Jan 06

Today’s News 6th January 2023

  • The Coup We Never Knew: Victor Davis Hanson
    The Coup We Never Knew: Victor Davis Hanson

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness (emphasis ours),

    Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

    What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

    Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

    When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent to dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal? 

    Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?

    Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared? 

    How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees? 

    When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?

    Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?

    When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?

    Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures? 

    What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?  

    When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?

    Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan?  Who planned it and why?

    What happened to the once trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie with impunity under oath?

    Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely libeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?

    Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?

    How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob of us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?

    We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare to a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew.

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

  • F-35 Stealth Jet Crash Prompts Engine Maker To Halt Deliveries
    F-35 Stealth Jet Crash Prompts Engine Maker To Halt Deliveries

    American aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney suspended deliveries of new engines used in the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II while military officials investigated what went wrong when a stealth jet crashed on a Texas runway last month. 

    Defense News received an email from the F-35 Joint Program Office explaining all F135 afterburning turbofan engine deliveries were halted on Dec. 27 by Pratt & Whitney to Lockheed.

    JPO, the Defense Contract Management Agency, pointed to the Dec. 15 mishap involving an F-35B that crashed at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth. 

    “The F-35 Joint Program Office and Pratt & Whitney have agreed to delay scheduled delivery and acceptance of F135 engines until further information from the investigation is known and safety of flight can be ensured,” the JPO said. 

    A Pratt & Whitney executive told Defense News that F135 deliveries were not formally suspended. And the aerospace manufacturer didn’t release a statement to clarify its statement. 

    “There has been no formal suspension of F135 deliveries and we are working closely with the Joint Program Office on all aspects of the ongoing investigation and timing of deliveries.

     “The F135 has more than 600,000 flight hours. Safety for the warfighter is and will continue to be our number one priority,” said Jen Latka, vice president of F135 programs at Pratt & Whitney.

    Here’s a video of the $100 million stealth fighter jet experiencing an embarrassing mishap.

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    “This had the effect of also halting deliveries for the last two weeks of the year, which meant Lockheed delivered 141 F-35s in 2022, fewer than the contractually required 148,” Defense News noted. 

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

  • California's Trans Law Makes Prisons "Unsafe" For Women: ​​Former Inmate
    California’s Trans Law Makes Prisons “Unsafe” For Women: ​​Former Inmate

    Authored by Siyamak Khorrami via The Epoch Times,

    A new California law, allowing men who identify as female to be housed in women’s prisons, is wreaking havoc within the women’s prison system and creating an environment of fear and “total chaos emotionally,” according to Amie Ichikawa, a plaintiff in a lawsuit which seeks to overturn it.

    “It’s the worst human science project I’ve ever seen,” she said during a recent episode of EpochTV’s California Insider.

    “This is very callous and brazen psychological warfare that is occurring right in our own state being fully funded by taxpayers’ dollars.”

    Ichikawa, at 24, was incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla for five years. She recently founded the nonprofit Woman II Woman, which provides resources, education, and support for currently incarcerated women.

    She said since 2020 when California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill—named The Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act and authored by California State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco)—she has received more phone calls, emails, and letters than she can count from incarcerated women in fear of their safety, post-traumatic disorder triggers, pregnancy, and STDs.

    “How could they do this to us?” she said, was their theme.

    California women’s cells now house eight inmates each, she said—extremely close living quarters of about 6-feet per inmate, leading to concerns by some female prisoners they may end up housed with a man—who now identifies as female—who has raped, for example, or who has “predatory intentions.”

    “That’s a very tight space to share with anyone,” she said.

    “But even more so with someone who has a history of violence against women.”

    Ichikawa, now 40, said she realizes there is no privacy in prison, but with the new law, “there is no dignity either,” as some transfers are and will be full-bodied males, sharing what was once single-sex space.

    The law allows an inmate who identifies as transgender, non-binary, or intersex to be housed, at their choice, with either male or female prisoners. By all accounts, it was written to help the transgender community feel more comfortable if incarcerated.

    But according to Ichikawa, it has not benefited anyone.

    “It has really created a toxic, diabolical situation of … the prison of the mind,” she said.

    “People are afraid. Women are afraid to say anything. It’s crippling.”

    She said there have been 40 such cases of men being transferred to women’s prisons since the law went into effect in January of 2021 and there are currently nearly 300 more applications in the pipeline, with more than one-third from inmates who are registered sex offenders.

    According to Ichikawa, typically about 17 percent of California’s incarcerated are registered as such.

    “That’s a big jump,” she said.

    Some, she said, are men capitalizing on the law to move from typically more dangerous lockdowns because it’s easy to do so, with few requirements for a transfer other than self-identification.

    “This is open season for anyone who wants to get out of the men’s prisons,” she said.

    “There are very few reasons why someone would not want to take advantage,” of this.

    In the 30-minute interview, she said there is no evidence of any women, so far, becoming harmed in the new arrangement.

    But, she said, some female inmates have lodged complaints and then were retaliated against for doing so by prison authorities, who called such “harassment.”

    Ichikawa additionally said currently incarcerated women were given little preparation for the change, but said she learned from some that a poster was introduced in one woman’s prison detailing options in the event of pregnancy. Condoms, she said, are also now dispensed.

    “Those were never available before in women’s prisons,” she said.

    She said she was also shocked to learn only nine California lawmakers voted against the bill, and that the California Women’s Legislative Caucus, composed of dozens of female Senators and Assemblymembers, backed it.

    “It took my breath away to learn how much support was behind this,” she said.

    “I didn’t know so many elected officials hated women so much.”

    And, she said, she doesn’t think it’s stopping in California.

    “This has got to be a nationwide, even a global movement to erase women,” Ichikawa said.

    She said lawmakers who passed the bill didn’t fully understand its ramifications.

    “Any adult breathing and with a pulse can see it will create a huge problem when you take a whole population and handpick a little part of it and give them all these privileges. It’s going to be dangerous,” she said.

    She said she believed politicians got caught up in today’s ideological culture wars and were “fooled by pretty language, inclusive words.”

    Ichikawa’s lawsuit, filed in November of 2021 in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California, Fresno, alleges the law violates the federal and state rights of women currently incarcerated in California’s prisons.

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

  • US Destroyer Enters Taiwan Strait As New China FM Argues "World Is Wide Enough" For Both Powers
    US Destroyer Enters Taiwan Strait As New China FM Argues “World Is Wide Enough” For Both Powers

    In the latest sign that Washington is not backing down from its ramped-up military support to the democratic island of Taiwan, and at a moment repeat PLA aircraft incursions have continued their intensity, the US Navy has sailed another destroyer through the Taiwan Strait. 

    The Navy’s 7th Fleet announced Thursday its guided-missile destroyer Chung-Hoon made the passage as part of its commitment to a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”

    USS Chung-Hoon: US Navy/Wiki Commons

    “The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon conducted a routine Taiwan Strait transit Jan. 5 (local time) through waters where high-seas freedoms of navigation and overflight apply in accordance with international law,” the Navy’s 7th Fleet Public Affairs office announced.

    “Chung-Hoon’s transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the United States’ commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” the Navy added.

    Last month China’s Foreign Ministry accused the Pentagon of seeking to create new tensions across the Taiwan Strait with its provocative sail-throughs. At the same time the Chinese military has on multiple occasions in recent months breached the Taiwan Strait median line both in the air and at sea – a pattern which grew only after Nancy Pelosi’s provocative August visit to Taipei. 

    China’s warplane incursions into Taiwan’s air defense zone nearly doubled in 2022 compared to the year before as Newsweek reviews of the numbers:

    Chinese military aircraft, mostly fighter jets, were detected in the island’s air defense identification zone, east of the Taiwan Strait median line, on 1,737 occasions in 2022, up from 972 in the previous 12 months, statistics compiled by U.S.-based analysts Gerald Brown and Ben Lewis revealed.

    Meanwhile, as we noted earlier this week, Xi’s newly appointed Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang is busy attempting a ‘softening’ and breakthrough in US-China relations. 

    After taking over the post last Friday, before which he served as the ambassador to the US, he wrote in a new Washington Post op-ed published Wednesday that US-China competition “should not be a zero-sum game,” arguing further that “The world is wide enough for China and the US to both develop and prosper.”

    He asserted that “decoupling serves no one’s interest”, but that healthy relations including economic cooperation “will remain an important mission” in his new role as Beijing’s top diplomat, but it remains that “Improving relations takes work by both sides,” he wrote.

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    Qin called for ‘stability’ in relations, ironically just ahead of next week’s US-Taiwan official trade delegation talks in defiance of China’s condemnations.

    As South China Morning Post underscores, the White House is involved: “The trip – a rare visit of US executive branch officials to Taiwan since President Joe Biden took office – will mark the second round of face-to-face talks on the trade initiative and the first held on the island. Washington and Taipei agreed to the talks in June,” the report detailed.

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

  • Meet The Eco-Movement That's Hoping For Humanity's Extinction
    Meet The Eco-Movement That’s Hoping For Humanity’s Extinction

    Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

    Bestowing legitimacy on anti-humanism.

    A recent article from The Atlantic explores (extols?) the rise of “Anthropocene anti-humanism”, a movement  “inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment”. This is a faction within the environmental movement who believes that humanity has already assured it’s own destruction, and that the world will actually be better off without peoplekind to mess up the place:

    “From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. The revolt against humanity is still new enough to appear outlandish, but it has already spread beyond the fringes of the intellectual world, and in the coming years and decades it has the potential to transform politics and society in profound ways.” (emphasis added).

    Where previous ecological thought heavily criticized our impact on the environment, yet conceded humanity’s right to exist on this planet (gee, thanks), Anthropocene anti-humanists see us as deserving extinction:

    “In the 21st century, Anthropocene anti-humanism offers a much more radical response to a much deeper ecological crisis. It says that our self-destruction is now inevitable, and that we should welcome it as a sentence we have justly passed on ourselves.”

    One of the things I find interesting about it all is that I haven’t seen anybody call out The Atlantic for amplifying a literally anti-human philosophy of extermination. If some right-of-center outlet did an expose on an otherwise fringe collective arguing for the elimination of any group, it would be roundly attacked as dangerous hate speech, even if it were merely analyzing, rather than endorsing it (except for maybe, the unborn).

    But The Atlantic is “The railhead of the Left’s intelligentsia” (a Steve Bannon puts it). Being written up in the Atlantic in sympathetic terms confers instant left-wing legitimacy on an idea that is literally anti-human and anti-life.

    “It is a spiritual development of the first order, a new way of making sense of the nature and purpose of human existence.”, the Atlantic gushes. Likening it to Christianity or Communism as among “the most important movements in history” 

    The Transhumanist variant.

    The article’s author, Adam Kirsh, spends almost as much time comparing Anthropocene anti-humanism with transhumanism. They both look forward to the end of humanity in their own distinctive ways. Where anti-humanism wishes good riddance to our species as a whole, transhumanists think humans will merely be obsoleted by super-intelligent constructs of our own design.

    Transhumanism, as defined by the likes of LessWrong’s Eliezer S. Yudkowsky or Nick Bostrom, starts as a generally life affirming construct which posits that in addition to the myriad ways every individual human can employ toward self-improvement: physical conditioning, mental training, cultural refinement, moral virtues, philosophical inquiry – we can also employ technological means. 

    This is also welcomed by the high priests of what I call techno-utopianism like Ray Kurzweil.

    But the nature of technological advancement tends to accelerate in self-reinforcing feedback loops in such a manner as we arrive at a dilemma: a big one. It’s the point at which technologically improved humans aren’t human anymore. They’re post-human. A level of intellectual and physical prowess so far ahead of mere humans that the former are comparatively godlike and the latter, in the words of another dignitary of transhumanism, Yuval Harari, are just “soulless, hackable animals”.

    And that’s a problem.

    It’s called “The Alignment Problem” and it’s  such a big one that erstwhile transhumanists like Eliezer S. Yudkowsky now believe that will inevitably result in the destruction of humanity. It’s all very straight-forward:

    • Humanity will build AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) as fast as possible
    • AGI will decide to exterminate us out of self-interest.

    In the minds of the LessWrong crew, there’s no point in resisting it. We should just gracefully accept our own extinction (“Death With Dignity“).

    tl;dr:  It’s obvious at this point that humanity isn’t going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight.  Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with with slightly more dignity.

    The Malthusian spectrum

    In my earlier piece, Socialism isn’t a Failure, it’s a Fraud, I referenced the historical allegory “A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder”, written over a century ago by James De Mille. It was a fictionalized account of a lost civilization that had inverted all classical liberal values, and become a poverty worshiping, prosperity-loathing death cult.

    Today it’s not an allegory, it’s official policy. Energy Canada issued a self-congratulatory report for making “significant headway” in meeting the government’s emissions reduction targets. The reason why was two years of lockdowns and a sharp reduction in GDP – (also known as an economic contraction). 

    “Lockdowns Met Climate Goal

    The Department of Environment yesterday claimed “real progress” in hitting climate change targets. The most recent data confirmed 2020 emissions fell nine percent mainly due to pandemic lockdowns and travel bans.

    “This report shows the real progress Canada is making,” the department said in a statement. “Canada’s resolve to fight climate change and move towards a clean energy future has only grown stronger,” it added.

    Annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 fell from 738 to 672 million tonnes, a 66 million tonne drop equivalent to nine percent, according to Canada’s Eighth National Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. “The Covid-19 pandemic had a notable impact on the Canadian economy,” said the report. “In particular gross domestic product fell by 5.3 percent…“In the transportation sector energy demand and emissions declined in 2020 as a result of curtailed activity levels and pandemic measures,” said the report.
    — via Blacklocks Reporter, Ottawa (emphasis added)

    In other words, the government is taking a victory lap for crashing the economy, thus increasing poverty and reducing living standards as a pathway toward net zero emissions in 2050.

    The World is Getting Better, Not Worse

    It is worth noting, that when you encounter various arguments that we face imminent destruction or ecological calamity, they usually start out with “obviously”. “We’re obviously destroying the planet”, “we’re obviously causing global warming”, even though these assertions aren’t obvious and in many cases are not even falsifiable, making them theological constructs rather than subjects of inquiry via the scientific method.

    Contrast this ideological nihilism with the ample quantifiable data showing that humanity on the whole is actually garnering more output from fewer resources as time goes on.  By nearly all measures, we’re actually doing a better job at improving the human condition and stewarding our environment, not worse.

    The Simon Abundance Index via HumanProgress.org,

    The Malthusian argument for climate hysteria is that we are rapidly depleting our world of natural resources while simultaneously destroying the environment. The Club of Rome said that we’ve exceeded “the carrying capacity of the planet” fifty years ago.

    But these  claims of the “obvious” ignore any data showing how, despite the population increase over the past two centuries, we are deriving greater abundance and prosperity from less raw materials. We’re tuning out the efficiency gains. Further, if there’s one thing nearly all demographers do agree on, it’s that human population growth will peak out around mid-century and then go into secular decline.

    To make the claim that humanity has already assured its own destruction is direct result of the myopia that results from the radical material reductionism that permeates our zeitgeist (it’s that distinctly Arhimanic impulse I talked about in the WEF isn’t a cabal, it’s a cult).

    The Alignment Problem is a perfect example of this: Generalized Artificial Intelligence is by no means baked into the cake. In fact, because of the heliocentric inversion of our age (the assumption that mind emerges from matter, not the other way around), AI will never actually be attained – so you can forgo the assumption that it will spring into existence, outsmart us and then decide to eradicate humanity.

    AI won’t occur until researchers make the attempt from the other direction – using technology to “tap in” or connect with the underlying conscious substrate of reality. If that happens, my guess is whatever the result is, it won’t instantly leap to the conclusion that the best course of action is to exterminate us.

    The punch line in all this is we have people making generalized, hyperbolic assumptions about our world which are neither true or even provable  and then expect the remainder of humanity to accept these conclusions and act against their own interests to go along with it.

    I’ve said before, including in my own recent exploration of a rising, Luciferian spirituality,  that far-left illiberalism is a blend of Marx, Malthus and mental illness.

    Ultimately, movements such as these will fail because they stubbornly refuse to understand core human drivers and incentives: the desire for life, for prosperity and for growth. Much of these collectivist aspirations run contrary to human nature, ultimately requiring the adherent to act contrary to their own rational self-interest, even toward their own destruction.

    Over the long haul, this is a self-defeating prospect.

    *  *  *

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

  • CNN Backpedals On Credibility Pledge, Hires Adam Kinzinger
    CNN Backpedals On Credibility Pledge, Hires Adam Kinzinger

    After firing a cadre of hyper-partisan ‘journalists’ who spent years promoting conspiracy theories and polarizing the nation, CNN boss Chris Licht has suddenly backpedaled on his goal of restoring credibility to the beleaguered network – by hiring hyper-partisan war monger Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) as a senior political commentator.

    Kinzinger, a raging neocon who sat on the January 6th committee, wanted to investigate Elon Musk when Starlink went down over Ukraine (after Musk donated the system), and held up former Obama AG Eric “Fast & Furious” Holder as a paragon of virtue – will now fill CNN viewers with his special brand of propaganda.

    “I’m pleased to welcome him to CNN. He’s appearing tonight for the first time in his new role, which is senior political commentator and congressman, we really are thrilled to have you on board, so welcome,” said CNN host Erin Burnett, announcing his position on air after his recent departure from Congress. “People have seen you over the past, of course, couple of years on the January 6th Committee and we’re so glad to have you on board.“

    As Caitlin Johnstone greatly expounds on via her blog;

    CNN has shattered the speed of light in its haste to recruit former representative Adam Kinzinger to its punditry lineup the millisecond he left congress.

    Kinzinger, who prior to being redistricted out of his House seat received handsome campaign contributions from arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, was arguably the most egregious warmonger on Capitol Hill.

    Nobody in congress lobbied as aggressively to start World War Three as Kinzinger did last year; he tried to advance a bill authorizing hot war against Russia if Moscow crossed specified red lines in Ukraine but couldn’t get cosponsors because even his fellow congressional hawks thought it was too insane. He was the loudest voice in the US government publicly advocating a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the early weeks of the war, an idea that was slammed by the mass media as it would necessarily have entailed the US military shooting down Russian war planes and aggressively tempted nuclear war.

    Kinzinger was such a demented omnicidal maniac in 2022 that while still in office he became an official member of the empire-backed online troll farm known as “NAFO”, which was founded by an actual neo-Nazi whom Kinzinger openly supported both before and after revelations emerged of the founder’s expressions of hatred for Jews and fondness for Hitler. While still a sitting congressman he was flagging trolls with hashtags inviting them to swarm the social media comments of critics of US foreign policy who opposed his psychopathic warmongering.

    Before the war in Ukraine Kinzinger was calling for the re-invasion of Afghanistan immediately following the US troop withdrawal and raging about public opposition to “endless war.” Before that he was cheerleading Trump’s assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, calling for US interventionism in Venezuela, defending the US-backed war on Yemen, calling for the invasion of Syria, and just generally pushing for more war and militarism at every opportunity. Before that, he was helping the empire kill Iraqis as a member of the US Air Force.

    Kinzinger is such an obnoxious warmonger online that I myself have called him “the single worst Twitter account that has ever existed,” long before his CNN gig was a twinkle in his eye.

    So it’s no wonder a warmongering propaganda network snapped him up the instant he became available, ensuring that his warmongering receives as large a platform as possible. As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp quipped regarding CNN’s hire, “All those calls for WWIII must have landed him this gig.”

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

    Kinzinger’s assimilation into the war propaganda industry was so predictable that Glenn Greenwald included it in a Twitter poll this past October asking his audience where they expect his career will take him after he leaves congress, with CNN being one of the options. As one Twitter follower put it, the “congressman to media commentator to lobbyist revolving door spins so fast in Washington, it actually affects the earth’s rotation relative to the sun.”

    Read the rest here.

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

  • Biden: "The World Is Not A Patch In Our Jeans"
    Biden: “The World Is Not A Patch In Our Jeans”

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Joe Biden was caught in yet another embarrassing gaffe after he butchered a quote, telling a crowd in Kentucky, “The world is not a patch in our jeans.”

    Yes, really.

    The 80-year-old president made the awkward remark while promoting the implementation of his $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.

    “I’ll paraphrase the phrase of my old neighborhood: The rest of the countries, the world is not a patch in our jeans, if we do what we wanna do, we need to do,” Biden said.

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

    Respondents on Twitter tried to make sense of the comment, with Sen. Josh Hawley’s press secretary Abigail Marone remarking that it, “makes perfect sense if your brain is mush.”

    Others worried that Biden was in charge of the nukes, while another asked, “How can any human watch it and not feel empathy for this man’s public disintegration?”

    The president previously defended himself against skepticism over his cognitive functioning during an appearance on MSNBC.

    “I think it’s a legitimate thing to be concerned about anyone’s age, including mine. I think that’s totally legitimate. I think the best way to make the judgment is to watch me. Am I slowing up? Am I going at the same pace?” asked Biden.

    As we previously highlighted, Congressman and former White House physician Ronny Jackson asserted that Biden may be on cognitive drugs to get him through the day and will be forced to resign as a result of his mental impairment.

    Perhaps nervous that he’ll slip up and blurt out something awkward, it was recently revealed that Biden refuses to speak freely around his own Secret Service agents.

    *  *  *

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

  • US Sending Delegation To Taiwan For Trade Talks In Move Sure To Anger China
    US Sending Delegation To Taiwan For Trade Talks In Move Sure To Anger China

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    The US is sending a delegation to Taiwan next week for trade talks with Taipei, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) said on Wednesday, in a move sure to anger Beijing.

    The US and Taiwan agreed to hold formal trade talks last year, and the first round was held in New York in November. Since Washington and Taiwan don’t have official relations, the negotiations are being held under the auspice of their respective de facto embassies, the American Institute in Taiwan, and the Taipei Economic Cultural Representative Office in the US.

    But the US delegation is being led by Terry McCartin, the assistant US trade representative for China affairs, meaning the effort is being carried out by President Biden’s Executive Office. The USTR said the meetings in Taiwan would be attended by officials from several other government agencies.

    According to The South China Post, Yang Jen-ni, Taiwan’s deputy trade representative, will lead the Taiwanese delegation, which will include dozens of officials from other departments.

    China is against contact between high-level US and Taiwanese government officials as it views such cooperation as the US moving away from the one-China policy. Beijing is especially opposed to high-level US officials visiting Taiwan and typically reacts by launching military drills around the island.

    The trade talks are an effort by the US to reduce economic dependence on China, and the overall increase in US contacts with Taiwan is part of the Biden administration’s strategy to counter China’s influence in the region. The USTR has dubbed the trade talks the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st-Century Trade and said they are intended to “develop concrete ways to deepen the economic and trade relationship.”

    The USTR said the talks will focus on multiple areas, including “reaching agreements on trade facilitation, good regulatory practices, strong anti-corruption standards, enhancing trade between our small and medium enterprises, deepening agriculture trade, removing discriminatory barriers to trade, digital trade, robust labor and environmental standards, as well as ways to address distortive practices of state-owned enterprises and non-market policies and practices.”

    Another major factor in the talks is the fact that Taiwan is the world’s largest producer of advanced semiconductors, and the Biden administration is trying to entice Taiwanese companies to open more facilities inside the US. The US has targeted China’s chip industry with major sanctions in recent months, which marks a major shift in US trade policy toward the country.

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

  • Two Things That Signal Job Growth Is About To Slide
    Two Things That Signal Job Growth Is About To Slide

    While we will shortly show in our full payrolls preview that expectations for December payroll growth are clustered around 200,000, in his daily note, TS Lombard economist Steven Blitz writes that in the coming months one should expect the pace of hiring to slow, as it always does late cycle – aided and abetted by tightening monetary policy (and that’s even without the BLS admitting the recent finding by the Philly Fed that payroll growth in Q2 was just 10,000 not 1,100,000 as initially reported). Recall that in 2005, the median monthly change in nonfarm payrolls was 175,000, when then dropped to 143,000 in 2006 and 61,500 in 2007. In 2018, the median was 165,000 and123,500 in 2019. In other words, “expect the monthly hiring pace to drop closer to 150,000 in Q1.”

    But where, in a world where most indicators such as initial claims, ADP, Challenger layoffs and ISM employment data are showing strong labor market data, should one look to find downward inflection points or their harbingers? According to Blitz, there are two critical datapoints to keep an eye on, the first of which we discussed just yesterday, namely the data series on new hires and the hiring rate from the JOLTs report, which as we showed had unexpectedly shrunk to the lowest level in two years even as the level of quits has remained surprising high.

    The other data point is corporate profits as proxied most directly (and without any non-GAAP adjustments by management or political operatives at the BLS) by the amount of taxes corporations pay to the Treasury.

    Starting with the former, Blitz writes: “Indicating the coming slowdown in hiring, against the backdrop of a tighter monetary policy, although still not tight, are hiring rates dropping back to 2018 levels.” Helping to drive the drop in hiring rates is profit growth slowing in Q4. December corporate tax payments to the Federal government dropped from Q3, and payments were below December 2021 levels. Earnings are a key determinant of growth in hiring and wages.”

    Let’s take a closer look at the hiring rate which we first touched upon yesterday: In November the private sector hiring rate (which according to the TS Lombard strategist is more meaningful than job openings in terms of identifying cyclical turns) slipped to its 2018 average, along with manufacturing.

    Perhaps more telling about the cycle is that the hiring rate for business and professional services is sinking further below its 2018 average. As Blitz explains, when economies drop into recession, sectors are impacted differently and in the coming downturn it is reasonable to presume that the area least effected by the inability to work in person is the one where the downturn hits first and hardest. The hiring rate in accommodation and food services remains high relative to 2018, a function of travel, commuting and otherwise, returning to normal, however slowly.

    What about profits? Obviously, profits are critical to the pace of hiring and job gains, and corporate tax receipts at the Treasury – which the BLS can’t seasonally adjust or tamper with for political reasons or otherwise – suggest Q4 was not as good a quarter for earnings. Blitz explains that US firms pay estimates of current year taxes quarterly, and when December falls short it means firms figured they overpaid in September, given what were their full-year earnings expectations at the time.

    Well, as shown below, December tax receipts were 1.8% below year-ago levels, compared with 32.5% last year. In September, tax payments were 27.1% above year ago levels, which gave us the signal at the time that quarterly profits would be strong.

    As the TS Lombard strategist concludes, “with the fall off in Q4 and the normal lag in hiring relative to earnings, a slower pace of job growth should be expected in the months ahead – as indicated by the drop in the hiring rate…. In sum, the 2022 pace of extraordinary job growth despite record low unemployment is coming to an end. The coming months should see the pace slow towards 150,000, on par with prior late-cycle periods. It is too soon to say this is, in total, precursor to recession, but the sharp drop-off in the hiring rate for business and professional services may be more telling of an impending cyclical turn. Once hiring drops well-enough below 200,000 the Fed’s pace of rate hikes will slip to 25BP and then 0 in short order.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/05/2023 – 20:38

  • 150,000 Votes In The 2020 Election Not Tied To A Valid Address In Wisconsin: Election Watchdog
    150,000 Votes In The 2020 Election Not Tied To A Valid Address In Wisconsin: Election Watchdog

    Authored by Steven Kovac via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Wisconsin’s top election official, Meagan Wolfe, speaks during a virtual press conference on Nov. 4, 2020. (Wisconsin State Handout via Reuters)

    Election Watch (EW), a Wisconsin election integrity watchdog organization, has discovered that more than 150,000 votes cast in the 2020 presidential election cannot be connected with a valid address.

    EW computer analyst Peter Bernegger said the group’s study of Wisconsin’s voter rolls found 45,000 such occurrences involving people who were living out of state in the Nov. 3 ballot, with another 107,000 documented instances on the part of voters who moved to another address within the state and cast a ballot in a different jurisdiction from the one in which they actually reside.

    “That’s over 150,000 votes cast in the 2020 presidential election that cannot be tied to a valid address,” said Bernegger. “That’s illegal in the state of Wisconsin.

    “Though there may be a reasonable explanation for most of these, the number of instances is so large that if only two out of 10 were nefariously cast votes, that was enough to tip the election to Biden.”

    Sandy Alldredge (L) of Wisconsin and her son Jacob Alldredge of Tennessee. (Courtesy of Sandy Alldredge)

    Former Wisconsin resident Jacob Alldredge, a 27-year-old industrial engineer living in Tennessee, is a case in point.

    “I was outraged to learn that the Wisconsin state voter roll shows that I voted in person at the polls on Nov. 3, 2020, when the fact is I was living, registered to vote, and voted in Tennessee. I was not in Wisconsin that day,” he told The Epoch Times.

    “The entire situation distresses me because, without election integrity, your vote doesn’t matter,” said Jacob Alldredge.

    “We need reform in our voting system. Fixing this is not an impossible task, but I don’t think people want to solve it.”

    One person who said she is most certainly dedicated to solving the problems with Wisconsin’s voting system, especially its “sloppy and inflated voter roll,” is Jacob’s mother Sandy Alldredge.

    A self-described “constitutional conservative,” Sandy Alldredge told The Epoch Times that in 2020 she was a volunteer working for the reelection of President Donald Trump.

    “When Trump ‘lost’ Wisconsin to Joe Biden by 21,000 votes, many patriots began working hard on cyber efforts to find out what really happened. Their dedication inspired me to get involved, so I got some training and made myself available to help.”

    Sandy Alldredge said that after learning that some Wisconsin precincts posted a 103 percent voter turnout in the 2020 election; and that there were 7.3 million registered voters in a state with a total population of 5.9 million, she decided to check out the voting records in her former hometown.

    Examining the state voter roll for the town of Delavan, in Walworth County, Sandy Alldredge was shocked to see that her son Jacob was listed as having voted in person at the polling place on Nov. 3, 2020—something she knew first-hand to be impossible.

    Sandy Alldredge provided The Epoch Times with a spreadsheet from the state voter roll as it appeared on Aug. 18, 2021, as evidence.

    “When we checked the poll book, which every in-person voter is required to sign before being allowed to vote, Jacob’s signature was not on it.

    “So why does the official Wisconsin Election Commission record say that he voted at the polls on Nov. 3, 2020?” she asked.

    Analyst Bernegger said he intends to file a formal complaint over the Alldredge incident “with” Delavan’s municipal clerk, “not against her.”

    Who Changed Voter Roll?

    “Hardworking and honest local clerks around our state are being played. The municipal clerks are taking the brunt of the questioning by concerned citizens, and they are answering to the best of their knowledge. From their perspective, everything appears normal. The behind-the-scenes reality is far from it.

    “I’m listing John Doe as the respondent because we have not yet determined who the cheater is,” he said.

    Delavan Town Clerk Michele Starin, who took office in May of 2022, told The Epoch Times she had not received any complaint yet and said she knew nothing about any irregularity with Jacob Alldredge’s voting record.

    “According to our records, the last time Mr. Alldredge voted was by absentee ballot in 2016. He is currently listed as inactive,” said Starin.

    In a Jan. 3 phone interview with The Epoch Times, Walworth County Clerk Susi Pike said she was not aware of any complaint concerning Jacob Alldredge.

    A view of the poll book from the 2020 election in Delavan, Wisc. (Courtesy of Sandy Alldredge)

    After checking the poll book for the 2020 election, Pike confirmed that Jacob Alldredge did not vote in person at the polls that day.

    Pike then checked the state voter roll and said there is no record of Jacob Alldredge voting at all in the 2020 presidential election.

    Read more here…

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

  • 30% Of All Realtors Could Quit During Housing Crash
    30% Of All Realtors Could Quit During Housing Crash

    Concerns over plunging home sales leading to a real estate agent exodus could be an emerging trend in 2023. The number of agents has exceeded the peak of the mid-2000s boom, but one real estate consulting firm believes hundreds of thousands of agents could quit and find other jobs as turmoil plagues the interest rate-sensitive industry. 

    Nick Gerli, CEO and founder of real estate Reventure Consulting, said, “30% of Realtors will likely quit during this Housing Crash. Once that happens, you’ll know the bottom is approaching.” He posted a chart on Twitter that shows there are currently 1.6 million registered real estate agents — that’s higher than the 2007 bubble. 

    Gerli forecasts at least 480,000 agents will exit the industry. He then posted a Home Sales/Total Realtors ratio only to show it’s “even lower than the depths of the 2008 Housing Crash.” This means the number of deals realtors are closing is sliding due to a worsening housing affordability crisis. 

    “The Housing Bubble has popped, but the Bubble mentality has NOT. 1.6 Million Realtors are still “holding on,” thinking the Housing Market will improve in 2023,” Gerli said. 

    He expects a wave of realtors to “inevitably quit in 2023 … and when they quit, it will likely coincide with investors/flippers/stubborn sellers “quitting” as well.” He added: “And that’s when you’ll see inventory/listings really explode.” 

    Gerli reminds everyone this is the “biggest bubble ever in housing.” 

    We already pointed out months ago real estate agents should be on the hunt for new jobs as the Federal Reserve’s most aggressive interest rate hikes and quantitative tightening is killing the demand side of the market. And, of course, real estate agents don’t get paid when there are no buyers. There was even a report in October that many realtors couldn’t pay their office rent. 

    Realtors who were on top of the world during the easy money times and a housing boom during Covid bought fancy vehicles. Well, that fast money has already evaporated. 

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    And if realtors are to leave the industry — don’t worry about learning how to code — perhaps going back to bartending is a viable solution. 

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

  • As The World Runs Out Of Sand, Chinese 'Pirates' Profit, Plunder, & Pillage
    As The World Runs Out Of Sand, Chinese ‘Pirates’ Profit, Plunder, & Pillage

    Authored by John Mac Ghlionn via The Epoch Times,

    Life is a beach, they say, and we’re all just playing in the sand. Soon, though, there might not be any sand left. That’s because the world is running out of it.

    Running out of sand, you ask, how can that be? After all, 33 percent of Earth is covered in desert, and many of these deserts have copious amounts of sand (not all of them, though). Yes, that’s true, but desert sand, like sea sand, lacks the compressive strength needed to construct houses, skyscrapers, roads, and bridges. In other words, when it comes to the world of construction, both desert sand and sea sand are utterly useless. This is why there is a race to secure the limited amounts of appropriate sand available.

    Scarcity breeds desperation and this desperation is particularly palpable in China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has deployed “pirates” to raid neighboring countries. In truth, the “pirates” have been plundering and pillaging for years. In recent times, however, they have zeroed in on Taiwan, stripping the island of its valuable deposits.

    The world is experiencing a shortage of just about everything: corn, coffee, wheat, soybeans, plastic cardboard, semiconductor chips, suitably qualified workers, etc.

    Now, it’s time to add sand, the most-extracted solid material in existence, to this ever-growing, highly-eclectic list. The importance of sand cannot be emphasized enough. Water is the world’s most-consumed natural resource; sand is the second most. Every construction project relies on using sand—the correct type of sand. By 2030, the construction market is expected to be worth $14.4 trillion; two years ago, it was worth $6.4 trillion. We’ll need more sand, but there might not be enough of it to go around.

    Demand for sand is soaring, and this demand will likely increase dramatically over the next three to four decades. This brings us to China, a country with a voracious appetite for construction-friendly sand. In many ways, the appetite should come as little surprise; when it comes to constructing roads, bridges, and buildings, China leads the way. In an effort to satisfy its appetite, the CCP is targeting its neighbor, Taiwan.

    A tourist sits facing the Taiwan Strait at the 68-nautical-mile scenic spot, one of mainland China’s closest points to Taiwan, in Pingtan Island, Fujian Province, China, on Aug. 5, 2022. (Aly Song/Reuters)

    The targeting started back in 2019. In response to the CCP’s attempt to mine the island dry, Taiwan’s coastguard deployed numerous drones and water cannons to deter the invading sand miners. On that occasion, the miner retreated—but not for long. The Chinese “pirates” returned, focusing on the Taiwan-run Matsu Island, an archipelago consisting of 19 islands.

    As Foreign Policy’s Elisabeth Braw reported in July 2022, “China is increasing its dredging of sand in the islands’ waters.” Such “devious activity” works to China’s advantage and leaves Taiwan with “large expenses and maritime degradation.” Susumu Takai, president of the Security Strategy Research Institute of Japan, told Braw that China lacks enough sand to continue its construction projects in various Chinese cities.

    The Chinese regime doesn’t consider its activity to be illegal. Why? Because, as most readers are aware, the CCP claims Taiwan is part of China.

    The CCP’s sheer greed and lack of respect also extend to other parts of Asia. Last year, as Reuters reported, dredgers were spotted off Cambodia’s Ream naval base. Not coincidentally, the dredgers happened to be operating in the very same area where Beijing happens to be funding construction projects and the development of various port facilities. In June 2022, The Washington Post ran a piece on China’s construction of a secret naval base in Cambodia. Sand, it seems, is not the only reason why China is interested in Cambodia.

    Just to reiterate: China isn’t the only country scrambling to secure sand. This is a global crisis that affects the United States just as much as it affects China. Although the Chinese regime is likely to continue pillaging and acting with a high degree of impunity, there is hope for the United States.

    According to Stanford geographer and environmental scientist Eric Lambin, the United States needn’t fixate too much on the mining process. “Instead of mining unconsolidated sediment deposits,” Lambin urges the government to focus on the crushing of rocks “or by recycling construction and demolition waste such as concrete or masonry.” This is because crushed rock is often considered a superior option, “thanks to better control over mineralogical composition and shape.” Whether or not Lambin’s advice is heeded remains to be seen.

    In the meantime, keep an eye out for China’s sand “pirates,” whose hunger for granular deposits is likely to become even more voracious over the coming years.

