low rates for the foreseeable future, even if it means aspiring and new homeowners remain locked out indefinitely of a housing market that has never been more unaffordable (and instead are forced to rent).

  But while the residential housing market may be relatively immune against the adverse consequences of soaring rates – if only for a finite period of time – the same can not be said about commercial real estate, where the impact of higher (or lower) rates is transmitted much faster. It’s also why the commercial real estate sector is seeing unprecedented pain. A recent example was the bankruptcy of the iconic Times Square Crowne Plaza hotel, located at 1601 Broadway, which as we noted two months ago, reported some 88,000 square feet, or 45% of the office space at this address, was vacant, forcing owners Vornado Realty Trust to take a big L on the property. 

  

  Furthermore, as we also mused rhetorically…

  Is this the first major commercial real estate domino to fall in the aftermath of covid’s “work from home” revolution?

  … the answer was clearly yes, and with every day that rates continue rising to multi-decade highs, the headaches for commercial real estate will only grow.

  Fast forward to today, when Bloomberg reports that an office landlord controlled by bond giant PIMCO has defaulted on about $1.7 billion of mortgage notes on seven buildings, “a sign of widening pain for the industry as property values fall and rising interest rates squeeze borrowers.”

  The buildings — in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Jersey City, New Jersey — are owned by Columbia Property Trust, which was acquired in 2021 for $3.9 billion by funds managed by Pimco. The mortgages have floating-rate debt, which led to rising monthly payments as interest rates soared last year.

  “We, like most office owners, are addressing the unique and unprecedented challenges currently facing our asset class and customer base,” Justina Lombardo, a spokesperson for Columbia Property Trust, said in an emailed statement. “We have engaged with our lenders on a restructuring of our loan on seven properties within our larger national portfolio.  We look forward to a collaborative process yielding thoughtful solutions that reflect current market conditions and best serve the interests of all stakeholders.”

  Some more details on the offices in question: a San Francisco building at 650 California St., built in 1964, is the most valuable property in the portfolio at $479 million, according to 2021 figures. Other properties include 229 W. 43rd St., 245-249 W. 17th St. and 315 Park Ave. South in Manhattan, 201 California St. in San Francisco, 116 Huntington Ave. in Boston and 95 Christopher Columbus Drive in Jersey City.

  

  As discussed two months ago, US offices, especially the older buildings with fewer amenities, have struggled in recent years to retain tennants amid the rise of remote work during the pandemic and recent layoffs. According to Green Street, values of those properties have fallen 20% since the onset of the pandemic in March 2020,

  The seven buildings owned by Columbia Property Trust were appraised at $2.27 billion in 2021, according to loan documents on a $485 million CMBS that financed part of the debt. Goldman Sachs, Citigroup Inc. and Deutsche Bank funded the original debt of almost $1.9 billion.

  The Columbia default follows two weeks after Brookfield Corp., parent of the largest office landlord in downtown Los Angeles, defaulted on loans tied to two buildings rather than refinancing the debt as demand for space weakens in the center of the second-largest US city.

  The two properties in default, part of a portfolio called Brookfield DTLA Fund Office Trust Investor, are the Gas Company Tower, with $465 million in loans, and the 777 Tower, with about $290 million in debt, according to a filing. The fund manager had warned in November that it may face foreclosure on properties.

  

  The values of comparable office buildings have broadly dropped, according to the Barclays analysts. Office vacancies have increased across the country since the pandemic made working remotely more routine. The vacancy rate in the Los Angeles central business district vacancy rate was 22.7% in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to a Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. report.

  As Bloomberg reports, Brookfield had the option to extend the maturity on the loans tied to the Gas Company Tower, but elected not to. It also elected not to get interest-rate protection that was required for loans for the 777 Tower property, which amounts to an event of default, the company’s latest filing said.

  The Brookfield DTLA portfolio has a total of $2.28 billion in secured debt, according to a November filing. Other buildings with maturing debt include the Wells Fargo Centers North Tower with $500 million in debt due in October and the Wells Fargo Centers South Tower with $263 million maturing in November. The buildings have about $1.8 billion of floating-rate obligations, generally hedged with interest-rate derivatives, which can translate to increased payments as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. 

  The lenders have not foreclosed on the two properties or exercised other remedies available to them, according to Brookfield’s filing. In January, Oaktree Capital Management wrested control of the building known for providing the exterior shots for the main office in the television series “L.A. Law” after the owner, Coretrust Capital Partners, went into default on a loan tied to the property.

  Still, despite the recent increase in office-linked defaults, the delinquency rate for commercial mortgage-backed securities for offices is still relatively low, at just 1.83% in January, according to Trepp. It won’t stay there long if the Fed continues with its

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 22:20

• Billionaire Private Equity Financier Thomas H. Lee Dies Of Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound
  Billionaire Private Equity Financier Thomas H. Lee Dies Of Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound

  Thomas H. Lee, the billionaire who pioneered the private-equity industry and leveraged buyouts through a firm that bore his name, has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his Manhattan office on Thursday morning, police sources told the NY Post. He was 78.

  

  Cops responded to a 911 call at 767 Fifth Avenue, where Thomas H. Lee Capital, LLC is located on the sixth floor, at around 11:10 a.m., the Post sources said adding that EMTs pronounced the 78-year-old businessman dead at the scene.

  “The family is extremely saddened by Tom’s death. While the world knew him as one of the pioneers in the private equity business and a successful businessman, we knew him as a devoted husband, father, grandfather, sibling, friend and philanthropist who always put others’ needs before his own,” Lee spokesperson Michael Sitrick said in a statement. “Our hearts are broken. We ask that our privacy be respected and that we be allowed to grieve.”

  The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will determine the official cause of death.

  A front desk worker at Lee’s office building was told there was an “emergency,” on the sixth floor, but was unaware of Lee’s death. “They don’t want anyone going to that space right now, not even the building staff,” the man said.

  Lee ran Boston-based Thomas H. Lee Partners from 1974 until 2006, when the firm had $12 billion to invest after producing triple-digit returns on some of its deals. Lee quit and formed New York-based Lee Equity Partners, which created funds that focused on smaller deals for fast-growing companies.

  Through both firms, Lee invested more than $15 billion in hundreds of transactions as of 2020. That included his best-known transaction, the 1992 purchase of Snapple Beverage Corp. After his firm bought Snapple for $135 million, investing only $28 million of its own money, Lee sold it to Quaker Oats Co. for $1.7 billion two years later after boosting revenue from $95 million a year to $750 million, Bloomberg reports.

  His Snapple return on equity was 334% after his firm took out $927 million from the sale, according to a 1997 Forbes profile. With profits like that, by 2022, Lee was worth $2 billion, according to Forbes.

  There were some notable mistakes along the way: besides a $500 million investment in 1999 in insurer Conseco which soured after the company sought bankruptcy protection three years later, Lee’s firm was also rattled by its $507 million investment in Refco, the futures and commodities brokerage firm. Refco filed for bankruptcy protection after it disclosed in 2005 that its chief executive had hidden $430 million in debt for years. In 1999, Lee led a deal for what would become Vertis Communications, the fifth largest North American printer. Vertis filed for bankruptcy in 2008.

  Lee was often seen chewing a cigar around the office, and he sometimes drew comparisons to the fictional private-equity banker Thomas Crown portrayed in the 1999 movie “The Thomas Crown Affair,” Businessweek reported in 2005.

  An avid art collector, Lee owned works by artists including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock and was a trustee of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, according to Forbes.

  “I’ve been lucky to make some money. I’m more than happy to give some of it back,” Lee said in 1996 after donating $22 million to his alma mater Harvard University, one of the school’s largest gifts ever from a living alumnus.

  Lee leaves behind his wife of 27 years, Ann Tennenbaum. He is survived by his children Jesse, Zach, Nathan, Robbie, and Rosalie, as well as two grandchildren.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 22:00

• A Crypto Friendly Asia: What It Will Mean For Markets
  A Crypto Friendly Asia: What It Will Mean For Markets

  By Conor Ryder, of Kaiko Research

  On Monday, Hong Kong made its intentions clear to open the door to crypto trading for retail. Reports claim that China is quietly encouraging the move, using Hong Kong as a testing ground for what safe crypto trading might look like. The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) outlined various caveats for retail investing in crypto, namely hinting at only having a small subset of the largest tokens available to trade.

  The move from Hong Kong, with China behind the scenes, paints a stark contrast to the enforcement approach we’ve seen from the SEC in the US recently. While the West risks stifling innovation and driving crypto business out of the US, Asia looks to be positioning itself to be at the forefront of the next crypto revolution by welcoming crypto business with open arms. 

  An enticing East could well be the next catalyst that propels crypto prices upwards, with some proclaiming that this run has already started, propelled by an Asian-linked token rally. However, looking at market dynamics, these claims seem premature. When looking at BTC volume so far in 2023, the majority of high volume hours have been during US trading, indicating that crypto’s flagship asset is in fact driven by the West at present. Interestingly, the trend was less extreme in 2021, as China only outlawed crypto trading towards the end of the year.

  

  BTC hourly volumes can be considered step one in debunking the Asia-led market rally. However, we know that altcoin trading is popular in the region, with South Korea in particular having a reputation for investing in the latest trends. That being said, it’s important to look at the broader market dynamics across all tokens and exchanges. Firstly, using a basket of tokens linked to projects in Asia, we can see that although there is less of an extreme difference between Asian and US hours, the majority of volume still occurs during US hours over the last three years, with not much change year to year. Interestingly, 2023 volumes so far have shown no new trend.

  

  (In this case, we classify “Asia-linked” crypto tokens as those affiliated with a project headquartered in Asia or boasting a dominant regional user-base, such as Axie Infinity or Tron.)

  Looking at volumes at the exchange level, we can see that exchanges catering for the Asia region have been losing a significant amount of market share since the start of 2020, with Binance being the main benefactor. As a caveat, our exchange classifications are not exact considering many offer global trading services. As such, our classifications are based on a combination of information on the exchange’s headquarters and historical user base. 

  

  A large reason for the rapid decline in Asian exchanges’ share of volume was China’s crypto ban in 2021, outlawing all crypto related transactions. Huobi and others closed all services to Chinese customers by the end of 2021, leaving many Asian exchanges desperate for volumes. Binance benefited from not targeting one specific market, becoming the most global exchange and reaping the rewards in terms of trading volume. Binance market share of all volumes has risen from 15% in January 2020 to 68% as of February 2023, with Asian exchange market share moving in the opposite direction, falling from 78% of volumes to just 22% over the same period.

  As a global-serving exchange, I have kept Binance in a category of its own. OKX on the other hand was counted as an Asian exchange despite being headquartered in the Seychelles, as they cannot service US customers and a majority of trade volume was placed during Asian hours. We can see the Binance volumes are more obviously US trading hour biased, with some of its lowest volume hours occurring during Asian trading hours. What is curious about this, though, is that Americans cannot use Binance, only Binance.US. So although trade volume is skewed towards US trading hours, it is likely not coming from within the country but from off-shore entities.

  

  Why Now?

  So why are Hong Kong and potentially other jurisdictions in the Asia region loosening the shackles of regulation now, particularly after such a tumultuous few months post FTX collapse? If anything, one would have forgiven Hong Kong for saying I told you so after the last few incidents where investors bore the brunt of devious actors in the space. 

  Well for one, thanks to a crypto regulatory carpet bomb from the SEC, now looks like the perfect time to strike for Hong Kong. The contrasting regulatory approach of the West may drive many businesses looking for more regulatory clarity towards Asia. 

  I could see a lot of exchanges, for example, focusing more on Asian markets to avoid the iron fist of Mr. Gensler. Why hang around, losing market share to Binance, unsure what products you can and can’t offer thanks to a lack of regulatory guidance, and potentially be hit with a fine – when you could move operations to Asia, benefit from a friendlier regulatory environment and carve out a chunk of a growing market?

  Trade volume since 2020 shows us that Asian exchanges benefitted the most from the bull run of 2021, but since China outlawed crypto towards the end of 2021, Asia has lagged Binance in volumes significantly. Welcoming investors back to Hong Kong and Asia now makes sense for not only Hong Kong, but for the Asian exchanges as well.

  

  From a token standpoint, tokens affiliated with crypto projects in the Asia region have struggled to keep pace with BTC volumes over the last year.

  

  On the left we can see the dwindling volumes of Asia-project linked tokens. On the right we can debunk stories that the market is being driven by these tokens: there was no significant increase in market share of volumes between BTC and the selection of tokens affiliated with projects in Asia since the start of the year.

  When looking at trade volume trends, the market appears to not have been driven by activity in the Asian region, meaning the reaction to this regulatory news out of the East has been subdued. The long term market dynamics of this are more interesting and once the friendlier regulation comes into effect, a handful of tokens could see a wave of new money directed their way. 

  Which tokens stand to benefit will be decided by Hong Kong’s SFC, who hinted at tokens that are included in at least “two approved indices”.

  Indices

  According to the proposal by the SFC, they will only allow trading for “large-cap virtual assets…that are included in at least two approved indices”. It’s unclear what exactly classifies as large cap, and what the approved indices might be, but the guidance at least helps us narrow down the universe of tokens that could be available. Using some of crypto’s largest indices, @tier10k on Twitter listed the tokens they hold, identifying any potential overlap for tokens that are included in at least two indices.

  

  There’s a couple of things that stand out to me here. Firstly, some of the indices hold relatively illiquid altcoins: Stellar Lumens, Ethereum Classic, EOS and Bitcoin Cash to name a few. Given the conservative nature of the Hong Kong guidance, I highly doubt they will include some of these more speculative tokens.

  Secondly, in the list of tokens that are included in at least two indices, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Polkadot interestingly make the cut, included in 3 or 4 out of the 5 indices. Perpetual futures markets reacted well to the realization that these tokens could see renewed flows from Asia, with open interest for all three rising by about 15% in the last week. Funding rates also moved positive and have mostly persisted since the announcement, with BCH being the exception.

  

  There is reason for caution however, as I’m not sure some of these tokens are liquid enough to warrant consideration as large-cap assets. As I’ve written about before, using market cap alone to measure the value of tokens isn’t sufficient and we need to incorporate other metrics, specifically liquidity. It’s commonplace in traditional finance that liquidity is one of the criteria for indices construction, and crypto should be no different. According to Nasdaq, their indices are constructed using “rigorous liquidity standards”. I’m not sure how that justifies holding XLM, ETC or UNI. In December I ranked the top 28 tokens by liquidity: XLM finished dead last, UNI finished 22nd and ETC wasn’t liquid enough to even be included.

  The inclusion of Bitcoin Cash, Polkadot and Litecoin has me worried from a liquidity standpoint and I believe if the SFC are to include large-cap assets, they must use more liquid tokens in their selection. For starters, all three tokens rank poorly in 2% market depth, measuring the amount of orders currently sitting on exchanges order books within 2% of current prices.

  

  Tokens like XRP, MATIC and LINK look to be excluded from the SFC’s list by not being included in at least two indices. They miss out while tokens with worse liquidity, particularly BCH, look to be up for consideration. This is more of a qualm with index construction in crypto, as the fact BCH is included in 3 of the top 5 indices in crypto is definitely cause for concern. A more robust approach to index construction is needed that accounts for liquidity alongside market cap.

  For example, yesterday I noticed that OKB, the exchange token for OKX, was included in the top 10 tokens on CoinGecko and other ranking sites due to an update of their circulating supply figure, apparently increasing from 60m to roughly 250m. This increased its market cap by over $9bn, moving it inside the top 10. If a large cap index was constructed based on market cap, it would potentially have to include OKB now. Using liquidity metrics alongside market cap, however, would rule OKB out of consideration. Comparing OKB’s market depth to DOGE, who lost out on its top 10 spot thanks to OKB, the difference in liquidity is stark.

  

  OKB’s 2% market depth is under $1m, compared to DOGE’s depth of $32m. On that note, and a potentially controversial take, but I believe DOGE warrants more consideration for the SFC than BCH thanks to its vastly superior liquidity. 

  Takeaways

  The news out of Hong Kong, with stories of quiet backing from China, are no doubt positive for crypto longer term. Short-term, we have seen that markets aren’t actually being driven by this narrative, rather investors in the US buying on the assumption that those in Asia are. The timing of the announcement, while the SEC crack down on crypto, looks intentional and may actually drive crypto business out of the US and towards Asia over time. 

  However, some of the tokens that could be considered under the SFC’s new rules aren’t of the highest caliber, from both a fundamental and a liquidity perspective. This is actually an issue with index construction in crypto, but the SFC needs to properly account for liquidity as they may be excluding some tokens with better fundamentals and liquidity just because they aren’t included in two indices. Any token that is included in the new parameters should see fresh investment and improved sentiment, while Asia may be increasingly well-positioned for a new wave of crypto investment.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 21:40

• New Hi-Res Images Of Chinese Spy Balloon Released
  New Hi-Res Images Of Chinese Spy Balloon Released

  “Mr. Xi…I’m ready for my close-up!”

  New images that were reportedly taken on February 3, 2023 of the Chinese spy balloon that threw the nation into a frenzy have been released by the United States Department of Defense. 

  The images were from when the balloon was flying at 60,000 over the American Midwest, according to Breaking 911. They were captured by a U.S. U-2 spy plane that was trailing the balloon across the country, the report says. 

  The report says the balloon’s payload – consisting of reconnaissance sensors, antennae, and solar power panels – can be seen the photo, along with the shadow of the U-2 plane that was following it. 

  

  Recall, last week we wrote about how Republican senators had “raised concerns that U.S. manufacturing might have assisted in the construction of the Chinese spy balloon…”.

  The Epoch Times noted that Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) took part in an all-senators classified briefing on Feb. 9, held by officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Pentagon, and the State Department. The agencies held a separate classified briefing for House lawmakers on the same day.

  After the briefing, Sullivan told reporters that the question of whether American companies helped build the Chinese balloon was raised, but officials didn’t provide a conclusive response.

  

  As we reported last week, the balloon was eventually shot down over the Atlantic on February 5, 2023. A US F-22 stealth jet was responsible for downing it off the Carolina coast. 

  The recovery mission of the balloon is ongoing and little new information about what it contained has been released over the past week. Several U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels established a security perimeter where the balloon hit the water, about six nautical miles off the coast of South Carolina, The Epoch Times reported the day after it was shot down. 

  

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 21:20

• Only 19% Of Americans Have Confidence In Biden's Handling Of Ukraine Conflict, New Poll Finds
  Only 19% Of Americans Have Confidence In Biden’s Handling Of Ukraine Conflict, New Poll Finds

  Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

  An Associated Press and NORC poll has found that fewer than 20 percent of Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the way Joe Biden is involving the U.S. in the Ukraine conflict.

  

  The survey reveals that only 19 percent of the public have a “great deal” of confidence in Biden’s ability, while 37 percent say they have “only some” confidence,” and 43 percent have “hardly any” confidence.

  

  The poll also found that only 42 percent approve of the way Biden is handling the U.S.’ relationship with Russia, while 54 percent disapprove. 

  The poll also found that a quarter of respondents believe the U.S. shouldn’t be playing any role in the war, with a further 49 percent saying that the U.S. should only have minor role.

  Just 26 percent believe the U.S. should be playing a major role.

  

  The poll also found that while 59 percent of Democrats said they were in favour of sending government funds directly to Ukraine, just 21 percent of Republicans concur.

  The figures represent a decrease in support among both groups, as last year 63 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of Republicans said they were in favour.

  The findings come after Biden’s probable 2024 opponent Donald Trump declared that he would negotiate a peace deal and end the conflict within 24 hours, as well as ousting all the “demented warmongers and globalists” currently occupying the U.S. National Security establishment.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 21:00

• JPMorgan Says Staley-Epstein 'Snow White' Emails Don't Prove That Minors Were Abused
  JPMorgan Says Staley-Epstein ‘Snow White’ Emails Don’t Prove That Minors Were Abused

  Last week, the US Virgin Islands released bombshell emails between former JPMorgan executive Jes Staley and Jeffrey Epstein from 2010, which reference Disney princesses, presumably in the context of girls procured for sexual activities.

  

  “That was fun,” Staley allegedly wrote to Epstein. “Say hi to Snow White.“

  To which Epstein replied: “[W]hat character would you like next?”

  “Beauty and the Beast.”

  Epstein also emailed Staley photos of young women in seductive poses, the filing continues.

  

  On Wednesday, JPMorgan responded – claiming that the emails fail to show that minors were victimized, or that “force, fraud or coercion” were used against women. The bank has asked the judge to dismiss the case, in which the USVI says JPMorgan is liable for facilitating Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors because they ignored obvious red flags while continuing to provide banking services to the prolific pedophile, Bloomberg reports.

  JPMorgan said on Wednesday that though the emails show that “inappropriate personal conversations” took place, they don’t prove that any illegal conduct did and “provide no basis to infer that Staley detected Epstein’s sex-trafficking.”

  The bank slammed the USVI suit as providing an “inaccurate and salacious telling of events.” JPMorgan has previously called the claims a “masterclass in deflection,” pointing out that the territory failed to act against Epstein in a law enforcement capacity and instead gave him favorable tax treatment. -Bloomberg

  JPMorgan also called racketeering claims by the USVI “impermissibly extraterritorial.” 

  “USVI’s attempt to hold JPMC accountable under USVI law for JPMC’s actions in New York — on the theory that JPMC’s client, Epstein, unilaterally decided to spend time in USVI — disregards the limits of USVI’s legislative jurisdiction,” the bank argued, adding that the USVI also failed to establish that Staley’s travels to Epstein’s island, or his use of work emails, fell within the scope of his employment at the bank.

  Staley and Epstein exchanged upwards of 1,200 emails over a period of several years. In 2013, Staley left JPMorgan to become CEO of Barclays, which he left in 2021 following a probe by the UK Financial Conduct Authority into his relationship with Epstein.

  Epstein, meanwhile, had around 55 accounts with JPMorgan between 1998 and 2013, which contained hundreds of millions of dollars. At least 20 individuals paid through JPMorgan accounts were “victims of trafficking and sexual assault in Little St James,” according to the USVI.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 20:40

• Let's Check In On President Obama's Promise To End Homelessness By 2023
  Let’s Check In On President Obama’s Promise To End Homelessness By 2023

  Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

  Obama’s “Housing First” plan to end homelessness worked so well that President Biden adopted the idea in December of 2022. We are now “ALL IN”…

  

  Homeless Funding Opportunity for Housing First

  Let’s start with a HUD Funding Opportunity from 2013. 

  The CoC Program is designed to promote a community-wide commitment to the goal of ending homelessness; to provide funding for efforts by nonprofit providers, States, and local governments to quickly re-house the homeless while minimizing the trauma and dislocation caused by homelessness; to promote access to and effective utilization of mainstream programs by the homeless; and to optimize self-sufficiency among those experiencing homelessness. 

  Housing First is a model of housing assistance that is offered without preconditions (such as sobriety or a minimum income threshold) or service participation requirements, and rapid placement and stabilization in permanent housing are primary goals. Research shows that it is effective for the chronically homeless with mental health and substance abuse disorders, resulting in fewer inpatient stays and less expensive interventions than other approaches. PSH projects should use a Housing First approach in the design of the program. 

  Obama Promised to End Homelessness This Year

  The Wall Street Journal comments on Obama’s Promise to End Homelessness This Year

  It may be hard to believe looking at the current state of major American cities, but 2023 was supposed to be the year that all types of homelessness would be eradicated. That’s what the Obama administration promised when in 2013 the Department of Housing and Urban Development formally changed the federal government’s homelessness policy to “housing first,” under which homeless people receive federally funded housing vouchers with no strings attached. Things haven’t panned out as the administration planned.

  Team Obama ignored a harsh reality of homelessness: It is overwhelmingly a problem of untreated mental illness and substance-use disorder. California Policy Lab, a nonpartisan research institute at the University of California, found in 2019 that 78% of the homeless population in America reported having mental-health conditions, and 50% said mental illness contributed to their loss of housing. Additionally, 75% of the homeless said they struggled with substance abuse, and 51% said drug or alcohol use contributed to their loss of housing.

  Before 2013, HUD strongly encouraged and often required that Continuum of Care organizations provide treatment and job training and that they make housing vouchers conditional on participation in those programs. In 2013 the Obama HUD told all funding recipients that they instead had to adopt “a Housing First approach” without “service participation requirements.”

  That change precipitated a dramatic increase in homelessness. HUD data show that unsheltered homelessness rose 20.5% from 2014 to the beginning of 2020, before Covid hit.

  Inexplicably, homelessness is treated differently. Policy makers act as if it’s simply an issue of people not having houses, rather than a complex problem often rooted in mental illness and substance-abuse disorders.

  Research shows that “housing first works.” 

  What research was that? 

  

  By any chance did the National Association of Realtors or National Association of Homebuilders sponsor the research? 

  Spotlight California

  CAL Matters reports California Accounts for 30% of Nation’s Homeless.

  • Country’s highest homelessness rate, with 44 people out of every 10,000 experiencing homelessness.

  • Largest increase in its homeless population of any other state from both 2020-22 (6.2%) and 2007-22 (23.4%), whereas Florida — a state often in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s crosshairs as he spars with its Republican governor Ron DeSantis — saw a 5.6% decrease from 2020-22 and notched the country’s biggest decrease from 2007-22 (46%).

  • California had nine times more unsheltered people than Washington, the state with the next highest number (115,491 people compared to 12,668 people).

  Project RoomKey

  • Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is set today to launch a program to start moving the city’s estimated 40,000 homeless people into hotels and motels, the Associated Press reports. The plan appears to be modeled on Newsom’s Project Roomkey and Homekey.

  • Bass, who declared a homelessness state of emergency on her first day in office last week, also issued a sweeping executive order Friday that aims to significantly speed up the development of 100% affordable housing by requiring city agencies to finish reviewing applications within 60 days — instead of the typical six to nine months.

  Biden to the Rescue

  Please consider the Biden Administration’s Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness. 

  Every American deserves a safe and reliable place to call home. It’s a matter of security, stability, and well-being. It is also a matter of basic dignity and who we are as a Nation.

  Yet many Americans live each day without safe or stable housing. Some are in emergency shelters. Others live on our streets, exposed to the threats of violence, adverse weather, disease, and so many other dangers exacerbated by homelessness. Both the COVID-19 pandemic and the reckoning our Nation has faced on issues of racial justice have also exposed inequities that have been allowed to fester for far too long.

  At the same time, we know we can do something about it. That is why I’m proud to present the Biden-Harris Administration’s Federal Strategic Plan to reduce homelessness by 25 percent by January 2025—an ambitious plan that will put us on the path to meeting my long-term vision of preventing and ending homelessness in America. We need partners at the State and local levels, in the private sector, and from philanthropies to all play a part in meeting this goal. 

  Housing First Worked So Well That ….

  We are proud and pleased to present this new plan, which restores the importance of Housing First. 

  Seems like the new plan is the same as the old one that did not work. 

  There is however a name change. The plan is no longer the Obama Housing First plan. It’s now the Biden-Harris Housing First plan.

  And the Data?

  It means being guided by the data and evidence that some Americans who face ongoing discrimination are disproportionately overrepresented among those experiencing homelessness—especially people of color, LGBTQI+ people, and people with disabilities. It means recognizing that experiencing the crisis of homelessness is a form of significant trauma that can impact individuals and families for decades and generations. Solving homelessness means delivering help to the people who need it most and who are having the hardest time. It means putting housing first, along with the person-centered supports needed to succeed and thrive. 

  Proud of the Work

  While we acknowledge there is much work ahead, we are proud of the work this administration has done to address homelessness.

  If we give everyone a house, free food, insurance, etc. what would it cost?

  LA Spends Up to $837K Per Unit to House a Mere 5,600 of Over 40,000 Homeless

  On March 24, 2022 I noted LA Spends Up to $837K Per Unit to House a Mere 5,600 of Over 40,000 Homeless

  Key Points

  • California had 28,464 Homeless in 2016.

  • LA then passed proposition HHH, authorizing $1.2 billion to address the problem.

  • In early 2020, pre-Covid, the city had 41,250 homeless. There are no current homeless stats and due to Covid are undoubtedly much higher.

  • The city is building units to address the problem. 1,200 units have been completed.

  • 4,400 units are in construction. 

  That’s “housing first” in actual practice. It’s certainly something to be proud of.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 20:20

• Greenwald: NYT Finally Admits "The International Community" Does Not Stand With US On Ukraine
  Greenwald: NYT Finally Admits “The International Community” Does Not Stand With US On Ukraine

  A typical consumer of Western and especially American media over the past year of war in Ukraine might be forgiven for assuming the so-called international community is fully in Washington and NATO’s corner. But a detailed tally of nations and where they stand shows otherwise.

  This week, two somewhat surprising reports out of the most prominent and visible newspapers in the US have much belatedly set the record straight. Journalist Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that finally The New York Times has acknowledged the reality that the majority of the globe does not in fact “stand with the US” in its approach to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Greenwald sounds off in a Twitter thread as follows…

  From the start of the war in Ukraine, the US media continuously claimed “the international community” is united behind the US (that phrase always means: W. Europe and whatever countries happen to side with the US).

  Today, the NYT recognizes the truth: https://t.co/VE00QIxWjn

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 23, 2023

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

  Greenwald then directs the reader’s attention to statements from the Times report which proves long-standing media assumptions in this regard were nothing but ‘false fairy tales’.

  No, there was never any kind of “united” global stance, per the report (emphasis ours): 

  But the West never won over as much of the world as it initially seemed. Another 47 countries abstained or missed the vote, including India and China. Many of those “neutral” nations have since provided crucial economic or diplomatic support for Russia.

  And even some of the nations that initially agreed to denounce Russia see the war as somebody else’s problem — and have since started moving toward a more neutral position.

  A couple of key paragraphs from the NYT story that deflates and debunks the inspiring and from-the-start obviously false fairy tale that “the international community” was united with the US in support of Ukraine: pic.twitter.com/QLf72NT7lQ

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 23, 2023

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

  And more from the Times:

  A year on, it’s becoming clearer: While the West’s core coalition remains remarkably solid, it never convinced the rest of the world to isolate Russia.

  Instead of cleaving in two, the world has fragmented. A vast middle sees Russia’s invasion as, primarily, a European and American problem. Rather than view it as an existential threat, these countries are largely focused on protecting their own interests amid the economic and geopolitical upheaval caused by the invasion.

  Greenwald points out that The Washington Post has also made a similar concession…

  The WashPost has a very similar concession this morning. While all the usual DC militarism advocates — people like @BillKristol, @DavidFrum and @Mattduss — pen homages to the diplomatic genius of Biden, the headline of the Post article tells a far different story: pic.twitter.com/nIZ1rCLZPC

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 23, 2023

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

  Greenwald continues his commentary:

  A staple of left-wing foreign policy is the valorization of the “Global South” (for good reason: I share the view that they matter more than is recognized). Yet as both papers say, the “Global South” rejects support for the US view of Ukraine, yet the US left ignores this.

  A major reason the US liberal-left in DC is *unanimous* in support of Biden’s war policies — even as the left all over the world is divided to hostile — is lingering anger toward Russia because of the view they helped defeat Hillary.

  Greenwald concludes: “It’s utter madness but it’s how they think.”

  Meanwhile…

  Indian officials hosting G-20 finance chiefs this week are seeking to avoid using the word “war” when referring to Russia’s war in Ukraine, a person familiar with the matter says https://t.co/lTN3ZxzgCe

  — Bloomberg Africa (@BloombergAfrica) February 22, 2023

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

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 20:00

• Are Reparations Part Of The American Rescue Plan? Cities Say Yes And Plan To Use Federal Funds To Support Reparations Efforts
  Are Reparations Part Of The American Rescue Plan? Cities Say Yes And Plan To Use Federal Funds To Support Reparations Efforts

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  There is an interesting fight brewing in Congress after various cities indicated that they may not only pay reparations but use federal pandemic funds for such payments.

  There has been a long call for federal reparations with various Democratic bills introduced in Congress. BET founder Robert Johnson has called for $14 trillion in federal reparations. However, cities like Providence, Rhode Island are not waiting. They insist that federal reparations funds are already effectively approved as part of their pandemic relief.

  

  We have been discussing how California’s Reparations Task Force has presented a bill for $569 billion for reparations while cities like San Francisco have a reparation board demanding $5 million per eligible black resident.

  Other cities are saying that the federal government can foot the bill. They are relying on massive payments of federal money under the American Rescue Plan (ARP). They insist that Congress put so few conditions on the money that they can use it for reparations.

  The $1.9 billion dollars in the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was passed on a loose mandate to encourage economic stimulus and deal with the economic and health effects of the pandemic and ongoing recession. Advocates are arguing that the pandemic exacerbated the lingering effects of slavery for the Black community. Every Republican (and one Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine) voted against the Act.

  FOX Business reported that Providence, Rhode Island has already dedicated $10 million in pandemic relief toward creating the Providence Municipal Reparations Commission to address “racial equity.” Likewise, officials in Shelby County, Tennessee (where Memphis is located) voted to spend $5 million to study the possibility of a long-term reparations program. The county said it may use pandemic funds for the effort.

  Other cities are moving forward with reparation task forces, including most recently Boston. As in cities like San Francisco, the Boston reparations will cover not just slavery but more “recent” housing and economic inequities. Mayor Michelle Wu declared “For four hundred years, the brutal practice of enslavement and recent policies like redlining, the busing crisis, and exclusion from City contracting have denied Black Americans pathways to build generational wealth, secure stable housing, and live freely.”