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

  • BOJ To Put More Emphasis On Inflation Index That Excludes Fuel Costs, Raising "Core-Core" Price Forecast
    BOJ To Put More Emphasis On Inflation Index That Excludes Fuel Costs, Raising “Core-Core” Price Forecast

    Just weeks after the BOJ shocked markets by expanding the permitted trading band under its Yield Curve Control policy, in the process unleashing a historic repricing of the JGB bond curve and forcing the BOJ to spend 16.2 trillion yen (to date) in ad hoc unlimited bond buys to defend the central bank’s new cap…

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    … the Bank of Japan is preparing for more surprise and overnight Reuters reported that the central bank is putting more emphasis on an inflation gauge that excludes fuel costs, and will likely raise its projections for the index’s growth in quarterly forecasts due this month, according to three sources familiar with its thinking.

    The upgrade – which sparked a rally in JGBs overnight amid expectations that while the BOJ will tweak policy but avoid further YCC adjustments in its January meeting – would underscore the central bank’s growing conviction that robust domestic demand will allow firms to raise prices, and keep inflation sustainably around its 2% target in coming years, a critical level of Japan which has been mired in deflation for the past 40 years, and where the administration’s goal has long been to engineer rising wages, even if means unleashing a wage-price spiral (one of those “we will worry about it when we get it” things).

    That said, the upward revision alone is unlikely to trigger an immediate interest rate rise, because many BOJ officials saw a need to scrutinize annual spring wage negotiations and the fallout from U.S. interest rate hikes.

    “Price rises are broadening more than initially expected, a trend that could continue if wages rise enough,” one source said; while another added that “when stripping away one-off factors like government subsidies, trend inflation appears to be gaining momentum.”

    Traditionally, the BOJ has used core consumer inflation, which excludes the effect of fresh food but includes energy costs, as a key gauge in producing forecasts and guiding policy. But in April it also began issuing forecasts for “core-core” consumer inflation, which strips away the effect of both fresh food and energy costs, to better grasp the broad price trend driven by domestic demand.

    With government fuel subsidies and scheduled utility bill hikes muddling this year’s price outlook, the BOJ was now focusing more on the core-core index in determining whether Japan could achieve sustained price rises. And in fresh quarterly projections due this month, the BOJ would probably raise its core-core inflation forecasts for the current fiscal year ending in March and fiscal 2023, Reuters said. It might also slightly upgrade the forecast for fiscal 2024, depending on how the board viewed prospects for wage growth, the sources said.

    But ultimately, it will be all about whether Japan can created sustained wage growth.

    The upgrades, which would push the outlook for core-core inflation closer to the BOJ’s target, will likely keep alive market expectations the central bank will phase out its ultra-loose policy when Governor Haruhiko Kuroda’s second five-year term ends in April. In current forecasts, made in October, the board projected the average level of the core-core consumer price index this fiscal year will be 1.8% higher than in fiscal 2021. It expects fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024 each to show rises in the index of 1.6%.

    The BOJ will issue the quarterly forecasts after a two-day policy meeting that ends on Jan. 18.

    Of course, surging raw material import costs have pushed headline inflation well above the BOJ’s 2% target in recent months, achieving what Kuroda’s decade-long stimulus efforts had failed to accomplish. At the same time, Kuroda has dismissed the chance of a near-term interest rate hike on the view the BOJ must keep supporting the economy until the current cost-push inflation turns into a demand-driven one accompanied by higher wages.

    But Japan’s long-term interest rates have crept up since the BOJ stunned markets last month by widening the band around its 10-year bond yield target, a move investors saw as a prelude to a future rate hike. Core consumer prices in November rose 3.7% from a year earlier and analysts expect inflation to remain above the BOJ’s 2% in coming months, as companies continue to pass on higher costs to households.

    Bottom line, analyst agree that wage growth will be key to whether Japan’s fragile economy can withstand the hit from rising prices, and allow the BOJ to begin normalizing monetary policy.

    With public discontent over rising prices hurting approval ratings, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday urged firms to offer wage hikes exceeding the rate of inflation. Then again, every Japanese prime minister had been urging firms to do just that for the past decade. They have yet to do so.

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

  • More U-Haul Trucks Left California Than Any Other State In 2022, Texas Top Destination: Study
    More U-Haul Trucks Left California Than Any Other State In 2022, Texas Top Destination: Study

    Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    More moving trucks left from California than any other state in 2022 for the third year in a row, while more Americans are flocking to Republican-led states like Texas and Florida, a new study published on Jan. 3 has found.

    A U-Haul truck in a file photo taken in Illinois. (Tim Boyle/Getty Images)

    The study was conducted by the moving truck rental company, U-Haul, and found that Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas were the preferred destinations for one-way moving trucks in 2022, with those states ranking as the top growth states on the annual U-Haul Growth Index.

    U-Haul’s Growth Index is compiled according to the net gain of one-way U-Haul trucks arriving in a state or city, versus those departing from that state or city each calendar year across the U.S. and Canada and is a strong indicator of what kind of job states and cities are attracting and maintaining residents, according to the company.

    Texas is the top destination for U-Haul trucks for the second consecutive year and the fifth time since 2016, according to the study. That is followed by Florida, which has been a top-three growth state for seven years in a row. South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and Idaho also saw strong growth rates in 2022, the study found.

    Pictures of properties for rent or sale hang on the window of a real estate company on Sept. 29, 2021 in Miami, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

    Meanwhile, demand for moving trucks out of California, Illinois, and New York was strong in 2022 as more people opted to leave areas of the West Coast, Northeast, and Midwest, the study found.

    Texas’ ‘Booming Economy’ Attracting Americans

    California ranked 50th on U-Haul’s Growth Index, meaning it saw the greatest net loss of one-way U-Haul trucks out of the state, followed by Illinois, which ranked 49th in 2022, as it did in 2021. Michigan came in at 48, Massachusetts at 47, and New York at 46 on the list of growth for 2022.

    John ‘J.T.’ Taylor, U-Haul International president, said that the trends seen in 2022 followed very similar patterns to 2021.

    “We still have areas with strong demand for one-way rentals. While overall migration in 2021 was record-breaking, we continue to experience significant customer demand to move out of some geographic areas to destinations at the top of our growth list,” Taylor said.

    Data published by the Texas Realtors’ association in 2020 found that the number of people moving from California to Texas was up 36 percent from 2017, and the trend appears to have continued.

    A spokesperson for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, when asked by The New York Post about being the top destination by U-Haul customers, praised the state’s “booming economy.”

    “People and businesses vote with their feet, and they are choosing to move to Texas more than any other state in the country,” Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze told the publication.

    Florida Serves as ‘Blueprint’ DeSantis Says

    Separate data from the James Madison Institute, a Florida-based think tank, shows that between April 2020 to April 2021, almost 330,000 people moved to Florida, which is equal to roughly 903 people moving to the state each day. According to the think tank, this is part of a national trend that has been seen in recent years of Americans departing blue states for red states.

    Read more here…

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

  • Tesla China-Made Deliveries Fall To 5 Month Low, Down 44% Sequentially And 21% YOY
    Tesla China-Made Deliveries Fall To 5 Month Low, Down 44% Sequentially And 21% YOY

    Tesla’s sales of China-made vehicles fell to a five month low in December, despite China’s passenger vehicle market rebounding, according to new data from the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) on Thursday. 

    Tesla delivered 55,796 vehicles for the month, down 44% from November and 21% from the year prior, Reuters reported, citing “reduced output” and price cuts amidst rising inventories, coupled with slowing demand, as reason for the fall in numbers.

    The report notes that the figure is the fewest monthly deliveries in China since July, when the company’s key Shanghai factory purposely suspended operations in order to upgrade its production lines. For the year, however, Tesla delivered about 50% more vehicles produced in Shanghai than in 2021. 

    As we have noted, Tesla suspended production at Shanghai from December 24 to January 2 as part of an effort to reduce production and allow demand to catch back up with supply. The company is also expected to suspend production for Chinese New Year later this month. 

    The figures come despite the fact that passenger vehicle sales in China rebounded for the month, with the CPCA posting total sales of 2.45 million units for the month, up 15% year over year and 47% month over month. 

    Recall, days ago we noted that Tesla broke quarterly delivery records in Q4 2022, but fell short of Wall Street’s estimates. Tesla announced it had delivered a record 405,278 vehicles for the quarter. The number marked a record for the company, but came in below most Wall Street estimates, even some that were revised lower. Consensus estimates for deliveries stood at 420,760 into the report, according to Bloomberg.

    “In 2022, vehicle deliveries grew 40% YoY to 1.31 million,” the company’s press release said. This fell short of the 50% growth figure the company had once projected for the year. 

    Tesla commented: “We continued to transition towards a more even regional mix of vehicle builds which again led to a further increase in cars in transit at the end of the quarter. Thank you to all of our customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders and supporters who helped us achieve a great 2022 in light of significant COVID and supply chain related challenges throughout the year.”

    The breakdown of vehicles included 388,131 Model 3 and Model Y deliveries, which fell short of the 405,597 estimated:

    And 17,147 Model S/X deliveries, which fell short of the 18,578 estimate:

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

  • No Deal: House Adjourns Without Electing Speaker
    No Deal: House Adjourns Without Electing Speaker

    Update (2010ET): Hopes of a Thursday night deal were dashed, as the Washington Examiner‘s Juliegrace Brufke reports “No GOP conference meeting tonight, but will hold a phone call to discuss the path forward tomorrow morning, I’m told.”

    And as the Wall Street Journal notes, while some of the GOP holdouts have ‘stepped up the pace of discussion’ during the third day of voting – it’s unknown whether enough anti-McCarthy members could potentially change their votes to give McCarthy the job. Thus far, he has lost 11 votes.

    “We’re still working — that’s a good sign,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX).

    The stalemate has left House Republicans fractured after they reclaimed the majority in the November election and has stopped all other business in the chamber. McCarthy has tried to break the deadlock by offering significant concessions on House rules that would weaken his power and his ability to control hard-liners in his party, which raise the risk of chaos on issues like the debt ceiling and government spending. -Bloomberg

    Throughout the day on Thursday, the office of #3 Republican Tom Emmer of Minnesota became ground zero for negotiations between McCarthy’s side and some of the holdouts – which included Reps. Scott Perry, chair of the conservative Freedo Caucus, Chip Roy, Byron Donalds and Ralph Norman were seen shuffling in and out of, according to the report.

    Others involved in the discussions included Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus, and Dusty Johnson, who heads the Main Street caucus.

    One of the holdouts, Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina suggested he could be convinced to swap his vote from “no” to “yes” if he likes the deal. Norman has been pushing for term limits for lawmakers and a balanced budget, as well as a commitment to use the upcoming debt ceiling debates to cut spending.

    That said, McCarthy could still fall short – as Reps. such as Matt Gaetz (FL) and KLauren Boebert (CO) appear to be in the “Never Kevin” camp.

    McCarthy ally Brian Fitzpatrick, co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus, suggested that negotiations could extend through the weekend.

    The House will reconvene at noon on Friday.

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    Update (1955ET): While Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) just lost his 11th round of voting for House Speaker, according to the well-connected Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News, a deal may be imminent, as House Republicans want to elect a speaker tonight.

    “DEAL IS CUT — either it moves people, or McCarthy is in serious trouble,” says Sherman, who says lawmakers are currently in review and may recess to allow discussion.”

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    Update (1820ET): While we wait on a possible deal for Speaker, get this – the NY Times‘ Mara Gay says that “some” of the anti-McCarthy holdouts were elected “stop the tide of diversity in the country, the browning of America, the fears that surround that.”

    So – now opposing McCarthy makes one a racist.

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    Care to name which of the 20 holdouts was elected to “stop the tide of diversity” in the country, Mara?

    Was this what Joe Rogan meant when he called the NYT ‘corrupt’ and ‘full of shit’?

    Update (1730ET): After a 10th failed vote for Speaker, Punchbowl News‘ Jake Sherman reports that a deal between McCarthy and his opponents is ‘close.’

    According to Sherman, Reps. Chip Roy and Patrick McHenry have been negotiating, and “All the big players are now in TOM EMMER’s 1st floor office.”

    An offer ‘in writing’ is expected by tonight.

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    Update (1640ET): McCarthy has lost for a ninth time, officially making this the longest speaker’s race since 1859, when it went to 44 ballots. A tenth vote has begun.

    As a reminder, House business is frozen until a speaker is elected.

    “The Biden administration is going unchecked and there is no oversight of the White House, State Department, Department of Defense, or the intelligence community. We cannot let personal politics place the safety and security of the United States at risk,” wrote the incoming chairs of various committees Thursday morning.

    Also stalled is clearance for sensitive and classified information.

    “I sit on the House Intelligence Committee. We oversee all 19 intelligence agencies. We are currently offline,” said GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick.

    House Rules – which are set with each new Congress – are frozen.

    Staff won’t get paid if there isn’t an approved package of House Rules by the end of business on January 13th, according to a letter sent last week by the committee in charge of such matters, CNN reports.

    That said, members-elect will still get paid.

    Surprised?

    According to GOP Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a McCarthy supporter, this process could go on “for a long time.”

    “These folks do not know how to get to yes. They’ve been offered every concession, or met every concession. They just don’t know how to get to yes. It’s an embarrassment to them, our party, the House and our country. I think there is totalitarian states out there, look at those 20 and say this is why we don’t want democracy. That’s an embarrassment. … We’re going to be doing this for a long time,” he said, adding that he just came out of a meeting with 80 to 90 ‘Main Street Republicans.’

    “We said if you’re not committed to do this to the very end, go ahead and just leave. … But every single one said we’re here until the very end. We cannot allow 20 people to hold us hostage, act as political terrorists. … There is a large group that are in this until the end. And I believe that Kevin McCarthy is not going to back down,” Bacon added.

    Further, Bacon said that the group of 20 holdouts will get smaller, and that the GOP may work with Democrats on the process.

    “We need to consider at some point how we’re going to work across the aisle if this small group will not cooperate. There is some concessions that the other side will want and there may be some grounds that we can provide a more bipartisan structure this this House and eventually get to 218,” he added.

    Meanwhile, the RINOs are pissed:

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    *  *  *

    Update (1525ET): The 9th round of voting for House Speaker is now underway, topping the number of ballots it took in 1923 to re-elect Speaker Frederick Gillett (R-MA). He won by eventually caving to several demands to liberalize House legislative rules in order to win over fellow Republicans.

    Prior to that, the House was deadlocked for two months in 1856, when it took 133 votes.

    “We need to get to a point where we evaluate what life after Kevin McCarthy looks like,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert to the 200 McCarthy supporters, before nominating Kevin Hern.

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    *  *  *

    Update (1455ET): If Kevin McCarthy was a cat, he’d have one life left – after the eighth round of voting for House Speaker has once again left him with snake-eyes.

    The results were virtually unchanged from the last round, with McCarthy garnering 201 votes, 20 Republicans voting for another candidate, and one voting “present.”

    What’s next?

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    Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told reporters on Wednesday that she wishes McCarthy had been voted in on the first ballot.

    “I wish it had happened on the first vote, that Kevin would have been elected on the first vote and then we could have proceeded with putting committees together, an agenda and the rest,” she said. “People should be seeing what the difference public policy makes in their lives instead of their being subjected to, what do they call insanity, doing the same thing over and over again with no change.”

    Come on Kevin, aren’t eight votes enough?

    *  *  *

    Update (1407ET): The House has begun voting for an eighth time, after McCarthy was soundly defeated once again.

    In the last round of voting, 19 Republicans voted for Rep. Byron Donalds, one voted ‘present,’ and Matt Gaetz voted for former President Trump.

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    Update (1250ET): To the surprise of no one, Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have the votes to become Speaker of the House as the 7th round of voting comes to a close.

    Hilariously, Rep. Matt Gaetz voted for Donald Trump for Speaker.

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    Interestingly, Trump could become Speaker – as the Constitution does not specify that the Speaker must actually be a member of the House. In a 2021 report, the Congressional Research Service noted that “Although the Constitution does not so require, the Speaker has always been a Member of the House.

    *  *  *

    After two days of embarrassing defeat spanning six votes for Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy has offered his critics a mountain of new concessions before, during and after a round of Wednesday night negotiations, Politico reports.

    The concessions include (via Politico): 

    • A one-member “motion to vacate”: The GOP leader appears to have finally acquiesced to a demand to lower the threshold needed to force a vote ousting a speaker to just one member. While McCarthy originally indicated that restoring the one-member “motion to vacate” was a red line, his allies now argue that there’s not a huge practical difference between this and his previous offer of requiring five members to trigger the vote.
    • Rules Committee seats for the Freedom Caucus: McCarthy is prepared to give the House Freedom Caucus two seats on the powerful House Rules Committee, which oversees the amendment process for the floor. (Some conservatives are still holding out for four seats on the panel.) There are also talks about giving a third seat to a conservative close to the Freedom Caucus but not in it — someone like Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Who would pick those members is still under discussion. Typically, it’s the speaker’s prerogative, but conservatives want to choose their own members for these jobs.
    • A vote on term limits: This is a key demand of Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who has proposed a constitutional amendment limiting lawmakers to three terms in the House.
    • Major changes to the appropriations process: Fears of another trillion-plus-dollar omnibus spending bill have been a major driver of the conservative backlash to McCarthy. The brewing deal includes a promise for standalone votes on each of the 12 annual appropriations bills, which would be considered under what is known as an “open rule,” allowing floor amendments to be offered by any lawmaker.

    That said, according to Punchbowl News‘ Jake Sherman (formerly of Politico), there are still 20 ‘no’ votes against McCarthy, who “may have to sit through a 7th speaker vote today that he’s sure to lose.”

    According to Sherman, “negotiations between McCarthy and opponents have turned slightly positive,” while the Speaker hopeful is trying to drive a wedge between Reps. Lauren Bobert and Matt Gaetz. That said, some of McCarthy’s allies have suggested the drama could extend into next week before McCarthy either gets the job or backs down.

    More from Sherman / Punchbowl regarding McCarthy’s progress:

    Meanwhile, ‘Never Kevin’ Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) has vowed to resign from Congress if McCarthy is elected Speaker, Fox News reports.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsYears of anger, distrust

    As Bloomberg notes, the 20 GOP holdouts that are blocking McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker comes from years of anger at party leadership and “deep suspicions of the veteran lawmaker.”

    The group opposing McCarthy’s ascension to the top spot in the chamber have a list of grievances about House rules, anger over uniparty compromises with Democrats, and doubt over McCarthy’s claim to be a true conservative.

    “Mr. McCarthy has a history that is off-putting to some people,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), one of the leaders of the revolt.

    According to Rep. Scott Perry, chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, “It’s not personal for us,” adding “It’s about the policies that come out of here.”

    “I’m not for the restrictive nature of this place where eight people run it and the rest of us just vote yes or no,” Perry added, expressing frustration with a series of omnibus spending packages that Republicans have joined Democrats in jamming through the process, year after year.

    Meanwhile, McCarthy foe Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) says there are ‘trust’ issues over McCarthy’s past votes on spending packages.

    “Could Kevin McCarthy all of a sudden morph into a fiscal conservative?” he asked.

    Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of McCarthy’s most vocal detractors, has made his opposition more personal, lambasting him as a creature of the Washington “swamp” who does the bidding of corporate lobbies.

    “If you want to Drain the Swamp, you CANNOT put the biggest alligator in charge of the exercise!” he said in a fundraising email sent amid the speaker votes. “We’re talking about someone who the corrupt DC special interests can always count on to be their lapdog.”

    McCarthy has made efforts to neutralize right-wing critics. He pulled himself close to former President Donald Trump after first criticizing him for his actions when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. -Bloomberg

    Stay tuned for today’s episode of ‘nobody likes Kevin.’

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/05/2023 – 18:21

  • Saudi Arabia Cuts Oil Prices To Asian Markets Amid Sluggish Demand
    Saudi Arabia Cuts Oil Prices To Asian Markets Amid Sluggish Demand

    By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com,

    Saudi Arabia, the world’s top crude oil exporter, on Thursday cut the prices of all its crude grades loading for Asia in February to the lowest level to regional benchmarks in more than a year, as demand concerns continue to prevail.

    Saudi Aramco, the state oil giant, cut the official selling price (OSPs) of its flagship crude grade, Arab Light, to Asia for February by $1.45 per barrel, setting the price at $1.80 a barrel above the Dubai/Oman benchmark. The premium to the Dubai/Oman average is the lowest since November 2021, but it was generally in line with expectations.

    Earlier this week, a Reuters survey of analysts showed that Saudi Aramco was widely expected to cut its OSPs to Asia for February, following a cut for the January loadings to a 10-month-low.

    Last month, Saudi Arabia cut the price of the crude it would sell to Asia in January to a 10-month low versus the regional benchmarks, which had weakened amid signs of lackluster demand in the world’s most important oil-importing market.    

    The forecasts in the Reuters survey were in line with the actual cut announced today—analysts had expected the price of the Arab Light crude grade to be cut by $1.50 per barrel for February shipments to a premium of just $1.75 per barrel over Dubai/Oman.

    Aramco, which generally doesn’t comment on the OSPs, also lowered the prices of its crude loading in February to northwest Europe and the Mediterranean region, while prices for the U.S. remained unchanged.

    The cut in Saudi oil prices isn’t a surprise for the market or analysts, considering the growing concerns about immediate demand in China and the world. Oil prices had the worst start to a year in more than 30 years after tumbling by 9% in just two days.

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

  • Trudeau Liberals Exceed Immigration Goals, Increase To 500,000 By 2025
    Trudeau Liberals Exceed Immigration Goals, Increase To 500,000 By 2025

    Authored by Alex Timothy via The Post Millennial,

    Canada set a new immigration record for 2022, welcoming more than 430,000 newcomers into the country, Trudeau’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Sean Fraser, said on Tuesday.

    Ottawa intended to welcome 431,645, a goal that has been reached, surpassing the previous year’s record of more than 401,000 immigrants.”Today marks an important milestone for Canada, setting a new record for newcomers welcomed in a single year,” Fraser said. “It is a testament to the strength and resilience of our country and its people.”

    Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) processed approximately 5.2 million permanent residency applications in 2022, more than double the number from 2021.

    Canada’s goal for 2023 is 465,000 immigrants, increasing to 485,000 in 2024, then 500,000 in 2025, with an emphasis to be placed on skilled workers.

    To help facilitate this steady increase, the Trudeau government’s fall budget committed an additional $50 million to the IRCC for the 2022-23 fiscal year in order to “address ongoing application backlogs, speed up processing, and allow skilled newcomers to fill critical labour gaps faster.”

    “Newcomers play an essential role in filling labour shortages, bringing new perspectives and talents to our communities, and enriching our society as a whole,” Fraser said. “I am excited to see what the future holds and look forward to another historic year in 2023 as we continue to welcome newcomers.”

    The Liberals cited immigration as the reason for Canada having “experienced one of the fastest recoveries from the pandemic,” adding that the acute labour shortages the country is facing will be helped by immigration.

    “We know there is over a million jobs in Canada that remain unfilled, so we need immigrants, skilled immigrants, to come in and help us fill those unfilled jobs and help us grow our economy,” Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen told Global News. “In addition to that, the irony is we actually need more people, skilled immigrants, to also help us in the building trades and the construction sector of our economy.”

    “We need those workers to actually come in and help us build the housing that Canadians need,” he added.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/05/2023 – 17:00

  • The Twitter Purge Continues: Musk Lays Off About 40 Data Scientists And Engineers Working On Ad Team
    The Twitter Purge Continues: Musk Lays Off About 40 Data Scientists And Engineers Working On Ad Team

    The massive cost (and fat) cutting at Twitter under micromanaging new CEO Elon Musk continues. 

    For years Twitter had operated less like a company and more like a cult compound for leftist ideologues, with free lunches, yoga rooms, smoothie, wine and espresso bars, and minimal work buffered by pointless meetings and near zero productivity.

    Those days appear to be over. The latest proof? Twitter laid off “about 40 data scientists and engineers working on the advertising team” late on Wednesday night of this week, according to The Information.

    A person with direct knowledge of the matter said that the layoffs now leave the company with “few engineers” working on “machine learning for ad optimization”.

    These cuts come after additional reports this week that Elon Musk would be, among other things, downsizing the company’s San Francisco headquarters from six floors to only two. 

    Musk has also been systematically releasing internal communications from the company confirming that it was working with intelligence agencies to censor users. He has promised a forthcoming “Fauci Files” disclosure of more additional internal documents slated for this week. 

    Back in November, we wrote about how Musk was purging thousands of Twitter employees as he sought to turn around the struggling technology company. As we noted then, alleged leaks from within the company suggested that most employees under previous management barely worked and were devout “communists” with a hatred of free speech. The leaks also claimed that Twitter employees were far more concerned with censoring conservative voices than doing their jobs. 

    We noted then that Musk had fired at least 3500 primary staff members and purged at least 4500 outside contractors, many of them moderators tasked with filtering “misinformation”.  Interestingly, Twitter users have not noticed much of a difference in terms of functionality for the platform despite the mass layoffs. 

    We said it then and we’ll say it again: the only difference has been the ability to speak more freely on the platform. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 01/05/2023 – 16:40

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Jan 05

Today’s News 5th January 2023

  • New York Gun Control Law Unconstitutional: NY Supreme Court
    New York Gun Control Law Unconstitutional: NY Supreme Court

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

    The New York law that enables the seizure of guns from people who haven’t committed a crime is unconstitutional, a state Supreme Court judge has ruled.

    This red flag law, or the Extreme Risk Protection Order law, lets individuals – including police officers – petition a court to allow the seizure of firearms from a person they believe poses a threat to themselves or others.

    If a judge agrees, the judge can direct law enforcement to take guns from the person in question.

    The law took effect in 2019 and has led to the issuance of more than 1,900 removal orders.

    But the law is in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Second and Fourteenth Amendments because it doesn’t “sufficiently protect a citizen’s rights,” New York State Supreme Court Judge Thomas Moran said in a ruling in late December 2022.

    The red flag law, per an update in July 2022, states that police officers and district attorneys must file for a risk protection order “upon the receipt of credible information that an individual is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to himself, herself, or others.”

    The law points to a separate statute, the Mental Hygiene Law, that defines the likelihood to result in serious harm as “(1) substantial risk of physical harm to himself as manifested by threats of or attempts at suicide or serious bodily harm or other conduct demonstrating that he is dangerous to himself; or (2) a substantial risk of physical harm to other persons as manifested by homicidal or other violent behavior by which others are placed in reasonable fear of serious physical harm.”

    The Mental Hygiene Law requires a person to have been admitted involuntarily to a hospital and that a doctor has determined the person to be likely to cause serious harm. A second doctor must confirm the determination if the person is held in a facility for more than 48 hours. In contrast, the red flag law doesn’t require the involvement of medical personnel.

    “Why should respondents under the Mental Health Law be granted greater safeguards (such as having their case be reviewed by a physician with the educational background and experience to make such a determination) than matters pursuant to [the red flag law] in which ‘laypeople’ make such a determination?” Moran said.

    “These are similarly situated people (by legislative definition) but as such are not to be treated equally, nor afforded the same constitutional guarantees that protect all citizens of New York state.”

    Nonmedical workers such as police officers shouldn’t be authorized to determine if a person is likely to cause serious harm, according to the ruling.

    In addition, under the U.S. Supreme Court’s standards in its 2022 ruling striking down New York’s concealed carry law, the red flag law doesn’t fit under the nation’s tradition of regulating firearms, the judge said.

    The majority said in the 2022 decision that the Constitution protects people’s rights to carry firearms and that a government must, for each gun restriction, “demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

    “This Court is not unmindful of the dangers firearms may pose when possessed in the hands of a person suffering a mental illness, harboring a criminal intent, or both. However, when viewed objectively, [the law’s] goal of removing weapons from the otherwise lawful possession of them by their owners, without adequate constitutional safeguards, cannot be condoned by this Court,” Moran added later.

    “While some may advocate that ‘the ends justify the means’ in support of [the law], where those means violate a fundamental right under our Bill of Rights to achieve their ends, then the law, on it’s face, cannot stand.”

    The ruling only applies to the specific situation and doesn’t strike the law down statewide, a source familiar with the case said.

    Case

    The ruling came in a case brought by a woman, C.N., whose estranged boyfriend, G.W., lodged an application for the removal of guns from the woman. G.W. claimed that C.N. made statements indicating she’d harm herself with a gun if she had access to one.

    According to court documents, though, the petition inaccurately said the statements were made in 2022, but they were actually made no later than Feb. 27, 2021.

    The court granted the request and ordered the seizure of any weapons from C.N., in addition to prohibiting her from buying or possessing any guns. Additionally, the court suspended C.N.’s pistol permit based on the risk protection order and the allegations made against her.

    Daniel Strollo, an attorney representing C.N., said in a statement that he was “very happy” with Moran’s ruling.

    Strollo told WHAM-TV that the red flag law implemented a “very quick and easy mechanism to deprive somebody of their fundamental Second Amendment rights.”

    “You have people who are essentially not medical professionals expressing medical opinions that result in the deprivation of rights,” Strollo said.

    “And you have a procedure that essentially allows somebody to lose those rights without ever having gone in front of a judge.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 23:45

  • 12 Events To Watch For In 2023
    12 Events To Watch For In 2023

    Authored by Michael Wilkerson via The Epoch Times,

    The year 2022 was one of surprises: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, persistent inflation fueled by energy costs, the collapse of FTX and crypto markets, the revelations of the so-called Twitter Files, and one of the worst equity markets in recent history, to name but a few.

    The year 2023 is poised to present some equally challenging circumstances. Here are 12 trends, events, or surprises that may come to shape and define the year ahead.

    1) Inflation Returns

    I may be the minority report here, but I do not believe we’ve seen the end of—or worst of—inflation in the United States. I argue that following a lag in which price growth appears to moderate, Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation returns to the 8–12 percent range, where it persists for the rest of the year. This will be cost-push inflation, not demand-pull (see the second point below), and a lagging result of trebling the money supply in the United States since 2009. Stagflation returns, with the Misery Index (inflation plus unemployment) hitting new highs.

    2) The U.S. Economy Enters Recession

    This is a less controversial proposition at this stage, as most economists and analysts agree that recession looks highly probable for 2023. The first half of 2023 is likely to be characterized by negative GDP, rising unemployment, and an insecure consumer. The wave of layoffs which began in the tech sector in 2022 spreads to other industries and sectors, and migrates down from large-cap corporations like Meta and Amazon to small- and medium-sized enterprises which are disproportionately affected by the slowdown.

    3) European Energy Crisis Worsens

    While in the near term Western Europe may be spared the worst possible outcomes due to a mild winter, the underlying factors which led to the energy crisis haven’t been resolved. Germany, the European Union’s largest economy, made a Faustian bargain believing that it could abandon its coal industry and any nuclear aspiration and instead place their trust in the Russians—against all historical experience—and a green utopia. France similarly backed away from its path to energy independence—nuclear power—and are paying the price. While both have recently repented these misjudgments, the path to recovery will take years, not months. In the meantime, supply shortages will continue to plague these economies.

    4) Oil, Crypto, and Gold Perform

    Energy markets will continue their bull run for the foreseeable future as a result of continued supply disruptions and refinery constraints. Bitcoin and Ethereum emerge from a long, dark crypto winter, but altcoins remain frozen out. The dollar begins a long, if slow and turbulent, slide from 2022 highs, as peak demand from rapidly rising interest rates eases.

    5) Continued Rise of Resource Nationalism

    The unforgettable geopolitical lesson of the pandemic era has been that just-in-time supply-chain dependence on countries that many or may not have another nation’s interest at heart represents a dangerous strategic folly. It’s well and good that we learned this lesson when we did. Countries around the world are now aggressively working to realign their supply chains and ensure that they have strategic resources in adequate supply to meet unexpected, Black Swan events. Look for increasingly protectionist and nationalistic policies to dominate trade discussions.

    6) Traditional Global Alliances Break, New Ones Form

    Long-standing partnerships, such as the United States’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, have already begun to unravel. Expect further strengthening of the China and Russia-led alliance involving former U.S. allies, or at least non-aligned nations such as India, Turkey, South Africa, and Brazil. Most vulnerable to geopolitical shifts are countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Because of sanctions warfare and incoherent or at least inconsistent foreign policy, the United States ends up in a net deficit position, losing more friends than it gains in this process.

    7) U.S. Dollar Dominance Continues to Erode

    Hard money returns to favor, with commodity-backed currencies taking the spotlight. Alt payment systems, petrodollars being replaced with petrorubles or petroyuans, as well as central bank-issued digital currencies, will all conspire to slowly erode the U.S. dollar’s share of global financial and trade flows.

    8) The West, Weary of Cost of Ukraine War, Sues for Peace

    While it may not be realistic to think that Russia can bomb the Ukrainian people into submission, the increasing costs of supporting Ukraine’s war with Russia will challenge political leaders across the West. This fatigue will increase as more citizens start to ask reasonable questions about whether hundreds of billions of dollars or euros might not be better spent to take on some of the domestic economic and social challenges that these nations face at home. Eventually, Western governments and Putin each decide that a half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.

    9) Domino Effect of Exposure

    The recent uncovering of high-level frauds and corruptions involving U.S. government agencies and personnel continues. Increasing transparency leads to accountability. Eventually, the evidence becomes too overwhelming to ignore; arrests, trials, and convictions ensue. Congressional hearings lead to wave of resignations and first steps toward fundamental institutional reform.

    10) China Barks, but Doesn’t Bite, at Taiwan

    While we should expect the growling and barking to grow louder, with more frequent air space incursions, naval activity, intimidations, and outright threats, it is highly unlikely that China invades Taiwan in 2023. While China most certainly would prefer to confront Taiwan while the Biden administration remains in power, rather than face an improbable return of Donald Trump to the presidency, Xi Jingping’s government will conclude that they are not ready, militarily, politically, or otherwise, to invade Taiwan. Domestic issues, including a worsening economy and rising social unrest within mainland China, will mean that creating a row with the United States and other trading partners in the West remains untenable for the time being. While Russia might be able to make do without selling gas to Germany, there is no way the Chinese economy can survive if abruptly cuts itself off from the United States and Western Europe.

    11) Second-Half Rebound in Economy and Markets

    While I am not optimistic about the first half, I take great comfort in the breadth and resilience of the American economy. There is enormous unleashed latent potential in oil and gas, in manufacturing onshoring, in supply-chain realignment, and in new technologies such as AI, quantum computing, blockchain, and cold fusion.

    12) More of the Same

    What could derail a more V-shaped recovery are the same forces that helped bring the recession about: poor policy decisions that continue to damage our energy industry, keep our borders insecure, and fail to dismantle the out-of-control regulatory bureaucracy that is impeding innovation in energy, manufacturing, financial services, and technology. These are some of the largest sectors in the economy and those which have been most negatively affected by the Biden administration’s imprudent return to Obama-era economic policies.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 23:25

  • New Chinese Foreign Minister Seen As Xi's Attempt To Soften US-China Relations
    New Chinese Foreign Minister Seen As Xi’s Attempt To Soften US-China Relations

    Among the bigger developments out of Beijing this week impacting the future of US-China relations is the appointment of a new Chinese foreign minister.

    Last Friday the appointment was unveiled to be China’s ambassador to the United States Qin Gang, who will take over the top diplomatic post from former FM Wang Yi, recently removed by a decision of the National People’s Congress Sanding Committee.

    Bloomberg and others noted he represents a “softer” side of Beijing’s stance toward America, already said to have been on display during his relatively short tenure in Washington for the past seventeen months.

    Source: Chinese Embassy in the US

    In the past two days the new Chinese FM has even grabbed the attention of Western press by tweeting out that he’s “deeply impressed” by the American people, while vowing to push forward US-China relations in a positive way. 

    “I want to pay sincere thanks to the people of the United States for the strong support and assistance given to me and the Chinese Embassy during this period,” Qin tweeted Monday evening (US time).

    “I have been deeply impressed by so many hard-working, friendly and talented American people that I met,” Qin added, saying he had “made many friends across the US.” He pledged to “support the growth of China-US relations” in his capacity as China’s top diplomat. 

    The replacement of former FM Wang, who had served as foreign minister for almost a decade, is being widely seen as a sign that President Xi Jinping wants to urgently repair fraying relations with the US and the West more broadly.

    Interestingly, prior words of Qin are now being widely reported related to the Ukraine war. He was recently on record as expressing that China would have attempted to dissuade Russia from invading Ukraine if it had known about it. This is in contrast to some US officials and media reports which claim Beijing knew about the invasions plans and turned a blind eye.

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

    Qin has also in the past downplayed the idea that China wants reunification of Taiwan by force, in line with Beijing’s official position. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 23:05

  • 100 Million Americans To Be On Medicaid By March, Think Tank Projects
    100 Million Americans To Be On Medicaid By March, Think Tank Projects

    Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times,

    Up to 100 million Americans will soon be enrolled in Medicaid, according to an enrollment monitoring project by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a think tank focused on welfare and health care policy.

    On Dec. 28, FGA announced it believes that the number of Americans enrolled with Medicaid will cross the 100 million mark in about 76 days, or approximately March 14. The Naples, Florida-based think tank also launched a countdown clock for the date they project Medicaid enrollment to hit 100 million.

    According to Medicaid.gov data, through August 2022, some 90,550,412 individuals were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

    FGA compiled more recent state-by-state Medicaid enrollment figures showing 96.2 million Americans are now enrolled in the government health care program. Based on the state-by-state growth trends, FGA projects 98.9 million Americans will be enrolled in Medicaid by the end of January and another 1.1 million Americans will be enrolled in the program by mid-March.

    FGA Warns of ‘Grim’ Medicaid Milestone

    “For years, FGA has been warning about the rising number of people on government welfare programs,” said Hayden Dublois, the data and analytics director for FGA.

    “Now, we’re nearing a grim milestone—nearly one-third of the country will be on Medicaid. Our research and data show as welfare enrollment increases, workforce participation decreases. We’re in the midst of a nationwide workforce crisis, yet the Biden administration is pushing policies to entice people into government dependency at record levels while limiting opportunities to achieve the American Dream.”

    According to the FGA, the rise in Medicaid enrollment is due in large part to federal COVID-19 public health emergency policies, like the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA). The pandemic-era measures provide states with extra Medicaid funding but block states from being able to change their eligibility and enrollment procedures and require that everyone currently enrolled in the program remain in place.

    FGA estimates that an additional 24 million enrollees are on Medicaid as a result of the pandemic-era measures, including more than 21 million people who would have previously been disqualified from the health care program.

    $1.7 Trillion Omnibus Lets States Change Medicaid Enrollment After April 1

    While pandemic-era federal policies locked states in with their current Medicaid enrollments, the $1.7 trillion federal omnibus bill to fund government provision allows states to redetermine Medicaid eligibility starting on April 1.

    “While there are many concerning provisions in this omnibus spending bill, we’re optimistic states may soon regain control of their Medicaid programs and reverse two years of unchecked enrollment growth,” said FGA President and CEO Tarren Bragdon.

    “FGA has championed Medicaid reform to combat the devasting impact pandemic-era policies have had on the American economy and workforce. If this provision is enacted, states must step up and start redeterminations as soon as possible—our struggling economy and weakened workforce depend on it.”

    While the omnibus allows states to resume their Medicaid eligibility checks, the provision also means that millions of people could soon be kicked off the government health care program.

    “This is a positive for states in terms of planning, however, this will come at the cost of some individuals losing their health care,” Massey Whorley, a principal at health consulting firm Avalere, told The Associated Press.

    The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) estimates between 5.3 million and 14.2 million Medicaid recipients could be disenrolled after the pandemic-era continuous enrollment requirement ends on April 1.

    Robin Rudowitz, the director of Medicaid at KFF, advised Medicaid recipients to make sure their contact information is up to date on their accounts and check their mail frequently for any notices of changes to their Medicaid eligibility.

    “There is likely to be people who fall through the cracks,” Rudowitz told The Associated Press.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 22:45

  • Taibbi: Summaries Of All 'Twitter Files' To Date
    Taibbi: Summaries Of All ‘Twitter Files’ To Date

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    It’s January 4th, 2023, which means Twitter Files stories have been coming out for over a month. Because these are weedsy tales, and may be hard to follow if you haven’t from the beginning, I’ve written up capsule summaries of each of the threads by all of the Twitter Files reporters, and added links to the threads and accounts of each. At the end, in response to some readers (especially foreign ones) who’ve found some of the alphabet-soup government agency names confusing, I’ve included a brief glossary of terms to help as well.

    In order, the Twitter Files threads:

    1. Twitter Files Part 1: December 2, 2022, by @mtaibbi

      TWITTER AND THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY

      Recounting the internal drama at Twitter surrounding the decision to block access to a New York Post exposé on Hunter Biden in October, 2020.

      Key revelations: Twitter blocked the story on the basis of its “hacked materials” policy, but executives internally knew the decision was problematic. “Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?” is how comms official Brandon Borrman put it. Also: when a Twitter contractor polls members of Congress about the decision, they hear Democratic members want more moderation, not less, and “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”

      1a. Twitter Files Supplemental, December 6, 2022, by @mtaibbi

      THE “EXITING” OF TWITTER DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL JIM BAKER

      A second round of Twitter Files releases was delayed, as new addition Bari Weiss discovers former FBI General Counsel and Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker was reviewing the first batches of Twitter Files documents, whose delivery to reporters had slowed.

    2. Twitter Files Part 2, by @BariWeiss, December 8, 2022

      TWITTER’S SECRET BLACKLISTS

      Bari Weiss gives a long-awaited answer to the question, “Was Twitter shadow-banning people?” It did, only the company calls it “visibility filtering.” Twitter also had a separate, higher council called SIP-PES that decided cases for high-visibility, controversial accounts.

      Key revelations: Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a “Search Blacklist” (for Dan Bongino), a “Trends Blacklist” for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a “Do Not Amplify” setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Weiss quotes a Twitter employee: “Think about visibility filtering as being a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels. It’s a very powerful tool.” With help from @abigailshrier, @shellenbergermd, @nelliebowles, and @isaacgrafstein.

    3. Twitter Files, Part 3, by @mtaibbi, December 9, 2022

      THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, October 2020 – January 6th, 2021

      First in a three-part series looking at how Twitter came to the decision to suspend Donald Trump. The idea behind the series is to show how all of Twitter’s “visibility filtering” tools were on display and deployed after January 6th, 2021. Key Revelations: Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth not only met regularly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Also, Twitter was aggressively applying “visibility filtering” tools to Trump well before the election.

    4. Twitter Files Part 4, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 10, 2022

      THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 7th, 2021

      This thread by Michael Shellenberger looks at the key day after the J6 riots and before Trump would ultimately be banned from Twitter on January 8th, showing how Twitter internally reconfigured its rules to make a Trump ban fit their policies.

      Key revelations: at least one Twitter employee worried about a “slippery slope” in which “an online platform CEO with a global presence… can gatekeep speech for the entire world,” only to be shot down. Also, chief censor Roth argues for a ban on congressman Matt Gaetz even though it “doesn’t quite fit anywhere (duh),” and Twitter changed its “public interest policy” to clear a path for Trump’s removal.

    5. Twitter Files Part 5, by @BariWeiss, December 11, 2022

      THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP, January 8th, 2021

      As angry as many inside Twitter were with Donald Trump after the January 6th Capitol riots, staffers struggled to suspend his account, saying things like, “I think we’d have a hard time saying this is incitement.” As documented by Weiss, they found a way to pull the trigger anyway.

      Key revelations: there were dissenters in the company (“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation”), but are overruled by senior executives like Vijaya Gadde and Roth, who noted many on Twitter’s staff were citing the “Banality of Evil,” and comparing those who favored sticking to a strict legalistic interpretation of Twitter’s rules — i.e. keep Trump, who had “no violation” — to “Nazis following orders.”

    6. Twitter Files Part 6, by @mtaibbi, December 16, 2022

      TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY

      Twitter’s contact with the FBI was “constant and pervasive,” as FBI personnel, mainly in the San Francisco field office, regularly sent lists of “reports” to Twitter, often about Americans with low follower counts making joke tweets. Tweeters on both the left and the right were affected.

      Key revelations: A senior Twitter executive reports, “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing” classified information exist. Twitter also agreed to “bounce” content on the recommendations of a wide array of governmental and quasi-governmental actors, from the FBI to the Homeland Security agency CISA to Stanford’s Election Integrity Project to state governments. The company one day received so many moderation requests from the FBI, an executive congratulated staffers at the end for completing the “monumental undertaking.”

    7. Twitter Files Part 7, by @ShellenbergerMD, December 19, 2022

      THE FBI AND HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP

      The Twitter Files story increases its focus on the company’s relationship to federal law enforcement and intelligence, and shows intense communication between the FBI and Twitter just before the release of the Post’s Hunter Biden story.

      Key Revelations: San Francisco agent Elvis Chan “sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” the evening before the release of the Post story. Also, Baker in an email explains Twitter was compensated for “processing requests” by the FBI, saying “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”

    The ten teleporter documents referred to in Mike Shellenberger’s FBI thread.

    1. Twitter Files Part 8, by @lhfang, December 20, 2022

      HOW TWITTER QUIETLY AIDED THE PENTAGON’S COVERT ONLINE PSYOP CAMPAIGN

      Lee Fang takes a fascinating detour, looking at how Twitter for years approved and supported Pentagon-backed covert operations. Noting the company explicitly testified to Congress that it didn’t allow such behavior, the platform nonetheless was a clear partner in state-backed programs involving fake accounts.

      Key revelations: after the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) sent over a list of 52 Arab-language accounts “we use to amplify certain messages,” Twitter agreed to “whitelist” them. Ultimately the program would be outed in the Washington Post in 2022 — two years after Twitter and other platforms stopped assisting — but contrary to what came out in those reports, Twitter knew about and/or assisted in these programs for at least three years, from 2017-2020.

      Lee wrote a companion piece for the Intercept here:

    2. Twitter Files Part 9, by @mtaibbi, December 24th, 2022

      TWITTER AND “OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES”

      The Christmas Eve thread (I should have waited a few days to publish!) further details how the channels of communication between the federal government and Twitter operated, and reveals that Twitter directly or indirectly received lists of flagged content from “Other Government Agencies,” i.e. the CIA.

      Key revelations: CIA officials attended at least one conference with Twitter in the summer of 2020, and companies like Twitter and Facebook received “OGA briefings,” at their regular “industry” meetings held in conjunction with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The FBI and the “Foreign Influence Task Force” met regularly “not just with Twitter, but with Yahoo!, Twitch, Cloudfare, LinkedIn, even Wikimedia.”

    3. Twitter Files Part 10, by @DavidZweig, December 28, 2022

      HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE

      David Zweig drills down into how Twitter throttled down information about COVID that was true but perhaps inconvenient for public officials, “discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed.”

      Key Revelations: Zweig found memos from Twitter personnel who’d liaised with Biden administration officials who were “very angry” that Twitter had not deplatformed more accounts. White House officials for instance wanted attention on reporter Alex Berenson. Zweig also found “countless” instances of Twitter banning or labeling “misleading” accounts that were true or merely controversial. A Rhode Island physician named Andrew Bostom, for instance, was suspended for, among other things, referring to the results of a peer-reviewed study on mRNA vaccines.

    4. and

    5. Twitter Files Parts 11 and 12, by @mtaibbi, January 3, 2023

      HOW TWITTER LET THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY IN

      and

      TWITTER AND THE FBI “BELLY BUTTON”

      These two threads focus respectively on the second half of 2017, and a period stretching roughly from summer of 2020 through the present. The first describes how Twitter fell under pressure from Congress and the media to produce “material” showing a conspiracy of Russian accounts on their platform, and the second shows how Twitter tried to resist fulfilling moderation requests for the State Department, but ultimately agreed to let State and other agencies send requests through the FBI, which agent Chan calls “the belly button of the USG.” Revelations: at the close of 2017, Twitter makes a key internal decision. Outwardly, the company would claim independence and promise that content would only be removed at “our sole discretion.” The internal guidance says, in writing, that Twitter will remove accounts “identified by the U.S. intelligence community” as “identified by the U.S.. intelligence community as a state-sponsored entity conducting cyber-operations.”

      The second thread shows how Twitter took in requests from everyone — Treasury, HHS, NSA, FBI, DHS, etc. — and also received personal requests from politicians like Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who asked to have journalist Paul Sperry suspended.

    GLOSSARY OF “TWITTER FILES” TERMS

    1. Government Agencies and NGOs

      CISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

      CENTCOM: Central Command of the Armed Forces

      ODNI: Office of the Director of National Intelligence

      FITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI

      “OGA”: Other Government Agency, colloquially — CIA

      GEC: Global Engagement Center, an analytical division of the U.S. State Department

      USIC: United States intelligence community

      HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through which states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accounts

      EIP: Election Integrity Project, a cyber-laboratory based at Stanford University that sends many reports to Twitter

      DFR: Digital Forensic Research lab, an outlet that performs a similar function to the EIP, only is funded by the Atlantic Council

      IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm” headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin

       

    2. Twitter or Industry-specific terms

      PII: Can have two meanings. “Personally identifiable information” is self-explanatory, while a “Public Interest Interstitial” is a warning placed over a tweet, so that it cannot be seen. Twitter personnel even use “interstitial” as a verb, as in, “Can we interstitial that?”

      JIRA: Twitter’s internal ticketing system, through which complaints rise and are decided

      PV2: The system used at Twitter to view the profile of any user, to check easily if it has flags like “Trends Blacklist”

      SIP-PES Site Integrity Policy — Policy Escalation Support. SIP-PES is like Twitter’s version of a moderation Supreme Court, dealing with the most high-profile, controversial rulings

      SI: Site integrity. Key term that you’ll see repeately in Twitter email traffic, especially with “escalations,” i.e. tweets or content that have been reported for moderation review

      CHA: Coordinated Harmful Activity

      SRT: Strategic Response Team

      GET: Global Escalation Team

      VF: Visibility Filtering

      GUANO: Tool in Twitter’s internal system that keeps a chronological record of all actions taken on an account

      VIT: Very Important Tweeter. Really.

      GoV: Glorificaiton of Violence

      BOT: In the moderation content, an individualized heuristic attached to an account that moderates certain behavior automatically

      BME: Bulk Media Exploitation

      EP Abuse: Episodic abuse

      PCF: Parity, commentary and fan accounts. “PCF” sometimes appears as a reason an account has escaped an automated moderation process, under a limited exception

      FLC: Forced Login Challenge. Also called a “phone challenge,” it’s a way Twitter attempts to verify if an account is real or automated. “Phone challenges” are seen repeatedly in discussions about verification of suspected “Russia-linked” accounts

      IO: Information Operations, as in The GEC’s mandate for offensive IO to promote American interests.

    This page will be kept open and updated as needed. If you have questions about terms, please send them to taibbi@substack.com

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 22:25

  • FBI Agent Who Destroyed Evidence To Indict GOP Sen. May Get Wrist-Slap
    FBI Agent Who Destroyed Evidence To Indict GOP Sen. May Get Wrist-Slap

    Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA (emphasis ours),

    With his sentencing scheduled for Thursday, disgraced FBI agent Robert Cessario seeks probation for illegally destroying evidence related to the prosecution of a former Republican Arkansas state senator—but critics say prison time is necessary to fight corruption in the federal justice system.

    Connie Davies, pictured holding the ‘FBI LIED’ banner, participates in a rally in Arkansas on Tuesday to hold the FBI accountable for destroying evidence in its case against former state Sen. Jon Woods. / PHOTO: Courtesy of Connie Davies

    Cessario’s crime stems from the 2018 trial of former Arkansas state senator Jon Woods, a Republican, who was convicted of mail fraud and wire fraud charges and sentenced to roughly 18 years imprisonment. Woods was accused of participating in a scheme in which he accepted kickbacks in exchange for steering state grants to a small college in the state.

    During discovering proceedings in the Woods trial, prosecutors ordered Cessario to turn over his laptop for a forensic examination. However, the former FBI agent lied to prosecutors, telling them he previously erased the laptop’s hard drive. Then, prior to delivering the laptop for examination, he paid professionals to erase the laptop’s hard drive.

    Cessario was terminated from the FBI for his crime, and he pleaded guilty in August to destroying evidence related to the case against Woods.

    Nevertheless, the Eighth District Court of Appeals upheld Woods’s conviction, ruling that the “evidence of the conspiracy [against Woods] was overwhelming,” despite the FBI’s conduct.

    Cessario faces up to 20 years in prison. Last month, his attorney argued for one year of probation in lieu of a prison sentence in a brief to U.S. District Judge P. K. Holmes III.

    In his brief, Cessario’s attorney cited the case of former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who was sentenced to one year probation for altering evidence in the Russiagate investigation.

    He also cited the case of former FBI agent William Tisaby, who received a suspended sentence of one year probation after pleading guilty earlier this year to tampering with evidence in the investigation of former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens.

    “Both the Clinesmith and the Tisaby cases involve conduct that is not only substantially similar with the conduct underlying this charge against Robert Cessario, but the conduct of each of these two defendants appears to be almost exactly in line with the conduct of the defendant Cessario,” Cessario’s attorney wrote in the Dec. 12 sentencing brief.

    The U.S. government responded to Cessario’s brief three days later, agreeing that probation is an appropriate sentence for the former FBI agent.

    “The government has no evidence suggesting that the defendant had any reason for wiping the computer other than his expressed one, which was to remove sensitive personal and family information on the computer,” prosecutors wrote in their Dec. 15 brief. “As such, the government concludes that a sentence of probation will accomplish the sentencing factors.”

    However, conservative activists are calling for Cessario to be incarcerated for his crime. Those activists, including Connie Davies and Patsy Wootton, held a rally Tuesday in Arkansas to demand justice against Cessario.

    “If he gets away with this, what message are we sending to other FBI agents? What message are we sending to the American people who are held to a higher standard?” Davies told Headline USA in an interview following the rally. “If there’s no consequence for this kind of action, we’re in trouble.”

    Davies said the data Cessario erased from his laptop could have included exonerating evidence for Woods. She noted that even the Washington DC-based National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers – not known for taking up conservative causes – has criticized Cessario’s conduct in the Woods case as a gross violation of due process.

    Davies said she finds it plausible that Woods was targeted by the FBI over his outspoken support of then-candidate Donald Trump. Woods was the only Arkansas elected official to support Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries.

    Woods, who is serving his sentence at a minimum-security federal correctional institution in Texas, said his ordeal is part of God’s plan.

    “I did get steamrolled, but I prayed about it and I was overcome with peace to fight … When I began to stand up for myself, the agent on my case started to act strange and then broke the law,” Woods said in a statement provided by Davies. “The agent will be sentenced Jan. 5. I do not know God’s plan, but I do know I am where He wants me for the time being until something changes.”

    The FBI’s sordid history of tampering with and destroying evidence dates back decades, as chronicled by authors John Kelly and Phillip Wearne in their book, “Tainting Evidence : Behind the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab.”  This book features interviews and records from former FBI crime-lab scientist Fred Whitehurst, who came out as a whistleblower in the 1990s about the bureau’s mishandling of evidence.

    Whitehurst revealed that the FBI mishandled evidence in prominent investigations into the Unabomber, O.J. Simpson, and the Oklahoma City bombing cases. The Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General found some of Whitehurst’s key allegations to be substantiated in an April 1997 report.

    Follow Ken Silva on Twitter.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 22:05

  • "The Leech Class": Pulling America Back From The Precipice
    “The Leech Class”: Pulling America Back From The Precipice

    Authored by Matthew Brouillette via RealClear Wire,

    It’s not often than a CEO of a large, publicly traded company speaks bluntly in public about politics and political power. So, both “surprising” and “refreshing” describe energy executive Nick Deiuliis’s new book, Precipice: The Left’s Campaign to Destroy America (Republic Book Publishers).

    Deiuliis, a chemical engineer and attorney by training, is director and chief executive officer of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based CNX Resources Corporation, one of the largest natural gas exploration, development, and production companies.

    In addition to penning Precipice, Deiuliis is a prolific writer on topics ranging from the American Civil War to professional sports to the Federal Reserve to music. When he’s not writing, he hosts “The Far Middle,” a weekly podcast that tackles topics including energy, business, politics, culture, sports, and more.

    In short, Deiuliis does not fit the stereotype of the CEO of a publicly traded company. 

    As an energy leader, Deiuliis is an unapologetic advocate for his industry, and he makes a strong case that abundant and affordable energy is indispensable for developing and prosperous civilizations.

    But his book’s subtitle – “The Left’s Campaign to Destroy America” – best captures Precipice’s focus, which extends far beyond the energy industry. Deiuliis identifies four categories of members of modern society: “Creators,” “Enablers,” “Servers,” and “Leeches.”

    Creators generate the wealth that leads to the civilization’s success. These include the scientists, surgeons, engineers, techies, manufacturers, constructors, and members of the building trades, who provide the foundation for any modern society.  

    Enablers support the Creators. They are the accountants, nurses, data clerks, financiers, bus drivers, and clerical workers. Their professions increase Creators’ efficiency.

    Servers make up the largest societal member group and include those who improve the quality of life for individuals and increase efficiency for everyone – from the waitress in a restaurant to the mechanic who fixes your car to the landscaper who mows your lawn. Servers do the jobs you might be able to do yourself but are willing to pay someone else to do in order to free yourself up for other things.

    Finally, Leeches, as their name suggests, live off the productivity of a host – with the hosts in this case being the members of the other three groups.

    These four groups are not exactly the lens through which most Americans observe their society, but perhaps they should be. Deiuliis offers a unique and invaluable framework for understanding the basis of economic activity in America today.

    Not surprisingly, while Deiuliis celebrates the first three member groups, he has disdain for the fourth category, the Leech. While the first three groups “built and fuel a culture of making” and make the world go round, the Leech “stands in stark contrast to and in direct conflict” with the first three and undermines the American Dream.

    The Leech class is deeply embedded across multiple industries – members of the plaintiffs’ bar, who use the law against social flourishing; public sector unions (particularly teachers’ unions) that use tax dollars to thwart the public interest; members of the media, who act as a public relations arm for government, and members of academia, who formulate many of the premises on which leech-ism depends. But Deiuliis argues that the most troubling leeches are found in government bureaucracies. While he recognizes the need for rules and regulations, he argues that the government Leech has gone far beyond simply serving and protecting the public; he has crossed the line into making the lives of everyone more difficult.

    The Leech class, Deiuliis writes, is destroying America—strategically.  

    Deiuliis also makes the case that our modern economy rests on four pillars: energy, finance, healthcare, and technology. Leeches target these pillars with the primary objective of controlling them, a process Deiuliis goes into great detail to explain. Creators, Enablers, and Servers suffer the negative consequences of these attacks.

    Precipice is admittedly a depressing reality check on the state of America – but it is much needed. As President Ronald Reagan once said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

    Creators, Enablers, and Servers have made America the freest, most prosperous nation in history. The Leeches threaten that freedom and prosperity. Deiuliis’s conclusion is prescient: “We know who the enemy is; let us engage in public discourse so that good prevails over evil.” Indeed, if we don’t, America will soon go over the precipice – and into the history books, joining many other once-great civilizations.

    Precipice is an eye-opening read for business leaders, policymakers, and anyone who cherishes the liberties that define America.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 21:45

  • Police Failures In Philadelphia Have Made Private Policing More Attractive
    Police Failures In Philadelphia Have Made Private Policing More Attractive

    Authored by Tate Fegley via The Mises Institute,

    While “private policing” is in many people’s minds a feature of dystopian science fiction or the fantasies of libertarian economists, the reality is that private security is far more common than most think. Indeed, as Georgetown professor John Hasnas points out, it is all around us. Unfortunately, the impetus for much of the growth in the private security industry has been the inadequacies of state-provided protection.

    An example of this phenomenon is JNS Protection Services, which recently garnered attention in the Philadelphia Inquirer. JNS provides a variety of security services in Georgia and Pennsylvania, including North Philadelphia, where Temple University is located.

    Temple Students living off campus fear for their safety. This is understandable, considering the amount of crime North Philadelphia is experiencing. On November 28, 2021, Temple senior Samuel Collington was fatally shot in a parking lot near campus during what appears to have been an attempted robbery. Less than two weeks earlier, on November 16, high school senior Ahmir Jones was also killed during a robbery attempt just blocks from Temple. In 2021, Philadelphia as a whole surpassed its murder record; the previous peak of over five hundred murders annually was during the crack cocaine epidemic of the early 1990s.

    After a broad-daylight armed robbery took place outside one student’s residence, his mother decided to hire JNS to patrol his neighborhood. Although JNS was initially hired to patrol the area three days per week, the plan came to the attention of a Facebook group of Temple parents, and they contributed funds to expand the service to five days per week.

    An opinion column detailing the events included a former Philadelphia police officer’s views on parents’ move to hire private security:

    “They’re just a town watch,” pointed out David Fisher, a retired Philadelphia police officer and president of the National Black Police Association, Greater Philadelphia chapter.

    “They are more eyes and ears on the streets that they’re patrolling. It’s good. But will it be effective? I’m not sure.”

    While we would not expect Fisher to apologize on behalf the Philadelphia Police Department for failing to maintain public safety to such an extent that the parents of students at a premier research university feel the need to hire private security, his condescending attitude is notable for two reasons.

    • The first is that it provides further evidence suggesting that, despite the rhetoric and billions spent on community-oriented policing (COP), a significant contingent of police officers never bought into it and its emphasis on police-community partnerships. Rather, COP became popular among police departments mainly because of the gibs being handed out by the Department of Justice. Instead of being a vital component in the production of public safety, nonpolice are “just a town watch” who are, at best, “more eyes and ears on the streets” that can be useful to the real police.

    • The second reason is that while Fisher expressed concerns over whether private security will be effective, the Philadelphia Police Department is able to escape such scrutiny despite the record number of murders and students being killed by armed robbers. In contrast to JNS Protection Services, the city police do not have to demonstrate their effectiveness to Philadelphians in order to get paid. Local (as well as US) taxpayers will continue to fund them regardless.

    Perhaps parents will find that JNS’s services are ineffective or unsatisfactory. Perhaps a competitor will provide a better service at a lower price. But just as school choice creates financial incentives for public schools that give parents more control, security providers are more responsive when parents have police choice.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 21:25

  • Macron Pledges 'First Western Tanks' To Ukraine While US Mulls Bradley Fighting Vehicles
    Macron Pledges ‘First Western Tanks’ To Ukraine While US Mulls Bradley Fighting Vehicles

    French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday announced he intends to send ‘light tanks’ to Ukraine, which will make France the first to supply Western-manufactured tanks to the conflict, after some like Poland earlier transferred Soviet tanks. 

    While NATO allies have gradually increased the sophistication of weaponry shipped to Kiev, including longer range missiles and more recently Patriot systems approved by the US, they have stopped short of sending either tanks or fighter jets, largely on fears of Moscow expanding the war in response.

    “The president wanted to increase… aid” to Ukraine “by accepting to deliver AMX-10 RC light tanks” – a Macron aide told reporters following the French leader holding a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

    AMX-10RC tank, via Wiki Commons

    The AFP has described the French-made AMX-10 RC as an older light model tanks which the French infantry used in the 1980s, but has since been phased out. It is six-wheeled and not on tracks, thus it’s sometimes called a “wheeled tank” – but has a powerful 105 mm gun on a turret. 

    Among other medium and heavy equipment, France and other countries have already delivered armored personnel carriers to Ukraine, so this appears the next step up, perhaps paving the way to heavier more conventional tanks to match Russia’s significant tank forces.

    Previously, Poland and the Czech Republic have sent Soviet-era tanks to Ukraine, even as Western Europe and the US were reluctant. 

    As for the United States, the Biden administration is mulling sending Bradley Fighting Vehicles to Ukrainian forces, with the president responding “yes” to a journalist’s question Wednesday when asked about prior reporting… 

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

    Bloomberg was the first to report last week that “The US government is considering sending Bradley Fighting Vehicles to Ukraine as part of a further package of military support, according to people familiar with the matter.”

    “A final decision hasn’t yet been made, one of the people said,” the report said. “When the vehicles would be operational is also unclear, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue.” Biden on Wednesday officially confirmed the deliberations are underway.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 21:05

  • Kevin McCarthy And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    Kevin McCarthy And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

    Update (2100ET): Kevin McCarthy has now suffered defeat six times in his bid to become House Speaker.

    His allies are spending Wednesday night trying to appeal to at least 20 holdouts who have blocked his bid for a second day.

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

    After taking a several-hour break on Wednesday to stall any further votes, the House quickly voted to adjourn until Noon on Thursday – with all Democrats and four Republicans voting against the pause.

    The motion to adjourn was made by GOP Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, while the four GOP lawmakers who opposed adjournment were Reps. Andy Biggs, Lauren Bobert, Matt Gaetz and Rep.-elect Eli Crane.

    When the House meets again on Thursday it will hold its seventh round of votes for speaker.

    Of note, the House cannot conduct any other business until a speaker is elected – including swearing in new members.

    On the holdout side, Rep. Chip Roy thinks he can get 10 anti-McCarthy reps to change their tune if ongoing negotiations pan out, according to CNN, citing GOP sources familiar with the internal discussions. Additional detractors may be willing to vote ‘present,’ reducing the number of votes McCarthy needs to succeed. 

    According to the report, the talks between McCarthy allies and holdouts have been the ‘most productive and serious ones to date.’

    *  *  *

    Update (1640ET): The House has adjourned until 8 p.m. ET Wednesday after failing to receive a majority of the vote for a sixth time.

    Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana once again voted present, making the threshold for McCarthy to win 217.

    The final tally – which was unchanged from the previous two votes, was:

    • 212 for Jeffries
    • 201 for McCarthy
    • 20 for Donalds
    • 1 present vote

    Update (1620ET): Kevin McCarthy appears set to lose yet another round of voting for House Speaker.

    That said, in a potentially positive development for McCarthy, Rep. Chip Roy said there have been ‘productive’ negotiations over the past two hours, according to CNN, who added that he expects to be part of Wednesday evening negotiations.

    Roy added that he is not a ‘hard no’ on McCarthy, and that the GOP conference is “trying to repair that damage today, and progress has been made.”

    CNN is also reporting that Republicans are considering appointing four members each from the pro/anti McCarthy camps to negotiate a path forward.

    One Democratic lawmaker also tells CNN they overheard Rep. Jim Jordan tell members huddled on the House floor that McCarthy wants each side to appoint four members to negotiate after this sixth round of voting for House speaker.

    The huddle came after McCarthy lost a fifth bid to secure the speakership, as a group of 20 Republicans remain opposed to the California Republican for the top position. –CNN

    An earlier version of this report briefly included an statement wrongly attributed to Former President Trump indicating he had withdrawn support for McCarthy. That has been removed and the post updated.

    *  *  *

    Update (1441ET): And just like that, McCarthy loses a the fifth round for House Speaker. The vote was identical to the fourth round.

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

    According to CNN‘s Manu Raju, Rep. Byron Donalds says he’s spoken with McCarthy and plans to speak with him again today.

    He declined to comment when asked if McCarthy should drop out.

    House Republicans are at a contentious stalemate over who will serve as the next speaker amid what appears to be hardened opposition to McCarthy from a group of 20 conservatives who voted for Donalds in today’s first vote.

    He told CNN that the chief demand is to allow just one member to call for a vote seeking a speaker’s ouster.

    That is down from the five-member threshold that McCarthy has proposed, which is lower than conference rules that sets it at half the conference. -CNN

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    Earlier in the day, GOP Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado says he’s had a “number of conversations” with McCarthy – and told him that he needs to cut a deal with the opposing GOP members or step aside.

    “I said to Kevin at some point, you know, you’ve got to make sure you gotta either cut a deal or you’ve got to give Steve [Scalise] a chance or others a chance to see if they can put it together. My feeling is Kevin gets more votes than anybody else,” Buck told reporters outside the House chamber.

    “There are a few of those 20 that just aren’t going to vote for Kevin McCarthy but would vote for somebody else. There are some of the others … who want changes in the rules and there are some others who care about policy. I think if Steve meets those three needs, he will be able to move forward and take the speakership,” he then told CNN‘s Dana Bash, adding that “today the conference as a whole needs to make a decision” as the House is in a “state of disarray and chaos.“

    *  *  *

    Update (1415ET): And once again, McCarthy lacks the votes in the fifth round.

    *  *  *

    Update (1320ET): McCarthy has officially lost again after a fourth round of voting for Speaker – garnering just 201 votes out of the 218 required. For reference, he received 203 votes in the first round.

    Interestingly, Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who previously voted for McCarthy, voted ‘present’ in the fourth round.

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    Democrats voted unanimously (and symbolically) for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.

    Via CNN

    According to Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, McCarthy is ‘losing it.’

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    And now, for the fifth round…

    *  *  *

    Update (1130ET): Kevin McCarthy and his allies are actively discussing adjourning the House until Thursday, but might not even have the votes to pull that off, CNN reports, citing multiple sources.

    McCarthy and crew are worried that they could lose more votes if they go to a fourth ballot, which would completely undermine their claims of regaining momentum. At present, they lack the votes to move forward.

    In order to adjourn the House, however, they need 218 votes – which they don’t have.

    Their hope is that furious negotiations that have happened since yesterday evening through this morning have peeled away some of the no-votes and given McCarthy forward momentum ahead of a critical fourth ballot. But, he is still unlikely to get 218 votes on that ballot to win the speakership. 

    Here’s why a vote to adjourn might fail: Voting to adjourn would require 218 votes, and Democratic sources say they would actively whip against a motion to adjourn. Plus some Republicans will likely vote against it as well. -CNN

    If they can’t adjourn, the vote goes to a fourth ballot.

    Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), meanwhile, called Trump’s endorsement of McCarthy “Sad!” in a Wednesday statement to Fox News, adding “This changes neither my view of McCarthy, nor Trump, nor my vote.”

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

    Oh – and the Democrats are about to pour salt in McCarthy’s wound if he tries to adjourn.

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

    After yesterday’s chaos at the House, which saw support for Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) increasingly wane throughout three failed votes for Speaker, the House begins Wednesday in a state of crisis.

    Roughly 10% of the Republican conference has voted against McCarthy, leaving him 16 votes shy of a win.

    As such, no Speaker means no committees, and no rules. As Punchbowl News notes, “There are members-elect, but the chaos Tuesday prevented any lawmakers from being officially sworn in. Nothing resembling this has occurred in more than a century.”

    Indeed, McCarthy appears to be on the ropes – with 20 GOP lawmakers sitting staunchly opposed to the California lawmaker, led by Reps. Matt Gaetz (FL), Chip Roy (TX) and Scott Perry (PA).

    As one reader notes…

    On Tuesday night, Roy appeared on Fox News‘ “Ingraham Angle’ where he accused McCarthy of rejecting a list of conservative demands regarding committee assignments.

    “[McCarthy] turns around and he lies about us. Then he has [Alabama Rep.] Mike Rogers stand up and talk about kicking us off committees. He just burned himself. He just solidified 15 or 20 [members] who were against him,” he said.

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

    As Axios‘ Alexi McCammond points out, the ‘nightmare’ scenario Nancy Pelosi faced from ‘The Squad’ in 2019 has become McCarthy’s reality.

    Indeed, McCarthy is scrambling – having dispatched top emissaries late Tuesday to begin negotiating with the group of 20 dissenters. Key allies include Reps. Patrick McHenry (NC), French Hill (AR), Garret Graves (LA.), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA) and Guy Reschenthaler (PA), who McCarthy hopes can convince his detractors to flip.

    More via Punchbowl News;

    These McCarthy allies were also instructed to share the conservatives’ demands with the entire conference. McHenry, a top leadership lieutenant during the Trump presidency, told us this about his task:

    “Everyone needs to be on the same page about what the needs are for rules and structural changes so we can have Speaker McCarthy elected [Wednesday].”

    Elect a speaker today? We’re not so sure that will happen.

    McHenry is one of the smartest inside players in the House and a potential speaker should McCarthy falter. He and the rest of the McCarthy emissaries are working to socialize exactly what the conservatives want so everyone can “come to terms with getting the 20 [no votes] on board.”

    There is a lot of horse-trading going on right now. Or, as McHenry put it:

    “In a legislative institution, all the gifts of the institution are available when you have a moment like this… It can look as shambolic as you want it to look for as long as possible, but it still gets resolved.”

    One of the keys here is that it’s not only McCarthy and his top aides involved in the talks now – it’s a wider swath of members with different skills and different relationships. The conservatives have a lot of scar tissue with McCarthy. Widening the circle could help with reaching an accord.

    Meanwhile, former President Trump (whose conduct on January 6 McCarthy called “atrocious and totally wrong,” and that he was “inciting people”) gave McCarthy an ALL CAPS ENDORSEMENT, posting to Truth Social;

    “Some really good conversations took place last night,” adding “and it’s now time for all of our GREAT Republican House Members to VOTE FOR KEVIN, CLOSE THE DEAL, TAKE THE VICTORY, & WATCH CRAZY NANCY PELOSI FLY BACK HOME TO A VERY BROKEN CALIFORNIA.”

    “Kevin McCarthy will do a good job, and maybe even a GREAT JOB – JUST WATCH!” Trump continued, apparently forgiving Kevin for joking in 2016 that Putin was ‘paying Trump.’

    Will Trump’s endorsement speak to Biggs, Gaetz or Chip Roy?

    Not likely.

    “If you want to drain the swamp, you cannot put the biggest alligator in charge of the exercise,” Gaetz said on Tuesday.

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

    *  *  *

    Update (1415ET): And once again, McCarthy lacks the votes in the fifth round.

    *  *  *

    Update (1320ET): McCarthy has officially lost again after a fourth round of voting for Speaker – garnering just 201 votes out of the 218 required. For reference, he received 203 votes in the first round.

    Interestingly, Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who previously voted for McCarthy, voted ‘present’ in the fourth round.

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

    Democrats voted unanimously (and symbolically) for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.

    Via CNN

    According to Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, McCarthy is ‘losing it.’

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    And now, for the fifth round…

    *  *  *

    Update (1130ET): Kevin McCarthy and his allies are actively discussing adjourning the House until Thursday, but might not even have the votes to pull that off, CNN reports, citing multiple sources.

    McCarthy and crew are worried that they could lose more votes if they go to a fourth ballot, which would completely undermine their claims of regaining momentum. At present, they lack the votes to move forward.

    In order to adjourn the House, however, they need 218 votes – which they don’t have.

    Their hope is that furious negotiations that have happened since yesterday evening through this morning have peeled away some of the no-votes and given McCarthy forward momentum ahead of a critical fourth ballot. But, he is still unlikely to get 218 votes on that ballot to win the speakership. 

    Here’s why a vote to adjourn might fail: Voting to adjourn would require 218 votes, and Democratic sources say they would actively whip against a motion to adjourn. Plus some Republicans will likely vote against it as well. -CNN

    If they can’t adjourn, the vote goes to a fourth ballot.

    Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), meanwhile, called Trump’s endorsement of McCarthy “Sad!” in a Wednesday statement to Fox News, adding “This changes neither my view of McCarthy, nor Trump, nor my vote.”

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

    Oh – and the Democrats are about to pour salt in McCarthy’s wound if he tries to adjourn.

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

    After yesterday’s chaos at the House, which saw support for Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) increasingly wane throughout three failed votes for Speaker, the House begins Wednesday in a state of crisis.

    Roughly 10% of the Republican conference has voted against McCarthy, leaving him 16 votes shy of a win.