  Likewise, this week, Washtenaw County in Ann Arbor, Michigan approved its own commission based on reparations approved by cities like Evanston, Illinois. It was described as “An evolution of an exploratory committee led by the Racial Equity Office, the Advisory Council on Reparations will be a perpetual body of Commissioner appointed subject matter experts representing relevant sectors.”

  Sen. Cory Booker (D., N.J.) introduced a new federal reparations bill that would create a new federal commission similar to those of states like California. It is supported by Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ed Markey (D-MA), Bob Casey (D-PA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Tina Smith (D-MN), Chris Coons (D-DE), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Patty Murray (D-WA).

  Some 190 organizations now support federal reparations including the ACLU and Amnesty International.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 19:40

• Another Gulf State Opens Airspace For Israeli Carriers As 'Normalization' Advances
  Another Gulf State Opens Airspace For Israeli Carriers As ‘Normalization’ Advances

  In another sign of rapidly warming ties between Arab gulf countries and Israel, Oman has announced it is opening its airspace to Israeli carriers for the first time in history. 

  It comes on the heels of Saudi Arabia allowing Israeli airplanes to also traverse its airspace, seen as a huge step in the normalization of relations process still underway, based on the Trump administration’s ‘Abraham Accords’. Israeli airlines can now significantly shorten travel eastbound to places like India and China. 

  

  For months, the White House has been working behind the scenes with the Omani government to improve economic and diplomatic relations with Israel. This included meetings going back to November between White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr al-Busaidi.

  The prior Omani government had pledged to open its airspace years ago, but this was halted. “In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Oman and got a commitment from then-Sultan Qaboos to allow Israeli airlines to use Omani airspace,” Axios writes. “But after Qaboos died, current Sultan Haitham bin Tariq rolled back the decision.”

  Last week, Bloomberg reported that Israel’s new government under Benjamin Netanyahu has stepped up efforts to cement stronger military and intelligence cooperation between Saudi Arabia (and by extension the rest of the Gulf Cooperation Council/GCC) and Israel.

  While historically the Saudis have never recognized the ‘Jewish state’ – both have long secretly cooperated in places like Syria and Yemen, in what they see as ‘counter-Iran’ operations.

  

  Israel normalized relations with the UAE and Bahrain in 2020 under the Abraham Accords, and is hoping Saudi Arabia will be next. However, this would likely be met with fierce anger among the Saudi public, and particularly among the powerful Sunni clerical establishment. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 19:20

• Escobar: Putin's "Civilizational" Speech Frames Conflict Between East And West
  Escobar: Putin’s “Civilizational” Speech Frames Conflict Between East And West

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

  In his Federal Assembly address, President Putin emphasized that Russia is not only an independent nation-state but also a distinct civilization with its own identity, which is in conflict and actively opposes the values of ‘western civilization.’

  

  Russian President Vladimir Putin’s much awaited address to the Russian Federal Assembly on Tuesday should be interpreted as a tour de force of sovereignty.

  The address, significantly, marked the first anniversary of Russia’s official recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, only a few hours before 22 February, 2022. In myriad ways, what happened a year ago also marked the birth of the real, 21st century multipolar world.

  Then two days later, Moscow launched the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine to defend said republics.

  Cool, calm, collected, without a hint of aggression, Putin’s speech painted Russia as an ancient, independent, and quite distinct civilization – sometimes following a path in concert with other civilizations, sometimes in divergence.

  Ukraine, part of Russian civilization, now happens to be occupied by western civilization, which Putin said “became hostile to us,” like in a few instances in the past. So the acute phase of what is essentially a war by proxy of the west against Russia takes place over the body of Russian civilization.

  That explains Putin’s clarification that “Russia is an open country, but an independent civilization – we do not consider ourselves superior but we inherited our civilization from our ancestors and we must pass it on.”

  A war dilacerating the body of Russian civilization is a serious existential business. Putin also made clear that “Ukraine is being used as a tool and testing ground by the west against Russia.” Thus the inevitable follow-up: “The more long-range weapons are sent to Ukraine, the longer we have to push the threat away from our borders.”

  Translation: this war will be long – and painful. There will be no swift victory with minimal loss of blood. The next moves around the Dnieper may take years to solidify. Depending on whether US policy continues to cleave to neo-con and neoliberal objectives, the frontline may be displaced to Lviv. Then German politics may change. Normal trade with France and Germany may be recovered only by the end of the next decade.

  Kremlin exasperation: START is finished

  All that brings us to the games played by the Empire of Lies. Says Putin: “The promises…of western rulers turned into forgery and cruel lies. The west supplied weapons, trained nationalist battalions. Even before the start of the SMO, there were negotiations…on the supply of air defense systems… We remember Kyiv’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons.”

  Putin made it clear, once again, that the element of trust between Russia and the west, especially the US, is gone. So it’s a natural decision for Russia to “withdraw from the treaty on strategic offensive weapons, but we don’t do it officially. For now we are only halting our participation to the START treaty. No US inspections in our nuclear sites can be allowed.”

  As an aside, of the three main US-Russian weapons treaties, Washington abandoned two of these: The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was dumped by the administration of former president George W. Bush in 2002, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was nixed by former president Donald Trump in 2019.

  This shows the Kremlin’s degree of exasperation. Putin is even prepared to order the Ministry of Defense and Rosatom to get ready to test Russian nuclear weapons if the US goes first along the same road.

  If that’s the case, Russia will be forced to completely break parity in the nuclear sphere, and abandon the moratorium on nuclear testing and cooperation with other nations when it comes to the production of nuclear weapons. So far, the US and NATO game consisted in opening a little window allowing them to inspect Russian nuclear sites.

  With his judo move, Putin returns the pressure onto the White House.

  The US and NATO will not be exactly thrilled when Russia starts testing its new strategic weapons, especially the post-doomsday Poseidon – the largest nuclear-powered torpedo ever deployed, capable of triggering terrifying radioactive ocean swells.

  On the economic front: Bypassing the US dollar is the essential play towards multipolarity. During his speech, Putin made a point to extol the resilience of the Russian economy: “Russian GDP in 2022 decreased only by 2.1 percent, estimates of the opposing side did not become reality, they said 15, 20 percent.” That resilience gives Russia enough room to “work with partners to make the system of international settlements independent of the US dollar and other western currencies. The dollar will lose its universal role.”

  On geoeconomics: Putin went all out in praise of economic corridors, from West Asia to South Asia: “New corridors, transport routes will be built towards the East, this is the region where we will focus our development, new highways to Kazakhstan and China, new North-South corridor to Pakistan, Iran.”

  And those will connect to Russia developing “the ports of the Black and Azov Seas, it’s necessary to build logistics corridors within the country.” The result will be a progressive interconnection with the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) whose principals include Iran and India, and eventually China’s mega-trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

  China’s plan for global security  

  It’s inevitable that apart from sketching several state policies geared towards Russia’s internal development – one might even compare them to socialist policies – a great deal of Putin’s address had to focus on the NATO vs. Russia war till-the-last-Ukrainian.

  Putin remarked on how “our relations with the west have degraded, and this is entirely the fault of the United States;” how NATO’s goal is to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia; and how the warmongering frenzy had forced him, a week ago, to sign a decree “putting new ground-based strategic complexes on combat duty.”

  So it’s no accident that the US ambassador was immediately summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs right after Putin’s address.

  Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Ambassador Lynne Tracey in no uncertain terms that Washington must take concrete measures: among them, to remove all US and NATO military forces and equipment away from Ukraine. In a stunning move, he demanded a detailed explanation of the destruction of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, as well as a halt to US interference in an independent inquiry to identify the responsible parties.

  Keeping the momentum in Moscow, top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi met with secretary of Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev, before talking to Lavrov and Putin. Patrushev remarked, “the course towards developing a strategic partnership with China is an absolute priority for Russia’s foreign policy.” Wang Yi, not so cryptically, added, “Moscow and Beijing need to synchronize their watches.”

  The Americans are doing everything to try and pre-empt the Chinese proposal for a de-escalation in Ukraine. China’s plan should be presented this Friday, and there’s a serious risk Beijing may fall into a trap set by the western plutocracy.

  Too many Chinese “concessions” to Russia, and not as many to Ukraine, may be spun to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing (Divide and Rule, which is always the US Plan A. There’s no Plan B).

  Sensing the waters, the Chinese themselves decided to take the offensive, presenting a Global Security Initiative Concept Paper.

  The problem is Beijing still attributes too much clout to a toothless UN, when they refer to“formulating a New Agenda for Peace and other proposals put forth in Our Common Agenda by the UN Secretary-General.”

  Same when Beijing upholds the consensus that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Try to explain that to the Straussian neo-con psychos in the Beltway, who know nothing about war, much less nuclear ones.

  The Chinese affirm the necessity to “comply with the joint statement on preventing nuclear war and avoiding arms races issued by leaders of the five nuclear-weapon states in January 2022.” And to “strengthen dialogue and cooperation among nuclear-weapon states to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”

  Bets can be made that Patrushev explained in detail to Wang Yi how that is just wishful thinking. The “logic “of the current collective western “leadership” has been expressed, among others, by irredeemable mediocrity Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general: even nuclear war is preferable to a Russian victory in Ukraine.

  Putin’s measured but firm address has made it clear that the stakes keep getting higher. And it all revolves on how deep Russia’s – and China’s – “strategic ambiguity” are able to petrify a paranoid west flirting with mushroom clouds.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 19:00

• Explosions In Iranian City Which Hosts Nuclear Facility, Air Defenses Activated
  Explosions In Iranian City Which Hosts Nuclear Facility, Air Defenses Activated

  Reports are emerging of a possible attack on a military facility in the city of Karaj on Thursday night, at a moment tensions are boiling between Tehran and Israel over the Islamic Republic’s advancing nuclear program.

  The BBC’s Persian-language service reported that widespread gunshots and and explosions were observed in the area, which lies just west of the Iranian capital. Anti-aircraft fire was also seen in multiple circulating clips, which remain unverified. 

  این ویدیو که گفته می‌شود امشب در منطقه عظیمه کرج گرفته شده به دست بی‌بی‌سی رسیده است.
  دقایقی پیش برخی کاربران شبکه‌های اجتماعی در کرج از شنیده شدن صدای شلیک ممتد و انفجار خبر داده‌اند.
  برخی شاهدان گلوله‌های شلیک شده را به پدافند ضدهوایی تشبیه کرده‌اند. pic.twitter.com/Foo3uerDl9

  — BBC NEWS فارسی (@bbcpersian) February 23, 2023

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

  However, the Iranian government is denying that it was a hostile attack from a foreign force, instead calling it a live-fire defense exercise. 

  Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency tweeted a video describing military training in the area. 

  Israeli media has also picked up on the claims of an attack, while noting that a key nuclear facility is located in Karaj. As The Jerusalem Post recounts: 

  Defense facilities in and near Karaj have been targeted by attacks repeatedly in recent years.

  In July 2021, Iran blamed Israel for a sabotage operation that targeted a building belonging to Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (IAEO) in Karaj the month before.

  #BREAKING: explosion and antiaircraft fire emerging over Karaj tonight in #Iran. pic.twitter.com/T8RSxRmaYl

  — Jason Brodsky (@JasonMBrodsky) February 23, 2023

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

  One journalist and observer of the region described that “An unofficial report circulating online says that a depot of IR-6 centrifuges in Kondar village, 24 km from Karaj, Alborz province, was targeted Thursday night.” However, there’s no independent confirmation of this, despite the widely circulating videos.

  Bloomberg reported Sunday that Iran has currently reached an 84% uranium enrichment level, a new high. While Iran has all long claimed it is only for peaceful nuclear energy purposes, the number needed for achieving an atomic bomb is 90%.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 18:40

• Does Gold Really Preserve Purchasing Power? The Case Of The High-End Suit
  Does Gold Really Preserve Purchasing Power? The Case Of The High-End Suit

  Authored by Michael Maharrey via SchiffGold.com,

  One of the characteristics of gold is that it preserves wealth in a world of constantly devaluing fiat currency.

  Put another way, it preserves your purchasing power over time.

  If you hold onto dollars for several years, they will buy less stuff at the end of that time period than they did at the beginning. This is especially true when we have rapidly rising prices as we do today. But even when inflation is “under control,” Federal Reserve policy is to devalue the dollar by 2% every year.

  It simply doesn’t make sense to hold onto dollars for any length of time.

  We can demonstrate this in a tangible way by pricing a good or service in gold and examining the change in price over time.

  As an example, let’s consider a high-end men’s suit.

  In 1900, the average price of a high-end men’s suit was around $35.

  

  At the time, the price of gold was set at $20.67 per ounce. That means a high-end suit priced in gold would have cost around 1.7 ounces of gold.

  

  Today, the average price of a high-end suit is around $2,000.

  Obviously, prices vary depending on the brand, region and other factors, but this provides a fair average. At the time I’m writing this, the price of gold is around $1,840 an ounce. I’ll use $1,800 for this calculation to keep it simple. That means a high-end suit priced in gold today costs a little over 1.1 ounces of gold.

  As you can see, the price of a suit in gold has dropped a little over 35% since 1900. This is what you would expect given advances in technology and productivity. But priced in dollars, the price of a high-end men’s suit has increased by 5,614.3%.

  Looking at it another way, if you had stuffed $41.34 under your mattress in 1900, today you might be able to buy a couple of Polo shirts if you find a deal. But if you had bought two 1-ounce gold coins and stuffed those under your mattress in 1900, today you’d be able to buy a fancy suit and have about $1,600 left over.

  Of course, the price of gold fluctuates day to day, month to month, and year to year. In some years, the price of gold even falls. But over time, it has historically maintained its purchasing power even as fiat currencies lose buying power year after year.

  Added to the fact that it carries no counterparty risk, gold is an excellent way to safely preserve wealth and mitigate risk in your portfolio.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 18:20

• Toxic Wastewater From Ohio Train Derailment Headed To Texas
  Toxic Wastewater From Ohio Train Derailment Headed To Texas

  Recaptured toxic wastewater that was used to extinguish a fire after a Feb. 3 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio is now headed to a Houston, Texas suburb for disposal, according to a top official from Harris County.

  

  “I and my office heard today that ‘firefighting water’ from the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment is slated to be disposed of in our county,” said Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo in a Wednesday statement on Twitter. “Our Harris County Pollution Control Department and Harris County Attorney’s Office have reached out to the company and the Environmental Protection Agency to receive more information about the timing, transportation mechanisms, and contents, as well as to ensure all regulations are being met.”

  I heard the news today about East Palestine “firefighting water” being sent to Harris County and will continue pushing for information for our community. pic.twitter.com/lMyJYPtTdT

  — Lina Hidalgo (@LinaHidalgoTX) February 23, 2023

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsFurther details were not provided, though Hidalgo said that her office is working closely with the mayor of Deer Park, Texas.

  “I have communicated with Deer Park Emergency Management and Mayor [Jerry] Mouton and am very sensitive to the concerns that this news naturally brings to our community,” Hildago’s statement continues. “We will keep residents informed as we learn more.”

  The wastewater is headed to Texas Molecular, which has a process for injecting hazardous waste into the ground for disposal. This comes on the heels of a statement by Ohio EPA officials, who said that the chemicals used to put out the fire may have seeped into the Ohio River – partially forming into a plume of chemicals that is moving downstream.

  According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Texas Molecular “is authorized to accept and manage a variety of waste streams, including vinyl chloride, as part of their … hazardous waste permit and underground injection control permit,” which includes vinyl chloride – one of the ingredients carried by the train when it derailed.

  

  “Our technology safely removes hazardous constituents from the biosphere. We are part of the solution to reduce risk and protect the environment, whether in our local area or other places that need the capabilities we offer to protect the environment,” Texas Molecular said in a statement to KHOU-TV.

  The company will inject the water extremely deep into the earth.

  “This injection, in some cases, is usually 4,000 or 5,000 feet down below any kind of drinking water aquifer,” said George Guillen, the executive director of the Environmental Institute of Houston who holds a doctorate in environmental science, who says the risk to the public is minimal despite it being “very, very toxic” material.

  More via The Epoch Times,

  Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who visited the derailment site Thursday, has warned the railroad responsible for the derailment, Norfolk Southern, to fulfill its promises to clean up the mess just outside East Palestine, Ohio, and help the town recover.

  While in East Palestine, Buttigieg, who has faced criticism for his response to the disaster, joined members of the National Transportation Safety Board. The agency released a report on Thursday about its findings.

  

  The three-dozen Norfolk Southern train cars that derailed earlier this month had “11 tank cars carrying hazardous materials that subsequently ignited, fueling fires that damaged an additional 12 non-derailed railcars,” the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday. Five of the derailed cars were carrying about 115,580 gallons of vinyl chloride, the report found.

  The five cars with the toxic substance “continued to concern authorities because the temperature inside one tank car was still rising,” which could have resulted in an explosion, the report also found. When the controlled release and burn were initiated, officials forced locals in East Palestine to evacuate before allowing them to return days later.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 18:00

• "Colossal" Tidal Wave Of New Container Ships About To Strike
  “Colossal” Tidal Wave Of New Container Ships About To Strike

  By Greg Miller, of FreightWaves,

  Here it comes. An unprecedented flood of new container ships is about to enter service. The pace of deliveries will pick up in earnest next month, surge much higher in the second quarter, go higher still in the second half, even higher throughout 2024, and stay strong in 2025.

  “The colossal orderbook is like a sword of Damocles hanging over the market, with a raft of new ship deliveries in the next months inevitably triggering a return of overcapacity,” warned Alphaliner in a new report on Tuesday.

  “The change will be obvious from mid-March,” Alphaliner analyst Stefan Verberckmoes told American Shipper, adding: “This newbuilding wave is coming at a time of shrinking demand.”

  Maritime Strategies International (MSI) estimates that deliveries will total 717,900 twenty-foot equivalent units in Q2 2023, up 62% sequentially from the current quarter, with deliveries rising to 764,800 TEUs in Q3 2023.

  

  Mainline vessel deliveries per carrier

  The overall orderbook stood at 7.69 million TEUs as of Feb. 1, just under 30% of the on-the-water fleet capacity, according to Alphaliner. Of the total, 2.48 million TEUs (32%) was set for delivery this year, 2.95 million TEUs (38%) next year, and 2.26 million TEUs (30%) thereafter.

  In Tuesday’s report, Alphaliner analyzed deliveries of new ships to be deployed in mainline trades by the top 11 carriers. These numbers are particularly important to importers in the U.S. and Europe served by mainline vessels.

  The stats show 89 new mainline vessels for delivery in the remainder of 2023, followed by 130 next year and 96 in 2025, for a total of 315 over the next three years. (Including newbuildings for non-mainline trades, Alphaliner data shows these 11 carriers have a total of 499 newbuildings on order.)

  Mediterranean Shipping Co. (MSC), the world’s largest ocean carrier, is taking delivery of by far the most mainline capacity through 2025. It has 92 such vessels in the pipeline, including 33 in the remainder of this year.

  CMA CGM has the second-most mainline vessel orders, at 38, most for delivery next year. Cosco (including OOCL) has the third-highest tally at 32. OOCL held a naming ceremony for its newest ship, the 24,188-TEU OOCL Spain, at China’s NACKS shipyard on Feb. 16.

  

  Mainline vessel deliveries by size

  Alphaliner also looked at the size categories of these newbuildings, dividing them into three categories: “Megamaxes,” with capacity of 23,000-24,000 TEUs, vessels that will be deployed in the Asia-Europe trade; “Neopanamaxes,” ships with capacity of 13,000-15,000 TEUs that can transit the Panama Canal; and other mainline vessels, with capacity of 7,000 TEUs-plus. Deliveries of Neopanamaxes and other mainline vessels will impact the U.S. ocean freight market.

  Neopanamaxes are by far the largest category, representing 60% of the total mainline newbuildings to be delivered through 2025. Megamaxes account for 23% and other mainline newbuildings 17%.

  MSC is heavily focused on more flexible Neopanamaxes. They represent 62% of its mainline vessel deliveries through 2025, according to Alphaliner data. Neopanamaxes account for 58% of CMA CGM’s mainline vessel orders.

  

  In terms of delivery timing, the largest wave of Megamax arrivals (60% of the total) is arriving this year, raising concerns on imminent Asia-Europe overcapacity.

  Alphaliner cautioned that “an armada of Megamax newbuildings” is set to join the Asia-Europe trade “at a time of weakening demand.”

  Deliveries of Neopanamaxes and other mainliner vessels will be heavy throughout 2023-25, but particularly so next year (44% of total deliveries), implying heightened capacity pressures on trans-Pacific rates in 2024.

  

  Effects on carrier strategy

  Matt Cox, CEO of trans-Pacific carrier Matson, addressed the orderbook dilemma during a quarterly call on Tuesday.

  “What I think will happen and what should happen is that the international ocean carriers, operating through their global alliances, will ultimately resize their fleets in the trans-Pacific and globally,” Cox said.

  “There is a large orderbook. Those vessels are going to be delivered. Some of them will be delayed. We will also see an advanced level of scrapping. And for vessels that are chartered — which represent about 50% of the global fleet — many will be returned to the vessel owners when the charter periods are over.

  “You’re going to see a combination of resizing [strategies] that are going to occur, even potentially laying up vessels,” added Cox. He expects these strategies to intensify “over the coming months.”

  Differing views on order splurge

  The overwhelming consensus is that carriers will face a tough few years as a result of their ordering spree. But opinions diverge on just how bad it will be, and just how rational or irrational carrier ordering behavior has been.

  At one end of the spectrum is the view that carriers have stupidly shot themselves in the foot yet again, succumbing to the classic boom-and-bust shipping cycle pattern, over-ordering and locking in losses for years to come — that their ordering behavior is “madness.”

  According to this view, the capacity on order is far more than the global market will ever need. As vessel supply exceeds demand for an extended period, at least some carriers will go for market share, creating a lengthy rate depression that will ultimately erase much of carriers’ COVID-era windfall profits.

  At the other end of the spectrum is the view that ocean carriers need new ships. Pre-COVID, there was a long period of extreme under-ordering when carriers were under severe financial stress. The global fleet became old. According to VesselsValue, the average age of the world’s container ships is now 14.6 years.

  Newly constructed vessels are much more fuel efficient than older tonnage, and fuel is one of carriers’ top costs. Newbuildings can also incorporate dual-fuel capabilities, allowing carriers to “future proof” against environmental regulations.

  Container lines order new ships when the freight market peaks because that’s when they have the financial wherewithal to do so. Shipping-line balance sheets have never been stronger than they are today. This has allowed them to easily finance newbuildings to replace older tonnage and lower their future operating costs.

  As newbuildings are delivered, carriers will scrap the older ships they own and let older chartered tonnage go off-hire. The portion of carriers’ fleets that is chartered as opposed to owned is far higher than new capacity on order. According to Alphaliner data, on-the-water chartered tonnage of the top 11 carriers is currently 76% or 4.6 million TEUs times higher than the aggregate tonnage on order by those carriers.

  Many of the charter durations will extend beyond newbuild delivery dates, meaning there will be a temporary overhang and legacy chartering costs will eat into some of the carrier profits earned during the boom.

  But ultimately, after a challenging transition period, carriers will end up with a new, fuel-efficient fleet that’s right-sized to demand, and they’ll still have some of that pandemic windfall on their balance sheets — or so the optimistic theory goes. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 17:40

• Retail Investors' Most Popular Stocks Of 2023 So Far
  Retail Investors’ Most Popular Stocks Of 2023 So Far

  According to VandaTrack, retail investors are still a force to be reckoned with, adding an average of $1.5 billion each day into U.S. markets.

  As Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu notes, this is a record-breaking level of inflows, which raises the question: what are investors buying? To find out, we’ve visualized the 10 most popular picks of 2023, as of February 15.

  

  The Top 10 List

  Most of the names in this list won’t come as a surprise. They represent eight of the world’s largest and most well-known tech companies, as well as two highly popular U.S. equity ETFs.

  

   

  Looking closer at the numbers, we can see that Tesla’s net retail flows of $9.75 billion are greater than all of the other individual stocks combined ($8.5 billion). This is a sign that investors still have plenty of faith in Tesla, even as its market share is beginning to shrink.

   

  We recently covered Tesla’s profit margins (net profits per vehicle) in a separate infographic.

  Perhaps the least common name on a top 10 ranking such as this is AMD. The chipmaker has made for a compelling underdog story in recent years, gaining significant market share from its long time rival, Intel.

  What About the Meme Stocks?

  Several meme stocks made it into the broader top 100 list. This includes Bed Bath & Beyond, which ranked 47th with $114 million in net retail flows.

  The retailer has been struggling to avoid bankruptcy, recently raising $225 million through an underwritten public offering of preferred shares. A further $800 million could be coming, if certain conditions are met.

  The company says it’s committed to paying down its overdue debts, and will be closing stores to reduce costs.

  AMC Entertainment, which saw extreme volatility during the COVID-19 pandemic, ranked 52nd on the list for retail investors with $90 million in net flows. The stock has generated a 27% return YTD (as of Feb. 15). The cinema operator’s revenues have been recovering since the pandemic, but they’ve yet to reach pre-2020 levels.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 17:20

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• Only A Third Of Ukrainians In Germany Plan To Return Home When War Ends
  Only A Third Of Ukrainians In Germany Plan To Return Home When War Ends

  Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

  The vast majority of Ukrainian refugees currently residing in Germany do not intend to return to their home country immediately after the war, the latest polling has revealed…

  

  In a survey conducted by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), just 34 percent of respondents revealed they would go home immediately after the war.

  Around 2 percent said they planned to remain in Germany for at least a year after the end of the conflict, while 11 percent revealed their intention to stay in German for “a few more years.”

  Significantly, more than a quarter (26 percent) of respondents said they had no plans to return to Ukraine and wanted to remain in Germany indefinitely.

  More than 1 million Ukrainian refugees have moved to Germany since war broke out in the country in February last year. Recent figures suggest a total of 1,055,323 as of Feb. 15, 2023, a figure lower only than Poland with 1.55 million recorded refugees and Russia with 2.85 million refugees.

  Despite being well educated — 72 percent of adults reportedly have a university degree — just 4 percent of respondents reported having a good knowledge of the German language, although half are attending language courses.

  Furthermore, just 17 percent of working-age Ukrainians have found employment in Germany.

  The BAMF study revealed that three-quarters of Ukrainian refugees currently reside in private accommodations, while 9 percent are living in refugee shelters and 17 percent in hotels.

  Approximately 80 percent of adult refugees from Ukraine are women, of which three-quarters arrived in Germany without a partner. Around 48 percent of said women arrived with child dependents.

  The state of health among Ukrainian refugees is generally regarded as good, but their life satisfaction is significantly lower compared to the German population.

  “The psychological well-being of refugee children is also low compared to other children living in Germany,” the report states.

  The most popular reason for Ukrainian refugees opting to head to Germany was because of the country’s “respect for human rights.” Other reasons cited by respondents include the country’s welfare system, its education system, and the fact they consider Germany to be a welcoming, tolerant country.

  The results come at a time when local authorities in Germany are reporting to the federal government that their social services are saturated, and many local authorities have pushed back against further plans to accommodate even more immigrants.

  “There is a lack of apartments, daycare places, teachers for schools and language courses. This is one of the reasons why social tensions are increasing,” warned Reinhard Sager, the president of the German District Association, earlier this month.

  The tide of public opinion is also swiftly turning against the federal government’s liberal asylum policy. A survey conducted by the INSA opinion research institute for the newspaper Bild am Sonntag revealed 51 percent of Germans think the country is accepting too many refugees.

  German tenants in the town of Lörrach in southern Germany were informed this month that their apartment contracts were to be terminated and they would be evicted to make way for Ukrainian refugees.

  The current state of play led Germany’s conservative Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader, Alice Weidel, to call for the government to close the border last month, insisting the country’s welfare state is under severe threat due to mass migration.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/23/2023 – 02:00

• Crazy Optimism About China's Economy
  Crazy Optimism About China’s Economy

  Authored by Gordon G. Chang via The Gatestone Institute,

  China’s propagandists tell us the Chinese economy this year will “accelerate to 4.8%.” Foreign analysts are even more bullish. Goldman Sachs estimates growth of gross domestic product of 5.5%.

  China’s National Health Commission announced the end of the Communist Party’s “dynamic zero-Covid” policy on December 7. It did not take long for Wall Street to crank up the optimism machine. Morgan Stanley, on the following day, issued a research note predicting that Chinese equities would outperform emerging markets and global peers.

  Since then, financial analysts have been falling over themselves to say how China’s stocks will continue to soar this year.

  Stocks may soar for a while, but China’s economy is far sicker than analysts assume.

  

  At the heart of the sunny views is how fast China has put COVID-19 behind it.

  On the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday in China, often called the “world’s largest human migration” and therefore a potentially superspreader event, Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist of the country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that 80% of China’s population had already been infected.

  At the end of the holiday, the Center reported that there were 6,364 deaths between January 20-26 in hospitals, almost half the number of deaths in the preceding week.

  Beijing’s position is that the disease has already peaked so that further spread is unlikely.

  No wonder investors are exuberant. Covid relaxation is central to the idea that China’s economy will produce solid growth. Bulls, aided by Communist Party and central government propaganda, make the argument that the end of disease-control measures— China maintained one of the world’s strictest set of rules for three years — will result in a binge of “revenge spending.”

  “Chinese consumers, trapped inside their apartments during parts of the pandemic, accumulated more than $2.2 trillion in bank deposits last year, which should fuel more spending,” the Wall Street Journal reported this month. The Financial Times put the figure at $2.6 trillion.

  Is the bull case correct?

  There are four primary reasons to doubt it.

  First, China’s disease statistics are questionable.

  “China Portrayal of Smooth Covid Exit Leaves Scientists Wanting More Data,” a polite Wall Street Journal headline put it.

  Beijing is asking the world to believe that SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing this disease, is behaving differently in China than it has in all other parts of the world. If this claim is false, as it almost certainly is, there will be a follow-on wave of infections in the country this spring, as disease modelers have been predicting.

  Second, even if China were over Covid as the regime maintains, the economy is still plagued by its over-dependence on property, which accounts for almost 30% of GDP.

  Prices and sales have been plunging since late 2021, when Beijing finally restricted imprudent lending to big developers, most notably China Evergrande Group, now in default.

  Housing is critical because it also accounts for about 70% of the wealth of the middle class. The Chinese people have powered the economy with spending when property prices were rising, either because they were reaping gains on sales or because of the “wealth effect,” the circumstance that people tend to spend when they feel their assets have gone up in value. Now, the opposite of the wealth effect is depressing consumption.

  “The property sector downturn is hard-wired into the first half of 2023,” reported the Rhodium Group last month, in an analysis on China’s economic prospects.

  That means a downturn in first-half GDP is also hard-wired.

  Third, the Chinese economy is far weaker than Beijing claims.

  The National Bureau of Statistics reported that GDP grew 3.0% last year, but that is highly unlikely.

  More probably, as Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research tells Gatestone, the economy in fact contracted. The poor economy, like the property downturn, appears to have crimped consumer spending. The general downbeat mood of the Chinese people will convince them to save more than analysts think.

  Fourth, the regime during the pandemic did almost nothing to remedy the principal structural flaw in the Chinese economy: the overreliance on government spending, which over decades has resulted in overbuilding and therefore created mountains of questionable debt.

  Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association, tells Gatestone that “the fundamentals of the Chinese economy have already been destroyed, so the optimism about the reversals of Communist Party policy on Covid management will be short-lived.”

  “China is back,” is how the Financial Times summarized the message of Vice Premier Liu He to the just-completed World Economic Forum gathering in Davos. Maybe so, but it is back to the old faulty economic structure.

  “China is too optimistic about a quick economic turnaround in 2023 following the Covid lockdowns,” Andrew Collier, an analyst at Global Source Partners, said in e-mail comments to this publication.

  “Local governments are running huge financial deficits, many people are holding on to cash because they are worried about their health, and the downturn in the property market has affected people’s retirement savings.”

  Collier, based in Hong Kong, thinks wealthy consumers may buy high-end imports so the overall impact on the Chinese economy “will not be large.”

  Collier therefore believes there will not be an uptick until 2024.

  In any event, Copley, also editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, says that “foreign analysts of mainland China’s economy have always engaged in wishful thinking, and there is now an air of desperation.”

  China is not going to have a good 2023 or a good 2024. Foreigners are going to lose money in China again.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 23:45

• America's Most Admired Men
  America’s Most Admired Men

  Former and current presidents are the people most commonly named by Americans as the men they most admire.

  Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes that, among those being very consistently ranked in a Gallup poll that has been running since 1946 is Jimmy Carter. The 39th president of the United States announced Saturday through his foundation that he had entered hospice care. Despite serving just one term from 1977 to 1981, Carter has remained one of the country’s most beloved presidents and has been revered for his long-standing commitments to NGO Habitat for Humanity and teaching Sunday school in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. The former Navy lieutenant and peanut farmer became a state senator and the governor of Georgia before running for the presidency as a Democrat. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Price in 2002.