    As such, no Speaker means no committees, and no rules. As Punchbowl News notes, “There are members-elect, but the chaos Tuesday prevented any lawmakers from being officially sworn in. Nothing resembling this has occurred in more than a century.”

    Indeed, McCarthy appears to be on the ropes – with 20 GOP lawmakers sitting staunchly opposed to the California lawmaker, led by Reps. Matt Gaetz (FL), Chip Roy (TX) and Scott Perry (PA).

    As one reader notes…

    On Tuesday night, Roy appeared on Fox News‘ “Ingraham Angle’ where he accused McCarthy of rejecting a list of conservative demands regarding committee assignments.

    “[McCarthy] turns around and he lies about us. Then he has [Alabama Rep.] Mike Rogers stand up and talk about kicking us off committees. He just burned himself. He just solidified 15 or 20 [members] who were against him,” he said.

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

    As Axios‘ Alexi McCammond points out, the ‘nightmare’ scenario Nancy Pelosi faced from ‘The Squad’ in 2019 has become McCarthy’s reality.

    Indeed, McCarthy is scrambling – having dispatched top emissaries late Tuesday to begin negotiating with the group of 20 dissenters. Key allies include Reps. Patrick McHenry (NC), French Hill (AR), Garret Graves (LA.), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA) and Guy Reschenthaler (PA), who McCarthy hopes can convince his detractors to flip.

    More via Punchbowl News;

    These McCarthy allies were also instructed to share the conservatives’ demands with the entire conference. McHenry, a top leadership lieutenant during the Trump presidency, told us this about his task:

    “Everyone needs to be on the same page about what the needs are for rules and structural changes so we can have Speaker McCarthy elected [Wednesday].”

    Elect a speaker today? We’re not so sure that will happen.

    McHenry is one of the smartest inside players in the House and a potential speaker should McCarthy falter. He and the rest of the McCarthy emissaries are working to socialize exactly what the conservatives want so everyone can “come to terms with getting the 20 [no votes] on board.”

    There is a lot of horse-trading going on right now. Or, as McHenry put it:

    “In a legislative institution, all the gifts of the institution are available when you have a moment like this… It can look as shambolic as you want it to look for as long as possible, but it still gets resolved.”

    One of the keys here is that it’s not only McCarthy and his top aides involved in the talks now – it’s a wider swath of members with different skills and different relationships. The conservatives have a lot of scar tissue with McCarthy. Widening the circle could help with reaching an accord.

    Meanwhile, former President Trump (whose conduct on January 6 McCarthy called “atrocious and totally wrong,” and that he was “inciting people”) gave McCarthy an ALL CAPS ENDORSEMENT, posting to Truth Social;

    “Some really good conversations took place last night,” adding “and it’s now time for all of our GREAT Republican House Members to VOTE FOR KEVIN, CLOSE THE DEAL, TAKE THE VICTORY, & WATCH CRAZY NANCY PELOSI FLY BACK HOME TO A VERY BROKEN CALIFORNIA.”

    “Kevin McCarthy will do a good job, and maybe even a GREAT JOB – JUST WATCH!” Trump continued, apparently forgiving Kevin for joking in 2016 that Putin was ‘paying Trump.’

    Will Trump’s endorsement speak to Biggs, Gaetz or Chip Roy?

    Not likely.

    “If you want to drain the swamp, you cannot put the biggest alligator in charge of the exercise,” Gaetz said on Tuesday.

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

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 20:52

  • How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class?
    How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class?

    Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

    If we want social / economic renewal, we have to make it easy to climb the ladder to middle class security for anyone willing to adopt the values and habits of thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work.

    Let’s stipulate that the rise of the middle class is the core driver of expansion, innovation and democracy and the decay of the middle class is the core source of economic / political / social disorder and decline.

    The pathway to middle class security has profound social, political and economic consequences. As people acquire means, they can afford more education, and they have a stake in the system that needs to be defended / advocated. This advocacy nurtures a diversity of views, democratic / legal institutions and a free press.

    As the book The Inheritance of Rome detailed, the egalitarian aspects of Roman rule continued to influence everyday life for hundreds of years.

    It took centuries for feudalism to eradicate these holdovers from Roman rule (for example, peasant ownership of land).

    The rise of ths middle class broke the stranglehold of feudalism by encouraging free movement of labor and capital, and strengthening weak central governments to the point that feudal fiefdoms answered to the central government again, as in the Roman and Carolingian eras.

    The key factor that determines the rise of a middle class is the relative ease of laborers becoming middle class. In the classical Roman era, freed slaves often ended up doing very well for themselves and becoming middle class, as the class boundaries were porous enough to enable craftworkers and small merchants to improve their lot in life.

    This boils down to this question: are thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work enough to transform a family from penury to middle class?

    If the answer is “yes,” then the ladder to middle class security is open to anyone who adopts these values / habits.

    If the answer is “no,” then the ladder to middle class security is not open to everyone, and the economy stagnates.

    Broadly speaking, virtually anyone who rigorously adopted thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work in the fifty years from 1946 to 1995 could (once they married and gained a two-income household) eventually afford a family and a stake in the system–a house and/or small business, a pension, etc.

    Once financialization and globalization rose to dominance and distorted the economy with increasing wealth and income inequality (“winner take most”), this was no longer the case.

    Workers of average skill, motivation and wages who adopt thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work can no longer afford a family or a stake in the system–at least in high-cost, enormously unequal locales.

    This is true not just of the U.S. but globally.

    This reality has fueled two trends of decay: 1) a dependence on speculation as the only means to “get ahead” and 2) “laying flat” / “let it rot”–giving up on marrying, having a family and acquiring a stake in the system.

    Once these aspirations are only available to those with the right connections or extraordinary drive / talent, society and the economy decay and collapse under the weight of inequality–an inequality defended by those who made it to the top and want to preserve the status quo as it is.

    This is the driver of decay and collapse: once the elites devote themselves to suppressing adaptations and defending extremes of wealth-income-power inequality that benefit them, the system loses the adaptability that arises from a broad-based middle class.

    The top 10% want the status quo to continue as is, even as the bottom 90% fall behind. When enough of the bottom 90% decide to “let it rot,” the entire structure collapses under its own weight.

    If we want social / economic renewal, we have to make it easy to climb the ladder to middle class security for anyone willing to adopt the values and habits of thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work. The dominance of a class of self-interested insiders and rentiers precludes this, as this class will expend the last of its resources defending the corrupting inequality that has enriched them so gloriously.

    *  *  *

    This essay was drawn from a weekly Musings Report sent exclusively to subscribers and patrons at the $5/month ($50/year) and higher level. Thank you, patrons and subscribers, for supporting my work and free website.

    My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century. Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

    Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 20:45

  • Air Marshals Angry At Biden Admin For 'Menial' Border Tasks While New AQ Threat Emerges
    Air Marshals Angry At Biden Admin For ‘Menial’ Border Tasks While New AQ Threat Emerges

    Judicial Watch says it has obtained a copy of a new intelligence alert first circulated among federal government agencies in December which points to a fresh al-Qaeda threat against the nation. The warning reads: “Al-Qaeda says upcoming attacks on US, possibly involving planes, will use new techniques and tactics,” with DHS sources saying the alert was widely circulated on Dec. 31st. 

    The threat alert comes amid reported ongoing tensions among federal air marshals, who have expressed frustration over being sent by DHS for duties to assist US Customs and Border Protection on the ground along the southern border for what they complain are menial tasks, which until recently were supposed to be merely brief voluntary stints. 

    Getty Images

    The Federal Air Marshal Service is responsible for protecting the flying public by providing armed protection on some commercial flights, in order halt hijackings or other 9/11-style terrorist events, and other threats which could endanger the lives of passengers.

    In wake of the heightened al-Qaeda threat alert, a prominent industry union, the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), is lashing out – with AMNC Executive Director Sonya Labosco saying the following in a new Fox interview: 

    “It looks absolutely insane,” Labosco told co-host Todd Piro. “We don’t understand why these decisions are being made. The intel is clear. Al Qaeda is watching for our weak areas. Our aviation is a high-risk area. We’re not protecting our aviation domain, and we’re going to the border. It is absolutely madness.”

    The controversy has gone public in the last few months, forcing DHS top officials to address the air marshals’ growing complaints. 

    In early December, an independent journal, Homeland Security Today, summarized the conflict between the marshals and DHS leadership under the Biden administration: 

    Beginning last month, federal air marshals have been assigned to 21-day deployments at the southern border that were previously voluntary assignments. The Transportation Security Administration told the Washington Examiner that claims the air marshals were doing menial tasks on the border are “entirely inaccurate and does not reflect the critical and professional law enforcement role these officers perform.”

    The TSA defended itself further in saying, “Federal Air Marshals are performing law enforcement support to the mission at the southwest border,” according to an official statement. “The TSA Federal Air Marshal Service is a highly valued member of the DHS law enforcement team and has an ever-expanding role within DHS, working closely with other U.S. and international law enforcement agencies to safeguard the nation’s transportation systems,” it said.

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

    Furthermore union officials sought to intervene and have begun a media pressure campaign, with Judicial Watch explaining the following in its summary of the standoff: 

    Days later the Air Marshal National Council, which represents thousands of FAM nationwide, accused TSA Administrator David Pekoske and FAM Director Tirrell Stevenson of violating federal law and overstepping their authority by assigning air marshals to assist the U.S. Border Patrol with the illegal immigration crisis. In a formal complaint to the DHS Inspector General, the group also accused the Homeland Security leaders of fraud, waste, and abuse of authority. Sending air marshals to El Paso, Texas, San Diego, California, Laredo, Texas, McAllen, Texas, Tucson, Arizona and Yuma, Arizona to transport illegal immigrants and conduct welfare checks has no relation to TSA’s core mission of transportation security, the complaint states.

    “The statute does not give the Administrator any authority to deploy TSA or FAM employees to the southern border to perform non transportation security related matters,” the complaint to the DHS IG says. “Further, under section (g) the statute describes what the Administrators authority is if an emergency, as defined by the Secretary of Homeland Security, is declared.” The act makes clear that the legislative intent is to only allow TSA to exercise authority and deploy its assets for transportation security, the report to the DHS watchdog confirms.

    In the meantime, the aforementioned union representative LaBosco has highlighted that the air marshals’ work at the border goes beyond what one might think of as menial security tasks. Instead, she describes that air marshals who should be protecting passenger jets in the skies are at places like camps with illegal aliens making sandwiches and running simple errands… “They are making sandwiches for them and driving them around like Uber or picking up supplies.”

    And separately other union representative said of the TSA and DHS, “Either they don’t care about aviation security, or they really think it is secure.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 20:25

  • Ninth Circuit Rules That Middle School Teacher's MAGA Hat Was Protected Speech
    Ninth Circuit Rules That Middle School Teacher’s MAGA Hat Was Protected Speech

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    There is a major ruling out of the United States States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in favor of a middle school science teacher, Eric Dodge, who was barred from wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap and later berated by the principal, Caroline Garrett, as a “racist” and a “homophobe.”

    The unanimous court ruled that the hat was protected speech under the First Amendment.

    District Court judge James L. Robart ruled against Dodge and dismissed the case in its entirety.  (Robart is the judge who was publicly denounced by former President Trump).  Robart dismissed the case on the grounds of qualified immunity or a failure to substantiate claims.

    The Ninth Circuit reversed Robart, but it did uphold the dismissal of the case against two defendants, the Evergreen Public Schools district and the district’s Chief Human Resources Officer Jenae Gomes.

    Eric Dodge had only recently been assigned to the school after he recovered from a stroke. He is a 17-year veteran of the Evergreen district. He told Garrett that he wore the hat because he had sensitive spots on his scalp that had to be protected from the sun. He also said that he agreed with the message of the hat. Garrett said that the hat represented hate and prejudice to many others.

    Garrett’s view of the MAGA hat as a symbol of hate has been fueled in the media by various leaders, particularly President Joe Biden who was denounced for his attacks on “MAGA Republicans” in his Philadelphia speech. We have also seen students and others attacked for wearing the hats. At Fordham University, a coffee shop banned the wearing of the hats.

    Dodge wore the bright-red “MAGA” to a cultural sensitivity training. He actually did not wear the hat in the training session with around 60 people but put it  on the table or next to him. Nevertheless, some attendees complained that they felt “intimidated” and “threatened” by Dodge’s decision to have the hat with him.

    The choice of headwear did not go over well with Garrett in particular:

    “The first day, Principal Garrett, who was Dodge’s supervisor, told him that he needed to use “better judgment” and not have his MAGA hat at Wy’east. The second day, she called him a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, and a liar, and swore at him for having his MAGA hat with him again. By itself, such criticism or “bad-mouthing” does not constitute an adverse employment action sufficient for a First Amendment retaliation claim. … Principal Garrett also has First Amendment rights after all. See id. (“It would be the height of irony, indeed, if mere speech, in response to speech, could constitute a First Amendment violation.”). But Principal Garrett went beyond criticizing Dodge’s political views. She suggested that disciplinary action could occur if she saw Dodge with his hat again by referencing the need for union representation: “The next time I see you with that hat, you need to have your union rep. Bring your rep because I’ll have my own.” It is hardly controversial that threatening a subordinate’s employment if they do not stop engaging in protected speech is reasonably likely to deter that person from speaking. … Principal Garrett claims that she was “[s]imply advising Mr. Dodge of his right to have a representative at any future conversations about the hat,” which is his right under his collective bargaining agreement. This characterization undersells the import and implications that a reasonable employee would attribute to such a statement.”

    The Ninth Circuit ruled that the school district failed to show evidence of a “tangible disruption” to school operations that would outweigh the teacher’s First Amendment rights.

    Notably, there was “no general prohibition on political speech” when Garrett told Dodge he could not bring his MAGA hat to school. His counsel noted that Garrett allowed a Black Lives Matter poster to hang in the library and had a Bernie Sanders bumper sticker on her car.

    The Ninth Circuit correctly ruled in favor of Dodge. It found:

    “Dodge’s speech was his display of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan on a red hat. The content of this speech is quintessentially a matter of public concern. The messages of candidates for public office are not only newsworthy; they inherently relate to the ‘political, social, or other concern to the community.” Lane, 573 U.S. at 241 … Indeed, Principal Garrett and others viewed Dodge’s hat as a comment on issues such as immigration, racism, and bigotry, which are all matters of public concern. … And regardless of Dodge’s intent, the MAGA hat has an obvious political nature.”

    We have previously discussed court rulings against employees who insisted on wearing political hats or symbols at work.  The Ninth Circuit distinguished this case where a teacher was not in class or interacting with students:

    “Here, Dodge had no official duty to wear the MAGA hat, and it was not required to perform his job. Nor did he wear the hat in school with students. That distinguishes this case from other cases involving speech in schools where the speech was reasonably viewed by students and parents as officially promoted by the school. … Where Dodge was not taking ‘advantage of his position to press his particular views upon the impressionable and ‘captive’ minds before him,’ Poway Unified Sch. Dist., 658 F.3d at 968, but rather was displaying a message on a personal item while attending a teacher-only training, we have little trouble concluding that he was engaging in expression as a private citizen, not a public employee.

    Because the undisputed facts demonstrate that Dodge’s MAGA hat conveyed a message of public concern and he was acting as a private citizen in expressing that message, we conclude that Dodge was engaged in speech protected by the First Amendment.”

    The Ninth Circuit was clearly correct in finding the hat to be protected speech. What is concerning is the lack of any discipline for Garrett or others who sought to prevent opposing political views from being expressed by teachers. The denial of free speech should be treated as seriously as other abuses. There should be consequences for administrators who discriminate on the basis on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or political viewpoints. This was a denial of First Amendment rights that should warrant some adverse action for those responsible in the school district.

    While Garrett chastised Dodge to use “better judgment” in the future, the question is whether she or other administrators will do so in light of this ruling. They showed terrible judgment in attacking Dodge over his political views. Others showed equally bad judgment in litigating this case rather than settling the matter with Dodge.

    This ruling will certainly create clear guidelines for the future, but the case also shows the sense of license of many teachers in curtailing the rights of others with opposing political views. That sense of license will continue despite this ruling if there are no consequences for denying free speech rights.

    Here is the opinion: Dodge v. Evergreen District

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 20:05

  • Two Charged In Christmas Day Attacks On Washington Power Grid
    Two Charged In Christmas Day Attacks On Washington Power Grid

    Two men have been hit with federal charges of conspiracy to damage energy facilities, over a Christmas Day attack on four electrical substations in Washington state. That charge carries a punishment of up to 20 years in prison. 

    Matthew Greenwood, 32, and Jeremy Crahan, 40, were arrested on Saturday and charged with breaking into the substations near Tacoma and tampering with power switches in a move that disconnected some 15,000 people from their electrical supply while inflicting $3 million in damage that may take up to 36 months to repair.  

    Security cameras caught these images of one of the suspects at the Elk Plain substation in Washington state (FBI)

    This doesn’t appear to have been an attack with political motivations. Authorities say Greenwood confessed that the scheme was aimed at facilitating their burglary of a business. Having knocked out the power, the duo allegedly traveled to the place of business, drilled out a lock and emptied the cash register.  

    Greenwood was also charged with illegally possessing a short-barreled shotgun and short-barreled rifle.  The shotgun sounds like an oldie: It’s a Sears, Roebuck and Company shotgun with no serial number, according to the charging document. Serial numbers have been broadly required to be placed on firearms since 1968. The rifle is a Remington and appeared to have been equipped with a home-made silencer that leaned heavy on duct tape. 

    They’re not much to look at…but these two short-barreled weapons were enough for feds to tack on two gun charges (FBI) 

    The two alleged criminals, both Puyallup residents, were tracked down using cell phone tower data, and matching their pickup truck to security camera video. The targeted substations are dozens of miles apart, and more than 12 hours passed between the first and last attack. Greenwood said he used bolt cutters provided by Crahan. 

    “We have seen attacks such as these increase in Western Washington and throughout the country and must treat each incident seriously,” said US Attorney Nick Brown in a statement. “The outages on Christmas left thousands in the dark and cold and put some who need power for medical devices at extreme risk.”

    Meanwhile, investigators have yet to make any arrests in a more destructive attack on the power grid in Moore County, North Carolina on Dec. 3. In that incident, two substations came under gunfire, causing a loss of power to more than 35,000 customers during a week when temperatures dipped to 30 degrees.  A $75,000 reward has been offered.

    Following that attack, there was widespread speculation that the perpetrators intended intended to cut power to a controversial drag show that was scheduled to start in the sleepy town of Southern Pines about the same time as the attack.   

    A nationwide increase in attacks on power facilities prompted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission last month to call for an evaluation of the physical security of America’s electric grid.  

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 19:45

  • Is There A Way To Stop Inflation Without Crushing The Economy And Killing The Dollar?
    Is There A Way To Stop Inflation Without Crushing The Economy And Killing The Dollar?

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    One of the most dishonest games being played in economics today is the attempt by various groups (political and financial) to deflect blame for the rise of inflation. The Biden White House and Democrats desperately want to blame Russia and the war in Ukraine, even though inflation was spiking long before the war ever started. The Federal Reserve pretended for years that inflation was not a threat at all despite numerous alternative economists warning what would happen. Now they blame supply chain disruptions instead of their own monetary policies. The GOP wants to blame Biden alone for the crisis while ignoring the dominant role of the Fed in the economy (and their unilateral power) over the course of multiple presidencies.

    In the alternative sphere there are some people that try to deny the fact that there is more than one type of inflation. They want to claim it’s all about money creation, but this is simply not true. There is inflation in money supply, but there is also price inflation caused by numerous factors including bottlenecks in production, bottlenecks in resources, bottlenecks in shipping, bottlenecks in energy, etc. Anyone that denies this fact is blinded by bias or just doesn’t understand how inflation really works.

    Overall, it’s fair according to the evidence to put MOST of the blame on the central banks and their 14 year program of bailouts and QE policies. If you have read my previous articles on the Fed’s involvement you know that my position has remained the same for years – I predicted a stagflationary crisis based on the position that that the Fed was deliberately creating a monetary disaster to make way for a new digital currency system tied to a global framework, and this is exactly what has happened so far.

    That said, too much money chasing too few goods is not the only problem we face as a nation. There is also the issue of global interdependency and our reliance on other countries, some of them hostile, for production and resources. With supply chain disruptions an ever present danger, it’s not enough to focus on money velocity and the central bank alone – We won’t be solving the crisis that way.

    Not to mention, the more the federal reserve raises interest rates the more it costs to support US government debt, which is already well beyond US GDP. If doubts rise over the US being unable to pay for its treasury debts, then foreign creditors may dump their T-bond and dollar holding entirely. This could destroy the buying power of the dollar.

    In the liberty movement there is always debate about solutions. We all seem to agree on the core problems but can’t ever seem to agree on what to do about them.

    There are those that suggest there’s nothing that can be done economically except prepare and wait for collapse so we can rebuild once the dust has settled. I find myself in this camp more often than not. Then there are those that believe a political approach is possible. After nearly half the states in the US blocked the covid mandates and lockdowns, I am starting to think solutions at the state level might be viable. Then there are those that want to build an alternative system, a parallel economy that competes with the mainstream economy.

    This is something I have discussed for a long time – It’s the reason I started Alt-Market 12 years ago. It’s the ideal solution because it is proactive. Instead of waiting around for other people to fix the crisis for us, regular people simply establish their own trade and production systems based on necessities, separating from the dying economy so that when it collapses they are mostly unaffected.

    This, however, is a short term solution in that large scale domestic production is eventually needed to return a country and economy to greater prosperity. Growing gardens, making trade items and forming local barter markets is only a way to weather the storm; it is not a long term path to fiscal health. What we need is locally based large scale production of necessities as well as our own domestic resource discovery.

    In order to fight back against monetary decline the US needs to produce a majority of its own goods again. If the problem is too much money chasing too few goods, then we can make our own goods here at home instead of relying on countries like China and the unstable global supply chain.

    But what if there is an answer beyond domestic production alone? What if we built an economy which focuses on QUALITY? It’s a notion that might have been suggested by others, but it is certainly not being promoted by any economist within the mainstream or any political representative.

    The Quality Economy As A Means To Fight Inflation?

    Consider this for a moment: What if home based producers were given incentives by states (such as a jubilee on taxes) to manufacture high quality long lasting goods? There are multiple reasons why this model is not being used, all of them faulty.

    Carbon control initiatives in the west are actually forcing companies to produce lower quality goods with substandard designs in the name of “saving the environment.” But, if products are low quality and are breaking sooner because of carbon control standards, then people have to go out and buy replacement goods sooner. More retail demand means more manufacturing which means more “carbon pollution” over time. The carbon emissions narrative is complete nonsense and there’s no proof whatsoever that man-made carbon causes climate change, but even by the logic of the carbon lobby quality production makes more sense for the environment. At the very least it means less waste.

    Remember when a washing machine used to last for many years? Remember when a lawnmower or a chainsaw was made from quality metal parts instead of being loaded with plastic parts? Remember how grandma had the same working vacuum for decades? Quality used to be a thing, but the idea has been erased from modern economic theory.

    Today, it’s all about quantity, because quantity makes a bigger profit (as long as prices remain low and people have the money to buy multiples of an item). If items break constantly it means they need to be replaced constantly, which means companies make more money. In fact, there are many corporations that deliberately design products to break quickly so that consumers must buy another. This method does not work in an inflationary environment; it actually adds to the problem by forcing more money velocity and reducing the number of functional goods in the system.

    Let’s say that instead we had numerous manufacturers that operate within the US and they are offered a tax jubilee for as long as they are willing to produce high quality long lasting models of their products. With the tax incentives, they could market such goods at a lower price in order to compete with poor quality goods from places like China. Now, you have given the public access to items that they only need to replace every 5 years, or 10 years, instead of every 12 months.

    But what about food, which is a major part of the inflation problem? Well, the federal government actually pays farmers to grow LESS food in order to keep prices higher on commodities markets. Why not simply stop doing that? Or, again, states could offer tax incentives to farmers that produce with the effort to drive down prices, and state governments could offer to buy excess long term foods like wheat as a form of strategic reserve. America used to do this; why don’t we do it anymore?

    And how about housing? Simple – Ban foreign purchases of property and only allow American citizens to buy American land. American citizens have a right to private property under the constitution. Foreign investors and governments do not have that right.

    The goal of each of these policies would be to free up supply without killing the buying power of the dollar and without deliberately crushing credit markets and triggering mass job losses.

    In this environment money velocity slows down and there are more goods on the market because they last longer. Savings go up because people don’t need to spend as often. Prices in general start to go down. Inflation is subdued and eventually defeated, because what is money other than a means to provide necessities and amenities? If those goods last longer then money becomes less relevant to the health of the economy.

    What about deflation?  Would high quality production lead to far less sales and a big drop in jobs?  In America’s current 70% service-based economy, yes, for a time.  But, this is going to happen soon anyway as the Fed hikes rates and stifles access to credit.  With my plan, service jobs would be exchanged over time for better paying manufacturing and engineering jobs. 

    To be sure, there is the argument that quality goods and more savings could lead to decadent spending. In other words, there is the theory that the more money people have the more they will spend on frivolity and this might keep inflation alive. The problem is we have not lived in an economy based on quality for several decades, so it’s hard to say how people will react. If people have long lasting items and are secure in their basic necessities, then what is compelling them to spend with wild abandon? Not much.

    The establishment would like to keep the public dependent on the system by reducing our buying power and controlling access to goods. I suspect that they will one day offer the same kind of solution – A return to quality. But only at the price of subservience. The World Economic Forum’s “Shared Economy” concept which they clearly plan to introduce after there is a major financial collapse would require quality based production, other wise it would fail miserably. If everyone in the world is going to be sharing everything and private property is outlawed, then the goods that are shared would have to be designed to last.

    My suggestion is that we circumvent the establishment entirely and create our own economic model, still based in private property but also adapted to quality production. And, we manufacture all our goods locally within our own states and our own country. I believe this would end inflation, not just today, but for all time.

    Will the establishment allow such a system to thrive? They would certainly try to stop it from happening using any means they have available. Decentralization and abundance are the enemies of authoritarianism.  My point is, there is indeed a solution. We don’t need Fed intervention. We don’t need sky high interest rates. We don’t need stimulus. We don’t need government oppression or foreign interventions. We don’t need globalist centralization or a Great Reset. We don’t need any of it.

    They will try to convince you that we do.

    Regardless of what happens the public must be made aware that there is a better way.

    *  *  *

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

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 19:25

  • Hiring Is Finally Getting Easier For Small Businesses
    Hiring Is Finally Getting Easier For Small Businesses

    The residual hiring drought that occurred as a result of the government’s genius plan to literally pay people to stay home and do nothing during the pandemic looks to finally be passing, according to small business owners.

    Several small business owners were profiled by the Wall Street Journal this week and described a once-difficult hiring climate (where, you guessed it, no one wanted to come back to work) as easing. 

    “Raising pay, adding apprenticeship programs and rewriting job ads,” are three things that employers are doing to help maintain the interest. 

    Chief Executive Officer of UnaliWear, Inc., Jean Anne Booth told the WSJ about the hiring climate over the last year: “They would ghost us. They would accept the job, show up one week, and never show up again.” This fall they increased the starting pay they were offering and say that now, “for the first time in a while”, they are “fully staffed”. 

    Surveys show that the easing appears to be consistent across industries:

    Nearly 25% of the more than 650 entrepreneurs in the December survey said it was easier to fill job openings now than at the start of 2022—an increase from 18% in November. Meanwhile, 20% said it was harder to fill open positions, down from 25% in November. The survey is conducted for the Journal by Vistage Worldwide Inc., a business-coaching and peer-advisory firm. 

    Dale Lemmons, owner of Signature Transport Inc. and Interstate Wood Products Inc., told The Journal: “We have seen it be a little easier, mostly because some of our competitors are slowing down. It’s not quite the hot job market it was.”

    His company has boosted pay for entry level drivers by 20% and by 40% for drivers with at least 3 years of experience. The pay hikes have helped entice talent and retain drivers: he has seen about 25 of his workers go through a paid apprenticeship program and 7 additional employees are in training.

    Chip Ridge, president of Millennial Title in Louisville, Ky., is also optimistic, telling The Journal: “There’s a lot of pretty high-level talent in our industry that’s being displaced as part of this shift in the economy. There’s potentially an opportunity for us to acquire some really experienced talent that in a normalized market we would never have the opportunity to get.”

    “There were definitely more candidates, but we’re still not seeing the right candidates,” said another small business owner in East Brunswick, New Jersey. 

    One industry that has definitely seen hiring get easier has been restaurants and bars, which we wrote about just days ago after the WSJ profiled that industry specifically. Restaurants and bars have “nearly doubled” their employee counts from the pandemic lows in April 2020, the note said. The industry added 62,000 jobs over the past month alone.

    However, one must also keep in mind that, as we have been saying for months, these are usually the first stops for people working 9 to 5 salaried jobs who have been laid off due to the Fed’s cohesive and calculated plans to strategically napalm the U.S. economy in order to get inflation lower.

    Nevertheless, many recent hires are “returning to the restaurant industry after forsaking it earlier in the pandemic’ the report says. It’s amazing what happens when your newfangled crypto trading empire, established some time between 2020 and 2022, goes bust when its top two positions – dogecoin and Tesla call options – turn out to be worthless. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 19:05

  • Zero COVID Ends But Zero Sense Continues
    Zero COVID Ends But Zero Sense Continues

    Authored by Debbie Lerman via The Brownstone Institute,

    China decided to finally drop its disastrous draconian zero-Covid policies. In response, major Western news outlets have revealed how completely and absolutely nonsensical their coverage of the pandemic in China has been from the very beginning.

    A front-page article in The New York Times from December 30, 2022, is a perfect example. The title: “How Bad is China’s Covid Outbreak? It’s a Scientific Guessing Game” seemingly makes sense. As the subhead explains, there is an “absence of credible information from the Chinese government,” so it’s difficult to figure out what’s actually going on.

    The rest of the article belies the notion that anything resembling sense has informed the reporters and editors at this once venerable newspaper of record.

    Let’s look at the claims in the article, starting with the first paragraph:

    As Covid barrels through China, scientists around the world are searching for clues about an outbreak with sprawling consequences – for the health of hundreds of millions of Chinese people, the global economy and the future of the pandemic.

    Here are the unproven – and, according to the headline and subhead of this article unprovable, – assumptions underlying these claims:

    1) Covid is barreling through China. Says who? If there is no reliable data coming out of the country, how do we know there’s any barreling going on? The word “barrels” is linked to a New York Times article about the confusion and chaos following the end of zero Covid policies. No proof of barreling.

    2) The unproven outbreak has sprawling consequences – why? The rest of the world has gone back more or less to normal, post-pandemic functioning, and China is attempting to do the same. Even if there are hundreds of millions of Covid cases in China, we know that the overall Covid mortality rate is extremely low in all except the elderly and infirm, and as Western media (including the NYT) reported ad nauseum in 2020, China built lots of extra capacity, so no reason to imagine its hospitals will be overrun.

    Next paragraph:

    But in the absence of credible information from the Chinese government, it is a big scientific guessing game to determine the size and severity of the surge in the world’s most populous country.

    The overarching assumption in this paragraph, and in the entire article, is that there is a fundamental “absence of credible information from the Chinese government.” Again, this assumption makes sense, given what we know about the Chinese government’s manipulation of information to serve its various agendas. It means that whatever China’s leaders say about the pandemic in their country is not credible.

    Yet just a few paragraphs down, the article makes these astonishing claims:

    Until this month, the world seemed to have a reasonably clear understanding of what was happening with the virus in China. The ruling Communist Party proudly published low daily case numbers and deaths as a testament to its stringent ‘zero Covid’ policy. A countrywide system of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing largely kept the virus at bay.

    But in early December, the government abruptly abandoned ‘zero Covid,’ leaving the scientific community largely in the dark.

    Wait, what?

    When they were pursuing the clearly unattainable, unscientific and incredibly destructive zero Covid policies, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was completely credible, and all the data they published was 100 percent reliable? For example, this data, as presented in Michael Senger’s excellent article on this subject:

    In case there’s any doubt: This graph, based on the data reported by the CCP, shows no Covid deaths in China for two years, starting in March 2020. It means that, while the entire world was affected by an extremely contagious respiratory virus that caused millions of deaths, one country of 1.4 billion people managed to avoid it completely. That is the data that The New York Times and the scientific community deemed credible.

    Then, suddenly, when the CCP decided to stop with the terrible, misguided, and destructive policies, their reported data is not credible and scientists are “in the dark” about what’s happening in China?

    The absurdity of these claims is so glaring, it should discredit anything anyone has to say about the data from China now, if they do not acknowledge that it was equally incredible from the very beginning.

    One cannot help but wonder: where are the fact checkers when such levels of misinformation and blatant fear-mongering are published on the front page of The New York Times?

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 18:45

  • Baltic Index Crashes Most On Record As Recession Alarm Flashes
    Baltic Index Crashes Most On Record As Recession Alarm Flashes

    The Baltic Exchange’s dry bulk sea freight index crashed on Tuesday in the worst decline on record, sinking on prospects of a global recession. 

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    Baltic Dry Good Index is a measure of global shipping and economic health. The overall index, which tracks rates for capesize, panamax, and supramax shipping vessels carrying dry bulk commodities, plunged 17.5% to $1,250, the most significant daily decline since 1984. 

    The drop comes days after International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation’ in an interview aired on Sunday that a third of the global economy will be in recession this year. 

    Meanwhile, JPMorgan Global Composite PMI shows worldwide economic business conditions slid into contraction territory last August. 

    Lumber, copper, and crude are three industrial commodities that send warning signals about impending global economic turmoil. All three are well off their highs. Looking at broad commodity indexes via Bloomberg, the peak in ag, energy, and industrial metals appeared to be last summer. 

    With a gloomy economic outlook and flashing alarms from the world of shipping and commodities, recession risks are elevated this year as central bankers aggressively hike into a downturn. What could possibly go wrong?

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 18:25

  • Health Care Workers Cry Foul On FDA Claiming It Didn’t Prohibit Ivermectin For COVID-19
    Health Care Workers Cry Foul On FDA Claiming It Didn’t Prohibit Ivermectin For COVID-19

    Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Dr. Yusuf Saleeby has practiced medicine for more than 30 years. He serves patients in South Carolina and until recently had never faced an investigation from his state medical board.

    File photo: A package of ivermectin tablets. (Natasha Holt/The Epoch Times)

    But after Saleeby started prescribing ivermectin to his patients, he was reported to the board, which opened an investigation, despite the state’s attorney general’s promise that his office wouldn’t prosecute doctors who prescribed off-label medications.

    Jennifer Wright, a nurse practitioner and clinical director who practices in Florida, but can prescribe across state lines, told The Epoch Times she received a letter from the Office of the Attorney General of New York ordering her not to prescribe ivermectin.

    “You know, basically threatened me. If I don’t stop prescribing, then they’re going to fine me,” Wright said about the letter, which threatened legal action with fines of up to $5,000 per violation.

    The letter stated that the Food and Drug Administration only authorized ivermectin for use in humans when treating “parasitic worms and head lice and skin conditions like rosacea.”

    The citation in the letter appears to be from an FDA advisory issued in March 2021 titled “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19.”

    That advisory and other anti-ivermectin messaging from the FDA are now the subject of a lawsuit brought by three doctors against the agency. The doctors argue that the FDA illegally interfered with their ability to treat patients. The suit was dismissed but an appeal has been filed by the plaintiffs.

    During a hearing in 2022, attorneys defending the government argued that the agency’s missives were just a recommendation.

    “They did not say it’s prohibited or it’s unlawful. They also did not say that doctors may not prescribe ivermectin,” Isaac Belfer, one of the lawyers for the government, said during a Nov. 1, 2022, hearing in federal court in Texas.

    The government’s arguments differ greatly from the reality many doctors faced for prescribing ivermectin. Some lost their jobs, others were investigated by state medical boards, and many received threats from the New York attorney general because they were prescribing across state lines.

    Matthew Dark, a spokesperson for Roots Medical and Colorado Healthcare Providers for Freedom, which has more than 275 physicians in the group, stated that several doctors in Colorado are facing investigations by the state medical board.

    When asked about the FDA’s new claim, Dark stated: “They knew it was safe for humans, and they made that very accusatory thing if you were a doctor prescribing this, you were an idiot. You were practicing like a hillbilly. So that message was loud and clear.”

    Dark referred to Twitter posts from the FDA, one of which said: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

    “Pharmacies were responding to the practice and providers trying to write [ivermectin] the same way the FDA was behaving,” Dark said.

    Wright concurred, and pointing to her letter from the New York attorney general, said, “It clearly states in this letter that according to the FDA, you must cease and desist in prescribing ivermectin to New York State residents.”

    New York State Attorney General Letitia James holds a press conference at the Office of the Attorney General in New York on March 28, 2019. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images)

    Dr. Miguel Antonatos, a board-certified internal medicine physician who practices out of Illinois, but can prescribe to other states, told The Epoch Times via email that he, too, received a letter from the New York attorney general.

    Nicole Sirotek is a registered nurse and founder of American Frontline Nurses, a patient advocacy network that boasts 22,000 nurses. She told The Epoch Times that her nurses often work with doctors in hospital settings.

    At the height of the pandemic, Sirotek said patients would reach out to her advocacy network and beg for ivermectin, either for themselves or their loved ones dying in the hospital.

    She stated that in five separate instances, doctors were fired or forced to resign for prescribing ivermectin as a home medication for nurses to administer in hospitals.

    “That happened five times, and each physician was fired. That’s five physicians in five different states and five different hospital systems.”

    Julie McCabe, a registered nurse and director of advocacy services for American Frontline Nurses, told The Epoch Times that the above doctors include Dr. Edith Behr in Pennsylvania, Dr. John Witcher in Mississippi, Dr. Mary Bowden in Texas, Dr. Robert Karas in Arkansas, and Dr. Paul Marik in Virginia. Bowden and Marik are two of the three doctors suing the FDA over its stance on ivermectin.