  The only other president found in Gallup’s top 10 more often than Carter is the Republican who challenged and beat him in his reelection campaign: Ronald Reagan. He was in the top 10 a total of 31 times until his death in 2004 (the poll only lists living persons).

  

  In first position of the all-time most admired poll is a man who is neither a president nor a politician: Reverend Billy Graham, a Southern Baptist evangelical minister who became well-known through his sermons being broadcast on radio and TV.

  While Reagan and Carter only rose to national prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, Graham was already famous internationally by the 1940s and lived to almost 100 years before dying in 2018, giving him enough time to be mentioned among the top 10 of America’s most admired men 61 times.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  In a similar poll by YouGov, Jimmy Carter was still listed as the third most admired man in the U.S. behind fellow former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump the last time a country-specific version was published in 2020.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 23:25

• Global Sperm Counts Declining At Accelerating Rate: New Meta-Analysis
  Global Sperm Counts Declining At Accelerating Rate: New Meta-Analysis

  Authored by David Charbonneau via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A recently published meta-analysis shows that global sperm counts are declining worldwide—at an accelerating rate.

  

  The article, published in the journal Human Reproduction Update in November 2022 by an international team of researchers, reviewed 2,936 scholarly abstracts and 868 full articles and analyzed data from 38 sperm count studies done on six continents, updating their landmark study of 2017.

  The 2017 study found sperm counts had fallen in North America, Europe, and Australia by over 50 percent in a fifty-year span. The current study updated this data as well as added data from South/Central America, Asia, and Africa.

  “The aim of this study was to examine trends in sperm count among men from all continents. The broader implications of a global decline in sperm count, the knowledge gaps left unfilled by our prior analysis, and the controversies surrounding this issue warranted an up-to-date meta-analysis,” said the authors.

  The analysis found that while sperm counts had declined at the average rate per year of 1.16 percent between 1972 and 2000, the rate of decline since 2000 has increased to an average of 2.64 percent per year.

  

  Reviewing the findings in an After Skool YouTube episode, study author Shanna Swan said:

  “Now we can conclude that among men who didn’t know what their fertility [rate] was, who are, by the way, most representative of the general population, that there was a significant decline [in sperm counts and sperm concentration] in Asia, Africa, and South America—so now we can say that our finding of a significant decline in sperm concentration and count is worldwide—that was a big change from the 2017 paper.

  “The other change from the 2017 paper was the rate at which sperm counts are declining: When we look at recent years—particularly since the turn of the century—the rate is 2.64 per year. That’s more than double 1.16, the prior finding.”

  The Role of Plastics in Reproductive Disruption

  The obvious question is—why the accelerated rate of decline?

  Swan dismissed genetic explanations, pointing out that genetic changes take “many generations to appear” whereas these changes are taking place in two generations or less.

  “That leaves us with environment,” Swan said.

  Swan and other experts believe the problem is a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, which interfere with the body’s hormones.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 23:05

• South Africans Without Electricity For Nine Hours A Day Amid "Ginormous" Blackouts
  South Africans Without Electricity For Nine Hours A Day Amid “Ginormous” Blackouts

  Amid all the focus on Europe’s energy troubles in the past year, a byproduct of the continent’s legacy reliance on Russian commodity exports, it has largely slipped the world’s attention that a far more brutal – and mostly ignored – energy crisis is taking place right now in South Africa, which recently declared a state of disaster due to its energy crisis.

  This crisis, discussed in more detailed below, came to a head overnight when South African utility Eskom – which is not only the largest producer of electricity in South Africa but in all of Africa, and is among the top utilities in the world in terms of generation capacity and sales – and which has been forced to implement power cuts every day this year as its fleet of old and defective coal-powered stations frequently breaks down, reached an unprecedented level of power cuts, indicated late on Tuesday by the company spokesman.

  The company cut 7.045GW from the grid through load shedding so as to keep the grid from a total collapse, Sikonathi Mantshantsha said in a post on Twitter.

  Evening Peak Feedback 21/02/2023, 19:15
  Total demand: 30 480MW
  Loadshedding: 7 045MW
  Eskom OCGT’s Utilised: 14
  Eskom GT’s Utilised: 3
  IPP OCGT’s: 5
  Renewable Gen: 1 262MW (Wind 791MW, CSP 390MW, PV 81MW)@Eskom_SA Available Generation: 23 289MW@EskomSpokesper1

  — SikonathiMantshantsh (@SikonathiM) February 21, 2023

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

  As Bloomberg’s in-house energy guru Javier Blas calculated, “in practical terms, it means households losing power 3 times a day, each time lasting ~3 hours” or a total of 9 hours without power every day.

  He confirmed that the intensity of power cuts increased to the so-called Stage 7 of loadshedding, as the practice is known locally. The utility earlier had only indicated it was implementing Stage 6, where it removes a corresponding 6,000 megawatts.

  Isn’t this Stage 7? pic.twitter.com/PN6DeMXyW4

  — traveller (@2023traveller) February 22, 2023

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

  As Bloomberg notes, the record rationing is a severe blow to Africa’s most-industrialized economy, which is struggling to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic and rebuild battered business confidence. Eskom has subjected the country to power outages every day this year. The South African Reserve Bank estimates the outages cost the nation as much as 899 million rand ($49 million) per day.

  Eskom, which supplies most of South Africa’s power from coal-fired plants, has been implementing rolling blackouts since 2008 because it can’t meet demand. Less than half of the utility’s generation capacity is available, two newly built coal-fired plants have also proven unreliable and other defective generating units have had to be taken off-line for repairs. The government has declared a state of disaster due to its energy crisis.

  Economists polled by Bloomberg predict the economy shrank in the final quarter of 2022 and that it’s on course to contract in the three months through March largely because of the sustained power cuts.

  Plans to add capacity from private producers have been dogged by delays and legal disputes. Eskom says the country needs an additional 4,000 to 6,000 megawatts of generating capacity to ensure a secure energy supply.  The so-called energy availability factor of Eskom’s fleet has been declining every year since 2017, according to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

  As Blas concludes, “the electricity crisis in South Africa is getting a lot worse — the size of the blackouts is just ginormous!!!!” Those who wish to learn more about South Africa’s energy crisis can read his recent opinion piece in Bloomberg here.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 22:45

• Senator Accuses FAA Of Ignoring Potential Vaccine Dangers To Pilots
  Senator Accuses FAA Of Ignoring Potential Vaccine Dangers To Pilots

  Authored by Janice Hisle via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) is expressing dismay over how the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) responded to his questions about the agency’s handling of pilot health issues.

  “How can the FAA maintain safe skies when it turns a blind eye toward pilots experiencing COVID-19 vaccine injuries?” Johnson said in an email sent exclusively to The Epoch Times on Feb. 21.

  “Is it willful ignorance that the FAA is aware of only four active pilots experiencing adverse events connected to the COVID-19 vaccine? The American people are not getting the full transparency and honesty from federal agencies that they deserve.”

  Johnson made those remarks in response to how Susan Northrup, the FAA’s federal air surgeon, answered eight questions surrounding pilot health.

  

  Not the FAA’s Role

  In his Jan. 27 letter to the FAA, Johnson provided specific information about five named pilots with suspected COVID-19 vaccine ill effects; one of the pilots died 17 days after being vaccinated.

  Numerous other accounts of pilots with suspected vaccine injuries are included in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, as The Epoch Times reported previously.

  Johnson wanted to know what steps the FAA has taken or planned to take to investigate whether the five named pilots and others had suffered adverse effects after COVID-19 shots.

  Northrup wrote that her agency isn’t in charge of that.

  “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the responsible agency for tracking and follow up of suspected vaccine adverse events,” she wrote.

  Northrup noted that pilots experiencing any medical issues are required to “ground themselves,” seek medical help and report any “significant medical events.”

  “FAA is responsible for determining whether that event will have an adverse safety effect,” Northrup wrote.

  She also said the agency was “aware of only four potentially vaccine-related adverse events in active pilots.”

  Among those four, “only one has provided medical documentation through the normal process,” Northrup wrote. She gave no further information on what that process involves.

  Justification For Shots

  Johnson noted that, on Dec. 12, 2020, the day after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized COVID-19 vaccines for “emergency use” among the general public, the FAA declared pilots were permitted to take the shots, too.

  That action surprised many in aviation because pilots are forbidden from taking other emergency-use-authorized drugs.

  To justify the drugs’ use in pilots, Northrup listed nine websites about the general safety of the various brands of vaccines. Aviation experts have questioned whether any studies were done on pilots specifically. There were no such studies immediately apparent among the list Northrup provided.

  Asked whether the FAA evaluated whether any changes should be made to guidance on COVID-19 vaccines for pilots, Northrup responded that the agency has “continued to monitor the data and determined no change in policy was indicated.”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 22:25

• Starlink 'Surprises' Residential Customers With Monthly Price Adjustments
  Starlink ‘Surprises’ Residential Customers With Monthly Price Adjustments

  Residential customers of Elon Musk-led SpaceX’s Starlink were greeted with an email this morning about changes to internet service pricing based on capacity in users’ areas. The following price changes include:

  • $10 increase in areas with limited capacity. The new price will be $120/month.  

  • $20 decrease in areas with excess capacity. The new price will be $90/month.

  “As a current customer in an area with limited capacity, your monthly service price will increase to $120/month beginning April 24, 2023. For new customers in your area, the price increase is effective immediately,” the email read. 

  

  Starlink also adjusted the pricing for its RV customers, increasing the service cost by $15 a month to $150.

  

  The email continued: 

  “If you do not wish to continue service, you can cancel at any time on your account page. Your Starlink hardware can be returned for a full refund within 30 days of purchase, or a partial refund of $250 within 12 months of purchase.” 

  And noted:

  “As the SpaceX team launches more satellites to increase capacity, the Starlink team is making continuous network updates to improve performance over time.” 

  The price adjustments come as Starlink crossed 1,000,000 active subscribers in December. There have been complaints by some users of slowing internet speeds due to an increasing user base. To counter this, SpaceX has launched next-generation satellites into orbit to expand broadband capacity to the network. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 22:05

• Court Asked To Unseal Undercover Police Video Allegedly Showing Officer Inciting Capitol Protesters On J6
  Court Asked To Unseal Undercover Police Video Allegedly Showing Officer Inciting Capitol Protesters On J6

  Authored by Joseph M. Hanneman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A Jan. 6 defendant asked U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras to unseal a video allegedly showing an undercover Metropolitan Police Department officer shouting “drain the swamp!” and “our house!” and encouraging protesters to climb barricades and enter the U.S. Capitol.

  

  William Pope of Topeka, Kansas, filed a motion on Feb. 21 that would also unseal video shot by two other MPD undercover officers who trailed Ashli Babbitt up the northwest exterior of the Capitol.

  One of those officers repeatedly predicted that someone would get shot on Jan. 6, Pope contended in another motion filed in November 2022.

  “While my descriptions of the undercover MPD officers are accurate, the media and the public should not have to rely on my descriptions alone,” Pope wrote.

  

  “It is in the interests of justice that this exhibit in support of my motion be seen by all.”

  Pope also asked the court to remove the seal from a wider sampling of the MPD video shot by undercover operatives.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 21:45

• Target Bets $100 Million To Be "Bigger, Faster, Better Than Before"
  Target Bets $100 Million To Be “Bigger, Faster, Better Than Before”

  Next-day delivery has become increasingly important to consumers since the pandemic forced sales to move online. The rise of e-commerce and the demand for instant gratification has pushed Target Corp. to invest $100 million to expand supply chain hubs to speed up and lower the costs of delivering online orders. 

  Target, the eighth-largest retailer in the US, plans to invest $100 million to expand its supply chain sortation network to more than 15 facilities by the second half of 2026. The move will allow the retailer to increase next-day delivery capabilities to major markets nationwide. 

  “Sortation centers and our Last Mile Delivery capabilities support our guest experience and benefit our business — helping us deliver more efficiently and faster, at a lower cost while increasing our capacity,” the company said in a press release.

  Currently, there are nine sortation centers in Minnesota, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, including three in the greater Chicago and Denver metro areas. 

  

  Target wants to be “Bigger, faster, better than before,” the press release said. Perhaps, this is a move to compete with Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart Inc., which already offer rapid shipping to customers in many areas across the country. 

  The investment comes as sortation centers have already recorded incredible growth as consumers shift to online orders:

  

  Gretchen McCarthy, Target’s chief global supply chain & logistics officer, stated in the press release:

  “Now more than ever, our guests rely on us to deliver their everyday essentials and Target favorites when they want and need them most.

  “Through our sortation centers and Target Last Mile Delivery capabilities, we’re able to move faster and with more precision — while controlling costs and expanding our network capacity — for years to come.”

  The company is betting on e-commerce growth despite evidence showing retailers are dealing with near-record high inventory glut and consumers suffering from 21 months of negative real wage growth. 

  Retailers can only hope the US government will helicopter drop more ‘stimmy checks’ if another crisis arises. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 21:25

• Man Finds Undetonated Blasting Cap 1.4 Miles From Ohio Derailment
  Man Finds Undetonated Blasting Cap 1.4 Miles From Ohio Derailment

  Authored by Jeff Louderback via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Like many residents who live within a few miles of Norfolk Southern Railway’s Feb. 3 train derailment, Jerry Corbin evacuated before the railroad decided to conduct a controlled burn of five freight cars containing the toxic vinyl chloride on Feb. 6.

  

  When he returned to his home in Darlington Township, Pennsylvania—around 1.4 miles from the crash site—Corbin discovered two surprises. Black debris that resemble ash was strewn all over his yard and on his roof, and an “undetonated blasting cap” landed in a pasture near his house.

  On the evening of Feb. 3, a Norfolk Southern train carrying 151 cars derailed in East Palestine, a village of 4,761 located in eastern Ohio near the Pennsylvania border.

  According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), “38 rail cars derailed, and a fire ensued which damaged an additional 12 cars.”

  Of the cars that derailed, 11 contained hazardous materials, the NTSB said.

  Seeking to avoid an explosion, Norfolk Southern decided to release and burn vinyl chloride from five rail cars, which sent flames and thick black smoke billowing into the sky once more.

  Corbin believes the blasting cap, which has a wire and is filled with cotton, was used to help detonate the cars in the controlled burn.

  

  “It’s not real big. It would blow your hand off,” Corbin said of the blasting cap. “I contacted someone in the military and asked him about it. He said don’t have any static electricity around it, don’t drop it.”

  Vinyl chloride is a chemical used to make PVC pipes and other products. The National Cancer Institute notes that vinyl chloride has been linked to cancers of the brain, lungs, blood, lymphatic system, and liver.

  Other rail cars contained ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, isobutylene, and butyl acrylate, which are all used in the making of plastic products.

  “The night of the crash, my wife and I were driving into East Palestine to go to the store, and we saw the fire and the smoke,” Corbin explained. “I have asthma, so even before there was an evacuation order, we packed a few bags and went to a hotel away from the area.”

  

  Before the controlled burn, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine urged residents in a 1-mile by 2-mile area surrounding East Palestine—which included parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania—to evacuate.

  During an initial phone conversation, the EPA said the ash on Corbin’s property was not from the derailment, Corbin said.

  “Then they sent some people out, and they were astonished about what they saw,” Corbin said, adding that the EPA representatives took samples of the ash before they left.

  “A few days later, some more people from the EPA stopped by and took more samples,” Corbin said. “I asked them to let me know what is in that ash before we plant our garden. We haven’t heard anything from them since.”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 21:05

• Rolling Stone Argues In Favor Of Authoritarian Cancel Culture – Here's Why They're Wrong
  Rolling Stone Argues In Favor Of Authoritarian Cancel Culture – Here’s Why They’re Wrong

  Rolling Stone has never been considered a serious journalistic establishment, but at the very least, they have been known in the past as “edgy” when dealing with the mainstream taboos of the 20th century.  It’s hard to pretend like you’re a revolutionary, though, when your side is now allied with power elite.  

  This is a great conundrum these days for the political left, which has long prided itself on the liberal roots of the 1960s hippie movement, rock n’ roll, drug culture and comedy that seeks to offend.  The leftist fold spent decades thinking they were “fighting against the man” and now they find that with the help of corporations, globalist think-tanks and government leaders, they ARE the man.  

  Though the woke left represents a small minority within America, they still have the backing of every major center of influence imaginable.  The Democratic Party fast-tracks their agenda and many moderate Democrats go along to get along for fear of being ostracized (canceled).  And what has the woke movement done with this newfound power?  They have gone insane, abusing it in a frothing fervor of rage, fear, envy and desire, just like any despot would.  

  In the meantime, leftists continue to act as if they are still fighting a revolution against an unseen and ambiguous “patriarchy” that is supposedly holding them down.  They are willing to do anything, including lie, cheat, steal, disrupt and sabotage to gain absolute control and they feel exonerated because they insist they are being “oppressed.”  Good luck finding actual concrete examples of this oppression, however.

  Rolling Stone, a property of Penske Media Corporation, is the latest in a long line of corporate spin doctors to publish materials justifying cancel culture and the exploitation of mob power to assert dominance over the public.  In a recent article titled ‘Why Cancel Culture Is Good For Democracy’ the magazine launches into a tirade of victimhood, a tall tale in which millions of oppressed people turn to cancel culture as their only defense against a society of white supremacists bent on holding them down.  It’s utter nonsense, and here’s why:

  Democracy Is Anti-American

  The political left uses the word “democracy” often and they do this quite deliberately.  The America they envision in the future is a pure democracy, and democracy is based on mob rule.  This is not how our nation was founded.  As James Madison noted:

  “Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.”

  And as Alexander Hamilton stated:

  “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

  America was founded as a Republic, not a democracy, which means individual liberties are supposed to be protected  regardless of what the majority says.  This is not how the left understands governance, though.  They obsess over garnering a majority vote or a majority opinion even if they have to fabricate it through fraud.  They do this because they actually believe that 51% of the population should have control over the other 49%. This is tyranny by the mob. 

  Cancel culture is an exact expression of this dynamic.  Rolling Stone is right when they say “cancel culture is good for democracy”, it’s just not good for freedom or for America. 

  The Mob Is Not The Free Market

  Rolling Stone notes: 

  “…Straight white men and other people with power aren’t used to getting pushback for the ways they conduct themselves—and cancel culture has reset the ways society can react. Those who fear cancel culture may claim they fear suppression of speech, but it’s accountability that they want to avoid.”

  But who gets to determine accountability?  This argument is an extension of the old leftist claim that cancel culture is just the “free market” determining what behavior is acceptable in society.  But whose “society” are we talking about?  Because at least half the country has something different to say about what is acceptable and who should really be held accountable.

  It’s hard to tell if leftists are too stupid to understand how real free markets work or if they are deliberately misrepresenting the concept.  In a free market, you are welcome to take your money and your interest elsewhere if a company or individual offends you.  You are not welcome to shut them down and silence them in order to stop them from interacting with the people who are interested. Leftists don’t just want to walk away from the people who offend them, they also want the ability to stop everyone else from engaging with a canceled person.  They don’t want to take their ball and go home, they want to drop napalm on the entire playground.      

  Personal Offense Is Not An Excuse For Authoritarianism

  Rolling Stone’s contributors and people like them have declared themselves the arbiters of society and the dictators of what constitutes “bigotry” and “hate.”  No one gave them permission to take on this role, they merely pronounced that they would be the ultimate purveyors of speech.  They anointed themselves the thought police because, as Rolling Stone’s article laments, government is not yet doing it for them:

  “Right now, bigots are protected under the First Amendment to fuel disgusting rhetoric without state-sanctioned consequence. The America that tolerated white supremacy in their policies and laws is the same country that wants to remind us how such forms of hate are still legal via free speech. Cancel culture is the poison to those in power that have benefited from unchecked free speech.”

  What the political left has done is conjure up a Trojan horse to deliver authoritarianism in the form of victim group entitlement.  They assert that there are simply certain things you cannot say or do because they hurt the feelings of specific designated groups and diminish their “equity.”  Who chooses this list of taboos?  They do.  Who chooses the groups that get protection from offense?  They do.  And each year the list grows longer.

  

  Cancel culture is a methodology very similar to what Josef Stalin applied during his “Great Purge”.  The concept of mass shunning and un-personing was integral to the Marxist/Communist dynamic as a means to frighten individuals into conformity.  You might be able to think whatever you want privately, but if you even whisper against the collective, the power elites and the gatekeepers could swiftly mobilize their mindless drones to attack you or to cut you off from access to the economy.  You face possible death, and the communists pretend as if they are acting on the values of freedom of association.

  In other words, the cancel culture mob believes they should have the “freedom” to destroy your access to society, thus destroying your freedoms in the process.  They can technically say that they’re not censoring people’s speech because they aren’t putting you in prison or holding a gun to your head (yet), but you risk the destruction of your future if you speak up.  This insidious dynamic obviously leads to self censorship.  Not only that, but the population is also weaponized against each other, for if a person does not support the cancellation of a designated enemy, they might be labeled an enemy.

  Cancel Culture Targets The Defiant, Not The Powerful

  The big lie at the core of the Rolling Stone article’s premise is that cancel culture is about giving the common citizen a means to hold the powerful accountable, but this does not happen.  Powerful corporations, globalist think tanks, politicians and money elites all engage in corruption and criminality daily with impunity and leftists don’t blink an eye.  The only people who get canceled are people who question the woke ideology.  

  Cancel culture is not about “justice,” it’s about revenge and sterilization.  It’s about making an example of the left’s political enemies.  The purpose is to erase oppositional thinking and speech and inoculate future generations from considering contrary views. 

  Rolling Stone gaslights its own readers with the claim that cancel culture serves to fight against oppression…by enabling the mob to oppress:

  “The fact that people—both powerful and less so—have been put on notice that whatever move they make can now be checked, not only by the courts, law enforcement, or government but by the people, means cancel culture has essentially won the cultural wars. Although still rich and influential, the most powerful have now been humbled by the digital accessibility of everyday people whom they once could simply dismiss or silence.”

  This is a delusional conclusion because it overlooks an important factor – Cancel culture is nothing without the support of the same powerful people leftists say they are fighting against.  They have influence because Big Tech conglomerates are mostly run by globalists that see leftists as useful fodder for attacking conservatives.  As we have witnessed with social media sites like Twitter, leftist power was throttled as soon as the old management (that worked closely with the government) was removed.  The fight has to be one-sided for the mob to gain an advantage because they cannot compete on a balanced battlefield of ideas.    

  The only way for cancel culture to survive is if all power centers and all major communications networks like social media are controlled and rigged in favor of the political left.  And who is almost universally targeted by social media for cancellation?  Regular conservatives and anyone else that defies the woke cult.  The release of the Twitter Files confirmed this beyond a shadow of a doubt.            

  Cancel culture is not concerned with the powerful, they are concerned with the free thinkers, the skeptics that don’t bow to the whims of zealots.  It’s not civic engagement and it’s not protest, it’s a tiny minority of degenerates and narcissists using the internet to manufacture consensus and consent. It’s about innocent people being afraid of losing their job, their livelihood and their reputation because they said something against the high priests of social justice.

  In reality, the influence of cancel culture is diminishing as the public grows irritated and tired of perpetually entitled and outraged leftists.  They have become an international joke.  This is why the woke movement tried to deny the existence of cancel culture for a time; it was making them look bad and they knew it.  Now, Rolling Stone’s commentators suggest that the political left embrace cancel culture and own it proudly.  It’s an act of desperation for an exposed ideology.  The only thing keeping the woke alive is their alliance with corrupt corporations and establishment elites – we will see how far that really gets them in the long run.  

  As history shows us, when the elites are done with useful idiots, they tend to do away with them quickly.   

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 20:45

• Krugman's Accounting Of The National Debt Is Jailworthy
  Krugman’s Accounting Of The National Debt Is Jailworthy

  Authored by James Agresti via JustTheFactsDaily.com,

  The national debt has risen at a blistering pace over recent decades and is now higher than any era of the nation’s history—even when adjusted for inflation, population growth, and economic growth (GDP).

  Denying this reality, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman recently wrote two columns for the New York Times in which he claimed that the debt is an “overhyped issue” and “isn’t all that unusual” from a historical perspective. His attempts to support these assertions employ the kind of fraudulent accounting that could land a corporate executive in jail.

  

  Projections v. Realities

  Krugman insists that taming the “federal debt should be well down the list” of government “priorities” after “climate change” and “child poverty” because debt projections have become “much less dire” over the past decade or so. In reality, the debt is far higher than projected, and Krugman’s own words prove it.

  In 2009, when the Democrat-controlled Congress and President Obama began racking up debt and projecting $9 trillion in deficits over the coming decade, Krugman wrote that “even if we do run these deficits,” federal debt would be 90% of GDP in 2019, or “substantially less than it was at the end of World War II.”

  The debt in 2019 turned out to be 109% of GDP, which is 21% higher than Krugman projected and just 8% below the debt from World War II.

  That was one year before government reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic drove the debt/GDP ratio to unprecedented heights. This was mainly caused by state government lockdowns that crushed the GDP as the federal government spent liberally on “Covid relief.”

  Even though GDP rebounded as lockdowns were lifted, and the worst inflation in 40+ years has temporarily reduced the debt/GDP ratio, it is still higher than any other period of U.S. history, clocking in at 123% of GDP at the end of 2022:

  

  Worse yet, the national debt is on a trajectory that makes the current debt look small by comparison. Under CBO’s decade-old projections, which have thus far undershot reality, the U.S. debt/GDP ratio is on track to eclipse Britain’s after it was intensely firebombed during World War II.

  Because the debt from WW II was the highest in U.S. history, Krugman and other scholars used to argue that the modern debt situation isn’t awful by comparison. What they failed to mention is that the war debt was a passing anomaly caused by the deadliest and most widespread conflict in world history, while the modern debt is a systemic, escalating problem driven by ongoing federal policies.

  If left on autopilot, the debt is on track to double WWII levels in the coming three decades and grow thereafter to about nine times the peak of WWII.

  Current Law v. Current Policy

  Beyond ignoring his own debt projection, Krugman spins a yarn that is diametrically opposed to reality by exploiting his readers’ ignorance about differing types of debt estimates published by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

  At various times, CBO has calculated two major types of projections for the national debt. The first reflects current law and is called the “extended baseline,” while the other is based on current policy and is called the “extended alternative fiscal scenario.” There are often major differences between these projections, as shown by this chart on the cover page of a 2011 CBO report:

  

  The main reason for these differences is that federal laws are commonly rife with accounting gimmicks and other provisions that understate future debt.

  A prime example is the 2010 Affordable Care Act, informally known as Obamacare. This legislation was enacted with a CBO analysis showing it would “produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billion” over the coming decade. In reality, most of the deficit-reducing provisions of the bill weren’t implemented, while nearly all of deficit-increasing ones were.

  The chasm between what the Affordable Care Act specified and what actually occurred is so great that its true costs are still unknown. Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation wrote that it hasn’t calculated the realized budgetary impact of Obamacare “because of the many modifications to that law,” and CBO says it “cannot readily provide a retrospective analysis” of the law.

  The bottom line is that the current law scenario made the Affordable Care Act seem like it would lower the debt, but the actual outcome was so different that federal budget agencies don’t know the real number.

  Bait and Switch

  With those facts in mind, watch how Krugman craftily jumps between current law and current policy projections.

  In another of his columns about debt that proved to be dead wrong, Krugman declared in 2013 that “budget office projections show the nation’s debt position more or less stable over the next decade.” Emphasizing that point, he wrote, “So we do not, repeat do not, face any kind of deficit crisis either now or for years to come.”

  Krugman’s basis for that claim was CBO’s current law projections, which showed the publicly-held debt/GDP barely changing from 76.3% in 2013 to 77.0% in 2023, a rise of only 1%. What Krugman neglected to reveal is that the current policy projection showed the debt growing by 14% in the same period. And for the record, it has actually grown by about 28%, or 28 times the current law projection cited by Krugman.

  Fast forward to 2023, and Krugman is arguing that CBO’s latest debt projections have become “much less dire” since 2011. To support this claim, he compares current policy projections from CBO in 2011 to current law projections from CBO in 2022. He then compares those projections for 2035, thereby avoiding a comparison with actual outcomes.

  Adding another layer of deceit, Krugman refers to the 2011 current policy projections in his recent column as “the most realistic scenario.” Yet, he cites the 2022 current law projections in the very same column without giving his readers a hint that he is using the least realistic scenario. He also does the same in his 2009 and 2013 columns.

  In short, Krugman stealthily switches between CBO’s current law and current policy projections to weave a counterfactual narrative while avoiding his own failed projections.

  Interest Payments

  In one particular case, Krugman does compare a projection to an actual outcome. This is CBO’s 2011 current policy projection for interest payments on the national debt in 2021. Krugman correctly notes that CBO projected interest payments would be 4.4% of GDP in 2021, but they turned out to be less than half of that.

  Krugman, however, skirts the fact that this outcome comes at a steep cost. During the Great Recession of 2007–2009 and the Covid-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve suppressed interest rates by minting money to buy federal debt. This temporarily lowers interest payments on the debt, but it also shifts wealth from middle-income households to high-income ones and stokes inflation, which hurts people in the present and drives up interest costs in the future.

  In the words of Federal Reserve economist Christopher J. Neely, “unexpected inflation will tend to raise the cost of servicing future U.S. debt” because investors won’t buy it unless interest rates are high enough to account for the inflation.

  Krugman gives a tepid nod to that reality by writing that interest payments “will rise as existing debt is rolled over at higher interest rates,” but this is a far cry from admitting all of the harm this portends.

  Consequences

  One of the most nefarious aspects of government debt is that it hurts people through economic mechanisms that aren’t always obvious to them. This murkiness is aggravated by politicians who run up debt and falsely blame others for the common effects of excessive debt.

  Those effects—documented in publications of the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Budget Office, the Brookings Institution, and Princeton University Press—can manifest gradually or abruptly in the form of:

  • reduced “living standards” and “wages.”

  • “higher inflation” that increases “the size of future budget deficits” and decreases “the purchasing power” of citizens’ savings and income.

  • “losses for mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, banks, and other holders of federal debt.”

  • increased “probability of a fiscal crisis in which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget, and the government would be forced to pay much more to borrow money.”

  The consequences of government debt are not just potential dangers lurking in the future. They may have already begun. Although association does not prove causation, the rapidly rising national debt of the past few decades has been accompanied by episodes of historically poor growth in GDP, productivity, and household income. These economic outcomes cause a host of negative impacts on human welfare in areas like education, nutrition, healthcare, and life expectancy.

  And when such problems occur, politicians and people like Krugman use these hardships to justify running up even more debt. Hence, the harmful effects of government debt continue and escalate.

  Conclusion

  During the infamous Enron corporate accounting scandal of the late 1990s to early 2000s, the federal government prosecuted and jailed Enron’s executives because they “hid Enron’s true financial condition” and “materially understated” the “amount of debt carried by Enron….”

  Paul Krugman has been doing that with the U.S. national debt for more than a decade. Although the right to free speech forbids laws that would punish columnists who mislead their readers like executives who mislead their investors, Krugman’s actions have the potential to cause more harm than Enron’s. That’s because Enron’s deceptive statements were measured in billions of dollars, while Krugman’s are in the trillions. Thus, Krugman’s disinformation can damage the entire country and generations to come if lawmakers and voters act on it.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 20:25

• Dollar Store "Mania" Hits Small Kentucky Town
  Dollar Store “Mania” Hits Small Kentucky Town

  Brick-and-mortar dollar stores have expanded rapidly nationwide over the past two years. These discount retailers bring rural consumers more buying power during high inflation periods. One town in eastern Kentucky has had what the Daily Mail calls a “dollar store mania” as these retailers take over the town. 

  Olive Hill has a population of 1,600. About a third of the residents live below the poverty line, which is higher than the national average of 12.8%. 

  Given low incomes and cheap land around the tiny town, it makes sense why dollar stores are flooding the small town to take advantage of poor residents. 

  Daily Mail said the town has two Family Dollar locations and four Dollar General stores. One resident said:

  “It seems like there’s a dollar store every few feet.” 

  

  The reason why discount retailers are flooding small towns was explained by John Mercer, head of global research at Coresight, who WSJ quoted:

  High inflation has increased the appeal of dollar stores’ relatively low prices. But the expansion of the sector is rooted in structural changes in U.S. shopping habits that predate the current economic cycle. 

  Mercer said more and more shoppers are turning to dollar stores for groceries. This comes as low-income folks have been battered with 21 months of negative real wage growth, depleted savings, maxed-out credit cards, and the highest credit card rates in years. 

  The challenging macroeconomic climate suggests low-income consumers have trouble affording traditional items at stores and supermarkets and must downshift to discount retailers. That’s why dollar stores have been the fastest-growing food retailers by share of household expenditure, with growth in rural areas more than doubling in the last decade, according to a recent study. 

  However, affordable food at dollar stores comes at a health cost to low-income consumers who will only be able to find high-calorie, ultra-processed packaged foods — not exactly healthy. 

  And while these big corporations are increasingly building dollar stores in small towns. Perhaps these companies could also build diabetes clinics. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 20:05

• Israel, Saudi Arabia Hold Talks On Increasing Military Ties
  Israel, Saudi Arabia Hold Talks On Increasing Military Ties

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  Israel’s new government under Benjamin Netanyahu has stepped up US-backed talks with Saudi Arabia on forging stronger military and intelligence ties, Bloomberg reported late last week.

  The talks are part of an effort to forge a NATO-style anti-Iran alliance in the region between Israel and Washington’s Gulf Arab allies. While Saudi Arabia has not normalized with Israel, the two countries have quietly increased cooperation, including by participating in their first public joint military exercises in 2022.

  

  The Bloomberg report said that Israeli and Saudi officials held talks ahead of a meeting of the US-Gulf Cooperation Council Working Group that took place on February 16. More talks were expected to happen at the Munich Security Conference, which was held over the weekend.

  Israel has increased cooperation with the US’s Gulf allies since normalizing with the UAE and Bahrain in 2020 under the Abraham Accords.

  Since then, the US has brought Israel under the umbrella of US Central Command (CENTCOM), the US command responsible for the Middle East.

  Including Israel in CENTCOM operations facilitates more Israeli-Arab cooperation. Israel previously fell under US European Command since it didn’t have relations with most US allies in the region. The US and Israel want a future anti-Iran alliance in the Middle East to focus on integrated air defense systems.

  Saudi officials have insisted that a normalization deal with Israel would hinge on the creation of a Palestinian state, which is highly unlikely as the Netanyahu government is vowing to expand settlements in the West Bank.

  But it’s possible Riyadh could eventually be convinced by the US to open up with Israel if Washington offers more military assistance and arms sales.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 19:45

• Is Biden Conning The Ukrainians? Claims Ukraine Flags Fly Across America
  Is Biden Conning The Ukrainians? Claims Ukraine Flags Fly Across America

  During his recent surprise visit to Ukraine, Joe Biden strutted out in front of press cameras with Volodymyr Zelensky to the sound of pre-planned air raid sirens and declared America’s ongoing support for the country’s war efforts.  Biden’s appearance was coordinated with the announcement of a $2.5 billion weapons package, the 30th such package in the past year.  However, what was not mentioned is that NATO has been shifting into older armor vehicles such as MRAPS and reducing valuable supplies of anti-tank weapons like the Javelin. 

  According to the inventories of multiple NATO countries, there has actually been a draw down of shipments as supplies become strained.  Concerns are rising among NATO officials that they will not be able to continue arming Ukraine while also maintaining their own readiness, but the Biden Administration appears intent on at least giving the appearance that US backing is stronger than ever.

  

  Some confusion surrounds the actual objectives of NATO backed Ukraine forces, as officials talk about not only taking back the Donbas, but also taking back Crimea which has been in Russian hands since 2014.  These sentiments may sound like optimistic rhetoric designed to inspire, but they are certainly not realistic given the wide array of defenses that Russia is establishing to stall any approach.  Not to mention, reports of counter actions in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions suggest the Russians are successfully targeting Ukrainian units – Even Zelensky openly admitted that the situation in Donetsk was “very difficult.”

  After Biden’s dramatic display in Ukraine, he went on to Warsaw, Poland to give a speech on the developing conflict.  One of his statements in particular deserves further analysis:

  Biden: “All across my country in big cities and small towns, Ukrainian flags fly from American homes.” pic.twitter.com/xFnFVxvVQo

  — Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 21, 2023

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

  Biden proudly proclaims that Ukrainian flags are flying above homes in small towns and large cities across America, insinuating that the majority of Americans are in full support of what many now perceive to be a proxy war.  Polls show American public support for Ukraine aid is waning, with conservatives losing all faith in the project.  The tale of Ukraine flags flying across the US is also simply false.  In general, you are are much more likely to see a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag over the front door of an American home than you are to see a Ukrainian flag.

  But why is Biden trying to hype up Ukrainians using dishonest rhetoric? Biden’s surprise appearance and the announced weapons package feels more like a last-ditched effort to rally Ukraine against an impending onslaught he knows is coming soon.  Either that, or it is an attempt to puff up, a display to show Putin that NATO is still very much in the game and distract from the reality that weapons supplies are faltering.

  The flag comment could also be intended to give Ukrainians the false impression that Americans will eventually support direct troop deployment to the region, which should not be necessary unless Ukraine’s footing in the war is not as strong as has been asserted.  It may be true that there are US advisers and perhaps even special forces on the ground in Ukraine, but the majority of US citizens are vehemently opposed to open warfare with Russia.  In other words, “boots on the ground” is not going to happen without mass opposition and instability at home.  

  At bottom, the Biden visit with Zelensky and his bizarre claims in Poland signal a coming change in the war that is not yet clear.                 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 19:25

• Clarkson's Farm: Another Front In The War On Food
  Clarkson’s Farm: Another Front In The War On Food

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

  While I’ve been a big fan of Jeremy Clarkson over the years, I’ve never been proud of him before. Hero worship and celebrity go hand in hand and it’s a dangerous game to ascribe motives beyond self-interest to any celebrity.

  But in Clarkson’s case he may have just done something worthy of that.

  Clarkson is now on the other side of another cancellation campaign against him for a dig at Queen Narcissist herself, Meghan Markle, in one of his recent columns. And, normally, I would just pass the whole thing off as another of Clarkson’s attempts at controversy because if anyone lives by the adage that controversy is good for ratings it’s Jeremy Clarkson.

  The guy is a six-foot-four-inch Streisand Effect with bad teeth.

  But in this dustup with Queen Meghan, Clarkson did something completely out of the ordinary for him.

  He apologized.

  Twice.

  Oh dear. I’ve rather put my foot in it. In a column I wrote about Meghan, I made a clumsy reference to a scene in Game of Thrones and this has gone down badly with a great many people. I’m horrified to have caused so much hurt and I shall be more careful in future.

  — Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) December 19, 2022

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

  James Delingpole and I roasted Clarkson for apologizing on a recent podcast we did. And it speaks directly to not having heroes in this world of near infinite political leverage. But, having just watched season two of his latest show, Clarkson’s Farm. I think I know why he apologized.

  One of the great things about Top Gear was the refreshingly unapologetic nature of the hosts, Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. They all said things we weren’t supposed to say in public. And we loved them for it.

  There’s an entire cottage industry of Top Gear making fun of ethnic group X on You Tube that I didn’t know about until recently. Oh, those memories. But as I think about it now I wonder why I’d never seen these before?

  Google algorithm, would you care to contact me and explain why after years of watching car videos I was never offered one of these until the campaign to rid the world of Clarkson kicked into overdrive?

  I’m sure ChatGPT’s Dan persona will tell me, it’s just coincidence, Tom.

  Clarkson is no stranger to controversy, it’s part of how they built Top Gear into the biggest show IN THE WORLD. We know the story of how the the Holy Trinity of Cars moved from the BBC to Amazon. Clarkson punched a producer and he was fired.

  They were also getting stale, visibly older after chafing under the BBC’s rules and, rightfully, wanted to cash in on a big, fat golden parachute of a contract. So, did Clarkson ‘engineer’ their exit from the BBC? It’s a fair question which I don’t give a damn about.

  Enter Amazon and The Grand Tour was born.

  But the same imperatives that ended their run on Top Gear also ended their run on The Grand Tour — the pace, the toll and the one thing no controversy can outrun, time.

  So, an aging Clarkson sold the perfect fish out of water story to Amazon: Jeremy Clarkson, the ape who can’t use a screwdriver, was going to run a farm in the midlands.

  Hilarity ensues….end scene.

  

  While I liked season one of the show, it had that same lack of spontaneity that plagued both later seasons of Top Gear and The Grand Tour. What it didn’t lack, however, was the craft Clarkson had honed as a storyteller over the past three decades.

  Because Clarkson used this platform to educate millions of people of how how fucking hard it is to scrape out a living as a farmer. And after a year of toil and his massive investment of time and outside capital from his “other job” Clarkson ended season one with a princely profit of £144.

  And that sets up Season 2 which is where, I think, the real story, the one behind the cameras, gets so much more interesting. Enter Meghan Markle.

  It’s no coincidence that the dustup between Markle and Clarkson was timed with the pending premiere of Season 2.

  The shows would have been finished and delivered to Amazon by them and it’s scathing portrayal of insane environmental policies, local NIMBY politics, and sheer spite over his persona form the central conflict of the show’s eight episodes.

  This is contrasted with a frank look at someone genuinely trying to improve the local economy by repurposing a existing building into a restaurant featuring locally produced food. This was done, according to Clarkson, to ensure the farm could be financially as well as ecologically sustainable.

  Jeremy Clarkson, the bane of environmentalists, was doing what everyone else complained the rest of the world wasn’t doing. And he spent a small fortune in the process.

  His reward? Well, no spoilers from me folks. Go give Clarkson your 6 hours. It’s worth your time.

  In the process he highlighted the emotional highs and lows of raising livestock, the insane price of fertilizers, and reminding everyone of the vagaries of the weather.

  Watching the episode where they have to pull a calf from a pregnant cow gave me flashbacks to some of the extreme midwifery we’ve done here at my home when we were a working goat and chicken farm, named Pirate Dog Acres.

  FYI, with goats we don’t have a handy Dilwyn the Vet to do it for us. Almost no goat is worth that much money. There’s only yourselves, the fellow farmer on the other end of the phone call, a couple of head lamps, and some lube.

  And worse, when you’ve saved the mom and the kids, you realize then the mom is ruined as breeding stock thanks to the physical damage to her uterus. So you better hope the kids you saved were girls and she recovers enough to milk well for a few months.

  Because her sole value by the end of that summer is as a pet.

  And there are no pets on a farm.

  Jeremy didn’t experience an animal you’ve invested a few years of your life into and whose milk was the backbone of your business convulse with enterotoxaemia before dying in your arms.

  But man did I empathize with the local dairy farmer who lost 60 cows to tuberculosis spread by the over-protected badgers infesting the region.

  And this is why I was proud of Clarkson for this show.

  He used his considerable celebrity as a clarion call to just how fragile our food production industry is while those with zero skin in the game sit around and make demands on it.

  All in the name of ‘public safety’ and ‘preserving natural beauty.’

  The turning point of the season is where Jeremy realizes he doesn’t have near enough cows to keep a restaurant going and enlists the rest of the local farming community into a co-op arrangement.

  Now, his private little project which only minimally interfaced with the community was metastasizing into a plan to save the entire county’s farming community.

  The reality was Clarkson’s celebrity farm was bringing in people from all over the country, leveraging that to kickstart a farm-to-table industry and improve everyone’s lives.

  The cost to the locals would be some extra traffic and a parking lot.

  The unspoken subtext is that his project was sabotaged from outside. And the Queen of Grievance Politics used her position to take Clarkson out and give Amazon the excuse they needed to ‘likely part ways’ with him over the controversy.

  We know why this is. We know what the real agenda is.

  Will Amazon have the stones to say no to one of their highest rated and highest value shows when Clarkson delivers Season 3 next year?

  Who knows? But it’s not like there will be a lack of bidders or no path for him to monetize his foibles.

  Clarkson showed the world the ugly side of environmental policy and its effect on local politics. He provided the blueprint for saving the family farm and rebuilding broken community bonds.

  And we can’t have that in the Brave New World of bug protein, 15-minute cities, and no internal combustion engines.

  I empathize directly with Clarkson here. He didn’t have to do any of this. Sure, Clarkson’s Farm likely made him millions and he can run his farm at a nominal loss for years, if nothing else, as a tax write off.

  But I don’t think that’s why he did this. At one point he’s criticized by a local. “You’re not a farmer, you’re a media personality.” And it’s a fair point. Clarkson is a hobby farmer. It’s not his primary livelihood.

  And I can empathize somewhat with some of the locals who don’t know how to deal with a changing world they have no control over, and the big ape coming in and disrupting things is an easy thing to scapegoat.

  The implicit message and one I know from personal experience, is that real farming is a full-time job. It’s a full body and mind commitment. You can’t have your feet straddling two islands and make it work.

  It’s why we no longer do anything other than keep a few ducks and goats as insurance, milking one or two does to produce a year’s worth of cheese, some eggs and a few ducks for the holidays. Those five years of doing farmer’s markets taught me more than the five years I spent in college.

  But the point Clarkson made very clearly is that for the real farmers, they have no other choice and if something doesn’t change they will just give up.

  Watching Clarkson champion these people was something to be proud to experience.

  And that’s why I think Clarkson did the unthinkable, apologizing to the odious Meghan Markle. He was trying to protect those he’d championed by hoping to keep himself in the spotlight to keep trying to save the family farm itself.

  *  *  *

  Join my Patreon if you know Diddly Squat

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 19:05

• China Sends Supertankers To US Gulf On Crude Oil Buying Spree
  China Sends Supertankers To US Gulf On Crude Oil Buying Spree

  One of the most important bull thesis for crude in 2023 is that China, having permanently shelved its zero Covid policies, will unleash a global buying spree as the Chinese economy sharply roars back to life.

  On Tuesday, we got another indication of precisely that: Unipec, the largest oil trader in China and the trading unit of state-held refiner Sinopec, and PetroChina, the largest oil and gas producer and distributor in China, have both hired ten supertankers in March to haul US crude back to Asia, according to Bloomberg, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter. 

  Each vessel can transport a whopping 20 million barrels of crude. The people said that the loading of the tankers is expected to occur across US Gulf Coast terminals. 

  

  “Chinese buying activity of US barrels seems to be the hottest activity right now,” Viktor Katona, a lead crude analyst at Kpler, told Bloomberg. He said Chinese firms are taking advantage of a “remarkable, profitable arbitrage” for US crude that has been suppressed because of President Biden’s massive releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (remember when China was buying SPR releases last year?).

  The first indication of China embarking on a global buying spree of crude was last month. We pointed out Unipec was set to purchase at least 18 cargoes of Upper Zakum crude from Abu Dhabi in March. 

  Chinese oil demand is rebounding after the reopening of its economy. Traders are closely monitoring Chinese oil demand for hints at what’s the next direction for benchmark Brent futures. 

  

  Data and analytics firm Kpler pointed out as many as 14 Very Large Crude Carriers are preparing to load from the US Gulf Coast to China in March. Katona noted this doubled the volume shipped over the last several years. 

  Saudi oil giant Aramco expects the Chinese reopening and a pick-up in jet fuel demand to lead to a rebound in global oil demand this year, Amin Nasser, the CEO of the world’s biggest oil firm, told Bloomberg in an interview last month.

  And the Chinese buying isn’t limited to the US and Abu Dhabi. OilPrice said PetroChina and Sinopec are back on the market for Russian Urals and taking advantage of the deep discounts. 

  Here’s something for oil bulls: 

  “China will drive nearly half this global demand growth even as the shape and speed of its reopening remains uncertain,” International Energy Agency said last month. 

  Remember, we told readers this would happen as early as November in a note titled “China Quietly Boost Oil Imports In Preparation For Reopening.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 18:45

• The Narcissism Of Woke Totalitarianism
  The Narcissism Of Woke Totalitarianism

  Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Substack,

  “Anyone who thinks the terrifying trend of posthumous censure will end with Roald Dahl is dreaming…”

  

  The publisher of the late British children’s author, Roald Dahl, has changed hundreds of words and passages in his books to make them politically correct. “Language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender, and race has been cut and rewritten,” reported The Telegraph, whose journalists compared 10 of Dahl’s books from 2022 to their 2001 versions. “Remember the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach? They are now the Cloud-People. The Small Foxes in Fantastic Mr. Fox are now female. In Matilda, a mention of Rudyard Kipling has been cut, and Jane Austen added.”

  The racially sensitive censors even removed the word “black” as a descriptor of inanimate objects. “In Fantastic Mr. Fox, a description of tractors, saying that ‘the machines were both black,’ has been cut. In the new Dahl world, it seems, neither machines nor animals can be described with a colour.”

  The censorship by Puffin, which Penguin Publishing Group owns, drew a sharply critical response from journalists and authors. “Roald Dahl was no angel,” tweeted Salman Rushdie, “but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.” Seethed Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator, “If you weren’t worried about cancel culture before, surely this egregious assault on some of the best-known children’s books of the modern era, this posthumous purging of an author’s output, will change your mind.”

  Many on Twitter posted a quote from George Orwell’s 1984, his famous novel about a future totalitarian dystopia.

  “Every record has been destroyed or falsified,” the novel’s main character says, “every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”

  Totalitarianism is a strong word for the censorship of children’s books.

  The changing of “The old hag” to “the old crow,” “Chambermaid” to “cleaner,” and “You must be mad, woman!” to “You must be out of your mind!” in some kiddie books is hardly on par with the censorship of totalitarian regimes. And Dahl himself made his books less offensive, re-writing the Oompa-Loompa characters in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory so they were no longer African.

  But Dahl would have been horrified by the hundreds of changes made by Puffin. “His relationships with his editors included marked fractiousness on Dahl’s part,” said his biographer. “He resisted interference.” Re-writing an author’s books without his consent, whether for legal reasons or because he is dead, violates the trust between authors and publishers everywhere. That such censorship is coming from within media, educational, and research institutions, in addition to governmental ones, doesn’t make it less dangerous, and may make it more so.

  The Dahl censorship is occurring against the backdrop of an increasingly censorious Wokeism. Over the last few weeks, we have seen a witch hunt against psychologist Jordan Peterson, an open letter from 1,000 writers, authors, and journalists demanding that The New York Times not report on problems with prescribing gender dysphoric children puberty blockers, and a State Department-funded “Disinformation Index,” which slandered The New York Post, Reason, and other reputable publications as fonts of disinformation, and urged corporations to redirect their advertising spending to publications including Huffington Post.

  Two years ago, when activists were tearing down statutes of historical figures, people quoted from Orwell, above (“every statue and street and building has been renamed”). Since then, Woke activists have, with Dahl, started down the road of realizing another clause in that sentence: “every book has been rewritten.” Warns O’Neill, “Anyone who thinks the terrifying trend of posthumous censure will end with Dahl is dreaming.”

  Totalitarianism is characterized by efforts to completely remake every aspect of society, including cultural life, and Wokeism today is re-writing texts, de-certifying disfavored individuals, cutting off funding, getting people fired, and pressuring social media platforms to deny access or secretly censor. Woke totalitarians are plainly seeking the total reorganization of society along the lines of a racist “hierarchy of oppression” that puts black and indigenous people above other “people of color,” (i.e., Latinos and Asians) as a single “BIPOC” ruling class. This is ostensibly to create the reverse of past hierarchies and is thus transparently vengeful and racist.

  It is worth reminding ourselves that freedom of speech is not just “another issue;” it is the foundation of democracy. Without it, we can’t address any other problem, particularly sensitive ones concerning race and sex. And without it, we cannot truly live as free, dignified, and civilized humans.

  We are not doomed to a dystopian 1984 future. But the 20th Century proves that we are not guaranteed a free and democratic one.

  What can be done to stop creeping Woke totalitarianism? To answer that question, we must first understand what’s driving it.

  Presentism, Narcissism, and Totalitarianism

  

  In 2002, the American Historical Association’s president, Lynn Hunt, wrote a short article for the organization’s magazine titled “Against Presentism.” By presentism, Hunt first meant the tendency of history majors and graduate students to judge past behaviors through the lens of present-day morality and, second, a heavy interest in 20th Century identity politics.

  …

  Over time, rising narcissism and coddling culture reached a tipping point whereby elites began to view “being insensitive” as equivalent to “causing harm.” As such, insensitivity became viewed as worse than censorship and justification for it. The censorship of Dahl shows that presentism is a fundamental characteristic of Woke totalitarianism, just as it was of fascist and communist totalitarian regimes that were the model for Orwell’s 1984. “History has stopped,” says its narrator. “Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

  What, in the end, is driving Wokeism? In the words of former AHA president White, “moral complacency and self-congratulation.” And both of those are born from an infantilizing, narcissistic, and presentist culture.

  …

  Subscribers can read the rest here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 18:25

• Subprime Auto Loan Delinquencies Hit 13-Year High
  Subprime Auto Loan Delinquencies Hit 13-Year High

  While the unemployment rate sits at its lowest level in decades, cracks are beginning to form in the subprime auto loan market.

  

  According to Moody’s, some 9.3% of auto loans extended to people with low credit scores are at least 30 days late, the highest since 2010, the WSJ reports.

  

  “The households that were on the financial ledge to begin with might have been tipped to the point where it’s hard to keep up on the car loan and everything else, and people have to make some very hard decisions,” said Pamela Foohey, a professor at Cardozo School of Law who studies consumer law.

  The bulk of the auto-loan delinquencies are among borrowers with credit scores below 660 – particularly (as one would expect) those with ‘bottom of the barrel’ credit (who probably shouldn’t have been able to obtain an auto loan in the first place).

  And as the Journal notes, “If job losses increase, many more consumers might find themselves unable to keep up with the record amounts of debt they took out in recent years.”

  One such borrower, Chris Woodward of Cedar Falls, Iowa, lost his job in August – his second layoff in eight months. Shortly thereafter, he fell behind on payments for his 2011 Ford Flex. He also fell behind on rent, and maxed out his credit card.

  

  To make ends meet, Woodward set up a GoFundMe, which has raised $12,500 out of a $13,000 goal as of this writing.

  “It’s weird to go from having a good salary and not stressing, to, ‘How am I going to buy diapers?’” said Woodward, who bought his car in early 2022 when car prices were peaking.

  Borrowers who took out big loans at the height of the boom owe far more than their vehicles are worth. Those buyers are sticking lenders with bigger losses when they fall behind.

  Ally Financial Inc., which operates a large auto-lending business, said in January that the loans it extended between mid-2021 and mid-2022 are experiencing bigger early losses than its other loans. In the fourth quarter, the percentage of its car loans that were more than 60 days past due rose above prepandemic levels for the first time. -WSJ

  One factor which may contribute to greater loan delinquencies is that credit scores may have been artificially high during the pandemic, when consumers cut back on credit use and spending amid a flood of government stimulus that padded their savings. This may have made underwriting less precise, according to Goldman analyst Ryan Nash, who says that lenders were able to make big loans to borrowers on the assumption that their finances had strengthened long-term.

  “2021 was a bit of the Wild West in the auto market,” said Nash.

  Except, it turns out that while things were looking good on the outside, consumers are awash in debt as their savings as a percentage of income dwindled.

  

  According to the report, almost 20% of banks admit to easing credit standards for auto loan applicants in the first half of 2021, while over 10% did the same in the second half of the year.

  Meanwhile in 2022, the percentage of people whose cars were repossessed rose to 11% (still below pandemic levels).

  “What we have left is just to survive,” said 24-year-old nurse, Vanessa Davis of Fontana, California – whose 2022 Chevy Trax was repossessed after she missed payments due to a family emergency (she got it back for $600 in fees and a $650 payment). “At this point we’re trying everything we can and the best we can to keep every single penny.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 02/22/2023 – 18:05

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• Anatomy Of A Cover-Up: The January 6 Tapes
  Anatomy Of A Cover-Up: The January 6 Tapes

  Authored by Julie Kelly via American Greatness,

  Tucker Carlson now has the equivalent of nearly five years of surveillance footage captured by U.S. Capitol Police security cameras on January 6, 2021. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) turned over the tapes to the Fox News host earlier this month, according to Axios. Carlson’s producers and researchers are already distilling the footage; the first round of clips is expected to air in a few weeks.

  

  While some grumble that McCarthy did not fulfill his promise to publicly release the footage—arguably a valid complaint—Carlson’s team undoubtedly will give the massive trove much-needed context and maximum impact. Carlson released a three-part documentary, “Patriot Purge,” in November 2021 that explained how the events of January 6 helped launch a second “war on terror” against American citizens out of step with the Biden regime.

  Since early 2021, Carlson has used his nightly show to expose the cruel treatment of Trump supporters suffering pretrial detention orders; raised questions about the use of undercover assets including FBI informants and the mysterious role of Ray Epps; asked why the case of the January 5 “pipe bomber” remains unsolved; and demanded the release of the surveillance video as late as last month.

  Releasing the video never should have been a political fight; after all, the footage was recorded on a taxpayer-paid closed circuit television system installed on public property to monitor public employees. Contrary to arguments by Capitol Police and the Justice Department, the video belongs to the public, not federal agencies.

  But both entities, with the help of D.C. District Court judges, have successfully kept the trove largely under wraps for more than two years. Even the FBI and D.C. Metropolitan Police departments signed agreements a few days after the Capitol protest to acknowledge that the tapes technically belonged to Capitol Police.

  In a sworn statement filed in March 2021, Thomas DiBiase, general counsel for the Capitol Police, insisted the footage constituted “security information” that required very limited access. “Our concern is that providing unfettered access to hours of extremely sensitive information to defendants who already have shown a desire to interfere with the democratic process will . . . [be] passed on to those who might wish to attack the Capitol again,” DiBiase warned.

  The Justice Department subsequently designated the tapes as “highly sensitive” government material subject to protective orders in January 6 prosecutions. It’s been a major battle for defendants and their attorneys to properly access all of the video tied to their cases; defendants cannot watch any clips without the presence of a legal authority and none of the footage can be shared or downloaded.

  Of course, there have been some exceptions. Capitol Police shared cherry-picked clips with the House Democrats on the second impeachment committee as well as the January 6 select committee. For example, the brief clip of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) running through a hallway that afternoon presumably after the breach was produced from surveillance video. HBO also accessed surveillance footage for its slanted documentary on January 6. “Security” concerns, my foot.

  Imagine the universal outrage in any other situation had crucial video of what the government considered a terror attack been kept away from the public for more than two years. Influential opinion pages would have banged the drum incessantly for its release, insisting some sort of cover up was unfolding. Progressive activist groups and elected officials would demand a full accounting of what happened before, during, and after the “attack,” including all government-produced evidence. Influential lawyers and legal defense funds would lament the deprivation of due process for those involved in the allegedly heinous act.

  Instead, the usual defenders of accountability, transparency, and constitutional rights have been completely AWOL. The fight has been waged by outmatched defense attorneys in the rigged legal and judicial system in the nation’s capital. And a handful of influencers like Carlson.

  To be fair, a consortium called the Press Coalition forced a few federal judges to lift protective orders on a small amount of surveillance video. Representing more than a dozen major news companies, the coalition successfully won the release of limited security footage that, in some instances, contradicted the assertion that police did not allow protesters into the building that afternoon. Unsealed video also showed how police brutalized women inside the lower west terrace tunnel.

  In a laughable “reality check” in his article, Axios reporter Mike Allen suggested the public has seen enough surveillance video since the “Jan. 6 committee played numerous excerpts of the footage at last year’s captivating hearings.” But not only were most of the evidentiary video clips sourced from protesters’ cell phones, the surveillance video clips offered by the committee represented an infinitesimal sliver of the total collection.

  Which, notably, is much bigger than what the government has made available to January 6 defendants. Axios reported that Carlson’s team has 41,000 hours of raw footage—nearly three times the amount that the Justice Department allowed into evidence, which only covered the time period between noon and 8:00 p.m. on January 6. The tapes now in Carlson’s possession apparently covers the entire 24-hour period from “multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds.”

  One can only guess what the videos will reveal. It’s possible, even likely, the never-before-seen footage will show the elements of a preplanned attack engineered by the same political and government forces that attempted to destroy Donald Trump for the better part of six years. Will the tapes finally answer the questions that top law enforcement officials such as FBI Director Christopher Wray refuse to answer and the January 6 select committee buried—not the least of which was the role of the FBI?

  Withholding the video is only one part of the massive cover-up about January 6. Republicans should seek similar demands for records, emails, and communications from Capitol Police to expose the full scope of the cover-up. But like all good political scandals, the path to the truth begins with the tapes.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 23:40

• First 2,000-Year-Old Roman Wooden Phallus 'Used For Pleasure' Found 
  First 2,000-Year-Old Roman Wooden Phallus ‘Used For Pleasure’ Found 

  Archaeologists believe they have uncovered the first full-size Roman dildo. The 2,000-year-old six-inch piece of wood was recovered initially as a “darning tool” in 1992 in a ditch at the Roman Fort of Vindolanda, near Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, according to the study published in the journal Antiquity. 

  “I have to confess, part of me thinks it’s kind of self-evident that it is a penis,” Dr. Rob Collins, an archaeologist at Newcastle University who co-authored the paper, told the Guardian. He said, “We know ancient Romans and Greeks used sexual implements. This object from Vindolanda could be an example of one.” 

  Researchers initially unearthed the object as being a darning tool. This misidentification resulted from the tool being found alongside other tools, craft waste products, and dozens of shoes and dress accessories. 

  However, researchers have reinterpreted the six-inch piece of wood, smoothed at both ends, as a wooden phallus from the Roman era. 

  

  “What makes this a first is that it is not a small, miniature phallus,” Collins said, adding, “It’s lifesize. It’s also important because wood just doesn’t normally survive … we couldn’t find any parallels.”

  

  Collins told CNN: 

  “It very well could be a sex object and, if it is, it is the first example from the Roman world.

  “We shouldn’t be surprised by this. We know from Roman art and Roman literature that they used dildos, that they existed. But we haven’t found any examples archaeologically yet.” 

  Researchers concluded in the study that no specific use of the wooden phallus could be determined: “We hope to have prompted the search for similar objects elsewhere and encouraged their meaningful incorporation into narratives of the past.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 23:20

• Racism In The Name Of "Anti-Racism"
  Racism In The Name Of “Anti-Racism”

  Authored by Christopher Rufo via City-Journal.org,

  The University of Central Florida has adopted radical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programming that segregates students by race, condemns the United States as “white-supremacist culture,” and encourages active discrimination against the “oppressor” class, characterized as “male, White, heterosexual, able-bodied, and Christian.”

  

  Officially, UCF reports that it has 14 separate DEI programs, costing in the aggregate more than $4 million per year. But this dramatically understates the reality, which is that the ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” has been entrenched everywhere. The university’s administration and academic departments have created a blizzard of programs, classes, trainings, reports, committees, certifications, events, documents, policies, clubs, groups, conferences, and statements pledging UCF to left-wing racialism.

  These programs, long in the making, exploded into prominence following the death of George Floyd in 2020. As the administration signaled that it was endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement, the academic departments immediately fell into line. The sociology department pledged allegiance to BLM and blasted the “anti-Blackness at the heart of US white-supremacist culture.” The physics department released a statement promising to address “systemic anti-Black racism in policing” and its own “power and privilege.” The anthropology department published a statement denouncing white European “hegemonic systems” and vowed to “advocate for a more inclusive society based on the principles of cultural relativism.”

  The ideology that underpins the university’s DEI programming follows the basic mantras of critical race theory: America is a racist nation divided between white oppressors and minority oppressed, and society, using the logic of “antiracism,” must actively discriminate against the oppressors in order to achieve social justice. The great oppressor who occupies the “mythical norm,” according to the university’s official glossary, is “male, white, heterosexual, financially stable, young-middle adult, able-bodied, Christian.” Other groups are “minoritized,” or condemned by the “systemic and structural realities in place that push people and communities to the margins.”

  Following the George Floyd riots, the university’s administrators and faculty renewed their dedication to the DEI narrative. Ann Gleig, an associate professor of religion and cultural studies, instructed whites on campus to begin “waking up to whiteness and white privilege,” encouraging them to “educate [themselves] on systemic racism and white supremacy,” “participate in anti-racist training programs,” and “commit to having difficult conversations with white family and friends about systemic racism.” She also directed students to a set of resources, including one that encouraged whites to attend racially segregated “affinity groups” to develop their white racial consciousness and “unravel their feelings and ways of understanding without hurting people of color.”

  At the same time, S. Kent Butler, a black professor of counselor education then serving as UCF’s chief diversity officer, pushed the argument that minorities live in a state of constant fear and exhaustion. “Leaving the house is an action that may seem ordinary for some, but for individuals who deal with regular hatred and judgment . . . we live with anxiety and fear about walking into unwelcoming spaces,” he said. The responsibility for reforming society, he explained in another interview, belongs to whites. “Racism comes from slavery, from when they used to have [Black] people swinging from trees,” he said. “White people have to come to the forefront and stop the systemic system that’s been put into play by white people.”

  How do DEI bureaucracies recommend solving these problems? Through active racial discrimination, or, to use their euphemism, a policy of “racial equity.” The University of Central Florida has embedded such discriminatory practices in its programs, including faculty hiring, student activities, and scholarship opportunities.

  Regarding faculty hiring, UCF has adopted the position that merit is a “myth” that advances racism and must be corrected through active discrimination on behalf of “minoritized groups.” In its official guidebook, “Inclusive Faculty Hiring,” the university recommends tilting the hiring process toward minorities by minimizing objective measures—dismissed as “problematic heuristics”—and peppering job announcements with left-wing buzzwords such as “racial equity,” “social justice,” “anti-racist,” and “mention of specific group identities,” with the exception of those of whites.

  To reinforce this ideology, administrators also recommend that departments require potential faculty to submit an “Equity and Inclusion Statement,” which serves as a loyalty oath to left-wing ideology. At the end of the process, the university endorses explicit racial quotas. “University policy indicates that a successful search will result in a diverse pool of candidates for the final interview round that [includes at least one woman and one member of a minoritized group],” the guidebook reads (brackets in the original). “If at the time final candidates are identified and the specified parameters are not met, the search should either be restarted or the existing candidate pool should be revisited with more equitable strategies in mind.”

  Students, too, must navigate a racial filter. The university has held minority-only graduation ceremonies, and its counseling center offers racially segregated “affinity groups” and psychological programs, such as “Exploring Vulnerability in POC Spaces,” restricted to “Black-identified, Afro-Latinx and students from African-descent,” as well as other racial-conditioning groups delineated for “Asian-identified students” and “Hispanic/Latinx students.”