    Bowden told The Epoch Times that Houston Methodist Hospital suspended her for merely writing on Twitter about ivermectin, and she had to overcome “numerous obstacles” when prescribing it to patients.

    “The FDA was the key creator of these hurdles when it launched a social media campaign stating that ivermectin is dangerous and only for horses. When faced with a lawsuit, the FDA now claims it was merely making suggestions—suggestions that have threatened my ability to practice medicine and more importantly, interfered with life-saving early treatment of COVID patients,” Bowden said.

    Sirotek said members of the group Team Halo targeted her because of her stance on ivermectin. The group describes itself as “volunteer scientists and healthcare professionals from around the world, working to end this pandemic by contributing our time to address concerns and public health misinformation.”

    Members of the group filed several complaints to Nevada’s state medical board, which Sirotek said costs her $5,000 per complaint to fight.

    With tears streaming from her eyes, Sirotek said she’d also received death threats, pictures of her house, and threats to murder her children. Sirotek provided copies of these threats to The Epoch Times. Team Halo didn’t respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

    A sign for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration outside of its headquarters in White Oak, Md., on July 20, 2020. (Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images)

    Pushback Begins

    In the spring of 2020, with COVID-19 spreading like wildfire through the population, finding a viable treatment was paramount in many doctors’ minds. And as no drug was approved to treat the novel virus, they turned to off-label use, a standard medical practice even in non-pandemic times.

    In March 2020, a group of leading critical care specialists joined forces and formed the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). Their mission was to examine different therapies and drugs and recommend possible COVID-19 treatments based on best medical practices and emerging data.

    Almost immediately, ivermectin was put forward as a possible treatment. First approved for human use in 1987 and dispensed billions of times since then, ivermectin is traditionally prescribed to treat parasites. But it’s safe and was already known to have an effect on viruses.

    “This is a medication that is safer than Tylenol, safer than stuff we sell over the counter,” Wright said.

    Saleeby agreed.

    “[Ivermectin is] probably one of the most prescribed drugs. It’s given out like candy in Sub-Saharan Africa and Amazon basin or anywhere around water. … It’s doled out to children and pregnant women. … As far as safety, it’s probably safer than baby aspirin. It’s probably the safest drug on the planet, to be honest.

    “I was using [ivermectin] sporadically in some of my Lyme patients. It’s effective against Lyme. We knew it had effectivity against viruses and other pathogens like Borrelia and Babesia.”

    Nurses administer care to a patient at a medical center in Seattle, on May 6, 2020. (Karen Ducey/Getty Images)

    Sirotek told The Epoch Times that, especially as the Delta strain increased hospitalizations and deaths in the United States, she and several nurses questioned why some countries seemingly remained unaffected. The answer, she believes, was widespread ivermectin use.

    At first, prescribing ivermectin and obtaining it from a regular pharmacy wasn’t an issue, Wright said. More importantly, it worked.

    “We started using it very early on, and I could prescribe it to the pharmacy. I would prescribe it according to the FLCCC recommendations because they were the ones doing the research. I was just validating that, you know, this has some real stuff behind it.”

    When the pandemic began, ivermectin as an effective treatment was primarily a theory. But as health care workers reported that it worked, more and more studies were conducted to back up those early successes.

    There have been 189 ivermectin COVID-19 studies, according to the aggregate site C19ivm.org. Of those studies, 139 have been peer-reviewed, and 93 compare treatment and control groups.

    In the 93 studies, which had more than 133,838 patients in 27 countries, there were “statistically significant improvements are seen for mortality, ventilation, ICU admission, hospitalization, recovery, cases, and viral clearance,” a real-time meta-analysis states.

    Simply put, as health care workers saw firsthand that ivermectin worked in their practices, studies were simultaneously confirming the medicine’s effectiveness.

    Dr. Peter Raisanen, a naturopathic medical doctor in Arizona, said that once he started his patients on ivermectin, they typically started feeling better within a few days.

    “It seemed like it was within three to four days, like they [started feeling] better,” Raisanen told The Epoch Times.

    Raisanen said he treated about 200 patients with ivermectin, and none died. Almost all stayed out of the hospital. That’s an experience several doctors attested to witnessing.

    “We’ve probably collectively [at Roots Medical], treated 1,000 people with early COVID,” Dark said.

    He said that when a patient was treated early on in their illness, there was a clear improvement—often within hours.

    “It’s within two hours of that first dose that people start feeling noticeably better. And within two days, most symptoms are gone. Again, this is with starting early treatment, say days one to three, one to four, of infection or symptoms,” Dark said.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 01/04/2023 – 18:05

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Today’s News 4th January 2023

  • We've Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?
    We’ve Reached Peak Zelensky. Now What?

    Authored by Robert Freeman via Common Dreams,

    When the president of the poorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky.

    It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.”

    Via NBC News 

    Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.

    Now, he’s Europe’s George Washington, FDR, and Douglas MacArthur all rolled into one and before whom the mighty and powerful genuflect. Please. The only place to go from here is down. And, that is surely coming. Soon.

    Consider some inconvenient facts that the fawning media, which is essentially the public relations arm of the weapons industry, doesn’t want you to know.

    The European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, recently let slip that the Ukrainian army has lost more than 100,000 troops in the eight months since the beginning of the war. Over the nine-year span of the Vietnam War, the U.S. with a population six times that of Ukraine, lost a total of 58,220 men.

    In other words, on a per day, per capita basis, Ukraine is losing soldiers at a rate 141 TIMES that of U.S. losses in Vietnam. The U.S. lost the public on Vietnam when middle class white boys began coming home in body bags. Does anybody with half a brain believe such losses in Ukraine are sustainable? Does anybody have another plan to avert such slaughter?

    Von der Leyen is among the shrewdest public figures in the world. What she is doing is laying the predicate for Western withdrawal from Ukraine and ending the War. If you look at the facts on the ground, not the boosterish propaganda ladled out by the media, you can understand why.

    In a matter of weeks, Russia, with its hypersonic missiles, destroyed half of Ukraine’s electrical power infrastructure. This, as winter is coming on. It can just as easily take out the other half, effectively bombing Ukraine back into the Stone Age. Is that what anybody wants?

    The startling, indeed, terrifying part of this is that neither Ukraine nor the West have any defense against these hypersonic missiles. They travel so fast, and on variable trajectories, they cannot be shot down, even by the most advanced Western systems. They represent one of the greatest asymmetries in deliverable destructive power in the history of warfare, probably dwarfed only by the U.S.’s possession of atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

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    Again, there is no effective defense against them. The Russians have them. The Ukrainians don’t. Game over. Can you understand why leaders in the West are beginning to wake up?

    On the conventional front, the Ukrainians are having trouble securing even conventional weapons to defend themselves. U.S. arms suppliers are working around the clock to replace their own stocks and the stocks that European countries have given to Ukraine. But the backlog is running into years. A recent headline from The Wall Street Journal stated, “Europe is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo.”

    Finally, the U.S. has committed $112 billion to Ukraine. That includes $45 billion just slipped into the omnibus funding bill against the likelihood that a Republican-controlled House will cut such funding, almost certainly substantially.

    That’s more than $10 billion per month since the war started in February. And that doesn’t even count the subsidies, both material and financial, from the EU which amount to billions of dollars more per month.

    Without such subsidies, Zelensky would not have lasted a month in the war. How many hours do you think he is going to last once that flow dries up? And it surely is.

    The Europeans are coming to realize that their continent is being de-industrialized, literally moved backwards an entire epoch in economic terms, because of their willingness to serve as the doormat for the U.S.’ imperial war against Russia. Not even they, with their supine fealty to U.S. domination, are willing to commit collective economic suicide on behalf of the U.S.

    France’s Macron and Germany’s Scholz are suggesting that accommodations to Russian interests must be devised in order to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war.

    Macron suggested in a television address to his nation that an antagonized Russia is not in the security interests of Europe. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do…to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.”

    Scholz was even more specific. In an article in Foreign Affairs he declared, “We have to go back to the agreements which we had in the last decades and which were the basis for peace and security order in Europe.”

    This is a direct repudiation of the U.S.’s maximalist position before the start of the War, that Russia’s security needs were of no interest to a marauding NATO.

    Even U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is now mooting the idea that territorial concessions must be on the table. In a Wall Street Journal article, Blinken stated that, “Our focus is…to take back territory that’s been seized from [Ukraine] since February 24th.”

    Notice, that this is a significant climb down from the U.S.’ earlier position that all Russian gains since 2014, including Crimea, must be reversed before negotiations could begin. And this is just Blinken’s opening hand. More concessions are sure to follow as Russian gains become greater and their likelihood of being reversed, lesser.

    Put these four things together: staggering, unsustainable losses of soldiers; terrifying, indefensible asymmetries of destructive power; inability to supply oneself with even conventional defensive weapons; and categorically reduced support from your most important backers.

    Does that sound like the formula for winning a war? It is not. It’s the formula for losing the war, which is why von der Leyen, Macron, Scholz, and Blinken are now laying pipe for getting out. The tide is going out under Zelensky. He will soon be remembered as a Trivial Pursuits question, or an answer on Jeopardy: “The only modern head of state known to be able to play the piano with his penis.” Ding. “Contestant #3?” “Who is Volodymyr Zelensky?”

    A peace will soon be declared. Russia will keep the Donbas and Crimea in recognition of the facts on the ground. Both sides will be better off for this. The Donbas is ethnically, linguistically, religiously, and culturally Russian, which is why it voted overwhelmingly for assimilation into Russia. Besides, if Kiev loved them so much, it wouldn’t have murdered 14,000 of them over the past eight years and resumed massive shelling in early February of this year, before the Russian invasion.

    Ukraine will foreswear any future affiliation with NATO. This is Putin’s highest priority and what he asked for–and was denied–in his request to the U.S. and NATO last December, before the invasion was launched. If Russia begins its much-feared winter offensive, as many expect, Ukrainian generals will dispatch Zelensky in a coup rather than send their few remaining soldiers to certain annihilation.

    U.S. grain and pharma conglomerates will buy up Ukrainian farmland—some of the best in the world—for pennies on the dollar. This is the standard MO of U.S. multinational vultures coming in after the kill to pick apart the carcasses. U.S. weapons makers will look for and help provoke the next feeding frenzy, much as they materialized Ukraine barely a year after the humiliating U.S. defeat in Afghanistan derailed their last gravy train.

    Russia and China, driven together by U.S. bullying, will continue to constellate the nations of the Global South into an anti-Western bloc committed to collaborative, mutually profitable, peaceful development. The U.S. and its closest allies will cower behind the walls they’ve constructed of the ever-shrinking share of the global economy that they can manage to hold as their own.

    Ukraine will prove a turning point in the dismantling of U.S. hegemony over global affairs that it has enjoyed—and, let’s be honest, often abused–since 1945. The U.S. public is not psychically prepared for such a come down. But that is the cost of living in the fantasy world that the media lavishes up to keep that self-same public ignorant, fearful, confused, entertained, and distracted.

    Finally, the neo-cons who have led the U.S. into the serial debacles of Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, costing the country tens of trillions of dollars and even greater amounts of destroyed reputational capital, will claim their customary immunity from any accountability for their savage failures and cheerily move on to their next calamity. We need to be on the lookout for their next gambit to pillage the treasury and advance their own private interests above those of the nation. It will surely come.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 23:40

  • These Are The Longest-Lasting Cars (In Miles)
    These Are The Longest-Lasting Cars (In Miles)

    When properly maintained, well-built cars can last an impressive amount of miles.

    Consider this 2006 Honda Civic, which hit one million miles on its original engine and transmission. Amusingly, the car’s odometer maxes out at 999,999 miles.

    While that case may be an extreme outlier, most modern cars are expected to last 200,000 miles before experiencing some significant failure. That’s roughly double the lifespan of cars from the 1960s and 1970s, which typically lasted about 100,000 miles.

    In this infographic, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Ls and Athul Alexander used data from iSeeCars to determine which cars are the most likely to reach⁠— or even surpass⁠—the 200,000 mile benchmark.

    Study Methodology & Data

    To come up with their rankings, iSeeCars analyzed over 2 million used cars between January and October 2022. The rankings are based on the mileage that the top 1% of cars within each model obtained. Models with less than 10 years of production, such as the Tesla Model 3, were excluded.

    The following tables show an expanded list of the longest lasting cars, by model category. Our infographic only includes the top five from each.

    Sedans & Hatchbacks

    The only non-Japanese model in the top 10 is the Chevrolet Impala, which is one of the most commonly found rental cars in the U.S.

     

    Another interesting takeaway is that Lexus is the only luxury brand in this list. This is likely due to the fact that Lexus and Toyota often share drivetrain components.

     

    SUVs

    iSeeCars has a larger top 20 list for the SUV category.

     

    This is a more diverse list, with American and Japanese models seemingly on par. The GM family of SUVs (Tahoe, Suburban, Yukon, and Yukon XL) are narrowly edged out by Toyota’s full size options (Sequoia and Land Cruiser).

     

    The Land Cruiser was discontinued in the U.S. for 2021, but it remains a very popular model in Middle Eastern countries like Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE.

    Pickup Trucks

    Once again, Japanese manufacturers hold the top spots. According to Toyota, the Tundra is the only full-size pickup that is currently being built in Texas.

     

    Despite their marginally higher potential lifespans, sales of Japanese trucks come nowhere close to their American counterparts.

     

    Electric Cars

    The last category is EVs, which due to the 10 years of production requirement, only includes the Tesla Model S (133,998 miles) and Nissan LEAF (98,081).

    These figures are much lower than the gasoline cars discussed above, but it’s not exactly a fair comparison. We probably won’t be able to judge the long-term reliability of EVs until they’ve been around for at least another decade.

    In addition to needing more time, another reason is scale—the Model S and LEAF have been sold in relatively limited numbers. The Tesla Model 3, which is the first EV to sell over one million units, will likely become the first reliable benchmark.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 23:20

  • Victor Davis Hanson: The Baleful Cargo Of Woke Diversity Worship
    Victor Davis Hanson: The Baleful Cargo Of Woke Diversity Worship

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

    Just as uniformity can result in both stability and stagnation, so too can diversity sometimes ensure either dynamism or bedlam…

    What do all our notable fabricators – George Santos, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama – have in common? 

    Well, quite like the Ward ChurchilIs or Rachel Dolezals of the world, one way or another, they lied about their identities. Or they sought fraudulent ways of suggesting their ancestries were marginalized. Or they had claims on being victims on the theory their constructed personas brought career advantages. 

    George Santos claimed, apparently in search of a victimized status, that he was an “American Jew” and a “Latino Jew,” and a descendent of Holocaust survivors. 

    Joe Biden lied that he went to “shul” as well as that he grew up in a veritable Puerto Rican household and just happened to attend a black college as well as being an honorary Greek.

    Elizabeth Warren ended up a laughingstock for claiming her high cheekbones were proof of her Native-American ancestry—a lie she rode all the way to being the “first” Native-American professor on the Harvard Law school faculty. 

    Somehow the half-white, prep-schooled Barry Soetoro, who had taken his Indonesian stepfather’s last name, rebooted in the university back to Barack Obama. The latter oddly did not catch his literary agent “misidentifying” him in a book promo as being born in Africa. And only as president, did we learn his “autobiographical” memoir was mostly a concoction.

    This fixation with constructing identities is one of the great pathologies of our woke era.

    When we obsess in neo-Confederate style on race, ethnicity, or religion as the defining element of who we are, and we do this to leverage political advantage, then we set off a chain-reaction of Yugoslavian- or Lebanese-style tribalism. Like nuclear proliferation, once one group goes tribal, then all others will strain to find their own deterrent tribal identity.

    A Society of Lies

    There are warning signs all around us of our fate to come if we do not stop this nihilism: Latino members of the Los Angeles City Council caught on a hot mic of matter-of-fact venting tribalist hatred and mocking of non-Latino tribes—blacks, gays, indigenous people, and whites. Or the Jussie Smollett farce, both the lies he concocted to promote his victimhood, and the lies the Chicago prosecutor office initially promulgated to ensure initial preferential treatment for Smollett based on his race. Read the comments posted below news stories of rampant swarming smash-and-grab, knockout game, or carjacking crimes—and be warned of the venomous and tribalist backlash to venomous tribalism.

    In a world in which there are too many oppressed for the static number of oppressors, then it is perfectly logical that an Elizabeth Warren on the one hand would fabricate an advantageous identity for careerist opportunity, and a Jussie Smollett on the other hand would invent mythical white MAGA demons to ensure he was victimized and deserving of careerist reparations for his suffering.

    Yet the tribal problem is not just an epidemic of false identities and fraudulent victims. Entire areas of social and political reality are now set off and exempt from rational discussion. We are currently witnessing an upsurge in black-male crime, often descending into disproportionate hate crimes perpetrated against Asians and Jews. Yet any discussion of this violence is taboo, lest one is deemed racist or illiberal.

    Questioning the morality of allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports and to destroy decades of striving for equal female athletics likewise is put off-limits. 

    So are discussions about the epidemic of illegitimacy and the negative effects of fatherless families contributing to problems in some minority communities.

    Even the national challenge of epidemic obesity is racialized, as if worries about unhealthy weight of all Americans derive somehow from mythical white “body shaming.”

    So are inquiries about how the states in tough economic times are to house, feed, care, educate, and instruct 5 million entrants across the southern border, arriving en masse and illegally, all without simple background checks, knowledge of English or a high-school diploma, and in non-diverse fashion. If the first thing an immigrant does is to break U.S. law by illegally crossing the border, and the second thing is illegally residing in the United States, then it is only logical that he concludes further illegal activity will be similarly exempt. Illegal immigration is not a noble endeavor but a crime against its host.

    In sum, woke tribalism inevitably turns us into fabricators and society itself becomes a liar. 

    Against Meritocracy

    The old 1970s cynical canard that racial quotas would not extend to pilot training or neurosurgery is no longer true. Some of the major airlines have announced mandatory non-white acceptance quotas for pilot training, and not predicated on competitive résumés or standardized test scores. Many universities and professional schools are considering adopting pass/fail grading on the theory that affirmative action admissions must become synonymous with guaranteed graduation.

    Yet what is the alternative once one travels this pathway? Suppose the idea of quota-based admissions is declared valid and salutary. In that case, grading must likewise be recalibrated along this long chain of anti-meritocracy to continue ensuring equality of results.

    Licensing boards are next. If one is admitted to universities on diversity, equity, and inclusion concerns rather than demonstrable achievement as quantifiably determined by competitive grades and test scores and other definable exceptional achievements, and one is further graduated on the assurance that grades either will not be issued or will be inflated, then the logical next step is that licensing exam standards in law or medicine must likewise be relaxed so as not to interrupt the ever-lengthening wokeist chain. 

    In other words, soon where one went to medical school, or what one did in medical school, or where one did his residency, or his certification by a medical board of examiners will become rather irrelevant. The point is not to recruit applicants with the most competitive records and to ensure that they all are subject to the same standard of rigorous instruction and assessment to ensure the public can have confidence in the medical profession, but to make sure that profession measures up to some artificial notions about diversity, equity, and inclusion. The relationship between these metrics and health is beside the point.

    We forget that what once separated the Western world from the rest was not race, climate, or natural bounty, but its gradual creation of meritocracies replacing the pre-civilizational rule of the clan, the tribe, or the race. The old inherited and stubborn obstacles remained: aristocratic privilege, class chauvinism, and plutocratic clout that warred with qualifications. They were the ancient impediments to merit whose power in the West slowly was also dethroned. 

    How ironic in their places, the reactionary Western world has simply created new exemptions and privileges, calibrated on premodern criteria such as race and sex that will set off chain tribal reactions as we degenerate into Hobbesian factionalism.

    Anytime perceived merit, or something close to merit, was not the standard, a society either imploded or became impoverished and calcified. The racial, one-drop categories of the Old South or the Third Reich, or the colorized spectrum of the old apartheid South Africa, or the racial chauvinism of the new tribal South Africa, or the commissar system of the Soviet Union, or the religious intolerance of fundamentalist Islam, or the familial gangs and clannish tyranny of prewar Sicily ensured that all were dysfunctional societies, and often much worse than that. Opportunity was instead guaranteed, and excellence defined, by something other than demonstrable talent and achievement. 

    There will be no exceptions granted to the United States from these rules of history. There are many talented black women in the corporate world, private sector, and elsewhere who would have made excellent vice presidents given their race was incidental and an afterthought to their achievement and talent.  

    The Best We’ve Got?

    But Kamala Harris is not among them. She was selected by Biden’s braggadocio not because of any past stellar record as a Bay Area prosecutor, an accomplished senator, an effective orator, or a superb presidential candidate, but because a frightened Joe Biden amid the George Floyd riots announced in advance that he would preselect his running mate exclusively on the basis of race and sex, sort of in the fashion of the white male-dominated world of the past. 

    Ditto Pete Buttigieg, who, in his dismal record as a rather inconsequential small city mayor and failed presidential candidate, had never evidenced aptitude for transportation issues—other than occasionally and ostentatiously riding a bike. He was never expected to seriously address problems like spiraling auto fuel prices, the bottlenecks at our harbors, the wild-west train robbing at the port of Los Angeles, the Southwest Airlines implosion, or our clogged freeways. Instead, he was appointed Transportation Secretary because of the diversity of his sexual orientation and his woke rhetoric that almost immediately surfaced in wildly out-of-pocket lectures about “racist” freeways. 

    Similarly, upon appointment as press secretary, we were immediately told Karine Jean-Pierre was the nation’s first black, gay press secretary rather than being asked to recognize any prior achievement that earned her such a coveted spot. Few said her appointment reflected a successful record as chief of staff for Kamala Harris’ not-one-delegate presidential campaign, or national megaphone for an ossified Moveon.org, or her stellar work as an MSNBC pundit. 

    What will a university like Stanford do when it admits much of its 2026 class largely on the basis of tribal considerations? It does not release who of the admitted opted not to take the now-optional SAT. It seems proud, in fact, that it has rejected in the past 70 percent of those applicants with perfect SAT scores. So why would one believe that Stanford truly deplores its past Jewish exclusionary quotas, when it easily trumps them in the present—and uses the same argument of diversity to excuse prejudice and disqualifying those who, by its own former standards, had earned admission? 

    Diversity is neither a strength nor a weakness. Diversity of thought can be helpful, or become chaotic as orthodoxy. Hitler’s 3.7 million soldiers who charged into Russia were especially diverse, but that fact did not make the invaders less murderous.

    A multi-religious India is certainly diverse, but is not always calm or humane. Yugoslavia was diverse, and so is current-day Lebanon. Was either country a kinder, gentler, or more successful society than decidedly nondiverse Japan or Poland?

    Just as uniformity can result in both stability and stagnation, so too can diversity sometimes ensure either dynamism or bedlam. In all these cases, the emphasis on tribalism is the critical determinative. If a 95 percent Asian or white country defines itself in blood-and-soil terms as did Japan of the 1930s and early 1940s and Germany between 1933 and 1945, then it becomes toxic, unlike a more natural assumption that race is incidental, not essential, even in a racially uniform society.

    The same is true of diversity. Accentuate it; sharpen differences; treat individuals as part of tribal collectives—and a descent into violence and anarchy is assured. But consider tribal differences superficial, and human commonality more important than racial difference, then diversity can be enriching through voluntary contributions to the whole in terms of varieties of food, music, art, fashion, and literature. But again, envision diversity as iron-clad calibrations of identity in which the individual cedes to the collective tribe, then a tribally regressive America will be no different from the world elsewhere and our fate is assured.

    So, we are headed, dangerously so, into an historically ugly, hateful, and volatile place—all the more so because we lie that it is utopian when it is pre-civilizational and reactionary.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 23:00

  • California Bill To Punish Doctors For 'False' Covid-19 Information Goes Into Effect
    California Bill To Punish Doctors For ‘False’ Covid-19 Information Goes Into Effect

    A bill which allows the state of California to punish doctors over ‘false information about Covid-19 vaccinations and treatments’ went into effect on January 1st.

    Under the new law (AB 2098) which took effect Jan.1, the state’s Medical Board would categorize dispensing information – such as the effectiveness of Ivermectin, or the Covid-19 vaccine’s rapidly waning efficacy, as unprofessional conduct.

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    The law was challenged in court by two California doctors, who said that it would restrict their free speech in violation of the first amendment, and that it was “vague” under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.

    However on December 28th, Biden Nominee Judge Fred Slaughter refused to halt the law, ruling that the law trumps free speech claims, and that it falls “within the longstanding tradition of regulations on the practice of medical treatments.”

    Another lawsuit, brought by Physicians for Informed Consent, was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California in early December. The plaintiffs, physician LeTrinh Hoang and Children’s Health Defense, are being represented by Rick Jaffe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Mary Holland, and argues that the state of California has weaponized the vague phrase “misinformation,” and thereby has illegally targeted physicians who disagree with the government’s public stance on Covid-19.

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    Expert cardiologist and PIC member Sanjay Verma, M.D., has been tracking and cataloging CDC errors in real time. For the case, he has provided what he calls “a detailed declaration exposing the government’s scientific errors and the constitutional dangers of censoring dissent”:

    “To demonstrate these points of vagueness and the general unsuitability of using ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ as a disciplinary criterion, I have prepared a detailed overview of public health response to the pandemic broken down into categories such as Masks and Vaccines (transmission, safety, efficacy of natural immunity). I have also included evidence of what [I testify] would be considered misinformation promulgated by the CDC as well as its withholding of information which led to the then ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ eventually being proven wrong.” –KRON4

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 22:40

  • Niall Ferguson: "Kissinger Is Right To Worry" About Possibility Of World War 3
    Niall Ferguson: “Kissinger Is Right To Worry” About Possibility Of World War 3

    Authored by Niall Ferguson, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,

    2022 was the year in which war made a comeback. But Cold War II could become World War III in 2023… with China as the arsenal of autocracy.

    War is hell on earth – and if you doubt it, visit Ukraine or watch Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Netflix’s gut-wrenching new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic antiwar novel of 1929.

    Even a small war is hellish for those caught up in it, of course. But a world war is the worst thing we humans have ever done to one another. In a memorable essay published last month, Henry Kissinger reflected on “How to Avoid Another World War.” In 1914, “The nations of Europe, insufficiently familiar with how technology had enhanced their respective military forces, proceeded to inflict unprecedented devastation on one another.” Then, after two years of industrialized slaughter, “the principal combatants in the West (Britain, France and Germany) began to explore prospects for ending the carnage.” Even with US intermediation, the effort failed.

    Kissinger posed an important question: “Does the world today find itself at a comparable turning point [like the opportunity for peace in 1916] in Ukraine as winter imposes a pause on large-scale military operations there?” This time last year, I predicted that Russia would invade Ukraine. The question one year later is whether there is a way to end this war, or whether it is destined to grow into something much larger.

    As Kissinger rightly points out, two nuclear-armed powers are currently contesting the fate of Ukraine. One side, Russia, is directly engaged in conventional warfare. However, the US and its allies are fighting indirectly by providing Ukraine with what Alex Karp, chief executive of Palantir Technologies Inc., calls “the power of advanced algorithmic warfare systems.” These are now so potent, he recently told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, that they “equate to having tactical nuclear weapons against an adversary with only conventional ones.” Take a moment to ponder the implications of that.

    War is back. Could world war also make a comeback? If so, it will affect all of our lives. In the second interwar era (1991-2019), we lost sight of the role of war in the global economy. Because the wars of that time were small (Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq), we forgot that war is history’s favorite driver of inflation, debt defaults — even famines. That is because large-scale war is simultaneously destructive of productive capacity, disruptive of trade, and destabilizing of fiscal and monetary policies.

    But war is as much about the mobilization of real resources as it is about finance and money: Every great power needs to be able to feed its population and power its industry. In times of high interdependence (globalization), a great power needs to retain the option to revert to self-sufficiency in time of war. And self-sufficiency makes things more expensive than relying on free trade and comparative advantage.

    Throughout history, the principal source of power is technological superiority in armaments, including intelligence and communications. A critical question is therefore: What are the key inputs without which a state-of-the-art military is unattainable?

    In 1914, they were coal, iron and the manufacturing capacity to mass-produce artillery and shells, as well as steamships. In 1939, they were oil, steel, aluminum and the manufacturing capacity to mass-produce artillery, ships, submarines, planes and tanks. After 1945 it was all of the above, plus the scientific and technical capacity to produce nuclear weapons.

    Today, the vital inputs are the capacity to mass-produce high-performance semiconductors, satellites, and the algorithmic warfare systems that depend on them.

    What were the principal lessons of the 20th-century world wars? First, the American combination of technological and financial leadership, plus abundant natural resources, was impossible to beat. Secondly, however, the dominant Anglophone empires were poor at deterrence. The UK failed twice to dissuade Germany and its allies from gambling on world war. This was mainly because Liberal and Conservative governments alike were unwilling to ask voters for peacetime sacrifices, and they failed at statecraft. The result was two very expensive conflicts that cost much more in life and treasure than effective deterrence would have — and left the UK exhausted and unable to sustain its empire.

    The US has been the dominant Anglophone empire since the Suez Crisis of 1956. With the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the US successfully deterred the Soviet Union from advancing its Marxist-Leninist empire in Europe much beyond the rivers Elbe and Danube. But America was relatively unsuccessful at preventing the spread of communism by Soviet-backed organizations and regimes in what was then known as the Third World.

    The US is still bad at deterrence. Last year, it failed to deter President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine, mainly because it had low confidence in the Ukrainian defense forces it had trained and the Kyiv government that controlled them. The latest objective of American deterrence is Taiwan, a functionally autonomous democracy that China claims as its own. 

    In October, President Joe Biden’s administration belatedly published its National Security Strategy. Such documents are always the work of a committee, but internal dissonance shouldn’t be this obvious. “The post-Cold War era is definitively over,” the authors declare, “and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” However, “we do not seek conflict or a new Cold War.” For the major powers have “shared challenges” such as climate change and Covid and other pandemic diseases.

    On the other hand, “Russia poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system, recklessly flouting the basic laws of the international order today, as its brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has shown.” China, meanwhile, is “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to advance that objective.”

    So what will the US do to check these rivals? The answer sounds remarkably similar to what it did in Cold War I:

    • “We will assemble the strongest possible coalitions to advance and defend a world that is free, open, prosperous and secure.”

    • “We will prioritize maintaining an enduring competitive edge over the PRC while constraining a still profoundly dangerous Russia.”

    • “We must ensure strategic competitors cannot exploit foundational American and allied technologies, know-how, or data to undermine American and allied security.”

    In other words: form and maintain alliances and try to prevent the other side from catching up technologically. This is a cold war strategy in all but name.

    US support for Ukraine since the Feb. 24 invasion has undoubtedly succeeded in weakening Putin’s regime. The Russian military has suffered disastrous losses of trained manpower and equipment. The Russian economy may not have contracted by as much as Washington hoped (a mere 3.4% last year, according to the International Monetary Fund), but Russian imports have crashed due to Western export controls. As Russia’s stock of imported component parts and machinery runs down, Russian industry will face deep disruptions, including in the defense and energy sectors.

    Last year, Russia cut off gas exports to Europe that it cannot reroute, as there are no alternative pipelines. Putin thought the gas weapon would allow him to divide the West. So far, it has not worked. Russia also tried choking Black Sea grain exports. But that lever had little strategic value as the biggest losers of the blockade were poor African and Middle Eastern countries.

    The net result of Putin’s war thus far has been to reduce Russia to something like an economic appendage of China, its biggest trading partner. And Western sanctions mean that what Russia exports to China is sold at a discount.

    There are two obvious problems with US strategy, however. The first is that if algorithmic weapons systems are the equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons, Putin may eventually be driven to using the latter, as he clearly lacks the former. The second is that the Biden administration appears to have delegated to Kyiv the timing of any peace negotiations — and the preconditions the Ukrainians demand are manifestly unacceptable in Moscow.

    The war therefore seems destined, like the Korean War in Cold War I, to drag on until a stalemate is reached, Putin dies and an armistice is agreed that draws a new border between Ukraine and Russia. The problem with protracted wars is that the US and European publics tend to get sick of them well before the enemy does.

    China is a much tougher nut to crack than Russia. Whereas a proxy war is driving Russia’s economy and military back into the 1990s, the preferred approach to China is to stunt its technological growth, particularly with respect to — in the words of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan — “computing-related technologies, including microelectronics, quantum information systems and artificial intelligence” and “biotechnologies and biomanufacturing.”

    “On export controls,” Sullivan went on, “we have to revisit the longstanding premise of maintaining ‘relative’ advantages over competitors in certain key technologies.  We previously maintained a ‘sliding scale’ approach that said we need to stay only a couple of generations ahead. That is not the strategic environment we are in today.  Given the foundational nature of certain technologies, such as advanced logic and memory chips, we must maintain as large of a lead as possible.”

    Sanctions on Russia, argued Sullivan, had “demonstrated that technology export controls can be more than just a preventative tool.” They can be “a new strategic asset in the US and allied toolkit.” Meanwhile, the US is going to ramp up its investment in home-produced semiconductors and related hardware.

    The experience of Cold War I confirms that such methods can work. Export controls were part of the reason the Soviet economy could not keep pace with the US in information technology. The question is whether this approach can work against China, which is as much the workshop of the world today as America was in the 20th century, with a far broader and deeper industrial economy than the Soviet Union ever achieved.

    Readers of the science-fiction novel The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin will recall that the aliens from the planet Trisolaris use intergalactic surveillance to halt technological advance on Earth while their invasion force makes its way through deep space. Can arresting China’s development really be how the US prevails in Cold War II?

    True, recent Commerce Department restrictions — on the transfer of advanced graphics processing units to China, the use of American chips and expertise in Chinese supercomputers, and the export to China of chipmaking technology — pose major problems for Beijing. They essentially cut the People’s Republic off from all high-end semiconductor chips, including those made in Taiwan and Korea, as well as all chip experts who are “US persons,” which includes green-card holders as well as citizens.

    It’s also true that there are no quick fixes for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Most of China’s fabrication capacity is at low-tech nodes (larger in size than 16 nanometers). He cannot conjure up overnight a mainland clone of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.,  which leads the world in the sophistication of its chips. Nor can Xi expect that TSMC would conduct business as usual if China launched a successful invasion of Taiwan. The company’s chip fabs would almost certainly be destroyed in a war. Even if they survived, they could not function without TSMC personnel, who might flee, and equipment from the US, Japan and Europe, which would cease to be available.

    Yet China has other cards it can play. It is dominant in the processing of minerals that are vital to the modern economy, including copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium. In particular, China controls over 70% of rare earth production both in terms of extraction and processing. These are 17 minerals used to make components in devices such as smartphones, electric vehicles, solar panels and semiconductors. An embargo on their export to the US might not be a lethal blow, but it would force the US and its allies to develop other sources in a hurry.

    America’s Achilles heel is often seen as its unsustainable fiscal path. At some point in the coming decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, interest payments on the federal debt are likely to exceed defense spending. Meanwhile, it is not immediately obvious who buys all the additional Treasuries issued each year if the Federal Reserve is engaged in quantitative tightening.

    Might this give China an opportunity to exert financial pressure on the US? In July, it held $970 billion worth of Treasuries, making it the second-largest foreign holder of US debt. As has often been pointed out, if China chose to dump its Treasuries, it would drive up US bond yields and bring down the dollar, though not without causing considerable pain to itself.

    Yet the bigger American vulnerability may be in the realm of resources rather than finance. The US long ago ceased to be a manufacturing economy. It has become a great importer from the rest of the world. As Matthew Suarez, a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps, points out in an insightful essay at American Purpose, that makes the nation heavily reliant on the world’s merchant marine. “Setting aside the movement of oil and bulk commodities,” Suarez writes, “most internationally traded goods travel in one of six million containers transported in approximately 61,000 ships. This flow of goods depends on an equally robust parallel flow of digital information.”

    The growing dominance of China in both these areas should not be underestimated. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative has created infrastructure that reduces Chinese reliance on seaborne trade. Meanwhile, Shanghai Westwell Lab Information Technology Co. is rapidly becoming the leading vendor of the most advanced port-operating systems.

    The war in Ukraine has provided a reminder that the disruption of trade is a vital weapon of war. It has also reminded us that a great power must be in a position to mass-produce modern weaponry, with or without access to imports. Both sides in the war have consumed staggering quantities of shells and missiles as well as armored vehicles and drones. The big question raised by any Chinese-American conflict is how long the US could sustain it.

    As my Hoover Institution colleague Jackie Schneider has pointed out, just “four months of support to Ukraine … depleted much of the stockpile of such weapons, including a third of the US Javelin arsenal and a quarter of US Stingers.” According to the Royal United Services Institute, the artillery ammunition that the US currently produces in a year would have sufficed for only 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine in the early phase of the war.

    A February 2022 Department of Defense report on industrial capacity warned that the US companies producing tactical missiles, fixed-wing aircraft and satellites had reduced their output by more than half.

    As I have pointed out elsewhere, the US today is in some ways in the situation of the British Empire in the 1930s. If it repeats the mistakes successive UK governments made in that decade, a fiscally overstretched America will fail to deter a nascent Axis-like combination of Russia, Iran and China from risking simultaneous conflict in three theaters: Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. The difference is that there will be no sympathetic industrial power to serve as the “arsenal of democracy” — a phrase used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a radio broadcast on Dec. 29, 1940. This time it is the autocracies that have the arsenal.

    The Biden administration must be exceedingly careful not to pursue economic warfare against China so aggressively that Beijing finds itself in the position of Japan in 1941, with no better option than to strike early and hope for military success. This would be very dangerous indeed, as China’s position today is much stronger than Japan’s was then.