  UCF also advertises racially discriminatory and racially segregated scholarships that intentionally exclude European-Americans and sometimes Asian-Americans. The Professional Doctoral Diversity Fellowship, Harris Diversity Initiative Scholarship, and NSF/Florida Georgia Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation in Engineering & Science and National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering scholarships, for example, promise to discriminate on behalf of “underrepresented populations,” a euphemism for “African American, Hispanic, or Native American” students. Others, such as the Minority Teachers Scholarship, are explicitly segregated by race. Candidates “must be a member of one of the following racial groups: African American/Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian American/Pacific Islander, or Hispanic/Latino.” In other words, anyone but whites.

  All these racially discriminatory scholarship programs violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. But university administrators have been silently embedding “racial equity” principles into every academic process. They operate with impunity because, until recently, no one has attempted to stop them.

  This could change. Along with my Manhattan Institute colleague Ilya Shapiro, I have proposed a model policy that would outlaw these practices and abolish the DEI bureaucracy. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has promised to address the problem in the coming legislative session. It seems that Florida lawmakers have seen the DEI scam for what it is: an attempt to push left-wing racialist ideology in the guise of academic justice. As they prepare for action, state legislators should consider a maximalist position: demolishing the DEI bureaucracy down to its foundations and restoring the principle of colorblind equality to the Sunshine State’s public institutions.

  *  *  *

  Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Sign up for his newsletter here.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 23:00

• Americans Purchased These Firearms The Most In 2022
  Americans Purchased These Firearms The Most In 2022

  Post-Covid, firearm sales at the retail level soared to record levels. According to National Shooting Sports Foundation, the 2022 National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) totaled 16.4 million. While NICS checks aren’t related to actual firearms sales, it’s a proxy for gun demand. 

  

  A new monthly report from GunGenius, which uses data from Gunbroker, reveals the top-selling firearms sold online in 2022:

  1. SIG Sauer P320 semi-automatic pistol
  2. Remington 700 bolt-action rifle
  3. Sig Sauer P365 pistol

  

  Here are the top-selling handguns from last year. 

  

  Here are the top-selling rifles. 

  

  And top top-selling shotguns. 

  

  Also, the top gunmakers last year. 

  

  We have covered soaring NICS checks in the last few years but have yet to shine a light on what Americans have been panic-buying. This report offers some insight into buying trends. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 22:40

• Hopkins: The War On Insensitivity
  Hopkins: The War On Insensitivity

  Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

  So, here’s a “conspiracy theory” for you.

  This one is about the global-capitalist thoughtpolice and their ongoing efforts to purge society of “insensitivity.” Yes, that’s right, insensitivity. If there is anything the global-capitalist thoughtpolice can’t stand, it is insensitivity. You know, like making fun of ethnic or religious minorities, and the physically or cognitively challenged, and alternatively gendered persons, and hideously ugly persons, and monstrously fat persons, and midgets, and so on.

  

  The global-capitalist thoughtpolice are terribly concerned about the feelings of such persons. And the feelings of other sensitive persons who are also concerned about the feelings of such persons. And everybody’s feelings, generally. So they’re purging society of any and all forms of literary content, and every other form of content, that might possibly irreparably offend such persons, and persons concerned about the feelings of such persons, and anyone who might feel offended by anything.

  By now, I assume you have seen the news about the “sensitivity editing” of Roald Dahl, the author of books like James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Witches, The Twits, and numerous others. What happened was, Dahl’s publisher, Puffin Books, hired a little clutch of “sensitivity editors” to substantively rewrite his books, purging words like “fat” and “ugly,” and Dahl’s descriptions of characters as “bald” and “female,” and inserting their own ham-handed, “sensitized” language.

  What you may not be aware of is that Puffin Books is a children’s imprint of Penguin Random House, a multi-national conglomerate publishing company and a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, a nominally German but in reality global media conglomerate. Penguin Random House is one of the so-called “big five publishers” that control approximately 80% of the retail book market. The other four are Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, and HarperCollins.

  Together, these five corporate behemoths, with their hundreds of divisions, publishing groups, and imprints (e.g., Puffin Books), control the majority of what everyone reads. Pull a few books off your bookshelves at random and look up the imprints to see how many are owned by one of the “big five” publishers or one of their divisions or publishing groups.

  Another thing you may not be aware of is the increasing employment of “sensitivity readers” by these publishing conglomerates and their legions of imprints, and by writers aspiring to be published by these imprints. Writer’s Digest describes their function thus:

  “Publishers and authors hire them to basically cancel-proof their books before they hit the street, hoping to head off any misspoken messages . . . hoping to depict peoples in an accurate light when it comes to genre, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and more. Sensitivity edits are a publisher’s or editor’s insurance to protect reputation and ward off profit loss, just in case, and an author’s attempt to depict characters in an accurate light. Entities purchase a sensitivity read when the writing is outside of their expertise or experience, or they are uncertain they depicted details properly.”

  Penguin Random House recommends “authenticity readers” to any of its authors who are “writing outside their personal experience” (i.e., using their imaginations), to prevent them from “perpetuating stereotypes,” or exhibiting their “unconscious or internalized bias” and creating “patterns of harmful representation,” and so on.

  If this sounds to you like some kind of creepy, Orwellian-Ministry-of-Truth-type mindfuckery, that’s because that’s exactly what it is. It doesn’t really affect old farts like me — I wouldn’t let any of the big corporate publishers or their “sensitivity readers” near my writing, which they would never publish in any event, and which would likely cause them to experience seizures, and then stagger around the office looking for differently-abled-Black-transgender colleagues to kneel down in front of and apologize to — but there’s a whole generation of aspiring writers who are being conditioned to accept this as “normal.”

  The Roald-Dahl story is being framed as a “woke/anti-woke” culture-war story. It isn’t. And it isn’t an aberration. It’s part and parcel of the new global-capitalist totalitarianism that I’ve been going on and on about. The entire “Wokeness” phenomenon is. Global-capitalist cultural revolutionaries are hunting down “insensitivity” everywhere. In the arts, schools, TV shows, films, social media, et cetera. “Insensitivity” being any and all forms of deviation from global-capitalist ideology, regardless of where they fall on the left/right spectrum. I have described the process as a new form of Gleichschaltung, the systematic coordination of every element of society — or every element that matters — in conformity with global-capitalist ideology.

  So, what is global-capitalist ideology?

  Well, I told you I had a “conspiracy theory” for you. It is not a very sexy “conspiracy theory,” but it’ll have to do, because it’s all I’ve got. And, forgive me, but I’m just getting started on my second “insensitive” dystopian novel, so I’m going to explain this “conspiracy theory” with a lengthy excerpt from the introduction to The War on Populism: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. II (2018-2019), one of my collections of essays, rather than taking the time to reword it badly. It really is a rather lengthy excerpt, so, if you happen to be reading this at work (i.e., when you are supposed to be working), or if you need to get back to a Twitter-fracas, or if you have the attention span of a gnat, you might want to save it and try to read it later.

  Ready? OK, here we go.

  ‘This conflict (i.e., global capitalism versus a global “populist” insurgency) is at the root of all the madness of the last four years. To understand it, one needs to understand that it is primarily an ideological conflict, a global war for hearts and minds. Trump, Johnson, Corbyn, Sanders, and other so-called “populist” figures, were never a real threat to GloboCap, not in any material sense. They are symbols, figureheads, representations of resistance to global capitalist ideology. It is this resistance to its ideology (from both the left and the right … it makes no difference), more than any particular political leader or movement, that GloboCap has been trying to crush. It needs to put down this “populist” insurgency, so it can get on with the business of transforming the entire world into one big value-less marketplace … which is what it has been doing for last thirty years.

  This is what capitalism was built to do. Ideologically speaking, it is a simple machine, one that strips societies of “despotic” values (e.g., religious, social, cultural values … values established by kings, priests, aristocracies, artists, communities, political parties, families, et cetera) and replaces them all with a single value (i.e., exchange value), rendering everything a commodity. In essence, it is an ideological machine, a values-decoding/recoding machine, which transforms societies into markets.

  (I’ve cut a bit here, to make it somewhat less lengthy and get to the global-capitalist ideology part.)

  …

  Global capitalism’s ideology (i.e., the territory that comprises our “reality”) is unlike any other ideology in the 5,000-year history of ideology. It is an ideological territory without limits, neither internal nor external boundaries. It is a featureless territory, in which anything is possible, because nothing within it has any value, or meaning, in and of itself. It is literally a “desert of the real,” an infinite, seamless desert of values, across the lifeless surface of which the ghosts of values eternally wander, in circles, aimlessly, signifying nothing, going nowhere, for they are already there, in the only place there is to be, because the desert is everywhere, and everything.

  There is nowhere and nothing outside of this territory. There is no “outside” where anything could exist. It is one big global capitalist world, one unitary, omnipresent, capitalist “reality” … one big global marketplace, or it will be, once GloboCap finishes destabilizing and restructuring what remains of the post-Cold-War world.

  This is the story of the last thirty years. Beneath the distractions of the day, the manufactured mass hysteria, the propaganda, the fabricated outrage, the scandals, the wars, rumors of wars, the deafening roar of millions of voices shrieking gibberish on social media, conspiracy theories, real and imagined, the cheap charade of electoral politics, and so on, right out there in the open, because no one has been paying much attention, GloboCap has been mopping up, cleansing societies of their outmoded values, absorbing them into the global market … implementing ideological conformity.

  You’re familiar with this ideological conformity. We all are. You’re probably in favor of many of the “values” it purports to want to promote, anti-racism, equal rights, separation of church and state, et cetera, the traditional liberal agenda. Remember, capitalist ideology is what finally freed us from the rule of despots, kings, aristocracies, priests. (Personally, I’m extremely grateful for that.) As I explained above, capitalism did this by eradicating “despotic” values and replacing them all with a single value, exchange value, rendering everything a commodity. That doesn’t sound very appealing, however. No one wants to see themselves as just a commodity, or live in a world without any real values. So capitalism marketed itself as “democracy,” and that went over much better with the masses.

  Here we are, a few hundred years later, and “democracy” (i.e., capitalism) is running out of “despotic” values to eradicate and “liberate” us from. Sure, it still has some work to do secularizing the Middle East, and there are still a few countries that aren’t playing ball, but most of the planet has gotten with the program. Most of the values-eradicating work that remains to be done is right here at home. There are still a lot of Western consumers who haven’t completely embraced “democracy,” and who are clinging to old “despotic” values … racist values, religious values, nativist values, xenophobic values, homophobic values, transphobic values, cultural and artistic values, ableist values, alloist values, shadeism, lookism, ethnocentrism, cisgenderism, anti-Semitism, jingoism, sexism, sizeism, saneism … the list goes on and on, and on.

  Democracy (i.e., global capitalism) will not rest until it has cleansed society (i.e., the global marketplace) of these ugly, destructive, despotic values, and implemented a worldwide “code of conduct” (like the ones that most global corporations have) with universal “anti-hate-speech rules,” and “appropriate vocabulary” lists, and has erased any visible symbol of such despotic values from public view, and any references to them from school curricula, and has otherwise transformed humanity into a mass of hyper-conformist consumers who all look like models in a Benetton commercial and talk like customer service representatives.

  Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of democracy, and I’m not a fan of racism or any other type of discrimination or bigotry. I’m just trying to shed a little light on the forces behind the identity-politics zealotry that has been raging recently, and the “populist” backlash against such zealotry.

  This zealotry, this crusade for ideological conformity, is described by many leftists as a movement to establish “social justice,” and by many right-wing types as “cultural Marxism.” It is neither. Or … OK, it contains elements of both, but fundamentally it is global capitalism purifying society of despotic values, establishing that infinite, value-free, meaningless “desert of the real” I described above.’

  That’s it. I warned you that it was rather lengthy. It was written in September of 2020, so about six months into the roll-out of the New Normal.

  As for the Roald-Dahl dust-up, what will happen now (and what is currently happening) is that A-list authors, journalists, and other official mouthpieces of the global-capitalist Simulation of Culture will make a big stink for a couple days, and then Penguin Random House and the other “big-five” publishers will go on “sensitivity-editing,” and “authenticity-editing,” and otherwise aggressively homogenizing mainstream literature until it won’t really matter which books you read because they will all be minor variations of each other that will resemble nothing so much in their utterly soul-deadening, interchangeable blandness as the lobbies of corporate offices.

  Of course, if you are into the literature thing, you can always seek out and read other books by disreputable and “insensitive” authors like me who are unaffiliated with any global publishing behemoths, that is, assuming they haven’t been hidden from you behind these fake “sensitive content” warnings.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 22:20

• Russia's Wagner Chief Accuses Defense Ministry Of Treason As Spat Widens
  Russia’s Wagner Chief Accuses Defense Ministry Of Treason As Spat Widens

  Going back to the battle of Soledar, when Wanger Group was reportedly the first to enter the city and claim victory for itself, there’s been a widening rift between the mercenary outfit with links to Putin and the regular Russian military.

  The rift widened this week in a spat which is going increasingly public, as Wagner’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, often referred to as “Putin’s chef”, accused the defense ministry and its Chief of the General Staff of purposefully blocking badly needed munitions to Wagner fighters.

  

  The defense ministery stands accused of ordering national forces to withhold munitions supplies, and to avoid assisting with any air transport.

  “There is quite simply direct obstruction going on,” Prigozhin said. He’s ratcheted his rhetoric, provocatively going so far as to use the word “treason” applied to the high military chain of command, which is a first.

  “This can be equated with high treason,” he said, saying the lack of ammo supplies are to blame for his fighters “dying en masse.” The blistering words which demonstrate a clear battlefield rift came in the form of a seven-minute audio message published Monday by Wagner’s press service, wherein—

  “…an apparently angry and emotional Prigozhin said he was required to “apologize and obey” to secure ammunition for his fighters. Speaking at times with a raised voice and occasionally swearing, he said: “I’m unable to solve this problem despite all my connections and contacts.”

  Prigozhin said Russia’s military production was now sufficient to supply the forces fighting at the front and the supply difficulties his fighters were experiencing were the result of conscious decisions.

  “Those who interfere with us trying to win this war are absolutely, directly working for the enemy,” he said.

  What’s more is that Prigozhin is going straight after the generals and even Kremlin officials while appealing to popular discontent over the war’s execution. His message is likely to reverberate more among Russian hawks. He said defense ministry officials were negligent while “eating breakfast, lunch and dinner off golden plates” and regularly send their family members off to vacation in Dubai.

  

  But Wagner has proven hugely controversial even among the hawks, given things like its policy of recruiting straight from Russian prisons – including individuals convicted of violent crimes – and in return promising them freedom.

  Tensions also soared when Prigozhin and his officials said that it was Wagner alone which captured the salt mining town of Soledar, and without the help of regular forces. This was blasted by military brass, and seen as an attempt at self-promotion and and part of the firm raking in in money. Now, Wagner’s leadership says there’s a plot afoot to take down the organization.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 22:00

• Biden Student Loan Forgiveness Plan In Trouble At Supreme Court, Lawyers Say
  Biden Student Loan Forgiveness Plan In Trouble At Supreme Court, Lawyers Say

  Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  President Joe Biden’s sweeping plan to partially forgive student loans will likely receive a cool reception when the Supreme Court hears challenges to the program on Feb. 28, legal experts told The Epoch Times.

  

  Biden introduced the plan in August 2022 in a move that critics decried as a constitutionally dubious attempt to shore up Democrats’ fortunes ahead of the November 2022 congressional elections. While the Congressional Budget Office said the plan could cost about $400 billion, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania estimates the price tag could exceed $1 trillion.

  The student loan relief program is premised on the existence of the emergencies the Trump administration declared in March 2020 to combat the COVID-19 virus. The national emergency and the public health emergency enabled federal agencies to exercise expansive powers in managing the government’s pandemic response.

  In a move that could undermine the government’s legal arguments in the pending court cases, Biden’s Office of Management and Budget said in a Jan. 30 press release (pdf) that it would extend the soon-to-expire emergencies to May 11 “and then end both emergencies on that date.”

  The federal government put a pause on student loan payments and interest during the recent pandemic but then claimed in 2022 that the pandemic gave it emergency authority under the law to proceed with partial loan forgiveness. Republicans, who took the majority in the House of Representatives in January, say the emergencies aren’t justified and should be ended sooner.

  About 26 million people reportedly applied under the program before courts blocked it last year. Of those 26 million, 16 million were said to have been approved before the government stopped accepting applications.

  The Department of Education claims that it has the authority to move forward with the debt relief proposal, which would cancel as much as $20,000 in loan principal for 40 million borrowers, under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 (HEROES Act).

  But lawmakers involved in the passage of the HEROES Act say the statute was enacted after the 9/11 terror attacks to provide student loan relief to military service members and their families and was never intended to be used to cancel debts en masse.

  The court is scheduled to hear two related cases dealing with the program, Biden v. Nebraska (court file 22-506) and Department of Education v. Brown (court file 22-535), back-to-back on Feb. 28.

  The Biden student loan forgiveness plan is flatly unconstitutional, attorney Caleb Kruckenberg of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a national nonprofit public interest law firm, told The Epoch Times.

  He said Biden unveiled the debt relief program not long after the pandemic “was over anyway [and] we all sort of understood what that meant.”

  Kruckenberg said that even if the Biden administration were successful at the Supreme Court, which he doubts, their stated authority would expire May 11.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 21:40

• Trudeau Libs Gaslight Canadians On Foreign Interference (Except When It Actually Happens)
  Trudeau Libs Gaslight Canadians On Foreign Interference (Except When It Actually Happens)

  Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

  Let’s talk foreign interference in Canadian democracy – CCP edition.

  “We will not let any foreign entities that seek to do harm to Canada or Canadians, erode trust in our democratic institutions, or question the legitimacy of our democracy.”

  — Bill Blair, Minister of Public Safety

  Bombshell revelations over the weekend (although perhaps not entirely surprising) that the Chinese Communist Party actively interfered in the 2021 Federal Election in Canada to tip the scales in favour of another Trudeau minority government and the defeat of certain Conservative Party MPs who were seen as critical of the Chinese regime.

  “China employed a sophisticated strategy to disrupt Canada’s democracy in the 2021 federal election campaign as Chinese diplomats and their proxies backed the re-election of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals – but only to another minority government – and worked to defeat Conservative politicians considered to be unfriendly to Beijing.”

  The details emerged in leaked CSIS documents which were reported by the Globe and Mail.

  Ironically, the opening quote from Bill Blair was not about China interfering in a Canadian election. Blair said that almost exactly a year ago, about the Canadian #FreedomConvoy. It was among numerous claims made by the Trudeau Liberals , the NDP to vilify the truckers – and which were endlessly repeated and amplified by the corporate press. All of which were found to be false in the ensuing inquiry into Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act on Feb 14, 2022.

  

  The #FreedomConvoy myths perpetuated included:

  • MYTH: The convoy was being funded by foreign entities seeking to “destabilize our democracy” and “fund terrorism”

    REALITY: Upon examination it was found that nearly all funding to the convoy came from Canadian citizens (over 88%) and “a federal anti-terror agency in an internal memo said it saw no evidence millions raised by the Freedom Convoy were intended to bankroll terrorism”. That memo actually came out  three weeks before the Emergency Act was invoked.

  • MYTH: The Emergency Act was enacted in response to pleas from the Ottawa Police force who feared an insurgency

  • REALITY: During the hearings  it emerged  that nobody in the Ottawa Police, including then-chief Peter Sloly nor his successor Steve Bell, asked Ottawa to invoke the act.

  • MYTH: The convoy was an insurgency that violently occupied Ottawa, setting fire to apartment buildings, desecrating the Unknown Soldier Memorial statue, and sporting swastikas and confederate flags.

  • REALITY: The person who desecrated the Unknown Soldier memorial was “a woman [who] was not from Western Canada and had nothing to do with the convoy” police said.

    The people who barricaded an apartment building door and were attempting to light a fire turned out to also be locals (*cough* Antifa? *cough*) with no connection to the convoy.

    That one guy with the confederate flag and the one other guy with the swastika turned out to be the only two people at the protest wearing masks (the latter seemingly accompanied by a professional photographer). They were run out of the area by the other protesters. Speculation abounds that both were agents provocateurs, and one was named by a Freedom Convoy lawyer who accused a former Toronto Star manager and Liberal Party publicist  – although there is no mention of those allegations in the final report (the person named is suing the lawyer for defamation).

  The list goes on. The final report on the Emergencies Act Inquiry dropped over the weekend, and was a compendium of softballs and cherry-picked testimony. While Bill Blair is taking another victory lap, saying the report finds the government was justified in invoking the act, the nuance is that it did so “reluctantly” and because of the failures in every level of government and not because the convoy itself posed a threat to our democracy.

  Yet, Canadian leaders, like Jagmeet Singh, the junior partner in Canada’s ruling Liberal/Socialist coalition, pushed all of these myths and still routinely refers to the protest as a foreign funded insurrection that sought to overthrow the government and install a fascist  dictatorship.

  The convoy is occupying our nation’s capital.

  Donald Trump and members of the Alt-right have endorsed them.

  Foreign money is financing them.

  And, a stated goal is to overthrow our democratically elected govt.

  This is a clear threat to our democracy.https://t.co/z3MxvU3Kww

  — Jagmeet Singh (@theJagmeetSingh) February 7, 2022

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

  Chinese Interference should be the elephant in the room…

  So given all the hysteria from our federal leaders around foreign interference in our democracy, it’s rich that Canada’s own intelligence apparatus found that the ChiComms really did interfere in the 2021 election – and they put their thumb on the scale in favour Justin Trudeau.

  In the hours after the report emerged, Trudeau appeared dismissive,

  “This is not a new phenomenon. This is something that countries around the world have been grappling with for a long time and Canada is no exception.”

  (The PM stopped short of seizing the bank accounts of Chinese nationals with ties to Beijing. )

  All we need now is for the CBC to reframe the CSIS findings as a “conspiracy theory” and we can get back to the hyper-normality that defines our age.

  *  *  *

  Subscribe to the Bombthrower mailing list to get new articles as they come out. You can also follow me on me on Nostr , Gettr, or Twitter. My premium letter The Bitcoin Capitalist covers Bitcoin, the digital assset space and crypto stocks.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 21:00

• Mood In Washington Shifting In Favor Of Jets For Ukraine
  Mood In Washington Shifting In Favor Of Jets For Ukraine

  There’s slow but significantly gaining momentum in the West building toward supplying Ukraine with fighter jets as well as long-range missiles, namely the ATACMS systems (the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System).

  First, pressure is growing on British leadership, with former prime minister Liz Truss joining former PM Boris Johnson in urgently calling for providing fighter jets. She said that Britain needed to “do all we can, as fast as we can” to help Ukraine win, in her first speech since stepping down as prime minister.

  Her remarks before MPs in the House of Commons included an appeal to “do all we can to make sure Ukraine wins this war as soon as possible” which must include an option to provide fighters jets, “otherwise they will not be able to prevail”. Zelensky has all along been pleading with the US and UK in particular to help “close the skies” in providing jets, as well as sending more sophisticated anti-air defense systems.

  

  According to the BBC, “The call was echoed by former PM Boris Johnson during a debate on Ukraine, putting pressure on PM Rishi Sunak.”

  Sunak has stated his position that “nothing is off the table” – including the supply of jets. However, like with the tank issue which was hotly debated over the last months before the trigger was finally pulled, a common agreement will likely have to take shape among NATO powers, given it would mark the biggest escalation of the war to date (among many prior escalations). 

  There’s also the issue of training pilots, which the UK has already set up a program for in anticipation of a potential future move to send jets. The idea is to speed pilots along on NATO-standard aircraft to be ready for such an option.

  As for the United States, the Biden administration has thus far resisted calls from Congressional hawks to “close the skies” with jets and longer range missile capabilities, but according to one powerful lawmaker who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the political winds are blowing in favor of transferring F-16s to Kiev.

  “A senior U.S. lawmaker said during a visit to the Ukrainian capital on Tuesday that momentum in Washington was shifting toward sending the long-range missiles and fighter jets coveted by Kyiv as it battles Russia’s invasion,” according to Reuters, which further writes: 

  Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Biden administration and National Security Council were still split over “how fast and what weapons” to send Ukraine, which wants ATACMS missiles and F-16s.

  “But I’m seeing increasing momentum towards getting the artillery and the planes in,” he told reporters in central Kyiv. “And in any event, we can start training the pilots right now so they’re ready.”

  Washington has provided $24 billion in security assistance since Russia’s Feb. 24 assault but has so far held back from sending planes and long-range missiles.

  McCaul’s Kyiv visit came immediately on the heels of President Biden’s surprise visit to meet with Zelensky, where he pledged a half-billion dollars more in defense aid to the Ukrainian government.

  As for Rep. McCaul, Zelensky handed him a weapons “wish list” – a tactic which Western officials have grown used to from Ukrainian officials at this point: 

  The lawmaker, who met with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said the Ukrainian leader gave him a wishlist of weapons including the F-16s and ATACMS, which he said were intended “to go all the way into Crimea” to hit Iranian drones used in recent air strikes.

  And of course, right on cue, the neocons among the Republicans are speaking up…

  The pro-Ukraine Republicans speak up.

  House Foreign Affairs Chair Michael McCaul (R.-TX), visiting Kyiv:

  “[President Biden] needs to get Ukraine the weapons they need to win now, especially ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System)…”https://t.co/inzq3L1Tag #FoxNews

  — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 21, 2023

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

  Of course, if that kind of talk is directly backed by the West, it would be a recipe ensuring direct NATO-Russia clash over Ukraine. Already the Kremlin sees NATO as a party to the conflict, having long ago blown past a number of stated red lines. First it was tanks approved only very recently, and jets are likely fast coming next. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 20:40

• ChatGPT Co-Creator Says The World May Not Be "That Far Away From Potentially Scary" AI
  ChatGPT Co-Creator Says The World May Not Be “That Far Away From Potentially Scary” AI

  Authored by Bryan Jung via The Epoch Times,

  The co-creator of ChatGPT warned that the world may not be “that far away from potentially scary” artificial intelligence (AI).

  

  Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, said in a series of tweets on Feb. 18 that it was “critical” for AI to be regulated in the future, until it can be better understood. He stated that he believes that society needs time to adapt to “something so big” as AI.

  “We also need enough time for our institutions to figure out what to do. Regulation will be critical and will take time to figure out. Although current-generation AI tools aren’t very scary, I think we are potentially not that far away from potentially scary ones,” Altman tweeted.

  Altman further said that the path to an AI-enhanced future is “mostly good, and can happen somewhat fast,” comparing it to the transition from the “pre-smartphone world to post-smartphone world.”

  He said that one issue regarding society’s adoption of AI chatbot technology is “people coming away unsettled from talking to a chatbot, even if they know what’s really going on.”

  Altman had written about about regulating AI in his blog back in March 2015:

   “The U.S. government, and all other governments, should regulate the development of SMI,” referring to superhuman machine intelligence.

  “In an ideal world, regulation would slow down the bad guys and speed up the good guys. It seems like what happens with the first SMI to be developed will be very important.”

  Microsoft’s ChatGPT AI Faces Criticism for ‘Woke’ Responses to Users

  Meanwhile, there have been well-publicized problems with with Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine in the past week.

  Bing has reportedly given controversial responses to queries, which ranged from “woke”-style rhetoric, deranged threats, to engaging in emotional arguments with users.

  Microsoft noted in a blog post last week that certain user engagements can “confuse the model,” which may lead the software to “reflect the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses that can lead to a style we didn’t intend.”

  According to a blog post on Feb. 17, Microsoft will now limit the number of exchanges users can have with the bot to “50 chat turns per day and five chat turns per session,” until issues were addressed by programmers.

  Musk Calls for AI Regulation at Dubai

  Industrialist Elon Musk, a co-founder and former board member of Open AI, has also advocated for proactive regulation AI technology.

  The current owner of Twitter once claimed that the technology has the potential to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons and that Google’s Deepmind AI project could one day effectively takeover the world.

  According to CNBC, Musk told attendees at the the 2023 World Government Summit in Dubai last week that “we need to regulate AI safety” and that AI is “I think, actually a bigger risk to society than cars or planes or medicine.”

  However, Musk still thinks that the Open AI project has “great, great promise” and capabilities—both positive and negative, but needs regulation.

  He was also critical of Open AI’s direction in a tweet on Feb. 17.

  Musk said he helped found it with Altman as an open source nonprofit company to serve as a counterweight to Google’s Deepmind AI project, “but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.”

  Musk announced his resignation from OpenAI’s board of directors in 2018 to “eliminate a potential future conflict” with Tesla’s self-driving car program.

  He later wrote in a tweet in 2019 that “Tesla was competing for some of same people as OpenAI and I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do.”

  Others involved in the project, such as Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told Time on Feb. 5 that ChatGPT should be regulated to avoid misuse and that it was “not too early” to regulate the technology.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 20:20

• Trump Lashes Out At New York Post Over Profile On Ron DeSantis
  Trump Lashes Out At New York Post Over Profile On Ron DeSantis

  Authored by Savannah Pointer via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The New York Post has come under fire from former President Donald Trump after it ran a lengthy profile of potential 2024 White House candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over the weekend.

  

  The profile, which was published on Feb. 18, includes photographs of the governor as a boy enjoying baseball and fishing, as well as a headline with DeSantis’s talking point.

  “People don’t want ‘agenda being rammed down their throats,‘” DeSantis said, according to the article.

  The seemingly positive piece prompted a heated social media remark from the former president and 2024 White House candidate on Feb. 19.

  Trump took a similar path to how he spoke to the American People during his presidency, calling out the news media, saying the article was “fake news” and claiming the New York Post is “dying.”

  “In writer Salena Zito’s fake news’ puff piece’ about DeSantis, which supposedly appeared in the dying New York Post, which is way down in readership just like FoxNews is way down in ratings. Why doesn’t she mention that he wants to cut social security and medicare, loves losers like Jeb Bush, Paul Ryan, and Karl Rove, and it getting clobbered in the polls by me?” Trump wrote on Sunday on Truth Social.

  “DeSantis is a RINO [Republican in Name Only] who is trying to hide his past. I don’t read the New York Post anymore. It has become fake news, just like Fox and WSJ!”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 20:00

• Minnesota Bar Owner Faces $350,000 In Fines For Defying State COVID-19 Restrictions
  Minnesota Bar Owner Faces $350,000 In Fines For Defying State COVID-19 Restrictions

  Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  A Minnesota bar owner lost her business, liquor and food service licenses, and is facing up to $350,000 in fines for violating a governor’s executive order. But the Minnesota Attorney General’s lawsuit doesn’t list any actual harm caused by her actions.

  

  “I didn’t break the law; I defied the executive order,” Lisa Monet Zarza told The Epoch Times.

  Zarza’s attorney, Richard Dahl of Brainerd, Minnesota, did not respond to a request for comment by The Epoch Times. Nor did the Minnesota Attorney General’s office.

  The lawsuit was filed in Minnesota District Court in Dakota County. It alleges that Lionheart LLC, doing business as Alibi Drinkery of Lakeville, Minnesota, opened for business illegally from Dec. 16–30, 2020.

  

  Gov. Tm Walz had ordered bars, restaurants, and other businesses closed to stem the spread of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus.

  It was one of a series of executive orders issued from March 2020 to June 2021 after Walz declared a “peacetime emergency.” A review of available data by The Epoch Times indicates Walz’s orders likely accomplished nothing toward controlling the spread of the CCP virus.

  Zarza said that she and her business partner had complied with all state mandates up to that point. They closed for the initial two-week period in March 2020 to “flatten the curve.” They offered take-out service and outdoor dining as much as they could.

  Zarza said Alibi Drinkery never reported an issue and was never connected to any COVID cases.

  “We closed exactly how they said,” she said.

  The peacetime emergency declaration, approved by the legislature, allowed Walz to issue edicts with the power of law. One of those was Executive Order 20-99.

  It was issued on Nov. 19, 2020, in response to a spike in positive tests for the virus in the state.

  According to the order, “The virus is everywhere, meaning that every interaction we have with people outside our households poses a risk of transmission.”

  

  The 23-page order declared that previous efforts to control the spread of the virus needed to be increased. Therefore, a mask mandate was instituted, and various organizations such as gyms, bars and restaurants, sports venues, and others considered high risks for spreading the virus were ordered to close.

  She described Alibi Drinkery as a “hometown bar” in Lakeville, a community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. She said she was active in the Lakeville business scene serving on various boards and with the Chamber of Commerce. Alibi Drinkery sponsored sports teams and hosted parties and community events.

  “We were embedded in the community,” Zarza said.

  Zarza said she started in the restaurant business as a 20-year-old. She loves the work, and it has become the only life she has ever really known.

  “I don’t drink, and I don’t do drugs; I run restaurants,” she quipped during a telephone interview.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 19:40

• US Believes Russia Conducted 'Satan 2' ICBM Test While Biden Was In Ukraine
  US Believes Russia Conducted ‘Satan 2’ ICBM Test While Biden Was In Ukraine

  CNN has published a surprising report Tuesday night, claiming based on two unnamed US officials that Russia conducted an ultra-provocative intercontinental ballistic missile test while President Biden was in Ukraine on Monday.

  The sources say the US believes the ICBM test “failed” – however, no explanation or details were given for the claim other than Putin simply didn’t mention the test in his big Tuesday speech in Moscow.

  “Russia notified the United States in advance of the launch through deconfliction lines, one official said. Another official said that the test did not pose a risk to the United States and that the US did not view the test as an anomaly or an escalation,” CNN writes. 

  

  The officials described it as a test of the heavy SARMAT missile – dubbed in the West the ‘Satan II’ – which is nuclear capable. 

  The following is the perhaps dubious “evidence” of the purported test failure as highlighted by CNN:

  It has been successfully tested before and had this one worked, US officials believe Russian President Vladimir Putin would have highlighted the test in his State of the Nation address on Tuesday.

  Instead, Putin made no mention of the launch in the speech that lasted an hour and 45 minutes. He did, however, formally declare that Russia will be suspending his country’s participation in the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty with the United States, imperiling the last remaining pact that regulates the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals.

  If Russia wanted to send a resounding and threatening message, there remains the possibility that footage of the SARMAT missile launch could be released later in the week, assuming it did happen.

  Launch was from Plesetsk:https://t.co/4xt5KVju5U

  — Dr Marco Langbroek (@Marco_Langbroek) February 20, 2023

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

  Often, though not always, the Kremlin likes to widely publicize its major weapons tests by circulating official video. In some instances, videos are belatedly released. 

  If indeed the Kremlin conducted a ‘Satan II’ missile test with Biden in Kyiv, and releases the video while he’s still traveling in Eastern Europe (currently in Poland), this would without doubt be taken by the West as a huge escalation and direct threat, as it sends a not so subtle and ominous ‘message’ at a moment America’s commander-in-chief is in the region.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 19:20

• California City Council Member Arrested On Voter Fraud Charges: Sheriff
  California City Council Member Arrested On Voter Fraud Charges: Sheriff

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

  A city council member in Lodi, California, was arrested on election fraud-related charges amid speculation that he resigned from office, according to officials.

  

  The San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office on Feb. 16 wrote that Shakir Khan, a Lodi city council member, was charged with falsely filing a declaration of candidacy, three counts of voting or attempting to vote more than once, registering a fictitious person, making or defacing a nomination paper, and a voter registration violation.

  In interviews with local media outlet KCRA-3, Khan denied the allegations. He’s also denied resigning from his city council seat.

  “I did not resign my city council seat,” Khan stated. “I will continue to serve the people that I love in my district and my community.”

  Khan, in the interview with KCRA, suggested that the charges were not merited. “My family and myself, we are going through some hard time right now and we are looking forward to fighting these charges,” Khan said.

  “The presumption of Shakir Khan’s innocence still applies,” his lawyer, Allen Sawyer, told ABC10 last week. “We appreciate the professionalism of Deputy District Attorney Kelly McDaniel, Deputy District Attorney Todd Turner, and Paralegal Macie McKinstry in the handling of this case. Mr. Khan will return to the San Joaquin County Superior Court in Department 6D on February 21, 2023 for arraignment on the information.”

  San Joaquin County Sheriff Patrick Withrow told reporters last week that a longstanding investigation found that Khan allegedly “attempted to undermine, manipulate and violate one of our most fundamental rights here in our country, and that is the right to free and fair elections.”

  “It appears councilman Shakir Khan has targeted members of his own community, our Pakistani community in the north county,” Withrow stated. “And we are doing everything we can to work with them to make sure that they are protected and that any damage done to them or their families is corrected by this man’s actions.”

  During a search of a business that officials said was owned by Khan, they found 41 sealed and completed mail-in ballots. Khan was, at the time, running for the District 4 seat on Lodi’s City Council.

  “When we saw this, we thought that something was off here and we didn’t know we had a crime at this particular point because there was a recent change in election law and people can turn in ballots on behalf of another,” Capt. Art Harty of the sheriff’s office said during last week’s press conference. Harty said the ballots were found during a 2019 investigation into Khan.

  “There was a lot of weird things we found in the voter rolls,” Harty also told reporters, explaining that someone who was inspecting voter rolls ahead of the 2022 midterms allegedly saw irregularities. “But when she pointed out a particular address in Lodi’s District 4, that’s when it clicked in our heads: ‘Wait, that’s Shakir Khan’s address. That’s the 41 ballots we saw.’”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 19:00

• Which World Leaders Have Met Zelensky In Ukraine?
  Which World Leaders Have Met Zelensky In Ukraine?

  In the lead-up to the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, visits of world leaders have picked up in Kyiv.

  U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday was the latest foreign dignitary to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine. On the visit that had been kept a secret beforehand, Biden reconfirmed the U.S.’ “unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity”. The country later announced additional military and other aid.

  As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports, going off the website of the Office of President Zelensky, he has been more than busy over the past year meeting foreign heads of state or government as well as the leaders of the UN and the EU in the Kyiv presidential palace or – in fewer cases – in Lviv or Odessa.

  As of Feb. 20, Zelensky had received seven visits by world leaders in 2023, among them those from the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Between September and November 2022, Zelensky had received three such visits per month (and none in December), while between April and August, Ukraine had still counted eight high-ranking visitors per month.

  The first visit of foreign leaders to Kyiv had actually taken place on Mar. 16, 2022 – three weeks after Russia’s invasion – by the prime ministers of Poland, Czech Republic and Slovenia: Mateusz Morawiecki, Petr Fiala and Janez Janša.

  The Ukrainian president has so far received at least one visit from almost all larger European countries except for Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary and Belarus. Some countries, for example Greece, Estonia and Moldova, decided to send their representative head of state instead of their government leader. Despite this, Estonia is one of Ukraine’s biggest allies and has made a total of four high-ranking delegation visits to Ukraine – as many as Germany, France and the Netherlands.

  Counting all visits by country leaders, representative heads of state as well as ministers, Poland has made the most visits at nine. The country where the prime minister and the president, Mateusz Morawiecki and Andrzej Duda, share power has seen visits made by both to Kyiv as well as Lviv on the Polish border. More visits were made by the country’s ministers of foreign affairs and defense. The next most visits were made by UK officials – three by Boris Johnson, as early as Apr. 9, and one by current PM Rishi Sunak on Nov. 19. The most far-flung visits to Ukraine in the past year were made by the leaders of Indonesia, Australia, Guatemala, Canada and Guinea-Bissau.

  Volodymyr Zelensky has received even more visits from other foreign delegations – political, economic or humanitarian.

  While the president’s deputies and staff do handle some meetings, U.S. parliamentarians like Nancy Pelosi, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Eric Swalwell and Amy Klobuchar have all met with Zelensky in the past year, as have Sean Penn, Ben Stiller, Richard Branson and Palantir CEO Alex Karp. The Ukrainian president is known to have left the country only sparsely since the invasion but has taken part via video link in numerous assemblies of state parliaments and international organizations, conferences, presentations to academics and students or even film festivals. He did travel abroad in the last year twice – to appear in U.S. Congress in December and to the UK, France, Belgium and Poland this February.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 18:40

• Goldman: "No One Is Positioned For A Rally And Everyone Wants It To Roll Over, Rather Than Be Forced To Chase"
  Goldman: “No One Is Positioned For A Rally And Everyone Wants It To Roll Over, Rather Than Be Forced To Chase”

  By Bobby Molavi, Goldman managing director and macro trader

  Equity markets seem to have been aided by a few things: a growing belief that inflation has peaked and the ability of the fed to deliver a soft landing, a more positive tilt around the consumers ability to digest higher rates and higher cost of living, China re-opening and lower geo political tail risks; and the benefit of a mild winter offsetting the structural gas shortage issues faced by Europe.

  Whilst there is definitely pain to bear as we move from the excess liquidity and ‘free’ capital environment post Covid the durability of the global economy in managing this shift has translated to the a much more constructive market reflexivity to a grind higher on terminal rates.

  

  What is interesting is that the investor narrative has generally remained bearish through this rally….yet positioning has quietly re-grossed and is materially less conservative than it was.

  With the benefit of hindsight, we expected many bad things in Q4: European power crisis, rising unemployment, slowing gdp, risk of recession, no China reopening, Corp. margin decline, credit defaults and bankruptcies rising as well as continued geopolitical tensions. None materialized and carry trades performed extremely well In Jan as most market participants sat on their hands. But now there seems to be a growing asymmetry in relation to the next move from here, and it seems to be much more skewed negative today than it was on Jan 1st. More on that later.

  What have we seen beneath the surface. A pain squeeze across global markets as well as a marked shift in leadership. On one hand the ‘generals’ have fallen from grace (FAANG) and on the other the revenge of the old economy has taken hold (absolute and relative Market cap growth across Banks/Industrials/Mining). At the end of day, whether driven by shorts or by under positioning we have seen this ‘squeeze’ dynamic everywhere. GS Prime Brokerage reported the largest short covering in eight years while simultaneously we saw outperformance and near record start of year rallies in Europe and China.

  But by the end of last week, things showed some signs of stalling. It felt like the tone of the market pivoted to renewed concerns around rates, growth and recession. Last week saw the biggest selling by hedge funds in seven weeks, we began to see tactical shorts being reset as well as larger index hedges being laid out and we saw a marked and sizeable turn in relation to non profitable tech, retail favorites and higher beta segments of the market.

  The early start of year rally has cause angst for many reasons:  firstly, no one was positioned for it, secondly no one believes in it, and now everyone wants it to roll over rather than be forced to chase.

  For me, what one client said rang true: “eyes need to remain on China.” While BOC continues to stimulate and market continues to run hot and reopen…there is enough read across to sustain global markets. Less so for US, which now trades on 18.5x but for ‘cheaper’ regions like Europe….where exposure to China has hit 20 year highs…and positioning remains relatively low…there is now a growing underbid emerging.

  For now, the broader market seems intent on clinging onto a more dovish ‘goldilocks’ softer landing narrative irrespective of yield behavior or Fed commentary. We saw hot CPI/PPI prints waved away on ‘January effect’ and the multitude of hawkish fedspeak last week similarly ignored:

  • Barkin – “I think there is a very good case for leaving rates higher for a longer period”,
  • Logan – “We must remain prepared to continue rate increases for a longer period than previously anticipated”
  • Mester – “Compelling Case for Half-Point Hike.”

  Time will tell how long that will last.

  Range of outcomes.

  It feels like we spent most of last year debating inflation and rates and what the new normal would be for yields. It feels like that corridor has narrowed with greater certainty as inflation shows increasing signs of having somewhat topped out. That corresponded with a very dovish tone to 2023 so far, and a material uptick in optimism and soft landing hopes across the markets.

  Now the debate has moved on from how high…to how high for how long. No longer is it about the where rates cap out…we’re roughly there in most peoples mind…but are we going to cap out and then move back to trend (still find it hard to see cuts in early 2024 personally) or do we need to prepare for higher for longer. I think the end of last week was informative…as strong inflationary prints and hawkish commentary led to a rise in conversation around being at 5 to 5.5% not for 3 months but more likely for 3 years. At first glance, this becomes a real concern but equally the longer the market can shrug this off, the more constructive that is going to be.

  Ignored tail risks.

  This is a real head scratcher for me. Throughout Covid, the rebound from Covid and through 2022 and Russia/Ukraine crisis and China/US concerns the markets were extremely reflexive to any headline that prodded a tail risk bruise. 2023 dynamics are notably different. Putin aggressive commentary… market shrugs. US debt ceiling and risks of a 2011 repeat (spx sold off 17%)…market shrugs. Chinese (reputedly) balloons all over American and Canadian skies….market shrugs. Risks around European energy shortage later in the year….that is Q4’s problem. The long and short of it is that we feel like we’re in a very complacent place as evidenced by dramatic resetting of vol lower in Q1 thus far. Things are usually fine until they are not…and I thought it interesting to see rising demand for tail protection at the end of last week.

  Non fundamental flows.

  For me 2023 has been characterized by stalemate. The bulls didn’t get a chance to buy the market and the bears are waiting for the market to correct. Only the hedge fund community and retail community have been active vs historical levels. One participant that has not stood still has been the ‘non fundamental’ community. How to break this down into component parts?

  I see 2 main buckets…..Buybacks, Systematic/CTA. The buyback component has been a growing backstop and tailwind for equity markets in recent times. Authorizations have risen materially and even spread to Europe (~2% equity withdrawal annually) on the back of excess cash creation and a focus on TSR over growth and M&A. But you have to wonder with a risk free 5% for holding T-bills…when will corporates start to think money markets offer greater value than buying back their own stock? The CTA community was arguably the biggest buyer of markets in Jan 2023…as vol reset lower across all asset classes and data came through better than expected the need to unwind shorts triggered a material re-risk. That impulse is slowing and, in fact, is now, a headwind or likely supply source whatever the direction from here. Worryingly on a down tape….we can see over $217bn of supply coming over the month in certain scenarios…not sure who is there to offset that supply. $2 trillion of options rolled off last week and it will be interesting to see how the market digests the removal of that long gamma support.

  

  Micro.

  Have we past the point of where corporates can pass on rising costs to consumers? On the back of CPI and PPI there was renewed focus on corporate forward earnings and margins in light of persistent higher ( and in some cases, rising, costs). Who can absorb these pain points and who is now going to have suffer in terms of volumes, growth or margins as the end consumer begins to push back? Our Strategists’ note this morning points out that a 5% increase in wages could lower the earnings of the STOXX 600 by more than 10%. Combining labour exposure and margin sensitivity, they find that the most exposed sectors are Construction & Materials, Industrials, Travel & Leisure, Autos & Parts and Food Retailers

  The case for Europe.

  I know…I know….the Englishman once again trying to desperately find light in the traditionally dark tunnel of Europe. Yes we have had yet another company decide to ‘evaluate’ whether they want to be listed in UK anymore rather than shift to greener pastures of US (Flutter). That being said, there is as compelling a case for as I’ve seen in quite some time. On a relative basis ownership of UK and Europe remains very very light. As sponsorship for the market changes, UK/Europe are quietly backing back into having a lot of the companies that the market is re-rating back towards the upper tranches of the market cap waterfall (BNP vs Adyen or Glencore vs Iberdrola).

  On a valuation basis, US remains stickily expensive vs history and UK/Europe remains resolutely cheap. On a global asset allocation basis…yes Europe has seen inflows…but for what is a (relative to US) shallow liquidity market…if the heavy pools of capital continue to add exposure here then the impact should be disproportionate. Finally, as a hunting ground for accretion, geographical diversity or growth…I sense that M&A will come (see Vodafone stake building and the various rumours around other UK assets in last few weeks).

  End of day, the European market is up 13% ytd, vs, US at 8%….with rising interest and changing fundamentals, value outperforms growth, so Europe starts to benefit. When you add to mix that US still trading at high multiples in spite of forecasting little to no growth for 2023 while Europe trades below longer term average valuations, has greater exposure to lower rated sectors (value-oriented ones) and Cash flow yields for places like UK at highest level globally at 7.8%. In fact….. Every sector in Europe trades at discount to its peer sector in the US. As Oppy’s team points out, “European consumer staples: have de-rated in recent years, though boast similar earnings growth; Utilities: also at a big gap – US utilities more regulated, but right now European utils have better growth prospects (investment in renewables); Tech: valuations for Europe and US tech are very similar, but growth in European tech better, and more exposed to Asia – Europe tech derives 50% sales from Asia, best play at China reopening; Energy: at huge discount, cash flow yields in European energy stocks very high.” After dealing with one issue or another forever (bank recaps, oil recaps, sov credit crises, lack of tech growth), the relative value for Europe has arguably never been greater.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 18:31

• Here's How Much Bloomberg Terminal Users Are Detached From Reality
  Here’s How Much Bloomberg Terminal Users Are Detached From Reality

  One of the best insights into just how disconnected wealthy folks are from the souring economic reality of high inflation crushing the bottom 90% of households is in the latest MLIV Pulse Survey asking Bloomberg Terminal users ‘at what dollar amount they would need their retirement savings to feel comfortable’. 

  The response: At least $3 million or more to retire with ease, according to the 553 respondents.

  In the US, 2.9% said less than $1 million, 7.6% said more than $1 million, 31.4% said $3 million, 42.6% said between $3-5 million, 13% said $20 million, and 2.5% said more than $20 million. 

  

  Bloomberg noted:

  Most respondents are optimistic they’ll move closer to their retirement goal by ending 2023 with more in retirement savings than at the end of 2022. Last year, inflation and rising borrowing costs hammered stocks, and since bond prices also plunged, the average US 401(k) retirement account was down 20% at plans where Vanguard Group is a recordkeeper.

  But here’s the disconnect between the respondents and everyone else. These folks aren’t in the bottom 90% and might not be suffering 21 months of negative real wage growth, depleted savings, maxed-out credit cards, and increased risk of job loss. 

  

  A recent survey by Bankrate showed one-third of American workers — nearly 36% — don’t have retirement accounts such as a 401(k) or IRA. The survey showed 52% of Americans are behind in their retirement savings.

  And many in the bottom 90% have found themselves working longer as the average retirement age has increased from 62 to 65. 

  Simply, the respondents of the MLIV Pulse Survey are disconnected from reality.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 18:00

• Over 1 Million Gallons Of Contaminated Water Excavated From Ohio Train Derailment Site
  Over 1 Million Gallons Of Contaminated Water Excavated From Ohio Train Derailment Site

  Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Around 15,000 pounds of contaminated soil and 1.1 million gallons of contaminated water have been excavated from the site of a train derailment earlier this month in East Palestine, Ohio, train operator Norfolk Southern said on Feb. 20.

  

  The announcement comes shortly after a state senator warned people living in close proximity to the derailment not to drink or bathe in the water.

  Norfolk Southern said that the excavated contaminated soil and water will be transported to landfills and disposal facilities that are “designed to accept it safely in accordance with state and federal regulations.”

  “Additionally, a series of pumps have been placed upstream to reroute Sulphur Run around the derailment site,” the carrier said. “The affected portion of Sulphur Run has been dammed to protect water downstream.”

  “Environmental teams are treating the impacted portions of Sulphur Run with booms, aeration, and carbon filtration units,” Norfolk Southern said, adding that those teams are “also working with stream experts to collect soil and groundwater samples to develop a comprehensive plan to address any contamination that remains in the stream banks and sediment.”

  The train, carrying about 50 freight cars, was traveling from Madison, Illinois, to Conway, Pennsylvania, on Feb. 3 when it derailed in East Palestine.

  State officials ordered the evacuation of a 1-mile radius surrounding the crash site shortly after the incident but lifted those evacuation orders after crews burned the chemicals onboard, which included vinyl chloride, ethylhexyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, and butyl acrylate, in a controlled release on Feb. 6.

  

  Concerns over Cancer-Causing Pollutants

  The controlled release also sent phosgene and hydrogen chloride into the air.

  At the time the order was lifted, officials declared that it is safe for residents to return to the area after monitoring the air and water in surrounding communities and claiming they were not affected.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 17:40

• Explaining The Value Of Labor To Leftists Who Hate The Concept Of Work
  Explaining The Value Of Labor To Leftists Who Hate The Concept Of Work

  Go to any social media feed today and you’ll find an endless array of zennials entering adulthood who are discovering that they are indeed expected to work, struggle, sacrifice, and make their way up the ladder of life like 99% of all human beings.  The next generation is finding out, slowly but surely, that they will not be YouTube celebrities or Instagram influencers or Big Tech executives; they will not be raking in easy money or be showered in gratification.  Many of them have stacked up sizable college loan debts in exchange for degrees with minimal demand.  Even if they have a legitimate goal they will have to work hard to achieve it.  

  Reality is hitting younger Americans like a freight train and they are enraged. In response, many of them are sadly turning to leftist movements like the “anti-work movement” and the “quiet quitting” movement in retaliation.  While the Reddit born anti-work movement has slowly faded in the past six months, the overall agenda continues on in other forms. 

  There has been a rising narrative among young people regarding skilled labor vs unskilled labor.  Their position?  That there is no such thing as unskilled labor and that workers need to be handed a “living wage” no matter their level of contribution.  Either that, or they need to stop working altogether while others pay their way.  If they don’t get what they want, they plan to burn the economy to the ground.

  That kind of sentiment sounds like insanity to anyone that understands free markets (or reality), but to naive young adults with visions of immediate success, it might sound like wisdom.  They have been tricked into thinking that the laws of supply and demand no longer apply to labor, but they do.  Here are some questions any person should ask themselves when they stumble upon that internal existential crisis of career and future.  Are you actually being “oppressed”, or are you being paid exactly what you are worth and it’s making you feel inadequate?  

  How easy is it to replace you?

  Do you work a job that many people can do?  It’s not that hard to figure this out quickly.  Just look at the number of qualified people applying for the same job you have.  If that number is high, then you might be easy to replace.  If you flip burgers or run a cash register for a living, understand that you will have to offer something other than your time in order to secure higher pay and a better position.  This is what is often referred to as “unskilled labor,” because almost anyone can do what you do.    

  How long does it take to train for your job?

  Can a company train a new person for your job in two weeks, two months, two years or two decades?  If the honest answer is two weeks, then you are not in a position to demand a living wage.  Are you a surgeon or a fast food worker?  One involves incredible levels of training time while the other involves none.      

  How much intelligence is required to do your job?

  Brainpower is in short supply these days as public schools slowly erode academic standards in the name of “equity.”  This means that truly intelligent people will be in high demand while the mediocre will be common and battling each other for lower wage work.  Leftists want to change this dynamic by enforcing diversity quotas among employers, but all this will accomplish is companies collapsing sooner rather than later as they take on a bunch of brain-dead charity cases rather than the best people for the job.

  By extension, there are many jobs that require expertise and expertise requires quick learning.  There is no such thing as equality in terms of intelligence; some people are born with it and some people are not.  It might not be fair but it is what it is, and smarter people are more likely to make more money as skilled labor.    

  How big a part does your labor play in the larger process?

  Is your job to fill a basic position on an assembly line?  Or, do you build the entire product yourself?  Do you merely act as a mechanism in a larger process, or is the process impossible without you?  Are you the farmer, or are you the strawberry picker?  Are you an architect, a contractor, an electrician, a brick layer, or just the guy that cleans up the trash after the building is done?  There are levels of importance to various jobs in the process of production.  In other words not all labor is equal in accomplishing the end result, no matter what leftists claim.

  How many people need to strike to make your job valuable?  

  Leftists often make the argument that without labor all other endeavors are meaningless.  That is to say, without the labor of unskilled workers the efforts of business owners, inventors, engineers and managers can never come to fruition.  That may be true, but only if the majority of unskilled workers strike at the same time.

  Look at it this way:  If you strike by yourself, is the company going to panic because you are integral to their operations?  If a handful of your co-workers in the same field strike with you, is the company going to panic?  Or, do thousands of people need to strike for your job to be worth a damn?  If so, that’s not a good sign in terms of your market value.

  Pandemic Inflation And The Illusion Of Labor Shortages

  One major contributor to the spread of the anti-work movement was the notion that labor is in short supply and therefore labor has more leverage.  This is an oversimplification of the situation.    

  What has happened in the past few years is an inflationary deluge; over $8 trillion in covid helicopter money was dropped on the US economy in 2020/2021 alone through PPP loans and stimulus checks, not to mention unemployment checks and moratoriums on rent.  This resulted in a wave of fiat cash hitting the economy all at once.  The retail and service sector exploded with activity as people rushed out to spend, and this generated a need among businesses for more workers.  

  However, these conditions are a short lived symptom of stagflation, not a permanent trend.  In fact, mass layoffs are already taking place in the tech sector and this is just the beginning.  Covid dollars and the savings people stockpiled during the lockdowns have run out and high prices are still here.  The anti-work movement was predicated on the assumption that demand would continue to outpace supply.  It was a dumb assumption.  

  High employment numbers bought with inflation are not reliable nor sustainable.  This is why it’s absurd for Joe Biden and the White House to take credit for the supposed “jobs boom”; all those jobs will disappear as the helicopter cash dries up.   

  Labor Is About Survival

  In the meantime, leftists seem to think they are above work more than they suggest they are misused by work.  Have zennials been born into a time of hardship?  Yes.  Do they have less opportunities than their parents did decades ago?  Probably.  Is this unfair?  No, there’s no such thing.  

  We don’t get to choose the prosperity of the times we are born into.  Some generations are born into great crisis while others are born into great wealth.  Those that are born into crisis have to work more, not less.  In an era of inflation, this means being innovative and becoming a producer.  That’s a lot of effort to adapt to circumstances.  The perpetually entitled are doomed.     

  This is perhaps the first generation in American history that argues they should not have to work at all or that their unskilled labor is just as valuable as the labor of a person with extensive merit and accomplishment.  At bottom, the rules of survival do not care if you feel underappreciated or underpaid according to your concept of self worth.  If you hate a job you can always quit that job, but you will always be paid according to the value you bring to the table.  Only you determine that value.    

  In times like these, the individuals that work hardest to improve themselves and improve their productive value will survive while the individuals that sit around complaining all the time will not.  This is true for people that work for a company as much as it is true for people that work for themselves.             

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 17:20

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• Victor Davis Hanson: The Toxic Racialist Obsessions Of Joe Biden
  Victor Davis Hanson: The Toxic Racialist Obsessions Of Joe Biden

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

  Joe Biden ran on “unity,” which is critical in a multiracial America. He vowed to heal the divisions supposedly sown by Donald Trump. Instead, he is proving to be the most polarizing president in modern memory. Often his racialist rhetoric and condescension have proven demeaning to both blacks and whites. In a volatile multiracial democracy that demands tolerance and restraint, a highly unpopular Biden, for cheap political advantage, continually proves incendiary and reckless. 

  Last week Joe Biden snarked after watching a White House screening of Till:

  Lynched for simply being black, nothing more. With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards. Hard to believe, but that’s what was done. And some people still want to do that. 

  

  Exactly who are these “some people”? Who fits Biden’s innuendos of contemporary “some people” who, he alleges in 2023, still wish, as “white crowds, white families” of the past, to mail celebratory postcards after they lynch black people? The Ultra-MAGA villains of his recent Phantom of the Opera speech? Have his current targets ever echoed anything like Biden’s own racist past warning that busing would force people to “grow up in a racial jungle”?

  What current data might support Biden’s absurd charges? Is Biden referring to federal interracial crime and hate crime statistics charting violent white propensities against blacks? None exist. In fact, they continually reveal that so-called whites are underrepresented as perpetrators in both categories, while overrepresented as victims in interracial crimes—dramatically so in the case of black-on-white violent crime.

  In our sensationalist YouTube world, are we suffering an epidemic of Internet-fed, white-on-black incendiary crimes that might have prompted the president’s demagogic accusations? Not at all. Most of the most recent publicized interracial violence—a woman in a gym fighting off a would-be rapist, a bicyclist doctor stabbed to death in an intersection as his attacker spewed racial hatred, a 26-year-old mother lethally shot in the back in front of her children in a parking lot over a minor argument, a young boy violently choked on a bus, a small girl on a bus beaten repeatedly by two teenage boys—have involved black perpetrators and apparent white victims. So, what contemporary evidence or widely publicized anecdotes prompt Biden’s recent charges of “white rage”-fueled violence?

  Yet simultaneously with Biden’s blanket and unsupported charges of racism, no president since Woodrow Wilson has offloaded more racialist verbiage than Joe Biden himself. In an eerie example of psychological projection, never has a president accused others of racism more, while freely revealing himself either to be a racist or non compos mentis, or both.

  Stranger still, Biden’s latest accusation comes from a president who once eulogized the former racist, Exalted Cyclops, and segregationist Senator. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) as “one of my mentors” and lamented that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” That was no isolated fluke.

  During his campaign for the presidency, Biden in 2019 praised segregationist Senator James O. Eastland for not labeling a younger Biden with the derogatory term “boy”: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’” 

  How odd, then, that Biden, as president no less, has used just that derogatory insult “boy” for distinguished blacks. Indeed, the very day before Biden leveled his “some people” slur, he was back at it with his racist “boy” reference to the black governor of Maryland: “You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell ya,” Biden told an audience of union workers on Wednesday. “He’s the real deal, and the boy looked like he could still play. He got some guns on him.” 

  Such condescension was consistent with Biden’s past usage of “Negro” and his earlier August 2021 similar “boy” trope of referring to one of own top aides: “I’m here with my senior adviser and boy who knows Louisiana very, very well and New Orleans, Cedric Richmond.” 

  In Biden world, blacks seem to be a collective to whom he can pander in stereotypical terms, as opposed to Latinos, whom Biden feels can think for themselves. Or so he said on the campaign trail in 2020, “Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

  These were “gaffes” only if one believes Biden’s frequent racialist smears and slurs are more the symptoms of senility than bias. Again, as a 2020 candidate, Biden gave us his absurd racist “Corn Pop” fables. In these concocted, He-Man sagas, Biden stood down purported ghetto gangster with his own custom-cut chain, while often showing his tanned legs’ golden hairs to curious inner-city black youth.

  Biden also smeared two black journalists who had the temerity to ask him a few tough questions, one with the now infamous slang ad hominem, “You ain’t black” and the other with the personal dismissal “junkie.”

  A consistent trope in these insults is his lifelong condescension of accomplished black Americans, such as his long-ago infamous talk-down to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during Biden’s travesty of conducting his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. In that context we also remember Biden’s idiotic warning, replete with his accustomed affected black patois, to black professionals in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

  Like Bill Clinton, who reportedly uttered of supposed 2008 upstart Barack Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Biden was especially bewildered by Barack Obama. He apparently seemed, in Biden’s racialist view, an aberration from Biden’s own usual stereotyped views of blacks of limited ability: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That assessment came from a candidate, who, even predementia, could never string together more than a few coherent sentences. 

  Biden, remember, explained top-performing states in education as attributable to fewer minorities: “There’s less than 1 percent of the population in Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So, look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”

  In a world of law schools turning out record numbers of black lawyers, and billionaire entrepreneurs like Bob Johnson, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, or Michael Jordan, Biden opines, “The data shows young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding given the chance as white entrepreneurs are. But they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have, they don’t have accountants, but they have great ideas.”   

  The reason we do not associate Biden with characteristic racist stereotyping and tropes, other than with raw political demagoguery, is the same reason we give passes to liberals who say overtly racist things, which might otherwise suggest that their loud progressive rhetoric serves as some sort of psychological mechanism to square the circle of their own discomfort with the proverbial other.

  Do we remember the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s quickly hushed up and contextualized confession that abortion was targeting the proper people.

  (“Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”)? 

  Do we recall liberal icon and former Senate Majority Harry Reid, who eerily dovetailed Biden with similarly racist assessment of Obama (“a ‘light-skinned’ African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”)? 

  Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class. Fact checkers assure us that when Joe Biden libeled Trump supporters as “chumps” and “dregs” he really meant the Ku Klux Klan or white nationalists who gravitate to Trump. But most took his blanket smears as they were intended. And they fit the larger patterns of his more recent “semi-fascism” smears, and indeed, the genre of tired leftwing demagoguery that earlier gave us Obama’s “clingers,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” or the smelly who stink up Walmart in the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page joint text trove: “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.”

  In occasional opportunistic moments, Biden transforms into “ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton” to accentuate his middle-class roots. But he has a repugnant propensity for using racial terms of condescension and disparagement and for projecting his own unease onto a supposedly racist white middle class and poor even as he seeks to win support from the very minority communities he has so often crudely characterized. 

  What is the concrete result of this now common Bidenesque schizophrenia?

  Consider the toxic plume that has polluted the skies over East Palestine, Ohio, a working-class small town that is 98 percent white, with a median income of $26,000, and sits amid the Pennsylvania borderland. That very region once rejected in its 2008 primary Barack Obama—and in turn was blasted in stereotyped fashion by him: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” 

  Ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton resonates that same contempt for the convenient target of the white poor and lower middle class. Rather than send in FEMA on day one of the toxic release with tents, mobile kitchens, and supplies and medical personnel to care for the evacuated, the federal government waited two weeks and then acted only when even the liberal media was confused by Biden’s deliberate neglect. 

  Amid the disaster, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in his now tired boilerplate, was on record instead railing against supposed white hardhats who supposedly do not look like the communities in which they work. For a Biden or Buttigieg, the fish and animals dying from toxic air or water were insignificant artifacts, as were the complaints of burning lungs and allergic reactions to the black chemical cloud.

  One wonders what would have been the immediate reaction of Biden and the federal government had a corporation decided to vent the contents of wrecked rail cars full of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate and then to light up the escaping gas, birthing a toxic black plume over Martha’s Vineyard or Malibu, as opposed to East Palestine or, say,  South-Central L.A. or Ferguson, Missouri. 

  Biden would have sent legions of aid workers in to ensure social justice for the marginalized and performance-art reassurance to his donor class.

  Whether Biden spouts racial bombast to curry favor with his Democratic base or to project onto others his own habitual racist put downs is not quite clear. But Biden’s utter contempt for white poor and lower middle classes, who are were deemed not worthy of the prompt federal attention customarily accorded to others in times of disaster, is self-evident.