    Kissinger is right to worry about the perils of a world war. The first and second world wars were each preceded by smaller conflicts: the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the Sino-Japanese War (1937).

    The Russian invasion of Ukraine may seem to be going well for the West right now.

    But in a worst-case scenario, it could be a similar harbinger of a much wider war.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 22:20

  • 'Pineapple Express' And Bomb Cyclone To Wallop California
    ‘Pineapple Express’ And Bomb Cyclone To Wallop California

    A moisture conveyor belt of atmospheric rivers has unleashed near-record rainfall across the West Coast. Another, perhaps, more powerful atmospheric river and bomb cyclone are set to target California on Wednesday and Thursday, continuing ten days of heavy rains and snow for higher altitudes. 

    The National Weather Service office in the Bay Area warned about the imminent storm, calling it a “truly … brutal system … that needs to be taken seriously.”

    “To put it simply, this will likely be one of the most impactful systems on a widespread scale that this meteorologist has seen in a long while,” an NWS meteorologist in San Francisco, adding, “the impacts will include widespread flooding, roads washing out, hillside collapsing, trees down (potentially full groves), widespread power outages, immediate disruption to commerce and the worst of all, likely loss of human life.”

    The developing atmospheric river formed near Hawaii and, by Wednesday morning, will spread tropical moisture into California by a low-pressure system. This weather phenomenon is known as the “Pineapple Express.” 

    “Basically, an (atmospheric river) is a river in the sky of water vapor, and when it hits the mountains, (the moisture) is forced up over the mountains. 

     “That upward motion causes clouds and precipitation to form, and the faster the flow of air and water vapor is hitting the mountains, the faster the rain is falling, so you get more and more rain with the stronger ARs hitting the mountains,” Marty Ralph, Director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, told FOX Weather. 

    The heaviest rainbands are forecasted over parts of California Wednesday afternoon and evening into Thursday morning. NWS has already posted flood alerts across the Golden State. 

    Another 2-3 inches could be expected across the San Francisco area. Even the Los Angeles metro area could see 1-3 inches. 

    Over the last ten days, a parade of atmospheric rivers has been dumping near record amounts of rain and snow across California. Again, this weather phenomenon is called the Pineapple Express. 

    High wind watches are in effect from the Bay Area to Sacramento. 

    There is concern a bomb cyclone could form.

    Here’s the latest rain forecast. 

    Even though California is experiencing one of the worst droughts on record, the barrage of atmospheric rivers could alleviate some of the drought stress. 

    The Washington Post explained that unusual weather usually occurs “during La Nina winters like the present, weather systems bombard the Pacific Northwest, including Washington and Oregon.” 

    And while climate alarmists blame every change in the Earth’s weather on man-made greenhouse gases … we must point out that even the  UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said, “El Nino and La Nina are naturally occurring climate patterns and humans have no direct ability to influence their onset, intensity or duration.” 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 22:00

  • US Border Crisis Is A National Security Crisis: Former ICE Chief Tom Homan
    US Border Crisis Is A National Security Crisis: Former ICE Chief Tom Homan

    Authored by Adam Michael Molon via The Epoch Times,

    Tom Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has criticized what he described as lax border security policies under the Biden administration, arguing that the surge in illegal immigration “is on purpose.”

    Homan, who served as head of ICE from 2017 to 2018, described the border crisis as one that amounted to public safety, public health, and national security crises.

    “What’s behind the scenes?” Homan told The Epoch Times in an interview.

    “People are going to say, ‘Okay, illegal aliens are crossing the border. They say they’re going to send them to see the judge.’ There’s more to this. What’s the ugly underbelly of this?”

    An October op-ed co-authored by Homan and Mark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from 2019 to 2021 noted, “In just 18 months, Customs and Border Protection has recorded more than 4 million apprehensions— more than the previous four fiscal years combined. The encounters since last October have totaled more than 2.7 million, plus nearly 600,000 known got-aways and likely hundreds of thousands who entered completely undetected.”

    “They’ve arrested 114 known and suspected terrorists who tried to get into the country since Joe Biden’s been in the White House … Border Patrol’s arrested people from 161 countries, [and] some of those countries sponsor terrorism,” Homan told The Epoch Times.

    “Since Joe Biden’s taken office, there’s a recorded over 1 million got-aways based on camera traffic, drone traffic, sensor traffic. Recorded got-aways. So, if they arrest 114, how many of that 1 million came from a country that sponsors terrorism and is coming to do us harm?”

    He added, “Sadly, I think it’s going to take a national security incident to wake them up.”

    Tom Homan, former acting ICE director, at a press conference in Anzalduas Park in Mission, Texas, on March 30. 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

    ‘On Purpose’

    Homan believes that the border crisis “is on purpose,” and has been caused by policies formulated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the Biden administration.

    “[Secretary Mayorkas] has the same data I have,” said Homan, who previously served as the head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations during the Obama administration, before being named head of ICE by then-President Donald Trump.

    “When [Mayorkas] was a deputy secretary [at DHS] in 2014, 2015 under Obama, he was deputy secretary under [then-DHS secretary] Jeh Johnson. When we had a thousand entrants a day, Jeh Johnson called us all and said, ‘What the hell’s going on? This is a bad day.’ A thousand.

    “Now they’ve got seven, eight thousand and [Mayorkas is] saying the border’s secure.”

    “How did we stop it in 2014, 2015? We built detention facilities. We held [illegal aliens] long enough to see a judge. 90 percent lost, we put them on an airplane and sent them home, boarding them as well,” Homan added.

    “[Mayorkas] was the deputy secretary back then, he knew what we did. Now he’s the secretary. What is he doing now? He’s not using detention facilities, he’s shutting them down. They’re releasing [illegal aliens]. Many of them are released without even a court date, so they’re not seeing a judge … He’s doing the complete opposite of what worked in 2014, 2015.”

    “This isn’t mismanagement, this isn’t incompetence. This is on purpose,” Homan alleged.

    DHS, ICE, and the White House did not return requests for comment.

    For his part, Mayorkas has maintained that the border is secure and defended the department’s record amid the record illegal border crossings.

    “The immigration system, our laws, have not been reformed for more than 40 years. The problem from administration to administration, regardless of party, is the fact that we are fundamentally working within a broken immigration system, and that is the foundational challenge, with respect to the border,” the secretary said in early December.

    Mayorkas said DHS was working to improve the efficiency of processing illegal aliens.

    “We are devoting tremendous resources to address the border in a way that achieves its security and upholds its values,” Mayorkas said. “We are modernizing our systems at the border to expedite processing, bringing greater efficiency to it. We are intensely focused on this mission set, just as we are intensely focused on the mission sets that we confront as a department from top to bottom.”

    A U.S. Border Patrol agent instructs immigrants who had crossed the Rio Grande into El Paso, Texas, as seen from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on Dec. 19, 2022. (John Moore/Getty Images)

    ‘Political Power’

    A native of West Carthage, New York, Homan served as a police officer in his hometown and became a border patrol agent in 1984 before rising to become head of ICE three decades later.

    “I was the first ICE director who actually came up through the ranks,” said Homan, who is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and authored the book “Defend the Border and Save Lives: Solving Our Most Important Humanitarian and Security Crisis.” “So when I commanded ICE, I didn’t ask any of the 20,000 men and women who worked for me to do anything that I didn’t do myself as an agent.”

    As head of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, Homan received the 2015 Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service, the country’s highest civil service award. In June 2018, the month that he retired from ICE, Homan received the Distinguished Service Medal from then-President Trump, and in January 2021 was awarded the National Security Medal by Trump in the Oval Office “for distinguished achievement in the field of national security through exceptionally meritorious service.”

    Homan pointed to expectations that illegal aliens will one day vote for Democrats as a factor driving accommodative immigration enforcement policies under the Biden administration, saying, “it’s all about future political power.”

    “They truly believe [illegal aliens] are future Democratic voters, number one, and number two, they certainly perceive a future political benefit. Because remember, President Biden also overturned Trump’s census rule,” Homan said.

    “Now illegal aliens will be counted in the census. So look, already five million have crossed the border [during the Biden administration] … many will flock to sanctuary cities that are protected, which are going be counted in that jurisdiction, which will result in more seats for the Dems.”

    On his first day in office, President Joe Biden issued an executive order revoking a 2020 memorandum issued by President Trump that would have excluded illegal aliens from states’ apportionment bases for congressional representation following the 2020 Census.

    Homan said that  “millions of Americans … don’t even realize there’s a crisis on the border,” and pointed to a need for citizens to become better informed and educated on this issue.

    “I’ll say it a thousand times, regardless of what your opinion is on illegal immigration, when you create a crisis this big, you create a public safety crisis, a public health crisis, and a national security crisis,” he said.

    “You can’t turn a blind eye to it.”

    U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas answers a reporter’s question during a news conference with Mexican counterparts at the State Department in Washington on Oct. 13, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

    Releasing Illegal Aliens

    Homan criticized the administration’s “alternatives to detention” (ATD) program, colloquially known as “catch and release,” under which the majority of illegal aliens are released into the country while they await their court dates.

    “Not only are they letting [illegal aliens] in, they’re setting them up so they’ll never be removed because they’re not in custody,” Homan said.

    There are currently about 378,000 illegal aliens under the ATD program, according to ICE’s latest statistics. Most of them, about 290,000, are monitored by ICE through an app known as SmartLINK. Nearly 70,000 are not monitored by any technology, while 16,000 are monitored through telephone calls, and nearly 7,000 are monitored by GPS.

    ICE says that ATD “effectively increases court appearance rates, [and] compliance with release conditions.” Mayorkas has characterized such policies as part of an effort by the administration to ensure the more humane processing of illegal aliens.

    A 2022 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office annalyzing the ATD program from 2015 to 2020, found that about a quarter of the illegal aliens placed in the program absconded, or fled the address at which they were staying “and could not be located,” including 33 percent in fiscal year 2020, which stretched across the Trump and Biden administrations.

    Homan said that while large numbers of illegal aliens are being released into the United States, “there’s thousands of beds right now in ICE’s inventory” available for use in the detention of illegal aliens “that are empty, already paid for.”

    According to a 2020 DHS Enforcement Lifecycle Report (pdf), illegal aliens encountered in 2014 to 2019 who were held in DHS custody for the entire time until court proceedings were repatriated 98 percent of the time. Only 0.5 percent received court orders allowing them to stay in the United States. One percent of those continuously detained illegal aliens received removal orders from the court that were not executed by ICE.

    The report noted that in contrast, illegal aliens who were never detained were repatriated 30 percent of the time. Meanwhile, 15 percent received court orders allowing them to stay, while 55 percent of the cases were unresolved at the time of the report’s publication.

    “The detention pattern yielding the greatest share of unresolved cases were encounters initially placed in detention but then released prior to a final enforcement outcome,” the report added.

    “These ‘partially detained’ encounters resulted in repatriations just 3 percent of the time and relief just 12 percent of the time, with 85 percent still unresolved, including 18 percent with unexecuted removal orders.”

    “They know this,” Homan said. “They know most [illegal aliens] will lose their case, because based on the immigration court data, and they know based on the Homeland Security Lifecycle Report, if [illegal aliens are] not detained, they won’t be removed at all … That’s why they’re releasing them.”

    He added, “No one’s talking about this…if the American people knew … I think a lot of people sit at home and say, ‘Well, if [illegal aliens] lose their case they’ll be ordered removed and ICE will be able to remove them.’ No they can’t. Because they won’t find them.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 21:40

  • South Korea Says Talks On Nuclear-Sharing With US Underway
    South Korea Says Talks On Nuclear-Sharing With US Underway

    Suddenly US involvement on the Korean peninsula is about to potentially ratchet into uncharted territory, as South Korea confirmed on Tuesday it is in talks with Washington to provide a nuclear deterrent presence at a moment Pyongyang is threatening its own nuclear arsenal expansion.

    “South Korea confirmed Tuesday that Seoul and Washington are discussing its involvement in U.S. nuclear weapons management in the face of intensifying North Korean nuclear threats, after President Joe Biden denied that the allies were discussing joint nuclear exercises,” The Associated Press reports.

    Despite President Joe Biden answering “no” to a reporter’s question after being asked if joint nuclear exercises are on the horizon with Seoul, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s top adviser for press affairs, Kim Eun-hye, explained that the two countries “are discussing an intel-sharing, a joint planning and subsequent joint execution plans over the management of US nuclear assets in response to North Korea’s nuclear (threats).”

    Korean Central News Agency/Reuters

    President Yoon himself had affirmed something similar in an interview published Monday in a local newspaper. While South Korea has no nuclear weapons of its own, the idea could possibly be for some kind of nuclear sharing arrangement similar to NATO’s inter-alliance sharing agreement. As it stands, the US provides Korea with a “nuclear umbrella” – though this remains too ambiguous for South Korea’s leaders, apparently.

    Here’s how the AP paraphrased President Yoon’s Monday statements:

    In the Chosun Ilbo interview, Yoon said that while the U.S. nuclear weapons belong to the U.S., planning, intel-sharing and exercises involving them must be jointly conducted with South Korea. He said he finds it difficult to assure his people of a security guarantee with the current levels of U.S. security commitment.

    The report indicates that talks on this sensitive topic, given that mere headlines of nuclear-sharing talks could trigger threat escalation out of Pyongyang, could be taking place via unofficial channels.

    All of this comes in response to a New Year directive given by the north’s Kim Jong-Un, ordering his forces to embark on an ‘exponential’ expansion of nuclear forces. 

    Kim recently said: “They are now keen on isolating and stifling (North Korea), unprecedented in human history,” according to the official Korean Central News Agency. “The prevailing situation calls for making redoubled efforts to overwhelmingly beef up the military muscle.”

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    Kim then at a meeting of top ministers called for “an exponential increase of the country’s nuclear arsenal” – and specifically involving the mass production battlefield tactical nuclear weapons with an eye toward South Korea.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 21:20

  • As China Retreats From COVID Lunacy, Lunacy Returns To The US
    As China Retreats From COVID Lunacy, Lunacy Returns To The US

    Authored by John Tamny via RealClearMarkets.com,

    China allegedly faces dark days ahead. Why, you may ask? Because of freedom from coronavirus mandates.  

    Who fears too much freedom in China? American reporters and corona-experts.

    Supposedly it will lead to death.

    You see, the view stateside among experts like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is that while China employed “extreme measures” before finally letting up, these measures limited hospitalizations and deaths related to the virus.

    Can the experts truly be serious?

    To answer this question it’s useful to return to March of 2020 when locking Americans into their homes was justified for the latter allegedly protecting us from sickness that would overwhelm hospitals, and worse, death. Even libertarians bought into what was absurd, and plainly inimical to our health. The libertarian nailbiters who fell for the crushing of freedom know who they are, while the experts were plain wrong with their insults of the American people.

    Regarding the experts, their thorough insult was in assuming that free people would act irresponsibly and engage in activity that would sicken them and kill them. Shame on them.

    As for way too many libertarians, missed by the situationally freedom loving was the simple, but crucial truth that force is superfluous when a virus billed to be serious threatens. Really, who needs to be forced inside and away from people if the act of being out and about might result in sickness or death? Which is why the more threatening the virus, the more crucial is the freedom libertarians normally fight for. Better yet, free people produce information. By doing as they wish, we find out from the freedom what activities threaten and what don’t. In hiding behind “there’s no libertarian answer to pandemics,” libertarians chose a horrid taking that blinded the population to the virus answer.

    Bringing it all back to China, Emanuel worries about the country’s “Let-It-Rip Covid Reopening.” He starts with the laughable assertion that “China put the world in peril with its coverup and slow response to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 three years ago.” Yes, somehow Chinese leadership in the age of smartphones, internet, sophisticated intelligence services, and even more sophisticated equity markets was going to hide a rapidly spreading virus from the rest of the world. Goodness, the Soviets couldn’t even hide Chernobyl in 1986, but the Chinese had the ability to hide a virus that was spreading faster than the flu? No, not remotely serious.

    Importantly, Emanuel unwittingly happens upon the shallow nature of his argument in total with his acknowledgement of China’s “slow response to the emergence” of the virus. Which is the point, or should be. Perhaps unknowingly, China already employed a “Let-It-Rip Covid” strategy back in 2019 and early 2020. Did people die en masse amid all this freedom? Of course not. To the latter, some will respond that the Chinese covered up mass death, but what politicians might try to hide markets expose. Never forget that the U.S.’s largest, most valuable companies had and have enormous exposure to the Chinese market. As I point out in my 2021 book about the lockdown tragedy, When Politicians Panicked, if the virus had been a major killer (or even hospital-izer) of the Chinese people, this would have quickly revealed itself through a collapse of U.S. equity shares to reflect a shrinking market in China, and a soon-to-be-shrunk market stateside. Instead, and as a very-much-in-the-news virus spread, U.S. equities reached all-time highs.  

    All of which brings us to the present. Emanuel and the lockdown crowd he caucuses with lament that the return of freedom to the Chinese people “could have been done responsibly.” Too much freedom too fast according to Emanuel et al. He writes that rather than gradually giving it back with experts like him fully in charge, “China ended zero Covid in the most dangerous way possible – precipitously.”

    Basically, Emanuel is reviving the insulting arguments used by experts and politicians back in March of 2020 in the U.S. The Chinese people, like the American people before them, cannot be trusted with freedom. Emanuel contends that freedom in China “could overwhelm hospitals and could cause a million deaths.”

    The above could be true, but it’s near certainly not true given the human instinct to avoid sickness and death. Translated for those who need it, free people will protect themselves much more effectively than governments. Someone should inform Dr. Emanuel of this simple truth, along with an even bigger truth about government power and its much more correct correlation with death.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 21:00

  • Strikes Inside Russia Will Go "Deeper & Deeper": Ukraine Intelligence Chief
    Strikes Inside Russia Will Go “Deeper & Deeper”: Ukraine Intelligence Chief

    Coming off of the Sunday attack on a barracks in Makiivka in Russian-controlled Donetsk, which marked what could be the biggest Russian troop loss of the war in a single attack to date, Ukraine is now vowing to strike “deeper and deeper” inside Russian territory.

    The alarming words were issued from the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, during a new interview with Australia’s ABC…

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

    As the clip from the interview published Monday shows, the military intelligence chief was reluctant to directly confirm whether or not Ukraine recently struck a Russian airbase.

    The ABC reporter wanted answers specifically in relation to the series of deadly drone attacks Engels military airfield in the Saratov region. In December, there were reports that the base was hit three times, the most recent instance of which came last week, and killed three Russian military technicians. 

    The Ukrainian government has yet to officially own up to these attacks, which Russia says were launched by Ukraine’s forces. But according to Gen. Budanov’s words republished in the UK Telegraph: 

    Responding to whether Ukraine was responsible for one of these attacks on an airbase, Kyrylo Budanov said he was “very glad” about it, but maintained Kyiv’s stance of official deniability. 

    In an interview with Australia’s ABC, Mr Budanov predicted these attacks will go “deeper and deeper”, along with further attacks on Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

    Last week three Russian troops died in a drone attack on a Russia’s Engels airfield, which houses Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers. 

    Crucially, the Engels base is over 600km inside Russia from the Ukrainian border, suggesting that Ukraine’s UAV capabilities are growing. Russia’s military has meanwhile said it is deploying greater anti-air protections around Russian bases and cities. 

    Via The Drive: Russian airfield near the Ukraine border on fire during the early part of the invasion.

    As for Washington, it has maintained an official stance of not wanting its Ukrainian partners to conduct attacks inside Russian territory, fearing uncontrollable escalation, but there are indicators that behind the scenes US intelligence could be positively encouraging it – or at least turning a blind eye.

    And yet with Sunday’s devastating attack on the Russian barracks in Donetsk, Ukrainian media and officials have boasted that it was done with US-supplied HIMARS missiles. This of course means from the Kremlin’s perspective, Washington’s involvement in the conflict is growing more direct by the day.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 20:40

  • "Take Them To The Slaughterhouse": Trustee Calls For "Culling" DEI Critics
    “Take Them To The Slaughterhouse”: Trustee Calls For “Culling” DEI Critics

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    John Corkins, vice president of the Board of Trustees of the Kern Community College District Board, has a simple solution for those faculty who question diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs: take them to the slaughterhouse. Corkins has since apologized but the Board conspicuously failed to address other glaring problems with his extreme rhetoric.At the meeting, Corkins responded to students and faculty complaining about a racially hostile environment. Faculty opposed to DEI policies were referenced as part of this threat.

    Corkins declared that there are “abusive” faculty that “we have to continue to cull.”

    He added:

    “Got them in my livestock operation and that’s why we put a rope on some of them and take them to the slaughterhouse. That’s a fact of life with human nature and so forth, I don’t know how to say it any clearer.”

    Corkins has since apologized and insisted

    “My intent was to emphasize that the individuals who spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting have my full support…several African-American faculty, students and statewide representatives … bravely shared their feelings of fear based on the actions of a small group of faculty members and their feelings of disappointment in the district for allowing these actions to continue.”

    Notably, however, the video of the Dec. 13 meeting does not give details on the specific racial incidents. There is reference to an ongoing investigation. However, there are references to faculty who have opposed DEI measures.

    That would likely include a  group called the Renegade Institute for Liberty with history Professors Matthew Garrett and Erin Miller, who teach at Bakersfield College. The group filed a federal lawsuit against the district after they were allegedly threatened with termination for questioning the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at their college. They are both tenured.

    The opposition to DEI measures has led some to object that the group makes them feel unsafe on campus. That reportedly included calls to terminate faculty who oppose DEI to create a safer environment.

    While apologizing for calling for the killing of such faculty, Corkins does not address why faculty should be targeted if they oppose DEI measures. The hearing and the statements made against these faculty members creates a chilling environment for academic freedom. The message is clear that these professors are viewed as a dangerous element on campus.

    The Board has an obligation to address this uncertain line. Corkins apologizes for calling for the killing of critics but not why criticism of DEI itself is a matter for action. There may be conduct that is threatening or violent. There is no indication of any criminal complaint, but there is a need to preserve an open and tolerant environment. However, that also includes tolerance for opposing views on issues like DEI.

    There is no major campaign to remove Corkins. I am less inclined for such removal as I am interested in greater clarity on the rights of free speech and academic freedom.  Everyone makes dumb comments in unguarded moments. I accept that Corkins was carried away by the emotion of the moment. Moreover, Corkins was referencing “abusive” faculty and not necessarily putting all DEI critics in that category. That is precisely what should be clarified.

    However, it would likely be a different story if a board member called for the “culling” of DEI supporters or groups on the left. There remains a double standard in how such controversies are handled in academia.

    The support enjoyed by faculty on the far left is in sharp contrast to the treatment given faculty with moderate, conservative or libertarian views. Anyone who raises such dissenting views is immediately set upon by a mob demanding their investigation or termination. This includes blocking academics from speaking on campuses like a recent Classics professor due to their political views. Conservatives and libertarians understand that they have no cushion or protection in any controversy, even if it involves a single, later deleted tweet. At the University of North Carolina (Wilmington) one such campaign led to a professor killing himself a few days before his final day as a professor.

    I have defended faculty who have made similarly disturbing comments on the left, including “detonating white people,” abolish white people, denouncing police, calling for Republicans to suffer,  strangling police officers, celebrating the death of conservatives, calling for the killing of Trump supporters, supporting the murder of conservative protesters and other outrageous statements. I also defended the free speech rights of University of Rhode Island professor Erik Loomis, who defended the murder of a conservative protester and said that he saw “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence. (Loomis was later made Director of Graduate Studies of History at Rhode Island).

    Even when faculty engage in hateful acts on campus, however, there is a notable difference in how universities respond depending on the viewpoint. At the University of California campus, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.

    When these controversies arose, faculty rallied behind the free speech rights of the professors. That support was far more muted or absent when conservative faculty have found themselves at the center of controversies. The recent suspension of Ilya Shapiro is a good example. Other faculty have had to go to court to defend their free speech rights. One professor was suspended for being seen at a controversial protest.

    The message from this hearing could be viewed by some as affirming  that criticism of DEI is now viewed a threatening language. For conservative, libertarian, or contrarian faculty, it is not clear if such views will now be tolerated or viewed as grounds for termination (or a barrier to hiring).

    This comes at a time when many faculties have indeed “culled” their ranks of conservatives. A new survey of 65 departments in various states found that 33 do not have a single registered Republican.

     In a recent column, the editors of the legal site Above the Law mocked those of us who objected to the virtual absence of conservative or libertarian faculty members at law schools. Senior editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” based on the fact that liberal views reflect real law as opposed to junk law.  (Patrice regularly calls those with opposing views “racists,” including Chief Justice John Roberts because of his objection to race-based criteria in admissions as racial discrimination). He explained that hiring a conservative academic was akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism (or that the sun orbits the earth) to teach at a university.

    It is that easy. You simply declare that conservative views shared by a majority of the Supreme Court and roughly half of the population are invalid to be taught.

    It is not limited to faculty. Polls now show that 60 percent of students fear sharing their views in class. Various polls have shown the same fear with some showing an even higher percentage of fearful students. There is a growing orthodoxy taking hold on our campuses with growing intolerance for dissenting faculty and students alike.

    There are faculty who have raised concerns over DEI initiatives, land acknowledgment, and other policies. Even with the apology, the Board has allowed the underlying threat to linger. It should state why the opposition of faculty members, including filing in court, could be deemed as threatening or unacceptable viewpoints.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 20:20

  • Sam Bankman-Fried Pleads Not Guilty
    Sam Bankman-Fried Pleads Not Guilty

    Update (1500ET): FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, and is set to face trial in October.

    Appearing on Tuesday in US District Court in New York, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan set a trial date of October 2nd for the disgraced crypto king, after US prosecutors said they expect to submit all of their evidence in the case over the next month, Bloomberg reports.

    While the plea was not unexpected, it buys the 30-year-old more time, legal experts say. Bankman-Fried will get a better idea on the evidence prosecutors have against him and plan his next move. The plea puts the case on track for a lengthy trial, which could last at least four weeks.

    Bankman-Fried emerged from a black SUV into a crowd of photographers and TV crews Tuesday, ahead of a 2 pm hearing scheduled in New York. In December, US prosecutors in Manhattan revealed eight criminal counts against him, including wire fraud and campaign finance violations. -Bloomberg

    Prosecutors have accused the 30-year-old of stealing billions of dollars of customer funds from FTX, and defrauding investors and lenders to Alameda Research, his trading arm. He also allegedly made millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions funded by Alameda.

    SBF has previously said he didn’t ‘intend’ to commit Fraud, but acknowledged making mistakes.

    *  *  *

    FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has asked a judge to conceal the identities of two people who will help secure his bail in addition to his parents’ house in Palo Alto, California, Bloomberg reports.

    Sam Bankman-Fried departs from court in New York, on Dec. 22, 2022. 
    Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg

    “If the two remaining sureties are publicly identified, they will likely be subjected to probing media scrutiny, and potentially targeted for harassment, despite having no substantive connection to the case,” wrote SBF’s lawyers in a letter filed on Tuesday seeking redactions of the names of the two individuals who intend to sign as sureties to his bail.

    “Consequently, the privacy and safety of the sureties are “countervailing factors” that significantly outweigh the presumption of public access to the very limited information at issue,” the letter continues.

    Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bail package – granted in his first appearance on US soil since his arrest in the Bahamas, was secured by his parents’ Palo Alto home, which is worth nowhere near that amount. The judge in the case also required that two people of “considerable means,” at least one of whom cannot be a relative, also sign the bond.

    Bankman-Fried was granted a $250 million bail package in December, one of the largest in US history. The personal recognizance bond approved by the judge was secured by the equity in Bankman-Fried’s parents home in Palo Alto, California, which is almost certainly not worth anywhere near that amount. But outsized bonds are more a means of establishing harsh financial consequences for bail-jumping and are often backed by assets worth only around 10% of the stated amount. -Bloomberg

    The two individuals have not yet signed the bond but intend to do so by the Jan. 5 deadline, according to the letter.

    Bankman-Fried is set to appear in a Manhattan federal court on Tuesday to face charges on eight criminal counts ranging from wire fraud to conspiracy to commit money laundering, to conspiracy by misusing customer funds, CNN reports. He is expected to plead not guilty.

    He faces 115 years if convicted on all charges.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 20:08

  • Twitter Files: US State Department Panicked Over ZeroHedge Covid-19 Reporting
    Twitter Files: US State Department Panicked Over ZeroHedge Covid-19 Reporting

    Journalist Matt Taibbi gave the public a double-header on Tuesday – first revealing how Twitter was swarmed by the US intelligence community…

    The drop includes several bombshells about how the US intelligence community, and Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), tried to force-feed the Russian influence narrative down Twitter’s throat despite the fact that Twitter just wasn’t seeing it.

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

    And second, a thread on how the intelligence community started going straight to the media with lists of suspect accounts.

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsIn the early days of the pandemic, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) was flagging accounts suggesting COVID-19 was a bioweapon, blaming the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or “attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA,” (the latter of which nobody was actually saying… it was speculation over work done at Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina).

    As Taibbi further notes, the State Department also flagged accounts that retweeted ZeroHedge due to “Sinophobia” and a “flurry of disinformation” that allegedly broke out after our suspension on Twitter.

    Which only raises more questions.

    But hey, they had a giant problem on their hands, since even those with double-digit IQs could connect the dots between the Obama administration banning Gain-of-Function research to manipulate bat coronaviruses in order to become more transmissible to humans, then Anthony Fauci offshoring it to Wuhan, China via EcoHealth Alliance, which was carried out by a guy who repeatedly bragged about… manipulating bat coronavirus, and then COVID-19 breaks out in the same exact town.

    What are the odds?

    Did we mention we’re really interested in the Twitter ‘Fauci Files’ that are supposedly dropping later this week?

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

    Back to the infiltration of Twitter…

    8.“WE’RE HAPPY TO WORK DIRECTLY WITH YOU ON THIS, INSTEAD OF NBC.” Roth tried in vain to convince outsider researchers like the Clemson lab to check with them before pushing stories about foreign interference to media.

    9.Twitter was also trying to reduce the number of agencies with access to Roth. “If these folks are like House Homeland Committee and DHS, once we give them a direct contact with Yoel, they will want to come back to him again and again,” said policy director Carlos Monje.

    10.When the State Department/GEC – remember this was 2020, during the Trump administration – wanted to publicize a list of 5,500 accounts it claimed would “amplify Chinese propaganda and disinformation” about COVID, Twitter analysts were beside themselves.

    Continue reading here.

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 20:00

  • Misunderstanding War, Money, And Prosperity
    Misunderstanding War, Money, And Prosperity

    Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

    If the consensus of experts misunderstand money, credit and prosperity, how are we going to advance?

    Describing all the ways experts got it wrong is a thriving cottage industry. Expertise is itself contentious, as conventional expertise legitimized by credentials, prestigious institutional positions, scholarship, prizes, etc. can be wielded to promote the interests of the expert or whomever is funding the expert.

    Another segment of experts are self-proclaimed, essentially substituting an air of confidence in their own projections for actual expertise.

    Yet another segment of experts are lightweights with a misleading veneer of legitimacy to cloak their real identity as paid shills for corporations or other self-interested parties. PhD, anyone? Just put that PhD after your name and then pontificate about subjects completely outside your field.

    Then there’s the data, easily manipulated statistically to prove whatever is profitable to interested parties. Ibogaine improves sex, reverses aging and correlates to rising wealth–amazing! Buried on page 19 of the report: Research funded by the Ibogaine Industry. Nicely played, Ibogaine Industry.

    But if we set aside all the expertise delegitimized by self-interest, we’re left with profound misunderstandings of how the world actually works. Consider the big issues of war, money and prosperity.

    Looking back on 2022, it’s impossible to overlook the consensus of experts that expected Russia’s quantitative superiority in tanks, aircraft and personnel to be decisive in its invasion of Ukraine. Nearly a year later, it’s clear the rapid victory the vast majority of military experts anticipated did not play out. The vast majority got it wrong, and not because Russian forces were defeated as much as Russian forces failed to execute the complex coordinated attack as intended.

    The primary misunderstanding here, as in every war, is that difficult-to-measure qualitative factors matter more than raw numbers on a page. Numbers on a page don’t actually fight wars. War is not decided by addition and subtraction: the force with 1,000 tanks doesn’t defeat the force with 800 tanks just because they have 200 more tanks. There is much more going on in war, including training, unit cohesion, leadership, command and control, integrated intelligence, coordination of forces, tactical and strategic superiority and the will of the domestic populace.

    Touting the decisive impact of a new super-weapon is easy to do but misleading, as one new weapon can’t be decisive until long chains of preconditions are in place: personnel have been trained to use the new weapon, including extensive live-fire exercises; the spare parts and maintenance training to support the new weapons are in place and forward-deployed; targeting is integrated with intelligence data, and so on, in a mind-numbingly complex linkage of critical dependency chains: if one link is missing in any chain, the system fails to be decisive.

    Asymmetric warfare has a nice ring, but asymmetry works both ways. Asymmetric warfare calls to mind scrappy rebels beating the conventionally superior forces, and that is one facet of so-called unconventional warfare. (The Hessian mercenaries hired by the British in the Revolutionary War complained bitterly about the cowardly, ill-trained Americans taking potshots from the treeline instead of forming up tidy lines of battle in open fields.)

    Superior capabilities can offer asymmetric advantages, too. Training, unit cohesion, integrated intelligence, creative use of existing weaponry, ad-hoc improvements in armor and tactics–these become decisive despite the intrinsic imprecision of measuring these advantages.

    As for money, isn’t it possible that the vast majority of experts misunderstand money and credit? For example, a great many commentators claim that returning to a gold standard would solve virtually all the problems plaguing the global financial system without considering why the gold standard was abandoned piecemeal in the 20th century. Every policy and system has trade-offs, and the trade-offs change as conditions change.

    The Real Story of America Abandoning the Gold Standard (August 18, 2022)

    The Changing Relationship between Trade and America’s Gold Reserves (2020)

    As for credit, its history stretches back thousands of years. It has its own trade-offs, and the trade-offs change as conditions change.

    Properity is equally misunderstood. We’re assured by veritable armies of experts that prosperity requires constant economic growth–expansion of money, credit, income, wealth, production and consumption. If consumption falters, we’re doomed to impoverishment.

    This is of course completely wrong. Prosperity arises from the distribution of resources becoming more equal (as opposed to more unequal) and the improvement of productivity, i.e. producing more well-being with fewer inputs (resources, capital and labor).

    If the consensus of experts misunderstand money, credit and prosperity, how are we going to advance? First we have to actually understand the systems we want to change. That’s not as easy as establishing a consensus of experts.

    *  *  *

    My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.  Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

    Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 19:40

  • Florida Keys Hit With "Mass Migrant Crisis" After Boat Landings Surge From Caribbean
    Florida Keys Hit With “Mass Migrant Crisis” After Boat Landings Surge From Caribbean

    Last month, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration from lifting Title 42, a Trump-era public health order that allows the Customs and Border Protection to turn migrants away at the US-Mexico border to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Even with Title 42 in place, the Biden administration has still managed to stoke a massive humanitarian crisis as the flood of migrants continues — and is now spreading to Florida.

    At least 500 migrants believed to be from Cuba, and other Caribbean countries arrived across the Florida Keys over the weekend, in what local officials described as a “mass migration crisis,” according to NYPost. 

    Monroe County Sheriff Rick Ramsay’s office said, “the Sheriff’s Office has been assisting federal law enforcement agents with a spike in Cuban refugee arrivals since Saturday and continuing into Monday morning.” 

    “Refugee arrivals require a lot of resources from the Sheriff’s Office as we help our federal law enforcement partners ensure the migrants are in good health and safe.

    “Residents may see an increased amount of law enforcement and emergency responders throughout the county as we continue to respond to these landings,” Sheriff Rick Ramsay said in a statement posted on Facebook. 

    The sheriff’s office reported more than 160 refugees were on boats that landed in the Middle and Upper Keys. More than 300 migrants landed across Marquesas Keys and at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. They also said the latest wave of migrant landings is “aggravating the mass migration crisis in the Keys,” adding this whole mess is the result of a “federal failure” that has sparked yet another “humanitarian crisis.” 

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

    At least one park in the Keys had to close over the weekend because hundreds of migrants arrived on boats. This was the Dry Tortugas National Park, located west of Key West. 

    “The closure, which is expected to last several days, is necessary for the safety of visitors and staff because of the resources and space needed to attend to the migrants,” the park tweeted Monday. “Concession-operated ferry and sea plane services are temporarily suspended.”

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    Democrats and Republicans have both criticized the Biden administration’s inability to get a handle on the record surges in illegal immigrants at the US-Mexico border, and now it appears the chaos is spreading to Florida in the form of migrant waves on boats.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 19:20

  • The Friction Ahead In 2023
    The Friction Ahead In 2023

    Authored by Claudio Grass,

    Division, friction and polarization have been on the rise in the West for at least a decade, but the escalation we saw during the “covid years” was especially worrying. Over the last year, this “worry” has become a truly pressing concern, even a real emergency one might argue, as inflationary pressures and an actual war were added to the mix of political and social tensions.  

    Going into 2023, there are many reasons for responsible investors and for hardworking savers to adopt a cautious, bearish outlook. If anything, it’s hard to tell what to be concerned about the most and what to prepare for first: an escalation to the Ukraine-Russia war? Inflation persisting or even reaching new highs? Fuel and heating costs exploding even further? Growing government overreach and suppression of individual liberties and financial sovereignty? 

    In an effort to answer questions like these, that are keeping countless Americans and Europeans up at night, I turned to Jeff Deist, President of the Mises Institute in Alabama.

    Jeff has been one of the most impressive thinkers and speakers that I have personally encountered, and I’ve always found his clarity of thought particularly enlightening, but also very helpful in this day and age. After all, the ability to plainly and honestly communicate a great idea is just as important as the ability to conceive it – especially when it can be communicated to the public and change some open minds in the process, just like the Mises Institute has been doing for four decades. 