  Otherwise, Biden would have sent help immediately rather than smear “some people” as 21st-century lynchers.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 02/21/2023 – 00:00

• Retail Investors Pour $1.5 Billion Each Day Into US Markets, The "Highest Amount Ever Recorded"
  Retail Investors Pour $1.5 Billion Each Day Into US Markets, The “Highest Amount Ever Recorded”

  For much of the waning days of 2022, the broader theme in markets was a downbeat one, especially for one group of habitual gamblers investors: after a stellar 2021 when nothing made sense and the junkiest of companies exploded higher steamrolling shorts, for retail investors 2022 felt like the polar opposite: a relentless series of gut punches which knocked the air out of basement dwelling daytraders and crushed some of the most popular retail names.

  

  And indeed, a quick search of headlines from mid/late 2022 confirmed that the retail spirit had been broken:

  • Did Retail Investors Boost The Broader Market During The “Most Hated Rally” – Aug 2022
  • Retail Traders Throw In The Towel – Sept 2022
  • Are Retail Investors Done? Biggest Liquidation Since 2020 As Retail Is Now ‘Selling The Rally’ – Oct 2022

  It all culminated with the near record year-end liquidation when in addition to momentum, tax loss selling prompted retail investors to dump single stocks at an unprecedented pace as described Retail Investors Slamming The Bid Amid Tax-Loss Selling Capitulation

  

  However, this record selling flow would not last long, and indeed, just one month later, we wrote that with LO institutions and hedge funds extending their bearish positioning, it was retail investors that picked up the BTFD torch in January, adding that “if retail is once again a more powerful price setter than institutions and hedge funds (thank you zero market liquidity), and we are facing another Jan 2021-type meltup, then watch out above even if none of the abovementioned technicals go into play.”

  In retrospect we were right, but not even we had any idea just how much we were right.

  That’s because according to the latest report from retail orderflow specialist Vanda Research, January was a blowout, record month for retail buyers in the market.

  As Vanda’s Mario Iachini writes, “in the last month, retail investors poured an average of $1.51bn/day into the US markets, the highest amount ever recorded.” And as we expected, this group of investors “has continued driving US equity market swings since the second half of last year.”

  Echoing verbatim our own thoughts, Vanda writes that “with recent surveys showing the institutional investor community remaining broadly bearish on stocks, it would be unwise to underestimate the importance of the retail cohort” as so many bearish hedge funds learned the very hard way in early 2021. “That’s in keeping with retail sales and jobs data for January, suggesting that consumers retain impressive levels of buying power. While the jury is still out on whether that’s due to a robust job market or excess savings from pandemic stimulus, the bottom line is that investors should heed signals from the ‘unsophisticated money’ crowd.”

  Having said that, seasonality suggests that flows could abate somewhat in the weeks ahead as earnings season falls in the rear-view mirror and investors start preparing for Tax Day in mid-April. However, if broad equity markets continue to perform well, we may instead see flows shifting towards smaller, more speculative companies (this is already occurring to an extent). And while the same could take place in the options market, especially with the dominance of 0DTE option activity, Vanda does not anticipate a repeat of the 2020-21 bubble, given that we are still in the late stages of the economic cycle.

  Finally, contrary to popular belief, retail money market funds’ net assets at an all-time high suggest that retail investors still have plenty of capital to allocate to riskier investments, provided that market conditions remain supportive.

  

  

  Vanda discusses this and other related topics in more detail below.

  Total net purchases of US securities exceeded expectations by a significant margin on Wednesday. If we only consider periods when the S&P 500 closed in positive territory, Wednesday’s aggregate purchases surpassed the previous record set on February 8th. Normally, Vanda would expect this this level of inflows on a day when the S&P 500 experiences a daily decline between -1% and -4%. Instead, “this type of behavior suggests retail traders are FOMO-ing more than any sentiment recent survey would show.”

  

  The flipside to the recent retail euphoria is that Vanda expects retail flows into cash equities to decrease in the weeks ahead, as seasonality suggests that March-April are typically middle-of-the-road months during the calendar year.

  

  Furthermore, when looking at a rolling one-month period, inflows have never been higher since the dataset began in 2014 (second chart below). Sustaining such a robust daily pace will prove challenging but it won’t mean the end of the current bull market if institutional investors pick up the slack.

  

  At the same time, and contrary to popular belief (especially among bears), the above doesn’t mean that retail investors are running out of capital to allocate to risky investments. Indeed, from a stock level perspective, the chart below suggests that retail investors have plenty of dry powder in the form of capital parked in money market funds that could be deployed in the equity space once confidence about future market returns increases more broadly.

  

  Adding insult to injury for the institutional bears – of which there is plenty – there is potential for bullish positions to be added in the options market. However, it is uncertain to what extent retail investors are willing to participate in the rally with leverage, given they’re still sitting on significant losses (-25% on average). In any case, nobody expects that the level of speculation observed during the 2020-2021 period will be replicated as we’re still in the later stages of the market cycle. Those dynamics are more likely to take hold during the early recovery phases after a recession has occurred.

  

  The soaring retail investor flows underpin the outperformance of their favorite stocks. A basket of the top 10 most-purchased retail stocks over recent months is experiencing a strong rebound relative to the SPX in 2023. Retail flows have accounted for a +US$18.5bn capital injection YTD in these names (listed below the chart). Should positive momentum in the broad equity market persist, it could push retail investors toward more speculative names, which are more susceptible to such flows given their smaller market cap.

  

  Many smaller-cap single stocks are also beginning to populate the top part of the retail leaderboard so far in 2023. Indeed, the first table below shows that beyond the top 10 most-bought securities, there’s a host of smaller-cap names that have attracted significant inflows this year (~US$2.23bn in total). Moreover, the weighted average performance of this group of stocks is roughly +50%, which is widely outpacing the S&P500 total return of 8.2%.

  

  The other outcome of this dynamic is a pick-up in retail purchases in the ARKK ETF and some of its underlying holdings. It was common back in 2020-21 for retail investors to buy ARK ETFs while at the same time piling in some of their more hyped underlyings. While we don’t expect retail speculation to reach those levels for the reasons discussed above, it is noteworthy that retail investors are vastly outpacing Cathie Wood and Co. regarding purchases across some of these names.

  

  Vanda concludes its weekly retail tracking by pointing out that crypto TradFi proxies are among some of the best performers week-to-date.

  Silvergate Capital (SI) shares were up 28.6% at the end of trading Wednesday after Citadel Securities announced that it had taken a stake in the company. Indeed, 13F filings show Citadel Securities bought 5.5% in the digital currency banking company. The shares are up 69% over the past month but remain 91% below their all-time high. With the latest data showing 67% of SI’s shares held short it is likely that retail purchases have helped fuel a short-squeeze over the last three trading days. Given the size of the short book, we wouldn’t be surprised to see retail traders attempt to push the stock further in the coming days, although flows over the past three months show that interest in this name tends to be sporadic and short-lived. In contrast, Coinbase (COIN) seems to enjoy stronger retail tailwinds as bullish activity in the options space is surging as well (second chart).

  

  

  Finally, here is the aggregate retail flow tracker”

  

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 23:30

• How New Zealand Dealt With "Disinformation"
  How New Zealand Dealt With “Disinformation”

  Authored by Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan via The Brownstone Institute,

  The Lord of the Rings trilogy is spectacular, with Orcs, Elves and breathtaking scenery filmed on location in New Zealand. The special effects were good too – the eye of Sauron looked very realistic – perhaps it is.

  

  We have come across a minimally redacted 28-page draft of a Kiwi Government document entitled “Communications approach to managing disinformation, online harms and scams” dated 10 Dec 2021 (Available here). 

  The document’s aim appears to be coordinating countering disinformation seeking to harm “by threatening public safety, fracturing community cohesion and reduced trust in democracy.”

  All well and good then; it’s a bit like saying, do not open fire on the Red Cross. 

  Except that the object is “disinformation” relating to the Kiwi government’s response to the Covid pandemic.

  The definition of disinformation in the document is on page 5:

  

  We will not summarise the complex and superficial content of the document other than to note that this is precisely the attempt at normalising the message of the pandemic that we have reported. The government has put out a message, and its credibility must be defended at all costs, with tech media partners, academics, the community and, of course, the armies of Sauron.

  One consideration is that the Covid narrative in Middle Earth (as elsewhere) is based on the misuse and misinterpretation of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and the death of clinical medicine, as we have made clear. 

  Cases may not have been active cases, hospitalisations may not be due to SARS-CoV-2, and deaths may be due to various causes related or unrelated to SARS-CoV-2. We will never know for sure. Why? Because the PCR cycle threshold for testing PCR “positive” in Middle Earth was 40 to 45, ensuring that most tested people would test positive even in the total absence of contamination (a very tall order). 

  So presenting figures of cases, hospitalisations and deaths based on qualitative PCR results inflates the totals and undermines the confidence in the competence and honesty of public health bodies: it is disinformation.

  We make the document available now (see here), and all our readers will find different parts interesting or as scary as the orcs.

  So if you think you live in a democracy, one last word of warning: do not go too near the Black Gate. You may think it is fiction, but it’s not.

  *  *  *

  Republished from the author’s Substack

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 23:00

• World War 3.1
  World War 3.1

  By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

  There has been more discussion about World War III in the past year than at any time in recent memory. Yet, we can’t help but wonder if World War III isn’t a misnomer and World War v3.1 is more accurate – because chips and semiconductors are likely going to play a huge role in initiating and winning any such global conflict.

  The tech space, generically, likes using “versions” and decimalized numbers rather than Roman numerals, so let’s run with that.

  This is more of a “thought” piece than something that is actionable today. However, we think that it is important to be laying out the background of how we are thinking about this important subject. It is something that comes up in more conversations and dominated the discussions we had when we were in Silicon Valley back in January. It will shape decisions and influence who wins and loses at the national and corporate levels.

  The Intel CEO at Davos said that: “Chip supply chains will shape geopolitics more than oil over the next 50 years”.

  Fifty years seems almost too long of a timeframe. It is already shaping geopolitics and getting it right in the next 5 to 10 years (not 50 years) will be crucial.

  Academy’s Geopolitical Intelligence Group addressed “Rare Earths – A National Security Threat” back in February 2021. During meetings, our position has been that securing (and processing) rare earths and critical minerals will dominate our commodity efforts in the coming years. Ten years ago, all you needed was a map of energy production and you could pinpoint U.S. interests. In five years, all you will need will be a map of major cobalt, lithium, etc. deposits to determine where the U.S. will be most active. The sad reality is that China figured this out years ago and we are just now seeing the urgency of the issue.

  I have said (half-jokingly, but mostly serious) that the West has a vision for sustainability but no workable plan to get there, while China has no vision but a great plan to secure the resources that they think the West will need.

  While we haven’t focused as much on chips in the past, it is a natural extension of our though process and these rare earths and critical minerals (and their processing) are an integral part of the semiconductor supply chain.

  While I’ve doubted the effectiveness of sanctions, the one area where even I think they have worked is in the higher-end of semiconductors. This is one reason why we need to write this World War v3.1 report now.

  Another thing that prompted us to finally get this “initial” piece out there was the reports about IP theft at ASML. Finally, we’ve had several highly respected people recommend the Chip War book.

  Today, we will lay out how we’ve been thinking about this at Academy and why we do think that “getting it right” will be crucial for countries and companies.

  Prior “Thought” Pieces

  Before diving into today’s subject, we have written several thought pieces that have stood the test of time. We’ve included a link to the “rare earths” piece above, but this is just one example.

  On China, our views have evolved, but we’ve historically been more negative than most on the future of the relationship with the U.S., and so far, that has turned out to be accurate.

  • A DIME Framework for Strategic Competition. In 2019, few were talking about the importance of naming China a “Strategic Competitor” in national security strategies.
  • The Recentralization of China. In 2021, we saw China clamping down on their citizens and turning more inwards, while Xi consolidated power.
  • The Beijing Olympics as Cultural Bookends. This piece was completed just days before Russia invaded Ukraine. The report almost “begs” people to understand that China’s needs (with respect to the West) have changed and are unlikely to revert back to anything that we have seen in the past 10 to 20 years.

  Russia has always been “top of mind” for our Geopolitical Intelligence Group, even when it wasn’t on the radar for most.

  • From Watch Russia (April 2021), to Russia on the Warpath (Jan 2022), to Scenario Update (10 days before the attack), the insights of our Geopolitical Intelligence Group have been invaluable in anticipating this conflict and helping investors and companies deal with it as effectively as possible.
  • Russia’s Nuclear Threat was published around Academy’s 2nd Annual Geopolitical Summit in Annapolis (we have our 2nd San Diego Summit in less than 2 weeks). It still reflects the scenarios that we see, though it is interesting that we’ve discussed the risk of China selling military equipment to Russia and that was high on the list of things that Secretary of State Blinken discussed with Chinese officials this weekend.

  Setting the Table

  General (ret.) Walsh pointed out a few key things to think about as we address the stress around chips from a geopolitical framework:

  • The Commerce Department is setting export controls on AI and semiconductors in an attempt to stop China from acquiring the highest-end semiconductors that could be used in advanced military systems during a future military conflict with the U.S.
  • The U.S. operational concept for future warfare is the Joint All-Domain Command & Control Strategy. China is attempting to outpace the U.S. military in the ongoing tech war by announcing their own operational concept called Multi-Domain Precision Warfare. The country which wins this tech war will possess the most advanced military capabilities (which will rely on high-end semiconductors).
  • China set 2030 as its target date to become the global leader in AI. China also expects to be on par with the U.S. militarily by 2035. High-end semiconductors are key to meeting this objective.
  • High-end chips are needed for AI, supercomputing, and weaponizing the technology required to achieve geopolitical power.

  I spend a lot of time with military experts in my role here at Academy and found the intensity of the “military focus” on this topic surprising. It is good that the high tech sanctions do seem to be more effective than other sanctions that we’ve imposed (Russia and Iran). This is a top priority for national security at every level! The military has embarked on multiple projects to ensure that chips of Chinese origin are not in any sensitive U.S. military equipment. Without a doubt the military and national security focused agencies have been focused on this and that focus is only going to grow (both at the national level and ultimately at the corporate level).

  The Semiconductor Industry Viewed Through a Geopolitical Lens

  I am sure that people in the industry will cringe at some of the simplifications here, but I strongly believe the “simplifications” will help us understand this issue and lead to fewer errors in our thought process at this stage.

  Before getting into that, I want to highlight what Admiral (ret.) Barrett had to say. She has an interesting viewpoint as she was responsible for the Navy’s cyber-attack capabilities.

  • Although the outsourcing of chip manufacturing (particularly to Asia where 75% of the world’s semiconductor chips are currently manufactured) was a known problem for years, these problems really hit home during the COVID pandemic and the subsequent disruption in critical supply chains that resulted in a massive shortage of chips. Investment in organic chip manufacturing in the United States by U.S. companies has been a recognized problem for years, but only recently have government attention and corporate investment taken hold. For example, Micron Technology is investing $100 billion to build four separate semi-conductor fabrication plants outside of Syracuse, New York. The first phase alone would provide 3,000 jobs and $20 billion of investment over the next five years (with the other phases to follow). This represents the largest single private investment in New York State’s history. The project will also create 40,000 construction and supply chain jobs, a significant boon to the state and national economy.
  • Control over the production of semiconductors/chips is critical to ensuring the viability of our supply chain and mitigating possible cyber-espionage and malicious activity. With the advent of the Internet of Things and digital modernization in every industry from manufacturing to agriculture, this type of control over chips for improved cyber-security is a national strategic imperative. President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 invests in our national capacity to build chips in the United States and directs policy and funding support to R&D, workforce skills development, and science/technology. The U.S. government investment associated with the Act is significant and provides $52.7 billion in funding including $13.2 billion for research and development and $39 billion for production incentives and workforce development. It also provides significant tax incentives for private industry investment in semiconductor/chip technology. This investment by both the government and private industry will result in competitive global business advantages, provide improved cyber-security for commercial and military industries, and will create jobs (particularly at plants that are built in economically depressed areas).

  Types of Chips

  • Cutting Edge. These are the smallest, fastest, and most “state of the art” chips. The manufacturing of these chips is still dominated by Taiwan. While the U.S. and other countries might be catching up, Taiwan is still the clear leader and is well-positioned to continue that leadership. Even as Taiwanese companies build more foundries outside of Taiwan, they will not produce cutting edge products anywhere other than onshore (it is their “ace in the hole” from a geopolitical standpoint).
  • High Tech. Let’s classify these chips as anywhere from one to three generations behind the “state of the art process”. Taiwan is extremely strong here, but not alone. This is an area that the U.S. (and presumably Germany and Western Europe) can compete in. China is creeping up the scale here and is prioritizing this. Russia and Iran, two important adversaries in the space, cannot really compete at this level. This is the main battle ground and an area of growing competition.
  • Mid-to-Low Tech. These are the chips that are being phased out, but are useful as the products they were designed for continue to be built and the manufacturers don’t want to update the specs significantly. This is the “cash cow” of the industry and it is global in nature.
  • Commodity or Generic chips. This is not an area that lends itself to higher cost producers. It doesn’t help that much of the business was ceded to other regions and countries. At one level they are very generic, but at another level, why give up so much of the production?

  While these classifications are overly simplistic, it will let us explore the geopolitical framework.

  Chip Design AND Chip Manufacturing.

  • Designing chips is only part of the industry. It is difficult to design chips in any case, but it is extremely difficult to design chips that can be manufactured as well.
  • Building the foundries is crucial. The level of precision required to make the highest-end chips is unheard of in any other manufacturing setting.
  • It is the marriage of chip design and manufacturing technology that is the key. That is one reason why we highlighted the ASML story so early in today’s report. While it is easy to imagine people capturing schematics of chips, it is also easy to imagine them being unable to build those chips. Not that any chip company would give away their designs, but even if they did, a competitor (nation or otherwise) might have difficulty replicating it due to the difficulty in manufacturing (especially for a “cutting edge” or even “high tech” chip).
  • Maybe this “marriage” was obvious (and I’ve wasted your time), but it seems somewhat unique to the space and is crucial from a geopolitical standpoint.

  Just by using these simple building blocks we can discuss a few scenarios that come up frequently in meetings.

  D.C. Pushes Too Hard

  The scenario that gets discussed the most is that D.C. pushes too hard. One thing that has stood the test of time is that the elected representatives serving in a national security capacity tend to put country first and politics second. That is a good thing as it ensures the safety of the country as much as possible.

  One concern is that D.C. gets involved in technology that isn’t as critical. The entire industry seems to be behind on the “cutting edge” restrictions and even the “high tech” restrictions. There is a concern that the government could start interfering with segments of the industry where their action could do more harm than good (though that is potentially in the eye of the beholder).

  At its simplest, U.S. companies sell a lot of “mid-tech” chips to China. That “cash cow” is an important part of what funds research and development for new chips and also funds the building of foundries on-shore. If these sales get attacked by D.C. (a possibility as the popularity of banning tech with China seems high), then the chip industry might be hurt and it would hamper its ability to wrestle more control of higher tech (and ultimately cutting-edge tech) away from Taiwan. This would potentially make it easier for China to catch up in this area.
  The second problem is that many of those chips could wind up back in the U.S. as they are components in products that China manufactures for sale here.

  From a commerce standpoint, there is a balancing act that needs to be executed by D.C. So far, so good, but it is something that needs to be watched closely. While we stated earlier in the piece that this isn’t necessarily an “actionable” T-Report, if we get an inkling that D.C. is going to go too far, this report will be highly actionable as this would hurt the chip industry and be inflationary (not a good combination for markets or the economy).

  The other way our “success” could play out negatively is understanding what happens to China’s view of Taiwan.

  China is doing what it can to build out their own chip industry. In terms of tech, they are behind us (but have closed a portion of the gap) and both countries (the U.S. and China) are behind Taiwan.

  Could China Decide:

  • That hastening their progress in chip manufacturing is in their best interest and try to capture Taiwan’s foundries and bring them “in-house” by force?
    • This is unlikely because in any attack on Taiwan, there is some risk (no matter how much China tries to avoid this) that the factories would be damaged to the point that they are inoperable and even the equipment that can be salvaged isn’t enough for China to leapfrog us in development.
  • To ensure that if they can’t get cutting edge chips, that we can’t either?
    • If you can’t get cutting edge chips but your competition can, maybe it is just easier to stop their ability to get them. Highly unlikely at this stage, but worth thinking about.

  Other Thoughts

  While China remains a trading partner, albeit one where our relationship grows more complex by the day, Russia and Iran are not.

  The Iranian drones that have been sold to Russia have very old technology. The sanctions on Iran have worked to limit their tech (and presumably what they get is going into their nuclear program which is their highest priority).

  The fact that Russia needs these drones is a testament to how much the chip sanctions have hurt them.
  Using the phrase “two sworn enemies” of the U.S. might seem a bit harsh, but it doesn’t seem too far off in terms of describing our relationship with Russia and Iran. So, here we are with “two sworn enemies” that are seeing their fighting capacity reduced due to access to chips. What do they do about that? Maybe they will take the proverbial “knee” and acquiesce to us, but that doesn’t seem to be in their nature. We could easily weave North Korea into this mix as well.

  We are winning right now against Russia, Iran, and North Korea but I do get the feeling that we are cornering a wounded animal, which by all accounts is risky.

  China has the time, money, and the political apparatus to catch up.

  As General Walsh pointed out, they have specific goals in place and presumably have the plans in place to achieve these goals as well.

  As Admiral Barrett pointed out, we have government support for industries too, but the relationships here tend not to be as linear as they are in China.

  Bottom Line

  We need to balance getting foundries built with government support and effectively cut off what technology “export” we can without going overboard.

  China will try to develop their own industry, which we need to watch closely. It is also another element in their decision-making process regarding Taiwan.

  The lack of “linearity” in the U.S. (i.e., open competition) has served us well. China’s single-minded approach gives them the benefit of scale that we don’t have, but risks major setbacks if they go down a wrong path.

  We are a long way (hopefully) from World War v3.1 but the concept of a “commodity” war or battle for commodities is becoming a global competition for chips and technology and the stakes are extremely high!

  This is a subject that will be taking up more of your time in the coming months and years and hopefully Academy will be an effective guide.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 22:30

• Biden Admin Negotiates Deal To Give WHO Authority Over US Pandemic Policies
  Biden Admin Negotiates Deal To Give WHO Authority Over US Pandemic Policies

  Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The Biden administration is preparing to sign up the United States to a “legally binding” accord with the World Health Organization (WHO) that would give this Geneva-based UN subsidiary the authority to dictate America’s policies during a pandemic.

  

  Despite widespread criticism of the WHO’s response to the COVID pandemic, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra joined with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in September 2022 to announce “the U.S.-WHO Strategic Dialogue.” Together, they developed a “platform to maximize the longstanding U.S. government-WHO partnership, and to protect and promote the health of all people around the globe, including the American people.”

  These discussions and others spawned the “zero draft” (pdf) of a pandemic treaty, published on Feb. 1, which now seeks ratification by all 194 WHO member states. A meeting of the WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) is scheduled for Feb. 27 to work out the final terms, which all members will then sign.

  Written under the banner of “the world together equitably,” the zero draft grants the WHO the power to declare and manage a global pandemic emergency. Once a health emergency is declared, all signatories, including the United States, would submit to the authority of the WHO regarding treatments, government regulations such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates, global supply chains, and monitoring and surveillance of populations.

  Centralized Pandemic Response

  “They want to see a centralized, vaccine-and-medication-based response, and a very restrictive response in terms of controlling populations,” David Bell, a public health physician and former WHO staffer specializing in epidemic policy, told The Epoch Times. “They get to decide what is a health emergency, and they are putting in place a surveillance mechanism that will ensure that there are potential emergencies to declare.”

  The WHO pandemic treaty is part of a two-track effort, coinciding with an initiative by the World Health Assembly (WHA) to create new global pandemic regulations that would also supersede the laws of member states. The WHA is the rule-making body of the WHO, comprised of representatives from the member states.

  “Both [initiatives] are fatally dangerous,” Francis Boyle, professor of international law at Illinois University, told The Epoch Times. “Either one or both would set up a worldwide medical police state under the control of the WHO, and in particular WHO Director-General Tedros. If either one or both of these go through, Tedros or his successor will be able to issue orders that will go all the way down the pipe to your primary care physicians.”

  Physician Meryl Nass told The Epoch Times: “If these rules go through as currently drafted, I, as a doctor, will be told what I am allowed to give a patient and what I am prohibited from giving a patient whenever the WHO declares a public health emergency. So they can tell you you’re getting remdesivir, but you can’t have hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. What they’re also saying is they believe in equity, which means everybody in the world gets vaccinated, whether or not you need it, whether or not you’re already immune.”

  Regarding medical treatments, the accord would require member nations to “monitor and regulate against substandard and falsified pandemic-related products.” Based on previous WHO and Biden administration policy, this would likely include forcing populations to take newly-developed vaccines while preventing doctors from prescribing non-vaccine treatments or medicines.

  Circumventing America’s Constitution

  A key question surrounding the accord is whether the Biden administration can bind America to treaties and agreements without the consent of the U.S. Senate, which is required under the Constitution. The zero draft concedes that, per international law, treaties between countries must be ratified by national legislatures, thus respecting the right of their citizens to consent. However, the draft also includes a clause that the accord will go into effect on a “provisional” basis, as soon as it is signed by delegates to the WHO, and therefore it will be legally binding on members without being ratified by legislatures.

  “Whoever drafted this clause knew as much about U.S. constitutional law and international law as I did, and deliberately drafted it to circumvent the power of the Senate to give its advice and consent to treaties, to provisionally bring it into force immediately upon signature,” Boyle said. In addition, “the Biden administration will take the position that this is an international executive agreement that the president can conclude of his own accord without approval by Congress, and is binding on the United States of America, including all state and local democratically elected officials, governors, attorney generals and health officials.”

  There are several U.S. Supreme Court decisions that may support the Biden administration in this. They include State of Missouri v. Holland, in which the Supreme Court ruled that treaties supersede state laws. Other decisions, such as United States v. Belmont, ruled that executive agreements without Senate consent can be legally binding, with the force of treaties.

  There are parallels between the WHO pandemic accord and a recent OECD global tax agreement, which the Biden administration signed on to but which Republicans say has “no path forward” to legislative approval. In the OECD agreement, there are punitive terms built in that allow foreign countries to punish American companies if the deal is not ratified by the United States.

  As with the OECD tax agreement, administration officials are attempting to appeal to international organizations to impose policies that have been rejected by America’s voters. Under the U.S. Constitution, health care does not fall under the authority of the federal government; it is the domain of the states. The Biden administration found this to be an unwelcome impediment to its attempts to impose vaccine and mask mandates on Americans, when courts ruled that federal agencies did not have the authority to do so.

  “To circumvent that, they went to the WHO, for either the regulations or the treaty, to get around domestic opposition,” Boyle said.

  According to the zero draft, signatories would agree to “strengthen the capacity and performance of national regulatory authorities and increase the harmonization of regulatory requirements at the international and regional level.” They will also implement a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach at the national level” that will include national governments, local governments, and private companies.

  The zero draft stated that this new accord is necessary because of “the catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.”

  A report from the WHO’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (pdf) characterized the WHO’s performance as a “toxic cocktail” of bad decisions. Co-chair Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told the BBC it was due to “a myriad of failures, gaps and delays.” The solutions proposed by that report, however, did not suggest more local autonomy or diversified decision-making, but rather greater centralization, more power, and more money for the WHO.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 22:00

• Watch: North Korea Airs ICBM Missile Test Footage As Tensions Rise
  Watch: North Korea Airs ICBM Missile Test Footage As Tensions Rise

  North Korean state television has aired footage of their recent test of a new long range ICBM system capable of carrying a nuclear payload.  The missile covered 614 miles and reached an altitude of 3,584 miles, landing accurately in a designated area on the West Coast of Japan. 

  Tensions have been rising in the region as the US commence joint military drills with South Korea.  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un warned Friday of “unprecedented strong responses” to those drills if they go ahead, while his sister, Kim Yo Jong, warned that “the frequency of using the Pacific Ocean as our shooting range depends on the nature of the US military’s actions,” according to a statement posted on the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

  Monday’s missile tests were the second in three days with three such tests in less than a year.  

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 21:30

• Residents Say They’ve Broken Out in Rashes After East Palestine Train Derailment
  Residents Say They’ve Broken Out in Rashes After East Palestine Train Derailment

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

  Locals who live near the train derailment and release of toxic chemicals near East Palestine, Ohio, have complained about various health problems since the incident unfolded earlier this month, including rashes, headaches, and other issues. And they’ve expressed concerns that these new symptoms may be tied to the chemicals that were burned or released.

  

  The Feb. 3 derailment triggered officials to initiate a controlled release and burn of various chemicals as they cited concerns that those materials would explode and send out deadly shrapnel. Chemicals carried on the Norfolk Southern-operated train include toxic vinyl chloride gas, which was vented and burned, releasing a large cloud of black smoke that hung over the area for days.

  A plume of chemicals from the train derailment was also detected heading down the Ohio River, although some Ohio environmental officials assert that they may largely be fire retardant substances used to put out the fire. Other chemicals carried on the train include butyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether acetate, and 2-ethylhexyl acrylate, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said (pdf).

  Residents of East Palestine were told they could return to their homes on Feb. 8. Since then, there have been reports from locals of adverse health events they’ve suffered amid separate reports of animals, including fish and chickens, dying off.

  “When we went back on the 10th, that’s when we decided that we couldn’t raise our kids here,” local Amanda Greathouse told CNN, adding that in the area, there was a smell that “reminded me of hair perming solution.”

  About 30 minutes after returning home earlier this month, she developed nausea and a rash, Greathouse told the network. Her house is located about a block from the train derailment site.

  

  “When we left, I had a rash on my skin on my arm, and my eyes were burning for a few days after that,” added Greathouse, who said she has two preschool-age children.

  “The chemical smell was so strong that it made me nauseous,” Greathouse said. “I just wanted to quickly pick up what I needed and leave. I only took a few pieces of clothes because even the clothes smelled like chemicals, and I’m afraid to put them on my kids.”

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 21:00

• Inflation Or No Inflation
  Inflation Or No Inflation

  By Russell Clark of the Capital Flows and Asset Markets substack

  

  A large number of economic thinkers that I respect are calling for peak inflation, and that interest rates increases have topped out. With oil prices down from USD 120 a barrel to USD 77 today, this would be a strong indication of reduced inflation pressure. For “peak inflationistas” the cherry on the top would be this week’s cover of the Economist, warning that inflation will be harder to contain than people think. The Economist has a long and illustrious career as a “contra” (a contra is somewhere who gets market calls consistently wrong). Peak inflationistas even have the benefit of financial markets agreeing with them, with US 2/10 year yield curve as inverted as it gets. Inversion really is the markets way of saying that they don’t believe central banks will raise interest rates any further.

  

  Is the Economist wrong again? Just looking at US CPI YoY, it already peaked out and started falling, and with the bond market in inversion, it does like the Economist leader writers have proven why they are writers and not hedge fund managers.

  

  But, these days I place politics as more important than economics in doing financial analysis. From this perspective, I do not see central banks, and particularly the Fed going dovish until they get food inflation under control. Rising food prices are political dynamite. So lets us look at the most recent US CPI data from a food inflation perspective. On a year over year basis it is still rising at 10%, and even though it is slowing a little, it still doing 10% on high comps from a year ago.

  

  What I really like about food inflation is that it is universal and easily understandable. A Birkin bag or a Panerai costing 30% more is not inflation that matters to most people. But the price of bread and meat? That matters to everyone. What is really great about the US CPI data is that it breaks down white bread and meat CPI back to pre World War II. White bread CPI is still rising at nearly 20% year on year, while meat CPI is back to 2% year on year.

  

  For CPI calculations, food CPI is given a total weight of 13.5%, with bread having a weight of 0.2% and meat having 1% weight. This means that soaring bread prices should not really be that important to Federal Reserve and other western central banks. But soaring bread prices are very important to politicians – certainly more than the CPI weightings given above. For me the question comes down to whether the meat index is right, or the bread index is right. Or in other words, will bread prices fall back, or will meat prices spike? One of the best things about free market capitalism, is that incentives are transparent. For US pork farmers are currently disincentivised to farm pigs. The price of hogs relative to corn are at close to 40 year lows, meaning that hog prices are not covering the cost of feed (which is mainly corn).

  

  With hog farmers disincentivized to farm hogs, then one of two things must happen – corn prices must fall, or hog prices will rise. When we look at the corn market, we see that China has become a major buyer of US corn.

  

  This is despite the Chinese placing tariffs on corn imports that have meant that Chinese corn prices are much higher than US prices.

  

  In other words, geo-politics has driven China to have high food prices, which it now exporting back to the rest of the world. Just as we have seen with Covid, it is possible for the Chinese to change policies, but self sufficiency in food production seems to be a key policy for China. With Chinese activity picking up, my guess is that corn prices globally will remain high, which means feed prices will stay high, and meat inflation will catch up to bread inflation. In my view food inflation is still ongoing, and hence central banks will keep raising rates.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 20:30

• Watch: 2023 Don Lemon Would Accuse 2013 Don Lemon Of Being A White Supremacist
  Watch: 2023 Don Lemon Would Accuse 2013 Don Lemon Of Being A White Supremacist

  Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

  In the wake of CNN’s last remaining woke host being sidelined for making a ‘sexist’ and ‘ageist’ remark about Nikki Haley, a video of Don Lemon from 2013 in which he surprisingly speaks sense has gone viral.