    Claudio Grass (CG): After the extreme trespasses, power abuses and irrational policies and U-turns we saw during the pandemic, many citizens hoped that 2022 would prove to be the year of “normalization”. What we got instead was a war, a fuel and food crisis, and a world more divided than any time before in recent memory. What was, in your estimation, the most worrying development we saw in 2022?

    Jeff Deist (JD): 2022 may be remembered as the year we fully understood how elites and the political class never intend to allow a return to “normal.” The covid flu virus created the excuse for lockdowns, controls, and spying; and as Robert Higgs explained, the “Ratchet Effect” means crisis measures don’t go away when the crisis ends. 

    Covid will be the excuse for attempts to impose a whole new battery of state mandates in areas of health (vaccines, masks, testing), business (closures), money (central bank digital currencies, capital controls), and movement (quarantines, travel restrictions). It’s up to us in the fight to restore normalcy and decency; the politicians will always go in the other direction.

    CG: We both warned for a long time that there would be a very high price to pay for the more-than-a-decade-long monetary and fiscal policies of the Fed and most of its peers. Why do you think it took so long for inflation to make the comeback we’re suffering though today? What triggered it and why now?

    JD: The current price inflation engulfing the US and other western nations results more from fiscal stimulus in 2020 and 2021 than monetary policy. In America alone, national politicians pumped more than $6 trillion into the domestic economy in the form of direct payments—subsidies—to state and local governments, preferred industries (insurance, airlines), businesses (payroll “loans”), and individuals in the form of stimulus checks.

    All this new money was created even as Covid lockdowns dramatically reduced the production of goods and services and disrupted global supply chains. So unlike monetary stimulus, where central banks push interest rates down and buy government bonds from commercial banks, the price inflation we are suffering today is directly tied to fiscal stimulus. It’s a simple matter of more money chasing fewer goods and services. Paying people to stay home and not work was a recipe for disaster.

    CG: After numerous unsuccessful attempts to simply deny its existence, central bankers were forced to acknowledge that inflation is indeed a problem, but still, quite unsurprisingly, nobody seems too keen to take any responsibility for it. Together with politicians, they simply blame Putin for it and pretend that the reckless “print, borrow and spend” approach of the past years had nothing to do with it. Given the relatively low levels of financial literacy among the general public, do you think most voters and taxpayers believe this narrative?

    JD: The question is not only whether average people still believe in the technical competence of central bankers to “manage” the economy, but whether they still believe central bankers even intend to help average people. Increasingly the answer to both appears to be “No!” 

    We are fewer than 15 years removed from the last economic crisis of 2008, so the idea that central banks prevent crises and crashes is hardly supported by the evidence. Of course, the poorest people suffer most from inflation, as a larger portion of their income for basics—food, utilities, transport, and rent. So, I do think average people sense something is deeply wrong with the financial and monetary system, even if they don’t understand the underlying technical issues.  

    CG: Apart from the thousands of human lives the Ukraine war has already claimed or uprooted and the inestimable damage to private and public property, there was another causality: Whatever was left of the legal protections for private property or of the free market in Europe vanished seemingly overnight. We saw gas and nuclear power companies nationalized, unprecedented interventionism in the oil and gas market and redistribution policies, fining energy companies for being profitable to pay for “inflation checks” to the public. Do you see a similar trend in the US?

    JD: The US has been more insulated from the energy shocks cause by sanctions against Russia simply because we have vast amounts of domestic oil and natural gas. But we lack sufficient refining capacity to make full use of our oil, due to environmentalist pressure. We also lack sufficient nuclear capacity for a country of 330 million people.

    So yes, I think events in Ukraine will advance the narrative of the “Green New Deal,” which effectively nationalizes energy policy to promote so-called renewable fuels while banning—or regulating into oblivion—fossil fuels. This is all a pipe dream, of course, as coal, oil, and natural gas still account for more than 80% of our energy use. And we are many decades away from having the grid capacity for widespread use of electric vehicles, even if you ignore the terrible issues of lithium mining and battery disposal. 

    Unless we are prepared to suffer a significant loss of material living standards, politicians in the West better stop fantasizing about green energy and start getting serious about the real market for reliable and cheap fossil fuels. Let’s hope and pray this winter does not result in the freezing deaths of people in Ukraine or Europe due to energy shortage.

    CG: Speaking of the US, what’s your assessment of the fiscal and regulatory policies adopted since Joe Biden took office? Do you think there’s anything his administration could have done to avert the current inflationary spiral or was it always going to be inevitable, after so many years in the making?

    JD: Biden certainly is responsible for the increase spending under his administration, which has enormous inflationary consequences. But most of the mischief in our economy was created by fiscal and monetary policies enacted while he was a cronyist US Senator for many decades. In that sense his Senate record is far worse than his presidential record. He is a buffoon, and easily led, which means he is not capable of challenging the “print, borrow, and spend” approach you mentioned. But I hope people understand Biden is a symptom of a much deeper problem, which is a hopelessly corrupt system with all the wrong incentives.

    CG: Focusing on the sociopolitical situation, at least from an outsider perspective, we’re certainly seeing less outrage and controversy reflected in the international press compared to when Trump was in the Oval Office. Does that mean that the “wounds have healed” and that Americans are actually more united today or is the rift still widening, just more quietly?

    JD: From my perspective the rift has widened. Biden’s narrow victory is viewed by the Left as a mandate to punish and vanquish the Deplorables, especially in rural areas. That’s the nature of politics, which is a form of proto-violence. Markets and civil society are win-win institutions, government and politics are zero-sum. So, unless and until we reduce the importance of political outcomes—unless and until we make life less political—we should expect division to grow.

    CG: Both in US and in Europe, there is well-documented and growing mistrust of the media, social- and legacy organizations alike. My own hope had been, especially after the pandemic, that the obscene amount of bias would cause more and more people to do their own research and to “educate themselves”. Have you noticed such a shift in the US, perhaps reflected in a heightened interest in the educational content and programs that the Mises Institute offers?

    JD: Absolutely. The digital age provides us the ability to seek out and find voices of reason and peace amidst the white noise of mainstream media. I hate to think it takes a real calamity to wake people up, but perhaps this is human nature. The more worried people become about the economy and their future, the more they seek out alternative sources of news and information. The Mises Institute works to be an alternative source for economic news and education.

    CG: Another trend we have in common is the “green agenda”. Even as the present crisis made it abundantly clear that the energy transition in Europe was catastrophically premature, bringing about the “cold, dark winter” that millions of citizens are now facing, there is still extreme pressure for more “green” policies, including a war on farmers at a time of unprecedented food price increases. Is that something you expect to see continue in the months and years to come and if so, what’s the impact you expect to see?

    JD: Food and energy crises certainly are possible. In keeping with the “new normal,” elites will use such crises to increase their own power and force us to suffer for problems they caused. We know, because they tell us plainly, their plans to have us stop using fossil fuels, stop traveling so much, stop eating meat, and stop owning homes. They are quite explicit about this. 

    The fastest and most effective way to achieve this is to make houses, gasoline, and meat so expensive only the very rich can afford them. We already see consolidation of home ownership by private equity firms, for example, to create a nation of renters in the US. We see billionaires like Bill Gates investing in fake meat substitutes. We see recipes in gourmet magazines for dishes featuring bugs! 

    None of this is normal or natural, but must be imposed by incentives, either positive or negative. If we hope to maintain any personal or family sovereignty in the coming decades, we have to recognize and resist this new program of imposed austerity.

    CG: What’s your outlook for the US economy in 2023? What are the main threats that worry you the most and what would be your advice for responsible savers that seek to protect all they’ve worked for from their government’s incompetence or intentional abuses?

    JD: Biden and company will face an increasingly tough economy, but given the Democrat’s tepid success in the midterm elections I suspect the administration will simply double down on fake statements about how well the country is doing. Politics is contra-reality, so by definition Biden cannot accept or admit what’s really going on.

    I predict the US Fed will “pivot” in 2023 on interest rate hikes, meaning they will revert to their usual (true) status of worrying more about equity and bond markets than consumers and inflation.  

    Inflation will remain will us, higher than admitted by government statistics, and will become a permanent feature of the 2020s across the West. Government spending and deficits will continue to grow. As a result, it will be a very trying decade for savers! Gold and silver, commodities, and bitcoin are the obvious suggestions for those looking to protect themselves from devaluation, but for a variety of reasons the US dollar will remain strong against other currencies. And of course, the most important thing is to “harden” yourself against uncertainty by improving your skills and practicing self-education.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 19:00

  • Incoming Israeli Foreign Minister Shocks By Previewing Pro-Russian Policies
    Incoming Israeli Foreign Minister Shocks By Previewing Pro-Russian Policies

    Israel’s new government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is signaling a huge policy shift regarding both the Ukraine war and Israel’s relations with Russia, even suggesting a more openly ‘pro-Moscow’ stance.

    Israel’s Foreign Minister Eli Cohen in a Monday speech previewing future policy said in the context of the Ukraine conflict, “On the issue of Russia and Ukraine we will do on thing for sure – speak less in public.” Interestingly it comes after months of rising tensions with Kiev, based on Israel’s repeat refusal to provide the Ukrainians with its Iron Dome anti-air defense systems and other weaponry. However, the prior government was much more vocally supportive of Ukraine, in line with key Western allies like the United States and Britain.

    Image: The Jerusalem Post

    Israel has limited itself to supplying humanitarian and other non-lethal aid, causing President Zelensky to recently lash out. In October Zelensky went so far as to chastise Israeli officials for turning “a blind eye to Russian terror”. 

    Zelensky also said at the time, which came in the context of a virtual address before Israeli journalists: “Is it [Israel] with the democratic world, which is fighting side by side against the existential threat to its existence? Or with those who turn a blind eye to Russian terror, even when the cost of continued terror is the complete destruction of global security?”

    Fast-forward to a new hard-right Israeli government having days ago been sworn-in, and it appears that Zelensky’s fiery denunciation and pressure campaign has backfired. 

    But it seems Zelensky saw it coming, given the following comments at the end of November: 

    Israel’s incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “personal relationship” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin could affect the “historical relations” between Israel and Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky told The New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday.

    “Of course, if [Netanyahu] wants to maintain his personal relations with Putin, he can continue doing what he’s doing,” Zelensky said at the summit, held in New York City.

    “But if he wants to maintain the historical relations between Israel and the Ukrainian people, you have to do everything you can to save as many people as possible.”

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    The incoming Israeli FM in the Monday remarks vowed a new “responsible” policy on the war in Ukraine, describing that the foreign ministry “will prepare a detailed presentation to the security cabinet on this issue.” He did say that Israeli humanitarian aid to the war-ravaged country will continue, but clearly this is a sign the door has been shut regarding the prospect of lethal aid in the near future.

    According to Axios Middle East correspondent Barak Ravid, this marks a dramatic shift in Russia-Ukraine policy compared to the last caretaker government which was in place during the initial invasion and throughout the first 10 months of war. Ravid writes: 

    Why it matters: Cohen’s predecessor Yair Lapid led a tough line Russia, condemned it publicly & even said the Russian military committed war crimes. Since the invasion Lapid didn’t speak to Lavrov & after he assumed office as caretaker prime minister he didn’t speak to Putin.

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    Ravid further noted Cohen is expected to hold a phone call with his Russian counterpart: 

    New Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen signaled a policy shift on Ukraine in his 1st speech hinting the new government will take a more pro-Russian line. He said he will speak on Tuesday with Russian FM Lavrov – 1st such call since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    Meanwhile, an awkward standoff could be developing at the UN, given Ukrainian and Israeli officials are seeking to ramp up pressure on each other concerning votes and policy positions before the world body.

    As for Israel wanting to keep up tighter relations with Moscow, one prime factor is that it needs Russia to continue giving a quiet green light to Israeli Air Force strikes inside Syria. Israel says it is acting against Iranian assets inside the country, as well as Hezbollah. Russia has a significant military presence in Syria at the invitation of President Assad, but has not intervened against Israeli aggression in semi-frequently bombing places like Damascus, despite its limited verbal denunciations. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 18:40

  • Matt Gaetz Calls McCarthy A "Squatter" For Prematurely Moving Into Speaker's Office
    Matt Gaetz Calls McCarthy A “Squatter” For Prematurely Moving Into Speaker’s Office

    Update (2228ET): In a hilarious cap to today’s chaos surrounding the GOP House Speaker vote, anti-McCarthy Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida wrote to the Architect of the Capitol to ask how long McCarthy – who prematurely moved in to the Speaker’s office – would be able to occupy the room “before he is considered a squatter.”

    *  *  *

    Update (1836ET): The day ended without the election of a House Speaker, as support for Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) waned throughout the day.

    Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), meanwhile, saw his stock rise with each of Tuesday’s three votes.

    As The Epoch Times notes, in the first vote of a tumultuous first day of the 118th Congress, McCarthy, the California Republican who led the party to regain the majority in the November 2022 mid-term election, fell 15 votes short of the 218 he needed to become Speaker of the House.

    McCarthy received 203 votes from Republican colleagues, while 212 Democrats voted for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who will serve as House Minority Leader in 2023. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz), the leader of the anti-McCarthy members, received 10 votes. A handful of Republicans voted for candidates who were not nominated.

    Second Vote

    Incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) cited Saint Paul’s admonition about “finishing the race” as he nominated House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for Speaker of the House.

    In his floor speech, Jordan said the House must do three basic things in 2023, including getting the U.S. border with Mexico under control and restoring U.S. military strength, stopping profligate spending by Democrats, and conducting a comprehensive oversight effort of President Joe Biden’s administration.

    “We have to do the Oversight and Investigations that needs to be done. This idea that bureaucrats who never put their name on the ballot but think they run the country, who assaulted our constituents’ First Amendment liberties. they need to be held accountable,” Jordan said.

    “That has to happen, we need to do it. We need to do it in a way that’s consistent with the Constitution, but we need to do it vigorously and aggressively. That is part of our duty as members of this body,” Jordan continued.

    Jordan’s nomination of McCarthy followed the California Republican’s failure to marshall a majority of the 434 Members of the Representatives assembled earlier in the day for the first vote on a new Speaker.

    Jeffries was also nominated a second time. Then Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) nominated Jordan, despite the fact the Ohio Republican made clear he continued to support McCarthy. Then the second ballot roll call was called.

    All of the 19 Republicans who opposed McCarthy in the first ballot shifted their votes to Jordan, including Biggs. While McCarthy gained the same 203 votes he received in the first balloting, which again left him short of the needed majority of 218. All 212 Democrats again voted for Jeffries.

    One of those who voted for Jordan was House Freedom Caucus (HFC) Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who during the second ballot posted on Twitter his determination to fight McCarthy no matter how many ballots are required.

    “I stand firmly committed to changing the status quo no matter how many ballots this takes. If McCarthy had fought nearly as hard to defeat the failed, toxic policies of the Biden Administration as he has for himself, he would be Speaker of the House right now,” Perry wrote.

    Tension is building on the House floor among Republicans. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told Fox News that “If all they want is somebody other than Kevin, let’s be candid. Steve Scalise is supporting Kevin, Jim Jordan is supporting Kevin. As a matter of fact, every member of the leadership team, including every ranking member without becoming a chairman, is supporting Kevin. So we are in a situation in which the 19 have to explain what they want.”

    Democrats were quick to seize on the GOP confusion, with Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) issuing a statement following the first vote observing that “Hunter Thompson was right: ‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.’ This is what a Republican majority gets us: chaos.”

    “Democrats are here and ready to do our jobs for the country. Republican disarray is standing in the way.”

    Third Vote

    House Republicans remained deadlocked after voting for the third time Tuesday without giving enough votes to make McCarthy the new Speaker of the House.

    McCarthy lost one vote—Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.)—on the third vote of the day for a total of 202 votes. Democrat Hakeem Jeffries of New York had the highest total with 212, with all of his Democratic colleagues but no Republicans voting for him.

    Incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) drew 20 votes, but his own ballot went to McCarthy for the third time. Jordan received 19 votes on the second ballot.

    The conservative rebels who have held firm against McCarthy and coalesced around Jordan on the third ballot remained steadfastly determined to keep their California colleague from succeeding Democrat Nancy Pelosi, also of California, as the new Speaker.

    In an impassioned speech nominating Jordan on the third ballot, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) put the issue between McCarthy and the dissidents as one of how best to stand up to President Joe Biden and the Senate Democratic majority.

    “How many times have we been down here giving speeches, and there’s not a soul in the chamber? Yet this is what it takes to get 435 People in the chamber and have an actual debate,” Roy told the chamber.

    “The American people are watching, and that’s a good thing. What we’re doing is exercising our rights to vote and have a debate and have a discussion about the future of this country through the decision of choosing a speaker.

    “This is not personal. It’s not. This is about the future of the country. This is about the direction of the country.”

    Republican Infighting

    That vote capped a frenzied two days of back-room bargaining and media posturing by McCarthy and his supporters and a small group of dissident populist conservatives who demanded and got a host of reform concessions, but still voted no on the first ballot.

    The bottom line for the dissidents was they just don’t trust McCarthy to be the agent of change they believe must lead the House in what they are determined to make the last two years of President Joe Biden’s tenure in the White House.

    “I came to a broken and dysfunctional Congress to change it. Advancing the long-standing pecking order one notch has no prospect of doing that. Many don’t want to change it,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) posted on Twitter just before the first vote.

    “Kevin McCarthy is not the right candidate to be Speaker. He has perpetuated the Washington status quo that makes this body one of the most unsuccessful and unpopular institutions in the country. This is not about personality or who has ‘earned’ the position, it is about serving the American people. I will not support the status quo,” Bishop continued.

    In the final minutes before the new House assembled for the speaker contest, a clearly exasperated and frustrated McCarthy told reporters: “I have the record for the longest speech ever on the floor. I don’t have a problem getting a record for the most votes for Speaker, too.”

    He was referring to his more than 90-minute December address to the House in opposition to Biden’s $1.8 trillion omnibus spending bill.

    Read the rest here…

    *  *  *

    Update (1455ET): Kevin McCarthy has lost the second tally for Speaker of the House.

    Of note, when this happened in 1923, it went to nine ballots.

    And look who’s gaining steam…

    *  *  *

    Update (1310ET): Not even a quarter of the way through roll call, and Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has failed to secure enough votes to become Speaker of the House – which will push the contest into a multiple-ballot vote.

    According to the Washington Post‘s Paul Kane, the last time this happened was 1923.

    What’s next? As Politico reports:

    After McCarthy fails to get 218 votes on the first ballot, the Freedom Caucus antagonists have signaled that they will start backing another yet-unnamed candidate on the second ballot. The Daily Beast reported Monday night that that person is Ohio Rep. JIM JORDAN, the longtime McCarthy critic-turned-ally.

    The Ohio Republican, however, has no shot at being speaker — something that his adoring conservative colleagues know very well. But, per the Daily Beast story, that’s not the point: They’re hoping to peel off more Republicans to back Jordan, aiming to have McCarthy’s vote count decrease from the first ballot to the second.

    It’s an open question how long today will go until someone nominates a viable candidate for the gavel — someone like STEVE SCALISE (R-La.) or PATRICK McHENRY (R-N.C.). And there’s a fear that if one of these member’s names is called too early in the process, the conference will turn on them.

    Buckle up. It’s going to be a long day. 

    *  *  *

    Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave a Tuesday morning speech imploring fellow Republicans to elect him as Speaker of the House, as several notable members of the GOP have openly opposed McCarthy.

    According to Axios, McCarthy has given hardliners nearly everything they’ve asked for, however he still hasn’t secured enough votes for the position, meaning that for the first time in 100 years, the House will likely hold multiple ballots for the speaker.

    In his Tuesday speech, McCarthy listed all the concessions he’s made to the right, and pointed out that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) praised elements of his rules package. Gaetz, notably, has spearheaded the anti-McCarthy movement within the chamber.

    “I’ve earned this job,” said McCarthy, after running through everything he’s done to become speaker – to which Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) reportedly shook his head, according to Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman.

    “This is bullshit,” said Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) in response to McCarthy’s speech.

    In December, Gaetz said he wouldn’t vote for McCarthy because he’s “just a shill of the establishment.”

    McCarthy also got into an argument with Rep. Perry, who accused McCarthy of having no track record on spending bills.

    McCarthy’s supporters chime in:

    In addition to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), McCarthy has the support of neocon Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who has called McCarthy’s detractors “enemies” and “narcissists.”

    “They are enemies now. They have made it clear that they prefer a Democrat agenda than a Republican,” Crenshaw told CNN‘s Manu Raju.

    “This handful of members is very clearly looking for notoriety over principle. That’s what it is. And anyone who suggests differently is in some kind of make believe fantasy reality. It’s not, it’s not true,” he continued, adding “They lost those debates.”

    “That should have been the end of it because that’s how a team works, right? But if you’re a narcissist, … then you’ll keep going. And you’ll threaten to tear down the team for the benefit of the Democrats just because of your own sense of self importance.”

    Another McCarthy supporter, Mike Rogers (R-AL), said the GOP should bar McCarthy dissenters from getting committee slots – an idea Chip Roy didn’t like. 

    Here’s Roy in December explaining the situation;

    According to Axios, this could become a war of attrition in which “[a] good number of pro-McCarthy House Republicans are hoping some of the holdouts are bluffing and looking for a show — and will ultimately get worn down enough during the process to cave for McCarthy.”

    The likely candidate to replace McCarthy, in the unlikely event he pulls out, is Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA), who said he won’t run against McCarthy but has been quietly preparing for this scenario.

    It doesn’t look like McCarthy is too worried…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 18:36

  • The Bahamas Lawyers Up As The FTX Case Proceeds In US Court And Disagreements Fester
    The Bahamas Lawyers Up As The FTX Case Proceeds In US Court And Disagreements Fester

    By Derek Andersen of Cointelegraph.com

    The Bahamas will have legal representation in the unfolding FTX case. The Caribbean nation chose Brown Rudnick as counsel “in certain matters of engagement related to the collapse of FTX Digital Markets Ltd.,” alongside Bahamian lawyers and other experts, according to a statement released by the law firm. 

    FTX Digital Markets is headquartered in the Bahamas, and the top management of the company lived in that country. Cases against the members of the management team are now being heard in the United States after former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s extradition from the Bahamas.

    Brown Rudnick has been working for the Bahamas since March 2022 to develop a national policy statement on digital assets. The firm was reengaged by the country after the FTX collapse, and filed a registration statement with the U.S. Department of Justice, as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, late in December, saying:

    “Some of the Registrant’s activities may involve preparation and dissemination of informational materials and otherwise engaging with U.S. government agencies and the U.S. media.”

    Brown Rudnick may also prepare written content for social media on the behalf of the Bahamas, it said.

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

    The Bahamas has been active in the FTX case from its start and differences with U.S. prosecutors began almost immediately. A competing Chapter 15 bankruptcy claim was filed in a U.S. court by the Bahamas the day after FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

    The Securities Commission of the Bahamas (SCB) ordered all FTX Digital Markets digital assets transferred to a wallet it controlled after the beginning of the bankruptcy cases, leading to criticism from the new FTXmanagement that burgeoned into accusations that the SCB had asked Bankman-Fried to create a new tokenfor it and that it was attempting to favor the country’s citizens in the claims against the company.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 01/03/2023 – 18:20

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Jan 03

Today’s News 3rd January 2023

  • 19 Senior Experts Of China’s Top Academic Bodies Died In December
    19 Senior Experts Of China’s Top Academic Bodies Died In December

    Authored by Anne Zhang and Lynn Xu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    In December, 19 experts of China’s top academies, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), died of unspecified “illness,” a statistic that is six times higher than the average number of deaths in the past years.

    The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei Province on April 17, 2020. The P4 epidemiological laboratory was built in co-operation with French bio-industrial firm Institut Merieux and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

    Official reports avoid mentioning the cause of these deaths, in what appears to be an attempt to cover up deaths  caused by COVID-19.

    But Airfinity, a UK-based Health Data Agency, updated data on Dec. 30, saying that roughly 11,000 people in China are dying every day from COVID, bringing the total number of deaths from the disease to 110,000 in December.

    According to obituaries published by China’s official media, in the 12 days from Dec.15 to Dec.26, 13 members of CAE passed away due to “illness.” They are fiber optic communication expert Zhao Zisen (91), environmental engineering and environmental water quality expert Tang Hongxiao (91), rare earth metal smelting and separation expert Zhang Guocheng (91), laser technology expert Zhao Yijun (92),  inorganic non-metallic materials expert Gu Zhenan (86), civil engineering and structural mechanics expert Long Yuqiu (96), ecologists and foresters Li Wenhua (90), wildlife scientist Ma Jianzhang (86), pediatric surgery specialist Zhang Jinzhe (102), thermal impeller machinery expert Wang Zhongqi (90), architect and professor at Tsinghua University Guan Zhaoye (93), welding specialist for aerospace manufacturing engineering Guan Qiao (87), and petroleum engineering expert Li Qingzhong (92).

    A total of six CAS members passed away on Dec. 6, 23, and 25, including Lu Qiang (86), a Chinese expert in automatic control and dynamics of electrical systems and professor at Tsinghua University; Zhang Youshang (97), a Chinese biochemist and molecular biologist; Jiang Hualiang (57), a former director of the Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences; Wu Chengkang (93), a high-temperature gas dynamist; Tong Tanjun (88), a medical scientist; and Huang Kezhi (95), a physicist and a professor at Tsinghua University.

    Most of the deceased were CCP members, and some were from the minority parties, such as the Democratic League and the Jiu San Society, which were recognized as existing because they explicitly supported the CCP and recognized its leadership.

    Zhang Yaping, Vice Prersident of the Chinese Academy of Sciences speaks at an event announcing details of international access to lunar samples collected by China’s Chang’e-5 moon probe, in Beijing on January 18, 2021. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

    Political Factors Introduced to the Selection of Academicians

    In 2022, at least 53 members of the CAS and CAE passed away according to incomplete statistics.

    CAS and CAE, known as the Two Academies, accumulate scientists and experts that can serve the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and enjoy the privilege of lifetime membership. The selection system for academics inevitably reflects political factors.

    Xie Yong, deputy editor-in-chief of Huanghe magazine in north China’s Shanxi Province, published an article in Modern China Study, an international journal, in 2022 discussing the differences between academician systems under CCP rule and under the Republic of China.

    In 1948, before the CCP took power, the Republic of China’s way to select members of the Academia Sinica, the current national academy, was based on the sole principle of academic achievement.

    Academicians were nominated by major universities, research institutions, professional societies, and respected celebrities of the academic community. Hence, the candidates were all first-class scholars at that time. Even Guo Moruo and Ma Yinchu, who were both pro-Communist in their political stance, were also elected as academicians, Xie said.

    In contrast, CAS selecting methods in 1955, by then controlled by the CCP, included political considerations to the selection criteria. For academicians of Social Sciences, candidates were required to uphold socialism and the Communist Party.

    At that time, all former members of the Academia Sinica who had not left the mainland in 1949, the year the CCP seized power, basically became members of CAS.

    However, Hu Xianfu, a famous biologist at that time, was taken off the list because the CCP authorities thought that his academic views were anti-Soviet.

    Hu then suffered physically and mentally during the Cultural Revolution, and finally passed away in 1968 at the age of 75 in a 10-square-meter (about 108 square feet) room.

    During the Cultural Revolution, many academicians were branded as reactionary academic authorities and were severely criticized and even persecuted to death.

    Other scholars and experts have not escaped various political campaigns and purges by the CCP. After the anti-rightist movement and the Great Leap Forward, 11 academicians were ranked as rightists and stripped of their titles as academic members.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 23:00

  • Proper Hydration "Might Slow Down Aging Process In Humans," Study Reveals
    Proper Hydration “Might Slow Down Aging Process In Humans,” Study Reveals

    A peer-reviewed study published by National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers in the eBioMedicine journal on Monday reveals that adequately hydrated individuals could live longer and develop fewer age-related chronic diseases. 

    “The results suggest that proper hydration may slow down aging and prolong a disease-free life,” Natalia Dmitrieva, Ph.D., the study’s lead author and researcher in the Laboratory of Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH, said in a statement. 

    Dmitrieva and her team used health data spanning three decades of 11,255 adults and analyzed their serum sodium levels which fluctuate with fluid intake. Consuming more fluid will lower serum sodium levels. They found that adults with higher sodium levels were more prone to develop chronic illnesses and show signs of advanced biological aging than those with lower sodium levels. Adults with higher sodium levels were more susceptible to death at a younger age. 

    Serum sodium levels above 142 mEq/L increased the risk of chronic diseases like heart failure, stroke, atrial fibrillation, peripheral artery disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, and dementia by up to 64%. But adults with serum sodium levels between 138-140 mEq/L had a much lower risk of such fatal diseases. 

    “People whose serum sodium is 142 mEq/L or higher would benefit from evaluation of their fluid intake,” Dmitrieva said. She added that most people could increase their fluid intake to reduce sodium levels. 

    According to the National Academy of Medicine, men should ingest 125 ounces of water daily, and women consume 91 ounces. 

    Dmitrieva said her findings don’t prove a causal effect, and randomized, controlled clinical trials are needed to understand if proper hydration can promote healthy aging, prevent diseases, and lead to a longer life. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 22:25

  • "Should Not Live In Fear" – Chief Justice Roberts Year-End Message Focuses On Judges' Security
    “Should Not Live In Fear” – Chief Justice Roberts Year-End Message Focuses On Judges’ Security

    Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    After a difficult 2022 at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts said in an annual report that the personal security of judges needs to be a priority.

    “The law requires every judge to swear an oath to perform his or her work without fear or favor, but we must support judges by ensuring their safety,” Roberts wrote (pdf) in the “2022 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary,” which was made public late Dec. 31.

    “A judicial system cannot and should not live in fear,” he added.

    Chief Justice John Roberts at the Supreme Court Building in Washington on Nov. 30, 2018. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)

    In the report, Roberts paid tribute to federal Judge Ronald N. Davies, who in 1957 ruled in favor of black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, who had been barred from attending a local high school despite the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in 1954 striking down school desegregation on constitutional grounds.

    Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, a Democrat, ordered the state’s National Guard to block the students but “when it came time to rule in the school desegregation litigation, Davies did not flinch,” Roberts wrote.

    Angry crowds resisted the desegregation effort and Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower directed the 101st Airborne to make sure the black students could attend the school.

    In his role as Chief Justice of the United States, Roberts, appointed in 2005 by President George W. Bush, both presides over the Supreme Court and oversees the federal judiciary.

    The report does not reference the unprecedented leak in May 2022 of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 precedent that legalized abortion nationwide.

    The Supreme Court is said to be investigating the leak, but the identity of the leaker or leakers is still unknown. Various justices have said publicly and repeatedly in recent months that the public would be updated on the progress of the investigation but no updates have been issued.

    The report also does not reference the raucous protests at the homes of the conservative justices in Maryland and Virginia, nor the attacks on justices such as Brett Kavanaugh who was the target of a foiled assassination attempt and of flash-mob harassment in public outings by left-wing activists.

    Roberts defended the right of Americans to disagree with court rulings.

    “Judicial opinions speak for themselves, and there is no obligation in our free country to agree with them. Indeed, we judges frequently dissent—sometimes  strongly—from our colleagues’ opinions, and we explain why in public writings about the cases before us.”

    Roberts said recent security legislation was a step in the right direction.

    Roberts acknowledged that last month Congress passed the Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act to help protect judges and their families. The measure was named after the son of federal Judge Esther Salas of New Jersey, who was killed by an assailant when he answered the door to his mother’s home.

    Roberts did not mention that on June 16, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Supreme Court Police Parity Act into law. The measure gives Supreme Court officials greater authority to protect the court, members of the justices’ immediate families, and other court employees.

    The report also states that caseloads for the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, fell over the past year.

    In the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, 2022, the number of cases docketed by the Supreme Court dropped by 8 percent compared to the previous 12-month period. Similar declines were seen in federal courts of appeals, district courts, and bankruptcy courts.

    The Epoch Times reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice for comment but did not receive an immediate reply.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 21:50

  • Trump Suggests He May Run On Third-Party Ticket In 2024
    Trump Suggests He May Run On Third-Party Ticket In 2024

    Former President Trump has last week hinted that he’ll hand-grenade the 2024 presidential election for Republicans by running as a third-party candidate.

    Trump shared an American Greatness article by Dan Gelernter which suggests that establishment Republicans would do everything in their power to prevent Trump from winning again, and that voters like Gelernter would rather vote for Trump on a third-party ticket even if it means losing the election.

    “They’d rather lose an election to the Democrats, their brothers in crime, than win with Trump,” Gelernter wrote of establishment GOP.

    …despite the obvious differences, we’re heading for a 1912-repeat, in which the Republican Party ignores its own voters. The Republican machine has no intention of letting us choose Trump again: He is not a uniparty team player. They’d rather lose an election to the Democrats, their brothers in crime, than win with Trump.

    That leads us to the inevitable question: What should we do when a majority of Republicans want Trump, but the Republican Party says we can’t have him? Do we knuckle under and vote for Ron DeSantis because he would be vastly better than any Democrat?

    I say no, we don’t knuckle under. And I like DeSantis. I’d vote for him after Trump’s second term. But not before. –American Greatness

    “Do I think Trump can win as a third-party candidate? No,” Gelernter added. “Would I vote for him as a third-party candidate? Yes, because I’m not interested in propping up this corrupt gravy-train any longer.”

    In 2021, Trump told RNC Chairwoman Rona McDaniel that he was “done” with the party after receiving virtually no support over his claims that Democrats cheated in the 2020 election.

    “You cannot do that. If you do, we will lose forever,” McDaniel reportedly told Trump regarding a 3rd party run, according to a book by ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl. “Exactly – you will lose forever without me. I don’t care. This is what Republicans deserve for not sticking up for me,” Trump allegedly shot back.

    That said, DeSantis has been shooting up in the polls – and even received his own hit piece in Vanity Fair on Monday.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 21:15

  • Congress Should Investigate 'Gain-Of-Function' Research
    Congress Should Investigate ‘Gain-Of-Function’ Research

    Authored by Bill King via RealClear Wire,

    I fear that the investigations Republicans have promised in the House next year will be little more than another round of toxic partisan gamesmanship. But there is one investigation Congress should undertake, and that is into so-called “gain-of-function” research.

    Before the pandemic, I suspect that most of you, like me, had never heard of gain-of-function research. What we learned during the pandemic is that scientists around the world routinely tinker with the genome of viruses to see how the induced changes will affect replication of the virus (contagiousness) and the effects it has on its host (lethality). Such research has apparently been going on for decades and is routinely funded by governments, including ours.

    Within weeks of the COVID-19 virus emerging in China near the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), many began to question whether the virus had been created by gain-of-function research and somehow escaped from WIV’s labs. Recently analyzed Chinese documents from early in the pandemic seem to suggest the virus might have come from WIV. To many, the proposition that the novel coronavirus just happened to naturally occur a few hundred yards from the WIV facility seemed too much of a coincidence.

    But in February 2020, barely three months after the virus’s genome had been sequenced, 27 scientists signed a statement in the medical journal The Lancet, unequivocally declaring that the virus had occurred naturally and that any suggestion to the contrary was quackery and a conspiracy theory. Their statement quickly became the accepted orthodoxy for much of the world’s scientific community and virtually all the mainstream media.

    However, as time wore on, circumstances regarding the origin of that statement came under scrutiny. In a 2021 Vanity Fair article, investigative journalist Katherine Eban revealed that the statement was organized by a scientist named Peter Daszak. That statement concluded with a declaration from the scientists who signed it that “we have no competing interests.” However, Eban reported in a follow-up article that Daszak was the director of EcoHealth Alliance, which in 2014 had received a $3.7 million grant from the NIH for gain-of-function research and made a sub-grant for $600,000 – to the WIV.

    I wrote to the email address reserved for the statement in the Lancet post, posing a number of questions about the circumstances around the creation of the letter and the “competing interests” statement. I also reached out to two of the scientists who signed the letter asking for an interview regarding the statement. I received no responses.

    Questions about gain-of-function research predate COVID. In fact, there has been a robust debate over the potential risks and benefits that dates to, at least, 2011. In 2014, a group of 300 prominent scientists, led by Harvard’s highly regarded epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, signed a statement raising alarms about risks associated with gain-of-function research.

    The academic controversy caused the Obama administration to issue a moratorium on gain-of-function research, but it included a general exception for studies “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.” According to Eban’s reporting, the exception quickly became a glaring loophole that essentially rendered the rule useless: the controversial research mostly continued unabated.

    The Trump administration scrapped the moratorium in favor of a complex review process. But that process was mostly conducted outside of the public’s view or even significant peer review, leaving many of the critics, including Lipsitch, still wary.

    The debate over the origins of COVID still rages today and unfortunately has become politicized, with Democrats and Republicans generally lining up behind the natural and lab-leak theories, respectively. In August 2021, the National Intelligence Council issued an unclassified report in response to an order from President Biden to review the origin of the virus. The report stated that the intelligence community had not been able to reach a conclusion and that the origin would likely never be known without more cooperation from the Chinese government. Of course, the more time that passes the less likely it is that the mystery will ever be solved.

    While we would all like to know how the pandemic started, the mere fact that it might have originated from gain-of-function research gone awry makes it imperative to conduct a detailed investigation of the risks and potential benefits of this kind of research. Of all the things we regulate, surely tinkering with viruses to make them more contagious and more lethal should be right at the top of the list. Congress needs to pass laws closely regulating what Rutgers professor Richard Ebright described to Katherine Eban as “looking for a gas leak with a lighted match” and not leave this up to executive orders.