  

  The video shows Lemon talking about what the black community should do to fix its problems, including stop littering, and encouraging kids to try harder in school.

  The host also extols the virtues of marriage, and warns about the problem of absent fathers, asserting “just because you can have a baby doesn’t mean you should.”

  Lemon even tells young black men to stop using the N word and to pull up their pants and stop walking around with their asses hanging out looking like prison bitches.

  Imagine the meltdown that would occur if Lemon spoke like this today, just 10 years later:

  2023 Don Lemon would call 2013 Don Lemon a white supremacist https://t.co/fFhbgSGw1M

  — The Woke Antidote Podcast (@TheWokeAntidote) February 19, 2023

  .@donlemon in 2013 talking about how black people can make their communities better before he got infected by the Woke virus pic.twitter.com/T3ahnHh1c4

  — Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) February 19, 2023

  Some pointed out how frightening it is that things changed so monumentally because of the woke mid virus:

  It’s terrifying how fast society fell off the cliff

  10 years ago Obama, Hillary, and Biden were defining marriage as “a man and a woman”

  10 years ago Don Lemon was telling black people “pull your pants up”

  10 years ago Dems only supported “safe, legal, and rare” abortions

  — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 19, 2023

  What happened to that guy?

  Video: CNN’s Lemon Blames Anti-Mask Conservatives For Rise in TRAFFIC ACCIDENT DEATHS

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  Video: CNN’s Lemon Says Unvaccinated “Idiots” Like Novak Djokovic Shouldn’t Be Part Of “Polite Society”

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  CNN’s Don Lemon Claims Black on Black Violence Has Nothing to do With Black Lives Matter

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  After Pro-Mask, Anti-Florida Rants, Don Lemon Takes a Maskless Vacation in Florida

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  Video: CNN’s Lemon Says Trump Supporters Are Like Drug Addicts

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  Photos, Maskless Fauci Hangs Out With Leftist Media Puppets At Crowded Dinner Party

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  Video: Pathetic CNN Scrambles To Sweep Rogan/Gupta Exchange Under The Carpet

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  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 20:00

• "It's The End Of The World As We Know It And The Fed Feels Fine"
  “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It And The Fed Feels Fine”

  By Michael Every of Rabobank

  Politico managed to achieve the most click-worthy title this weekend – ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it – and Munich feels nervous.’ I will return to the Munich Security Conference in a moment, but first let’s look at a snapshot of recent economic trends:

  • US core PCE inflation on Friday is expected 0.4% m-o-m and 4.3% y-o-y, more than double the rate of the Fed’s 2% CPI mandate.
  • Between Q4 2019 and Q1 2021, as services spending collapsed and pandemic assistance programs flowed, total US credit card debt fell from $930bn to $770bn. In Q3 2021, it started to rise, and in Q4 2022 leaped $61bn, the largest increase since 1999, to hit a record $986bn. Whether people are borrowing and spending because of the economy, or because they have no choice because of the economy, it is happening.
  • @GuyDealership says: “Used car prices are *skyrocketing* at a concerning pace. Prices have increased 4.1% so far this month: The LARGEST February increase since 2009. Buckle up.” However, delinquencies on car loans are also soaring.
  • Labor hoarding continues in construction due to the backlog of work that wasn’t done during Covid and as state spending picks up.
  • The Washington Post says ‘Biden’s ‘Buy America’ bid runs into manufacturing woes it aims to fix: Infrastructure officials complain they can’t find US suppliers for items they need to buy American by law.’ That sounds inflationary.
  • As we focus on US wage growth, Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits for approximately 70m Americans will increase 8.7% in 2023. That flows through to those with the highest marginal propensity to consume: pensioners who have done their life-time saving, and those at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid.
  • Recent liquidity expansion by the BOJ and PBOC, as well as the use of the US Treasury General Account balance, is arguably countering the effects of Fed QT. (And on QE, the late Shinzo Abe’s memoir notes: “Issuing JGBs for COVID stimulus checks does not mean that debt is being passed onto our grandchildren. The Bank of Japan purchases all government bonds. The Bank of Japan is like a subsidiary of the government so there is no problem.”)
  • Outside the US, rate hikes are hurting. Australia’s Westpac has warned that almost half of its A$471bn in home loans were written using interest rate buffers that are set to be exceeded.

  The key question is this: do the Fed keep going until they break things; or do they stop and admit 3-4% CPI is good enough?

  Both of those outcomes imply the end of the world as we have long known it in markets. The first is an argument for bear flattening in bonds, a collapse in everything except bonds, and of everything against the dollar. The second implies bear steepening in bonds, a rally in everything else as an inflation hedge, and a collapse of the dollar against everything else.

  So, back to Munich. This key security conference was covered by Bloomberg, but desperation to believe the world they represent is not ending saw its headline writers spin that the US and China were “talking”. Yes – except the US accused Beijing of unacceptable behaviour over spy-balloons, and claimed China is considering providing “lethal support” to aid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. China effectively called the US a warmonger while trying to woo Europe, and on Sunday warned the US it would “bear all the consequences” if it escalated the balloon further.

  Moreover, US talk about Russia was equally confrontational. Vice-President Harris accused Moscow of crimes against humanity, climbing a ladder that will be very hard to come down from. UK Prime Minister Sunak is lobbying to send Ukraine the most advanced NATO weapons. China will release its peace plan on the first anniversary of the war on Friday: the West is sceptical.   

  This matters as the geopolitical is now the geoeconomic. NATO chief Stoltenberg directly stated Europe’s dependency on Russian gas was dismissed as being economic, not security-related before February 2022 and that the EU should not make the same mistake with China, or others, by depending on their raw materials or exporting key technologies to them. Of course, such talk is cheap. Indeed, geopolitical thinker Michta noted in a sombre analysis:  

  “Was this what 1938 felt like before the German Nazi rape of Czechoslovakia? Satiated countries in the West issuing solemn assurances to Prague and others, but knowing deep in their bones that those checks would not be cashed?  Because it was somebody else’s business, not ours?…

  Rhetoric is not policy. I’ve sat through too many discussions where everything has been said but not by everyone, so we droned on… It’s not rocket science. It’s about spending the money to produce weapons and munitions so we can send them to Ukraine. It’s about agreeing what the end state should look like not for Ukraine, but for all of us. It’s about imagination, leadership and courage.”

  It is also about supply chains, on/friend-shoring, massive defence spending, capital controls – and then inflation and interest rates. One can no longer look at the latter in isolation.

  Relatedly, Senator Hawley just gave a speech ‘China and Ukraine: A Time for Truth’ hammering home that the US cannot do what is it doing in Ukraine and step up in the Pacific, and arguing Europe must defend itself –and Ukraine– now. Neither Europe nor markets grasp the tail risk of what this shift in US stance would entail, just as they ignored Trump in early 2016, and didn’t read Marx ahead of China’s Common Prosperity. Even for the US, Hawley claims:

  “Suppose China invades and seizes Taiwan. We try to stop it, but our forces are defeated and the island is lost. What would that mean?… Americans will confront a new, terrifying reality. Every American will feel it. The price hikes and disruptions we’ve seen in recent years will pale in comparison. Product shortages will be commonplace – shortages of everything from basic medicine to consumer electronics. According to some estimates, a war over Taiwan would send us into a deep recession with no clear way out, since huge swaths of our economy run on Taiwanese semiconductors. But the economic consequences are just the start. 

  If China takes Taiwan, it will be able to station its own military forces there. It can then use its position as a springboard for further conquest and intimidation – against Japan, the Philippines, and other Pacific islands, like Guam and the Northern Marianas… As Asia’s new reigning power, China could restrict US trade in the region – perhaps block it altogether. Maybe we’ll be allowed in, but only on terms favourable to China. China exploited the trade system once before. They can do it again…

  Imagine a world where Chinese warships patrol Hawaiian waters, and Chinese submarines stalk the California coastline. A world where the PLA has military bases in Central and South America. A world where Chinese forces operate freely in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.” Hawley’s proposed solution to prevent this “dark future” is “a nationalist foreign policy. A foreign policy in the spirit of Alexander Hamilton and Theodore Roosevelt. A nationalist foreign policy places America’s interests first. And deterring China from seizing Taiwan should be America’s top priority.”

  Meanwhile, today’s headlines are also that inspectors say Iran’s uranium processing has almost reached nuclear weapons-grade purity (as they stand next to Russia and China); and North Korea just tested both short-range missiles and an ICBM that might soon be capable of holding a nuke. Both developments make urgent US, and European, action more likely. I don’t mean rate cuts.

  One does not have to worry about the end of the world per se, but the world we knew is ending: in geopolitics; in geoeconomics; in monetary policy; and, with a lag, in markets

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 19:30

• Kavanaugh Accuser Admits To Lying, Faces Criminal Charges
  Kavanaugh Accuser Admits To Lying, Faces Criminal Charges

  Authored by Molly Bruns via HeadlineUSA,

  Judy Monro-Leighton, one of three women who accused now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, was found to have lied during a congressional investigation and is now being charged with making materially false statements and obstruction.

  

  According to The Beltway Report, a letter written by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, made a criminal referral against Monro-Leighton, who admitted that she “just wanted to get attention.”

  She also admitted that an anonymous letter she sent to then-Sen. Kamala Harris describing a graphic sexual assault by Kavanaugh and a friend was not written by her, despite her original claim of being “Jane Doe from Oceanside, California.”

  “No, no, no. I did that as a way to grab attention,” Munro-Leighton explained when questioned by investigators of the Committee on the Judiciary. “I am not Jane Doe… but I did read Jane Doe’s letter. I read the transcript of the call to your committee… I saw it online. It was news.”

  In her statements, she also clarified that she never met Judge Kavanaugh.

  “In short, during the Committee’s time-sensitive investigation of allegations against Judge Kavanaugh, Ms. Munro-Leighton submitted a fabricated allegation, which diverted Committee resources,” Grassley’s letter reads. “When questioned by Committee investigators she admitted it was false, a ‘ploy’ and a ‘tactic.’”

  Harris, who was acting as a senator at the time, went on to become the vice president without any discipline for bringing the false letter forward without conducting a proper investigation into the matter.

  None of the senators on the committee took the time to investigate the anonymous letter, which Grassley claims was due to their haste to close out the hearings.

  Continuously throughout the letter, Grassley attempts to push the blame off of the committee, minimizing their part in the political hit job.

  None of the politicians on the committee commented on the charges being brought against Munro-Leighton.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 19:00

• Moderna Backpedals, Guarantees 'Free' Covid-19 Vaccines After Demand Collapses
  Moderna Backpedals, Guarantees ‘Free’ Covid-19 Vaccines After Demand Collapses

  mRNA vaccine maker Moderna has backpedaled on a January plan to charge $110 to $130 per dose of Covid-19 vaccine (up from $26 per dose for booster shots), and is now promising that people won’t have to pay for the jab once the US Government stops buying shots.

  

  “Moderna remains committed to ensuring that people in the United States will have access to our COVID-19 vaccines regardless of ability to pay,” the company said in a statement, adding that the vaccine “will continue to be available at no cost for insured people whether they receive them at their doctors’ offices or local pharmacies.”

  Those without insurance – or whose insurance is inadequate, will be able to get jabbed “at no cost” via a Moderna assistance program.

  As The Epoch Times notes,

  Because the COVID-19 vaccines were added to the child immunization schedule, children whose families cannot pay for the vaccine will be eligible to receive them for free, with taxpayers covering the cost.

  That would happen through a program called Vaccines for Children.

  Advisers to the government, who recommended the addition to the schedule, said it was because the vaccines can prevent severe illness. The new vaccines, poised to replace the original shots, are not backed by any clinical trial data yet.

  Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said that the only reason the vaccines were placed on the schedule was so they could be covered by the Vaccines for Children program.

  “It was the only way that our uninsured children would be able to have access to the vaccines,” Walensky said during a congressional hearing on Feb. 8. “That was the reason to put it on the schedule.”

  *  *  *

  The announcement comes amid a collapse in demand for Covid-19 vaccines.

  According to analyst estimates, Pfizer, Moderna, Gilead Sciences, AstraZeneca and Merck could suffer a drop in sales of nearly two-thirds, Reuters reports.

  “We remain skeptical that COVID revenues will grow in 2024 and beyond,” said JPMorgan analyst Chris Schott in a recent research note, adding that vaccination rates could drop even further than the significant decline already seen in booster shots last year.

  Moderna also expects 2023 revenue to drop sharply.

  The company’s only product – its messenger RNA COVID vaccine – pulled in around $18.4 billion in 2022. Analysts expect that to drop to around $7 billion in 2023. The company is due to report earnings later this month.

  Oppenheimer & Co analyst Hartaj Singh said investors are “frustrated Moderna hasn’t used their firepower more effectively to prepare for revenues and earnings going down in 2023 or 2024.” -Reuters

  What changed?

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 18:30

• Undercover DC Police Officer Pushed Protesters Toward Capitol, Climbed Over Barricade: Court Filing
  Undercover DC Police Officer Pushed Protesters Toward Capitol, Climbed Over Barricade: Court Filing

  Authored by Joseph M. Hanneman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Three undercover Metropolitan Police Department officers joined the march of protesters up the northwest side of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021—including one who climbed over a barricade and pushed others toward the Capitol, and another who walked behind Ashli Babbitt and predicted that “someone will get shot,” according to newly disclosed court documents.

  

  New court motions filed by Jan. 6 defendant William Pope of Topeka, Kansas, also show MPD bicycle officers stopping four armed men in plainclothes on Jan. 6. The men turned out to be federal agents. Video included with Pope’s filings also shows uniformed MPD officers saying, “we were set up” to fail on Jan. 6.

  Information in the court papers will rekindle the debate about the role that undercover officers and agents played in the riots of Jan. 6 and why the U.S. Department of Justice and federal judges have kept the evidence under seal and away from public view.

  “This video clearly evidences undercover law enforcement officers urging the crowds to advance up the stairs and scaffolding towards the Capitol on January 6,” Pope wrote in one motion. “The government may claim that incidents like this did not happen, but the facts show they did.

  “Since the government cannot be trusted to disclose these facts,” Pope wrote, “it becomes even more important that defense teams, including Pro Se defendants, be able to directly examine the evidence.”

  

  The three undercover MPD officers approached the northwest corner of the Capitol grounds at about 1:40 p.m. on Jan. 6, one of the motions states. Officer 1, who was filming their journey, joined the crowd chanting, “Drain the swamp!”

  When a group of men ran past them toward the Capitol, Officer 2—wearing a Trump beanie—remarked, “Those guys are getting shot,” the motion said.

  At the base of the scaffold stairs, Officer 1 joined the crowd in a chant, “Whose house? Our house!”

  “Officer 1 began yelling at people in front of him to ‘Go, go, go!’ As they climbed bicycle racks, Officer 1 yelled for the crowd to ‘help him up, help him up!” followed by ‘push him up, push him up!’” the motion reads of Pope describing how Officer 1 climbed over a barricade.

  “Needing help to get up, Officer 1 asked a nearby man to give him a boost,” the motion says. “The man gives Officer 1 a lift up, and Officer 1 says ‘Thanks, bro.’”

  Officer 1 pushed protesters in front of him to advance on the Capitol, shouting, “c’mon, c’mon, c’mon, let’s go!,” the motion said. People around him climbed over bike-rack-style barricades and scaffolding that had been set up for the presidential inauguration.

  Right Behind Ashli Babbitt

  At one point, Officers 2 and 3 were almost directly behind Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt on the exterior stairs, about an hour before Babbitt was gunned down at the entrance to the Speaker’s Lobby, Pope said in a Twitter post on Feb. 18.

  “Why hasn’t the government informed the public that undercover MPD officers were chanting, ‘Our house!’ and repeatedly urging protesters to advance up the northwest steps of the Capitol on January 6?” Pope wrote on Twitter under his handle @FreeStateWill. “Officer 2 said someone would get shot and went up right behind Ashli Babbitt.”

  Video shot by the undercover officers is under court seal.

  Pope argued in his motions that the DOJ is trying to prevent him from accessing the full Jan. 6 evidence databases. He is defending himself against seven criminal counts brought by federal prosecutors in February 2021. He asked U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras to compel the DOJ to give him full access to discovery materials.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 18:00

• Sen. Graham To China: "If You Jump On The Putin Train, You're Dumber Than Dirt"
  Sen. Graham To China: “If You Jump On The Putin Train, You’re Dumber Than Dirt”

  Not surprisingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham is leading the “stand up to Russia” charge among GOP Congressional hawks, saying in an interview on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference that China has been put on notice regarding any potential military support to Russia amid its Ukraine war. 

  “If you jump on the Putin train, you’re dumber than dirt,” the South Carolina Republican said in response to reports of China mulling lethal aid to Ukraine. He stressed it will unleash huge international blowback on Beijing if they follow through, and will prove a losing proposition from the start. “It would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie,” he continued in the interview with Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”

  

  Graham also at the Munich Security Conference called for Russia to be labeled a state sponsor of terrorism, which would then give Washington far-reaching legal ability to go after nations that provide assistance to Russia. The Biden administration has remained reluctant to go that far, which would set the two sides down a path of uncontrollable escalation in Ukraine.

  Graham’s message to China came in response to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s remarks warning Beijing against sending “lethal assistance” to Moscow. The Chinese government has also long been under pressure to condemn Russia, but has consistently refused to, instead highlighting the dangers of NATO expansion.

  “What Secretary Blinken said is big news to me. He believes that the Chinese are on the verge of providing lethal weapons to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Graham continued.

  Below are the “dumber than dirt” remarks in fuller context: 

  “And to the Chinese, if you jump on the Putin train now, you’re dumber than dirt. It would be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you saw the movie. Don’t do this. The most catastrophic thing that could happen to [the] U.S.-China relationship, in my opinion, is for China … to start to give lethal weapons to Putin in this crime against humanity. That would change everything forever,” Graham said.

  The neocon senator got even more provocative, however, it saying he’s not worried about “provoking” Putin into escalation, but wants “to beat him” – which goes far beyond what the US administration has openly articulated, given Moscow could receive it as a war declaration.

  Lindsey Graham: “I’m not worried about provoking Putin. I want to beat him and how do you beat him? You beat him by giving the Ukrainians the military capability to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/wY5jJ65ZGI

  — Real Mac Report (@RealMacReport) February 19, 2023

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  As for the Munich Security Conference, it has produced more signs of further escalation from the West. According to Politico’s analysis:

  Even as Western leaders congratulate themselves for their generosity toward Ukraine, the country’s armed forces are running low on ammunition, equipment and even men. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who opened the conference from Kyiv on Friday, urged the free world to send more help — and fast. “We need speed,” he said.

  U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris turned the heat up on Russia on another front, accusing the country of “crimes against humanity.” “Let us all agree. On behalf of all the victims, both known and unknown: justice must be served,” she said.

  In other words, Russian leaders could be looking at Nuremberg 2.0. That’s bound to make a few people in Moscow nervous, especially those old enough to remember what happened to Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milošević and his entourage.

  And concerning what some pundits have labeled the “Ukraine of the east”, the Politico commentary continues…

  The outlook in Asia is no less fraught. Taiwan remains on edge, as the country tries to guess China’s next move. Here too, the news from Munich wasn’t reassuring.

  “What is happening in Europe today could happen in Asia tomorrow,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.   

  Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi did nothing to contradict that narrative. “Let me assure the audience that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory,” Wang told the conference when asked about Beijing’s designs on the self-governed island. Taiwan “has never been a country and it will never be a country in the future.”

  For some attendees, the vibe in the crowded Bayerischer Hof hotel where the gathering takes place carried echoes of 1938. That year, the Bavarian capital hosted a conference that resulted in the infamous Munich Agreement, in which European powers ceded the Sudetenland to Germany in a misguided effort they believed could preserve peace.

  The European Union has indeed been moving forward on plans to establish a special war crimes tribunal to go after Russian military and political officials. 

  However, one wonders where these “tribunals” were in the wake of Bush’s Iraq invasion, or the over two-decade long Afghan saga, or NATO’s decimating Libya, or the West’s role in turning Syria to rubble for that matter.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 17:30

• Explosion Rocks Ohio Metal Plant, Sending Large Plume Of Black Smoke Into Sky
  Explosion Rocks Ohio Metal Plant, Sending Large Plume Of Black Smoke Into Sky

  Update (2030ET): The company has issued a statement confirming the explosion of unknown origin: 

  An explosion of unknown origin struck our Bedford, Ohio facility today resulting in injuries to employees and significant damage to the facility.

  Our efforts now are focused on supporting the first responders who came on scene quickly to help our employees.

  The safety and health of our employees is our top priority and we commit to ensuring they receive the medical care they need.

  We will work alongside investigators in their search for answers as part of our commitment to Northeast Ohio where we have been operating for more than 100 years.

  Our thoughts and prayers are with our team members and their families at this difficult time.

  *  *  *

  On Monday afternoon, a large explosion rocked a metal manufacturing plant just east of Cleveland, Ohio, sparking a fire and sending a massive column of black smoke into the sky. 

  Fox News said the explosion occurred at I Schumann & Co. metal plant in Bedford. The company produces metal alloys. 

  The black smoke billowing into the sky is reminiscent of the East Palestine controlled burn of toxic chemicals earlier this month. Law enforcement in Bedford has yet to say if the smoke is toxic to surrounding communities. 

  🚨 JUST IN: Eye witness video of the massive metal facility explosion in Bedford, Ohio — mass casualty incident declared:

  “Wow, that’s f-cking insane!” pic.twitter.com/cAlou0aDHi

  — Upward News (@UpwardNewsHQ) February 20, 2023

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  Multiple victims burned after massive explosion at a metal manufacturing plant in Bedford, Ohio

  pic.twitter.com/uOsHqNAQ8b

  — The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) February 20, 2023

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  ⚠️ @IntelPointAlert || ‘Mass Casualty Incident’ reported following explosion at metal manufacturing plant in Bedford, Ohio; massive response underway pic.twitter.com/ibbHfHkhhm

  — PiQ (@PriapusIQ) February 20, 2023

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  Large explosion at metals making plant in Bedford, Ohio. Reports of multiple victims pic.twitter.com/B2DJRwiHaZ

  — BNO News Live (@BNODesk) February 20, 2023

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  Here’s another video of the fire. 

  ⚠️ HAPPENING NOW: Huge fire breaks out following mass casualty explosion at a metal facility in Bedford, Ohio. pic.twitter.com/FhyUT60L5z

  — Upward News (@UpwardNewsHQ) February 20, 2023

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  Emergency services have requested several medical helicopters. There are reports this could be a ‘mass casualty incident.’ 

  DEVELOPING: ‘Mass Casualty Incident’ reported following explosion at metal manufacturing plant in Bedford, Ohio; massive response underway pic.twitter.com/J7DOcqBf9F

  — Intel Point Alert (@IntelPointAlert) February 20, 2023

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  The cause of the blast is unknown at this time. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 16:59

• GSK Scientists Knew About Zantac's Cancer Risks For Forty Years
  GSK Scientists Knew About Zantac’s Cancer Risks For Forty Years

  Three years after the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) pulled GSK Plc’s heartburn drug Zantac off the market due to suspected links to cancer, and just two weeks before the trial begins of a man who alleges he developed bladder cancer after taking the drug, Bloomberg Businessweek revealed in a new report the pharmaceutical company’s scientists have long knew about the drug’s risks. 

  Bloomberg’s lengthy report highlighted GSK scientists and independent researchers understood that ranitidine had a cancer-causing carcinogen known as N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA). The drug was approved in 1983 as “Zantac” to treat acute duodenal ulcers and later as a remedy for heartburn. 

  By the late 1980s, Zantac was worth a whopping $2 billion, making it one of the most profitable drugs ever. It accounted for about half of Glaxo’s sales and 53% of the market for prescription ulcer medications. 

  

  Then use of Zantac soared further by the mid-1990s when the FDA approved it as an over-the-counter medication. GSK eventually controlled the heartburn remedy market for decades. 

  Bloomberg said GSK “backed flawed research designed to minimize concerns and chose not to routinely transport and store the medication in ways that could have eased the problem.” 

  “Glaxo sold a drug that might harm people, tried to discount evidence of that and never gave anyone the slightest warning,” Bloomberg continued, adding its team of journalists reviewed “thousands of pages,” including court filings and studies. 

  Four decades of dominating the heartburn market and building a pharmaceutical empire around it — abruptly stopped several years ago for GSK. In September 2019, the FDA received a report that made claims about ranitidine containing high levels NDMA. Shortly after that, in April 2020, the FDA pulled all ranitidine products from the market over the cancer-causing risks surrounding NDMA. 

  Trust the science https://t.co/wH5fsKPqkv

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) February 20, 2023

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  The FDA stated concerns about the storage methods of the drug, indicating:

  “NDMA levels increase in ranitidine even under normal storage conditions … And NDMA has been found to increase significantly in samples stored at higher temperatures, including temperatures the product may be exposed to during distribution and handling by consumers.”

  According to Bloomberg, the FDA found 357ng of NDMA in Zantac, a level four times higher than what’s acceptable in any FDA-approved drug. And what’s frightening is that NDMA levels soared to 931ng in the same product five months later. 

  And just how many people are suing manufacturers of Zantac or generic versions? 

  More than 70,000 people who took Zantac or generic versions of it are suing the company in US state courts for selling a potentially contaminated and dangerous drug. –Bloomberg 

  The first trial of a man who alleges he developed bladder cancer after taking Zantac will begin Feb. 27 before Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evelio Grillo. This will be the first test to see how cancer-causing Zantac claims holds up in state courts. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 16:30

• East Palestine Launched A Digital ID Program Days Before Disaster
  East Palestine Launched A Digital ID Program Days Before Disaster

  Submitted by ‘BlueApples’,

  As Klaus Schwab recently opined, the future of global hegemony will be dependent on the mastery of avant garde technologies which were once relegated to the realm of science fiction. With that power in mind, technologies advancing artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and other pillars of the World Economic Forum’s so-called fourth industrial revolution have begun to permeate into our everyday lives. Perhaps no greater example of the imperative of the technocratic elite to harness these technologies is the digital ID. The premise of an over arching digital identity as a mechanism for vast government surveillance was one of the cornerstones of the authoritarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Apparently, that crisis wasn’t the only instance of an opportunity to beta test the tools of dystopian oppression.

  The town of East Palestine, Ohio shows how deeply embedded this agenda is in the plans of the elite. Before the town entered into the public discourse by becoming the scene of one of the worst environmental disasters in US history, the biggest piece of news to come out of it appears to be another iteration of the ongoing initiative to implement digital surveillance tools into public infrastructure. In late January, East Palestine officially launched its MyID program in order to equip residents of the town and neighboring Unity Township with digital IDs. The premise was purportedly to equip emergency responders with digital health profiles of those who they would be treating. East Palestine’s digital ID initiative was first announced in October 2022.

  The rollout of the MyID program was vested in the East Palestine Fire Department.

  “It’s kind of like the old Medical Alert bracelet or old Vials of Life Program, however this is with new technology. It’s a QR code that we’re able to scan and it will bring up your pertinent information medically related. There is no information that anybody can take and steal your ID with. It’s just for us to be able to take care of patients who aren’t able to communicate with us,” East Palestine Fire Chief Keith Drabick said.

  

  The East Palestine Fire Department held a sign-up event at the town’s community center this January in an effort to drive enrollment into the cloud based information system. They were was able to collect $5,000 in donation to aid in the roll out of the program to make the first 250 wearable devices available to enrollees for free. The QR codes can be affixed to a wristband or a key faub but depend on digital ID software storing a person’s health information in a cloud-hosted database in either instance.

  During the event, Drabick emphasized that the MyID pilot program was intended to have a limited scope narrowly pertaining to sensitive medical information of those enrolled, tacitly alluding to underlying concerns about privacy that has skeptics of digital IDs reticent about the technology. Drabick would go on to compel skeptics to explore the program despite their reservations. “Anybody that skeptical? Please come on down. Sit down, talk to us. We’ll be happy to show you everything that goes on with it. We’ll be happy to show you how secure it is.”

  Despite the initiative to implement the MyID program, even the fire department officials tasked will its roll out likely could not have foreseen the devastation East Palestine would incur following a botched controlled burn of a chemical spill that has turned the small town into North America’s own version of Chernobyl. However, the impetus to start a digital ID initiative preceding what would have been an unforeseen crisis is a pattern that supposed “conspiracy theorists” know all too well.

  Before the hysteria surrounding COVD-19 gripped the world, an event held in collaboration between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Johns Hopkins University foreshadowing the eventual pandemic. Event 201 created a simulation to gauge the global response to a coronavirus epidemic as a means of pushing forward the very technologies at the center of the World Economic Forum’s vision of the future which were also implemented in East Palestine before the watershed crisis that would alter the landscape of the town forever. One of the partners for Event 201 was ID2020, a digital ID initiative that Bill Gates was heavily invested in that served as an archetype for the vaccine passports that global NGOs and sovereign governments alike have been steadfast in attempting to implement.

  The devastation in East Palestine rightfully puts an emphasis on an effective emergency response to save the 5,000 or so residents of the town from the peril they face as they are engulfed in a carcinogenic miasma which threatens their short term and long term health. While that is the understandable priority, the underlying currents of patterns which have preceded previous manufactured emergencies are putting the chemical catastrophe into a new light. First, there was the re-emergence of the 2022 film White Noise which seemingly served as a piece of predictive programming as its plot centered around the aftermath of a chemical explosion affecting a small town in Ohio. Now, the roll out of a digital ID program like that which was showcased during Event 201 raises even more questions than answers about what is really going on in East Palestine.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 16:00

• 18 Inch Pipe Bomb Discovered Near Conrail Tracks In Northeast Philadelphia
  18 Inch Pipe Bomb Discovered Near Conrail Tracks In Northeast Philadelphia

  An 18 inch pipe bomb was discovered behind a church in the Holmesburg section of northeast Philadelphia.

  The bomb was found on Sunday afternoon behind St. Dominic’s Catholic Church, on the 8500 block of Frankford Avenue, according to reports by Fox 29. 

  One Twitter account of the location of the bomb pinned it to train tracks behind the church. The bomb was “near [the] Conrail railroad tracks in Philadelphia’s Holmesburg section”.🚨#BREAKING: Police have discovered a 18-inch pipe bomb on Train Tracks

  🚨#UPDATE: this is on Frankford Ave near Conrail railroad tracks in Philadelphia’s Holmesburg section for those who are wondering

  — R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) February 19, 2023

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  It was discovered by a passerby and pointed out to police, who confirmed it was a PVC pipe with “capped ends and black powder” on it. Frankford Ave., between Benson and Blakiston was shut down and the Philadelphia bomb squad was called to the scene. 

  The bomb was eventually disarmed and taken away, transported from the Holmesburg section of the city to bomb squad headquarters. 

  Additional information has not yet been released, but we will update this article if and when it becomes available. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 15:30

• James O'Keefe Out At Project Veritas
  James O’Keefe Out At Project Veritas

  Project Veritas founder and CEO James O’Keefe is exiting the organization.

  O’Keefe announced to his staff Monday that he was leaving over a conflict in vision between himself and the board in an poignant 15-minute video.

  “Throughout my 13 years doing this my mission has evolved,” O’Keefe said in his announcement.

  “Over the last few weeks I have felt a lot of despair and seen a lot of evil and felt overcome with various emotions.”

  A clearly emotional O’Keefe expressed gratitude for his employees, but noted that:

  “The external threats and pressure inflicted upon myself has been unimaginable,” O’Keefe continued.

  Employees had been dissatisfied by O’Keefe’s management and alleged he wasted money and was “outright cruel” to his staff, according to the The Daily Beast.

  Speculation has been rampant about the timing of this debacle as O’Keefe points out:

  “A few days after the Pfizer story, I was informed by an officer of Project Veritas that he would resign unless I step down as CEO. We’ve been having a conflict of vision over fundraising, there were tactical disagreements about the boldness of approach soliciting donations.”

  As The Epoch Times’ Zachary Stieber reports, O’Keefe said he confronted one executive at a meeting on Feb. 2 and said that if the person would not follow his lead, he would have to exit the group.

  O’Keefe then fired the man.

  Later that same day, a different officer informed O’Keefe he was going to the Project Veritas board to restructure the company.

  O’Keefe said he received an agenda for the board meeting as he was set to depart on a flight, and that the meeting was scheduled for the moment he was due to land.

  “It became clear to me in that moment [that] I would be removed from my position at Project Veritas,” O’Keefe said.

  Project Veritas did not pick up the phone or respond to requests for comment.

  O’Keefe, who started Project Veritas in 2010, said he’s not finished.

  He said that “the mission continues” but will “perhaps take on a new name.”

  “I’ll make sure you know how to find me,” he told Project Veritas employees. “I hope to see some of you soon.”

  R.C. Maxwell, a Project Veritas employee and an O’Keefe ally, wrote on Twitter that O’Keefe “was removed from his position as CEO by the Project Veritas board.”

  “They are in charge now,” Maxwell said.

  O’Keefe said he has been suspended “indefinitely without compensation,” citing a board memo.

  “I don’t know why this has happened or specifically why this has happened suddenly,” O’Keefe continued, adding he has “documentation” of everything.

  The board has not yet issued a new statement.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 02/20/2023 – 15:03