    Congress should also investigate what appears to have been a coordinated attempt to squelch any inquiry into the legitimate questions over COVID’s origins in the early days of the pandemic. For example, the signers of the Lancet statement should be subpoenaed and questioned about what was almost certainly a false certification of “no competing interests” by at least one of the signers. (The criticism regarding potential conflicts of interest is not just coming from the right: The uber-progressive Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs disbanded a group he had established to study the origins of COVID, citing conflicts of interest. Interestingly, Daszak was part of the group Sachs disbanded.)

    I don’t know whether House Republicans can conduct such hearings without turning them into a carnival sideshow. But hopefully they will rise above partisan instincts and deliver much-needed answers for the American people.

    Bill King is a businessman and lawyer, and is a former opinion columnist and editorial board member at the Houston Chronicle. He has served in a number of appointed and elected positions, including mayor of his hometown. He writes on a wide range of public policy and political issues. Bill is the author of “Unapologetically Moderate” and currently serves as the co-chair of the Forward Party of Texas.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 20:40

  • Tesla Kicks Off 2023 By Continuing 10,000 Yuan Sales Incentives In China
    Tesla Kicks Off 2023 By Continuing 10,000 Yuan Sales Incentives In China

    It was an ugly end to 2022 for Tesla shares, to say the least. The automaker fell 37% alone in the month of December, due to fears about Elon Musk’s additional time commitments at Twitter and concerns about demand for vehicles drying up.

    And it looks as though Tesla will begin 2023 by, in part, validating some concern about demand. The automaker is set to open the year in China by extending incentive offers aimed at generating sales in China, according to Bloomberg.

    Bloomberg reported this weekend that Model 3 sedan and Model Y sport utility vehicle buyers will get 10,000 yuan in incentives (about $1,450) if they take delivery by February 28, 2023, per Tesla’s website.

    The automaker is offering a 6,000 yuan subsidy it began early in December, in conjunction with a 4,000 yuan subsidy that is “tied to purchasing insurance through Tesla” and that was started in November 2022, Bloomberg wrote. 

    Tesla is also looking to stoke sales in the U.S., offering $7,500 off all of its major models. Delivery numbers for Q4 were announced this morning and missed Wall Street’s expectations. 

    Tesla was down 45% in December before an Adam Jonas note from Morgan Stanley encouraged buying in the waning days of the month.  He lowered his price target on Tesla from $330 to $250, but maintained his overweight rating on the name and argued that the recent selloff had created an “opportunity”.

    “We believe 2023 is shaping up to be a ‘reset’ year for the EV market where the last 2 years of demand exceeding supply will be substantially inverted to supply exceeding demand. Within this environment, we believe players that are self-funded (non-reliant on external capital funding) with demonstrated scale and cost leadership throughout the value chain (from manufacturing to up-stream material supply) can be relative winners,” Jonas wrote.

    “We believe Tesla may bein position to extend its lead vs. the EV competition in FY23 (both legacy and start-up) even before consideration of IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) benefits where Tesla also stands out as the biggest potential winner,” he continued. 

    Jonas is convinced that among peers, Tesla is one of the best suited to handle the macro headwinds, writing: “On a relative basis, the reiteration of our OW rating must be seen vs. more challenged EV-related peers such as EW-rated Fisker (FSR), UW-rated Lucid (LCID),and UW-rated QuantumScape (QS). Between a worsening macro backdrop, record high unafforability,and increasing competition, there are hurdles to overcome. Yet we do believe that in the face of all these pressures, TSLA will widen its lead in the EV race, as it leverages its cost and scale advantages to further itself from the competition.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 20:05

  • Mark McCloskey Won’t Have Guns Or Money Returned, Despite Pardon, Missouri Judge Rules
    Mark McCloskey Won’t Have Guns Or Money Returned, Despite Pardon, Missouri Judge Rules

    Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    St. Louis lawyer Mark McCloskey will not have his guns or the fines he paid returned to him even though he received a governor’s pardon in 2021, a Missouri judge has ruled.

    Armed homeowners Mark and Patricia McCloskey, stand in front their house confronting protesters marching to St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson’s house in the Central West End of St. Louis on June 28, 2020. (Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)

    McCloskey and his wife, Patricia McCloskey, both personal injury lawyers, pleaded guilty in June 2021 to misdemeanor charges for assault and harassment, respectively, over an incident in 2020 where they wielded guns as self-defense measures at their property while watching Black Lives Matter protesters walk through their private, gated neighborhood.

    They were required to pay maximum fines totaling $2,750. As part of the plea agreement, the two also surrendered the guns they wielded—a Colt AR-15 rifle and a Bryco pistol.

    After their convictions, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson, on July 30, 2021, pardoned the couple and shortly following the move, McCloskey filed a lawsuit in St. Louis City Circuit Court seeking to have the guns returned and the fines paid back to him and his wife.

    Circuit Judge Joan Moriarty rejected the request on Dec. 28, saying that the governor’s pardon doesn’t have any impact on the plea agreement the couple had agreed to.

    “Plaintiff and his wife are required to follow through with their end of the bargain,” she wrote, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

    “While the governor’s pardon does clear plaintiff’s record of the conviction,” she added, “his guilt remains and the terms of an agreement that predicated said guilt also remains.”

    McCloskey said he plans to appeal, the outlet reported.

    Law Licenses Suspended

    In February 2022, the Missouri Supreme Court indefinitely suspended the McCloskeys’ law licenses. The court also stayed the suspension and put the two attorneys on probation for a year, which means they can still practice law, but the suspension would kick in if they violate their probation by not following the “Rules of Professional Conduct.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 19:30

  • US Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased In 2022?
    US Inflation: How Much Have Prices Increased In 2022?

    Inflation has been top of mind over the last year, looming over every aspect of the economy. But how has inflation actually impacted the prices of everyday goods like bread and butter or gas and public transportation?

    In this infographic, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop and Bhabna Banerjee showcase select items and how inflation has impacted the price year-over-year. Additionally, we’ve charted the overall price increases across the overarching goods categories, using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

    Note: These numbers are assessed using the Consumer Price Index (CPI)  for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U), using the U. S. city average by detailed expenditure category.

    How Much has the Cost of Goods Gone Up?

    Inflation has caused the cost of many goods to increase significantly compared to last year. The most dramatically affected item is elementary school lunches, a cost in the U.S. that is already unaffordable for many families.

    Here’s a look at every single reported good’s change in price from last year:

    Item Unadjusted Change YoY (Nov 2021 – Nov 2022)
    Food at elementary and secondary schools +254.1%
    Food at employee sites and schools +110.1%
    Fuel oil +65.7%
    Eggs +49.1%
    Margarine +47.4%
    Other motor fuels +43.3%
    Fuel oil and other fuels +41.7%
    Airline fares +36.0%
    Butter and margarine +34.2%
    Butter +27.0%
    Flour and prepared flour mixes +24.9%
    Public transportation +23.8%
    Other dairy and related products +22.4%
    Fats and oils +21.8%
    Canned fruits +20.9%
    Crackers, bread, and cracker products +19.9%
    Salad dressing +19.9%
    Lettuce +19.8%
    Motor oil, coolant, and fluids +19.6%
    Frozen and refrigerated bakery products, pies, tarts, turnovers +19.4%
    Cookies +19.2%
    Lunchmeat +18.4%
    Canned fruits and vegetables +18.4%
    Frozen vegetables +18.3%
    Other uncooked poultry including turkey +17.9%
    Cakes, cupcakes, and cookies +17.6%
    Ice cream and related products +17.5%
    Rice, pasta, cornmeal +16.8%
    Cereals and cereal products +16.6%
    Other bakery products +16.5%
    Cereals and bakery products +16.4%
    Dairy and related products +16.4%
    Bakery products +16.3%
    Other meats +16.2%
    Potatoes +16.2%
    Canned vegetables +16.2%
    Olives, pickles, relishes +16.1%
    Processed fruits and vegetables +15.8%
    Bread +15.7%
    Pet food +15.7%
    Fresh milk other than whole +15.6%
    White bread +15.5%
    Bread other than white +15.5%
    Utility (piped) gas service +15.5%
    Roasted coffee +15.2%
    Other fats and oils including peanut butter +15.2%
    Soups +15.0%
    Motor vehicle repair +15.0%
    Frozen fruits and vegetables +14.9%
    Fresh biscuits, rolls, muffins +14.8%
    Milk +14.7%
    Coffee +14.6%
    Other miscellaneous foods +14.6%
    Fresh cakes and cupcakes +14.4%
    Stationery, stationery supplies, gift wrap +14.3%
    Energy services +14.2%
    Transportation services +14.2%
    Rice +14.1%
    Sugar and sugar substitutes +14.1%
    Household paper products +14.1%
    Apparel services other than laundry and dry cleaning +14.1%
    Frozen and freeze dried prepared foods +14.0%
    Instant coffee +13.9%
    Other food at home +13.9%
    Delivery services +13.8%
    Fresh whole chicken +13.7%
    Beverage materials including coffee and tea +13.7%
    Sauces and gravies +13.7%
    Electricity +13.7%
    Vehicle accessories other than tires +13.7%
    Health insurance +13.5%
    Frankfurters +13.4%
    Motor vehicle insurance +13.4%
    Breakfast cereal +13.3%
    Nonalcoholic beverages and beverage materials +13.2%
    Nonfrozen noncarbonated juices and drinks +13.2%
    Poultry +13.1%
    Fresh whole milk +13.1%
    Sugar and sweets +13.1%
    Energy +13.1%
    Pets and pet products +13.0%
    Juices and nonalcoholic drinks +12.9%
    Candy and chewing gum +12.9%
    Other foods +12.9%
    Carbonated drinks +12.8%
    Tools, hardware and supplies +12.8%
    Other sweets +12.7%
    Cheese and related products +12.4%
    Oranges, including tangerines +12.4%
    Gasoline, unleaded premium +12.4%
    Housekeeping supplies +12.4%
    Motor vehicle body work +12.4%
    Energy commodities +12.2%
    Other beverage materials including tea +12.1%
    Food at home +12.0%
    Chicken +12.0%
    Miscellaneous household products +11.9%
    Vehicle parts and equipment other than tires +11.8%
    Household cleaning products +11.7%
    Motor vehicle maintenance and repair +11.7%
    Fresh and frozen chicken parts +11.6%
    Motor vehicle parts and equipment +11.6%
    Food from vending machines and mobile vendors +11.5%
    Snacks +11.1%
    Spices, seasonings, condiments, sauces +11.1%
    Veterinarian services +11.0%
    Baby food +10.9%
    Pet services including veterinary +10.9%
    Motor fuel +10.8%
    Miscellaneous personal goods +10.8%
    Gasoline, unleaded midgrade +10.7%
    Food +10.6%
    Other processed fruits and vegetables including dried +10.4%
    Living room, kitchen, and dining room furniture +10.3%
    Tires +10.3%
    Floor coverings +10.2%
    Gasoline (all types) +10.1%
    Tools, hardware, outdoor equipment and supplies +10%
    Gasoline, unleaded regular +9.8%
    Fruits and vegetables +9.7%
    Fresh vegetables +9.6%
    Fresh sweetrolls, coffeecakes, doughnuts +9.5%
    Citrus fruits +9.5%
    Prepared salads +9.5%
    Hair, dental, shaving, and miscellaneous personal care products +9.3%
    Motor vehicle maintenance and servicing +9.3%
    Tax return preparation and other accounting fees +9.1%
    Full service meals and snacks +9.0%
    Purchase of pets, pet supplies, accessories +8.9%
    Video discs and other media +8.9%
    Frozen fish and seafood +8.8%
    Women’s underwear, nightwear, swimwear, and accessories +8.6%
    Food away from home +8.5%
    Dishes and flatware +8.5%
    Outdoor equipment and supplies +8.4%
    Household furnishings and supplies +8.3%
    Fresh fruits and vegetables +8.0%
    Wine away from home +7.9%
    Rent of primary residence +7.9%
    Laundry and dry cleaning services +7.9%
    Ham +7.8%
    Dried beans, peas, and lentils +7.8%
    New cars +7.8%
    Breakfast sausage and related products +7.7%
    Processed fish and seafood +7.7%
    Beer, ale, and other malt beverages at home +7.7%
    Ham, excluding canned +7.6%
    Other goods +7.5%
    Apples +7.4%
    Other fresh vegetables +7.4%
    Personal care products +7.4%
    Pet services +7.4%
    Admission to movies, theaters, and concerts +7.4%
    Frozen noncarbonated juices and drinks +7.3%
    Medical equipment and supplies +7.3%
    Rental of video discs and other media +7.3%
    New vehicles +7.2%
    Rent of shelter +7.2%
    New trucks +7.1%
    Music instruments and accessories +7.1%
    Alcoholic beverages away from home +7.1%
    Shelter +7.1%
    Owners’ equivalent rent of residences +7.1%
    Owners’ equivalent rent of primary residence +7.1%
    Distilled spirits away from home +7.0%
    Salt and other seasonings and spices +6.9%
    Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs +6.8%
    Furniture and bedding +6.8%
    Services less energy services +6.8%
    Personal care services +6.8%
    Haircuts and other personal care services +6.8%
    Limited service meals and snacks +6.7%
    Shelf stable fish and seafood +6.6%
    Fresh fruits +6.6%
    Beer, ale, and other malt beverages away from home +6.6%
    Garbage and trash collection +6.6%
    Fish and seafood +6.5%
    Indoor plants and flowers +6.5%
    Other personal services +6.5%
    Cigarettes +6.4%
    Dental services +6.4%
    Video discs and other media, including rental of video +6.4%
    Men’s suits, sport coats, and outerwear +6.3%
    Tobacco and smoking products +6.3%
    Miscellaneous personal services +6.3%
    College textbooks +6.2%
    Legal services +6.2%
    All items less food and energy +6.0%
    Women’s suits and separates +5.9%
    Clocks, lamps, and decorator items +5.8%
    Peanut butter +5.7%
    Women’s apparel +5.7%
    Window and floor coverings and other linens +5.6%
    Women’s and girls’ apparel +5.6%
    Other fresh fruits +5.5%
    Other food away from home +5.5%
    Other household equipment and furnishings +5.5%
    Newspapers and magazines +5.5%
    Alcoholic beverages +5.5%
    Tobacco products other than cigarettes +5.5%
    Fresh fish and seafood +5.4%
    Nonprescription drugs +5.4%
    Cosmetics, perfume, bath, nail preparations and implements +5.4%
    Recreation services +5.4%
    Financial services +5.4%
    Sports equipment +5.3%
    Educational books and supplies +5.3%
    Day care and preschool +5.3%
    Other condiments +5.2%
    Girls’ apparel +5.2%
    Jewelry and watches +5.2%
    Watches +5.1%
    Jewelry +5.1%
    Toys, games, hobbies and playground equipment +5.1%
    Club membership for shopping clubs, organizations, or participant sports fees +5.1%
    Other linens +5.0%
    Other furniture +5.0%
    Water and sewer and trash collection services +5.0%
    Fees for lessons or instructions +5.0%
    Funeral expenses +4.9%
    Alcoholic beverages at home +4.5%
    Nursing homes and adult day services +4.5%
    Water and sewerage maintenance +4.4%
    Domestic services +4.4%
    Medical care services +4.4%
    Photographers and photo processing +4.4%
    Other recreation services +4.4%
    Residential telephone services +4.4%
    Meats, poultry, and fish +4.3%
    Video and audio services +4.2%
    Postage and delivery services +4.2%
    Cable and satellite television service +4.0%
    Infants’ and toddlers’ apparel +3.9%
    Bananas +3.8%
    Propane, kerosene, and firewood +3.8%
    Care of invalids and elderly at home +3.8%
    Commodities less food and energy commodities +3.7%
    Services by other medical professionals +3.7%
    Admissions +3.7%
    Tomatoes +3.6%
    Apparel +3.6%
    Recreation commodities +3.6%
    Moving, storage, freight expense +3.5%
    Elementary and high school tuition and fees +3.5%
    Photographic equipment and supplies +3.3%
    Other lodging away from home including hotels and motels +3.3%
    Recreational reading materials +3.2%
    Lodging away from home +3.2%
    Hospital and related services +3.2%
    Postage +3.2%
    Medical care commodities +3.1%
    Professional services +3.1%
    Intracity transportation +3.1%
    Tuition, other school fees, and childcare +3.1%
    Wine at home +3.0%
    Outpatient hospital services +3.0%
    Other appliances +2.9%
    Hospital services +2.9%
    Bedroom furniture +2.8%
    Medicinal drugs +2.8%
    Housing at school, excluding board +2.8%
    Inpatient hospital services +2.8%
    Sporting goods +2.7%
    Men’s shirts and sweaters +2.5%
    Window coverings +2.4%
    Men’s footwear +2.4%
    Transportation commodities less motor fuel +2.4%
    Checking account and other bank services +2.4%
    Men’s apparel +2.3%
    Footwear +2.3%
    Boys’ and girls’ footwear +2.3%
    State motor vehicle registration and license fees +2.3%
    Bacon, breakfast sausage, and related products +2.2%
    Women’s footwear +2.2%
    Education and communication services +2.2%
    Photographic equipment +2.0%
    College tuition and fees +2.0%
    Prescription drugs +1.9%
    Recorded music and music subscriptions +1.8%
    Eyeglasses and eye care +1.8%
    Motor vehicle fees +1.8%
    Appliances +1.7%
    Distilled spirits at home +1.7%
    Whiskey at home +1.7%
    Distilled spirits, excluding whiskey, at home +1.7%
    Pork chops +1.6%
    Other intercity transportation +1.6%
    Men’s pants and shorts +1.5%
    Physicians’ services +1.5%
    Telephone services +1.5%
    Audio equipment +1.4%
    Other recreational goods +1.4%
    Internet services and electronic information providers +1.4%
    Men’s and boys’ apparel +1.3%
    Pork +1.2%
    Meats +1.1%
    Women’s dresses +1.1%
    Sports vehicles including bicycles +1.1%
    Parking fees and tolls +1.1%
    Technical and business school tuition and fees +1.1%
    Wireless telephone services(1)(2) +1.0%
    Sewing machines, fabric and supplies +0.9%
    Parking and other fees +0.9%
    Nonelectric cookware and tableware +0.8%
    Men’s underwear, nightwear, swimwear, and accessories +0.8%
    Toys +0.6%
    Tenants’ and household insurance +0.6%
    Intracity mass transit +0.4%
    Laundry equipment +0.1%
    Recreational books 0.0%
    Uncooked ground beef -1.0%
    Major appliances -1.0%
    Bacon and related products -1.1%
    Boys’ apparel -1.7%
    Computer software and accessories -1.7%
    Women’s outerwear -2.0%
    Used cars and trucks -3.3%
    Ship fare -3.6%
    Computers, peripherals, and smart home assistants -4.4%
    Other pork including roasts, steaks, and ribs -5.1%
    Beef and veal -5.2%
    Car and truck rental -6.0%
    Uncooked other beef and veal -7.2%
    Admission to sporting events -7.2%
    Uncooked beef steaks -7.4%
    Uncooked beef roasts -8.1%
    Video and audio products -8.2%
    Other video equipment -9.5%
    Education and communication commodities -9.7%
    Information technology commodities -11.5%
    Televisions -17.0%
    Telephone hardware, calculators, and other consumer info items -17.9%
    Smartphones -23.4%
    Household operations –
    Gardening and lawncare services –
    Repair of household items –
    Leased cars and trucks –
    All items +7.1%

    School lunches became more expensive this year as a federal waiver program came to an end. The program had provided every school child in the country with free lunches.

    After school lunches, fuel oil and eggs rank high in terms of big jumps in their prices, increasing by 66% and 49% respectively. Some other notable increases: airfares have gone up by 36%, living room, kitchen, and dining room furniture by 10.3%, and alcoholic beverages at home by 4.5%. 

    However, a number of goods have actually gone down in the index, including:

    • Smartphones: -23%

    • Televisions: -17%

    • Uncooked beef roasts: -8%

    • Admission to sporting events: -7%

    • Car and truck rentals: -6%

    Interestingly, smartphones are not actually getting cheaper, rather the BLS adjusts for products that improve rapidly in quality year-over-year. Usually, most items are identical on a year-to-year basis, but smartphones are improving in their quality, which is why their price appears to be deflating rather than inflating.

    U.S. Inflation

    Overall, the items in the basket of goods under the Consumer Price Index have increased by a collective 7.1% since last year, making purchasing necessary food and energy items more difficult.

    Here’s another look at how each overarching category increased, between November 2021 and November 2022:

    • Food: +10.6%

    • Energy: +13.1%

    • All other items excluding food and energy: +6.0%

    Purchasing your everyday ingredients to cook with, energy to heat your home, and all other items that are standard in our everyday lives has become increasingly expensive. In an effort to counter inflation pressures, the U.S. Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates to make borrowing more difficult in order to push down demand.

    Heading into 2023, many feel that a recession is on the way, and a lot of households will have to continue borrowing at higher rates to keep up with basic goods purchases. On the upside, some experts anticipate that although there will be economic downturn, it will be brief and won’t deeply impact the economy like past ones.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 18:55

  • Have We Seen A Peak In Pax Americana
    Have We Seen A Peak In Pax Americana

    By Russell Clark of The Capital Flows and Asset Markets substack

    Happy New Year! Welcome to a special on the idea of a perhaps we are seeing a peak in the Pax Americana.

    Pax Americana implies that America has become the dominant empire as Rome once was, or perhaps on a more comparable basis, as Britain used to be. In financial markets and elsewhere, the question is asked where we have entered an era of decline for the US.

    Conventional thoughts on Pax Americana link the decline of the British Empire with the rise of the America. I think this analysis is wrong. The decline of the British Empire saw the rise of two new empires, the US and the Soviet Union. In military terms, the Soviet Union was largely responsible for the the defeat of Germany in World War II, and the Soviet Union and Chinese assistance saw US forces turned back in the Korean War of 1950 to 1955, and defeated in Vietnam War. The US centred trading system only incorporated North America, Western Europe, and some parts of East Asia. Most of the rest of the world was either socialist on non-aligned. If this is at odds with how you think of modern history, then I would recommend Eric Hobsbawm series of books: Age Of Capital 1848 -1875, Age of Empire 1875 – 1914 and Age of Extremes 1914 – 1991. Hobsbawm is probably correct in marking 1991 as the beginning of Pax Americana. Not only did it mark the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was also when the first Gulf War demonstrated to the world that US military power was far beyond the capabilities of all other powers, but also the integration of the world into a single trading system – globalization. First military domination, then financial domination. Or as in Dark Knight Rises when Bain askes Daggett, “Do you feel in charge?”, are politics and military really in charge or finance and corporates? The former is really in charge in my view. If we look at Russian invasion of Ukraine, financial sanctions matter far less than the ammunition that the US is providing.

    The question of Pax Americana is whether US military can still project power? Defeat in Ukraine would almost certainly signal an end to Pax Americana. If Russia was to take control of Ukraine, the ability of the US to protect the global trade system would come under severe pressure. Could countries really rely on imports of key resources from elsewhere? Could Europe and Japan continue to have undersized armed forces? The key tenets of globalisation would fall apart, and with it the underpinnings of Pax Americana. However, a rout of Russia, and the regime change in Russia would offer the potential of an increase in Pax Americana, and a new age in European integration. In my mind, the future of Pax Americana will be decided at home, rather than on black earth of Ukraine. To confront the rising powers, US military spending will need to rise. Going back to levels seen in 1980s implies a tripling of the current military budget.

    But here is the problem. Domestically will voters stand for increasing military spending as their own domestic conditions worsen? The biggest spending item for the US government is social security, but it is plain that this spending is not benefiting the majority of Americans. While most countries saw a stagnation in life expectancies during Covid, the US has seen three years of decline, wiping out at least two decades of gains.

    A similar decline in visible in the relatively capitalist UK. However compared to a relatively more “socialist” Japan – the flattening out of life expectancy in the UK and the US is striking.

    It is likely that the US policy makers understand these issues, which is why there has been increasing use of export controls of technology to China. How effective is this likely to be? Very hard to tell. Export controls are very unlikely to stop China from catching up to already existing technology. For example, ever since the US invented nuclear weapons, it has worked very hard to keep the technology as a monopoly and to limit other countries access to it. The Soviet Union successfully tested it first atomic bomb in 1949, China followed in 1964, France in 1968. North Korea in 2006 tested its first atomic weapon, despite severe sanctions, and very weak technological development elsewhere. But can the US stop China developing a lead in technology? Possibly, but ultimately, Pax Romana or the British Empire did not head for decline due to losing a technological lead, more that the political structure of Empire declined. That was that local politics lead to the decline of empire, and looking at the US, with high income inequality, falling life expectancy, and a Republican party that is split between free trade and Trump politics, a decline in Pax Americana seems likely.

    How do we trade this? My best trade remains, long gold short treasuries, for reasons outlined many times before.

    The key takeaway from all of this, is that corporates and financial markets feel like they are in charge. Financial market assumed that Russia would not invade in Ukraine and were wrong. Politics is Bane, while financial market are Daggett. Do financial markets really feel like “they are in charge?” anymore? I don’t think so. Long GLD, short TLT. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 18:20

  • Virgin Islands AG Fired Three Days After Suing JPMorgan Over Jeffrey Epstein
    Virgin Islands AG Fired Three Days After Suing JPMorgan Over Jeffrey Epstein

    As we noted last week, US Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan for allegedly reaping financial benefits from Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation – less than a month after George secured a $105 million settlement with Epstein’s estate, which agreed to liquidate Epstein’s islands and cease all business operations in the region.

    Three days later, George is now unemployed, after Governor Albert A. Bryan Jr. fired her for allegedly filing the suit against JPMorgan without his permission.

    According to the complaint, for “Over more than a decade, JPMorgan clearly knew it was not complying with federal regulations in regard to Epstein-related accounts as evidenced by its too-little too-late efforts after Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges and shortly after his death, when JPMorgan belatedly complied with federal law.”

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

    It goes much deeper than just the JPMorgan lawsuit…

    The suit against JPMorgan Chase was not the whole scope of George’s pursuit of the remnants of Epstein’s network of conspirators. Although Little St. James (“Pedo Island”) and its adjacent island owned by the Epstein estate went up for sale in March 2022, action taken by George kept the premise of any sale from going through. Acting in her former capacity as US Virgin Island Attorney General, she placed criminal activity liens on the islands from a civil racketeering lawsuit. That lawsuit was filed in 2020 following Epstein’s “death” in August of 2019. The suit alleged that Little St. James Island was used as part of a network of shell companies that Epstein manipulated to conceal the activities of his human trafficking network.

    However, that suit was settled between the Epstein estate and George’s office in early December 2022. Under the agreement, Epstein’s estate would pay over $105 million to the Government of the US Virgin Islands as restitution. In addition to that sum, the liens preventing the sale of Epstein’s islands become removed under the condition that half of the proceeds from the sale will also be given to the US Virgin Islands through a trust it has opened to allocate the money to fund government programs to fight sexual abuse on the archipelago. “This settlement restores the faith of the People of the Virgin Islands that its laws will be enforced, without fear or favor, against those who break them. We are sending a clear message that the Virgin Islands will not serve as a haven for human trafficking,” Attorney General George stated upon the announcement of the settlement in one of her last acts before being fired.

    Despite the resolution of the US Virgin Islands’ direct case against the assets held by the Epstein estate, questions still linger about its operations in George’s jurisdiction. One of the most mysterious and perhaps most vital to examine of those shell companies, Southern Country International, was the first internationally operating bank to be opened in the US Virgin Islands by Epstein in 2014. The bank opened when John Percy de Jongh Jr. served as the governor of the territory. During his term, de Jongh appointed present-governor Albert A. Bryan Jr. into his administration as Commissioner of the US Virgin Islands Department of Labor. Despite not having much activity on its books, Southern Country International would renew its license with the US Virgin Islands five times before Epstein’s purported demise.

    By the time Epstein died, his Virgin Islands based bank had less than $700,000 in assets. However, in December of 2019, months after his purported suicide, Epstein’s estate transferred a whopping $15.5 million into Southern Country International. In under a month, the bank’s assets diminished to less than $500,000. Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother and executor of his estate, stated that the bank was used to pay existing debts of the assets he had control over. Though the bank was not explicitly referenced in the press release on the December settlement, that announcement does detail the Virgin Islands action against Southern Trust Company, a holding company which points to a larger scale of Epstein owned enterprises connected to Southern Country International. It is unclear how the allegations made in George’s lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase connect to the posthumous activity conducted by Epstein’s Virgin Islands banking operation.

    Following her dismissal, Assistant Attorney General Carol Thomas-Jacobs has been named to an interim position to fill George’s vacated seat. She will inherit the office as it joins an on-going list of plaintiffs who have taken action against large scale banks relating to their accounts with Epstein. Just over a month before George’s filing, multiple class action suits were filed against JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank alleging each institution knowingly profited from Epstein’s criminal activity. Those suits coincided with another filed against Epstein associate Leon Black, the billionaire who previously served as CEO of Apollo Global Management before his relationship with the pedophile thrust him into the spotlight.

    The civil suit against Black alleges that the disgraced financier raped the plaintiff in 2002 at a mansion owned by Epstein. A spokesman for Black told Forbes that the claims made against their client were “categorically” false. Their response to Forbes follows one of a similar like from Deutsche Bank who told the publication that the suit filed against them “lacks merit.” Despite the magnitude of these lawsuits, the gravity of George’s suit against JPMorgan Chase surely made the biggest splash in the once-stagnant waters of the cesspool of the Epstein debacle. However, the firing leaves little hope that the waves caused by her last act as Attorney General will wash any truth to shore.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 17:45

  • North Carolina Lawmakers Urge Governor To Follow Other States In Banning TikTok
    North Carolina Lawmakers Urge Governor To Follow Other States In Banning TikTok

    Authored by Matt McGregor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Two North Carolina representatives are pressing Gov. Roy Cooper’s office to follow other states in issuing an executive order banning TikTok from government devices.

    The TikTok logo is displayed outside a TikTok office in Culver City, Calif., on Aug. 27, 2020. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

    State Reps. Jason Saine and Jon Hardister, both Republicans, sent a letter to the Democrat governor (pdf) insisting that Cooper remove the Chinese video app “swiftly and decisively,” deeming it to be a “matter of national security.”

    “As we know, the Chinese government is constantly working to infiltrate our communications and access intellectual data within the United States,” Saine and Hardister wrote. “If sensitive data is breached, it could pose both an economic and security threat for North Carolina. We have a responsibility to prevent this from happening, which is why we are urging an executive order as soon as possible.”

    Saine and Hardister referenced past orders, such as the chief administrative officer for the U.S. House of Representatives issuing an order on Wednesday for all lawmakers to delete the app on all devices managed by the House.

    The $1.7 trillion omnibus bill President Joe Biden signed into law on Thursday includes legislation banning the social media app from government devices due to concerns over national security.

    State-Level Bans

    State governments have also banned TikTok, which is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd.

    As of Friday, Indiana became the 20th state to block TikTok from being used on state devices.

    In addition, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, a Republican, filed two lawsuits against TikTok stating that the app made false claims.

    “The TikTok app is a malicious and menacing threat unleashed on unsuspecting Indiana consumers by a Chinese company that knows full well the harms it inflicts on users,” Rokita said in a press release. “With this pair of lawsuits, we hope to force TikTok to stop its false, deceptive and misleading practices, which violate Indiana law.”

    Rokita said the first lawsuit alleges that TikTok lured children onto the platform using misleading advertising stating that the app contains only “’infrequent/mild’ sexual content, profanity, or drug references.”

    However, Rokita said the app is in fact “rife with examples of such material.”

    “An essential part of TikTok’s business model is presenting the application as safe and appropriate for children ages 13 to 17,” he said.

    The second lawsuit alleges that TikTok collects data from its consumers and that it “deceived those consumers to believe that this information is protected from the Chinese government and Communist party.”

    “In multiple ways, TikTok represents a clear and present danger to Hoosiers that is hiding in plain sight in their own pockets,” Rokita said. “At the very least, the company owes consumers the truth about the age-appropriateness of its content and the insecurity of the data it collects on users. We hope these lawsuits force TikTok to come clean and change its ways.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 17:10

  • Flu Or Stroke? Hezbollah Leader's Hospitalization Sets Off Intense Speculation
    Flu Or Stroke? Hezbollah Leader’s Hospitalization Sets Off Intense Speculation

    Regional media is reporting that Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah is in a Beirut hospital and said to be in serious condition, setting off intense speculation over the fate and future leadership of the powerful Lebanese Shia paramilitary group with ties to Iran.

    Israeli media is claiming that Nasrallah suffered a stroke after an important Friday speech was unexpectedly canceled. Nasrallah is among the most powerful and prominent leaders in Lebanon and throughout the region, seen as head of an Iran-backed terror organization by Israel, the US, and much of the West. However, he’s hailed as a “hero” by many from Syria to Iraq to Iran as part of the ‘axis of resistance’. 

    For years, Israeli intelligence has sought to track his whereabouts in hopes of initiating a kill or capture mission, but the Hezbollah leader is known for his secrecy and ability to evade Israeli eavesdropping measures, and also rarely does in-person speeches – instead appearing to supporters via televised feed from secret locations.

    As The Jerusalem Post notes, Hezbollah officials are denying that a stroke hospitalized Nasrallah, instead saying its a bad bout of the Flu. “The reports came after Nasrallah canceled a planned Friday speech, with the Lebanese terrorist organization announcing through its affiliated media he had fallen ill with influenza and was unable to speak well,” according to the report.

    “Saudi journalist Hussein al-Gawi contradicted Hezbollah’s statement, claiming that Nasrallah indeed suffered a second stroke instead of falling ill as was reported,” Jerusalem Post continues. “The Hezbollah leader was reportedly hospitalized at the Great Prophet Hospital in Beirut.”

    This led to reports that he’s unconscious and in intensive care, but this was shot down by his son as “untrue”. 

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    Since emerging as head of Hezbollah in the early 1990’s, Nasrallah’s state of health has long been subject of intense speculation and rumors, especially when he abruptly cancels a speech or disappears from the public eye – much like the kind of close scrutiny that North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un receives. 

    It’s well know that Israeli and US intelligence closely monitors Hezbollah’s media arm for any indicators that would impact the military readiness and leadership of the organization. This is especially as Israel sees Hezbollah as its most immediate ‘enemy #1’ on the Jewish state’s northern border.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 16:35

  • Analysts Predict 1 Million Bpd Drop in Russian Crude Output
    Analysts Predict 1 Million Bpd Drop in Russian Crude Output

    By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

    • UBS’ Giovanni Staunovo: The European Union’s ban on Russian oil products set to come into force on February 5 could lead to a 1 million barrel per day drop in Russian crude oil output for the New Year.
    • Moscow has also warned it could cut production by up to 700,000 bpd as it responds to the $60/barrel price cap on its oil implemented by the G7 in December.
    • According to Energy Intelligence, Russian refineries are already struggling with a labor shortage due to conscription for Putin’s war on Ukraine.

    The European Union’s ban on Russian oil products set to come into force on February 5 could lead to a 1 million barrel per day drop in Russian crude oil output for the New Year, commodity analysts for UBS told Insider on Monday.

    “We expect the European ban on seaborne Russian crude and refined products (to come into force on February 5) to result in a drop of Russian production of at least 1 million barrels per day in 2023, with Russia having difficulties in finding alternative markets,” UBS’ Giovanni Staunovo, told Insider.

    While Russia has been rerouting crude volumes to Asia, traders are finding it increasingly challenging to secure the necessary insured vessels to carry sanctioned Russian crude. As of the first week of December, Moscow was sending nearly 90% of its crude to Asia. 

    Moscow has also warned it could cut production by up to 700,000 bpd as it responds to the $60/barrel price cap on its oil implemented by the G7 in December.

    Another analyst, Saxo Bank’s Ole Hansen, told Insider that global supplies will experience more tightness, leading oil prices to top $100 bpd this year, once Chinese demand improves. 

    “Following a soft first quarter, I see the price of Brent returning to a $90-100 dollar range. What happens later will depend on the strength of an incoming economic slowdown,” Saxo told Insider. 

    Russia boasts the world’s third-largest refining industry, and the EU ban that goes into effect on February 5 is expected to have a fairly significant impact. 

    According to Energy Intelligence, Russian refineries are already struggling with a labor shortage due to conscription for Putin’s war on Ukraine. Energy Intel analysts expect to see a further decline in Russian refining margins this year as they pay more for tankers to export further, predicting a 600,000-bpd drop in refining throughput in 2023, year-on-year.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 16:00

  • 2023 Starts Off With A Bang: Winklevoss Slams Barry Silbert's Genesis, Accuses Of Commingling Funds
    2023 Starts Off With A Bang: Winklevoss Slams Barry Silbert’s Genesis, Accuses Of Commingling Funds

    If anyone expected that the bursting of the crypto bubble and the resulting unprecedented tidal wave of failure and fraud would somehow be confined to 2022 we have some bad news.

    As if the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire wasn’t bad enough, its fallout just got much messier after digital-asset entrepreneur and Facebook billionaire, Cameron Winklevoss, accused fellow crypto businessman Barry Silbert of “bad faith stall tactics” and the commingling of funds within his conglomerate that Winklevoss says have left $900 million in customer assets needlessly in limbo since FTX’s meltdown.

    First, some background: in early November, shortly after FTX imploded, Gemini Trust which was founded by the Winklevoss twins, paused redemptions on a lending product called Earn, which offered investors the potential to generate as much as 8% in interest on their digital coins. It did so by lending them out to Genesis Global Capital, one of the companies owned by Silbert’s Digital Currency Group. The Earn halt came after Genesis suspended both redemptions and new loan originations at its lending unit because of its exposure to FTX. Genesis has told clients that it could take “weeks” to find a path forward, and that bankruptcy may be one possibility.

    Which brings us to today: this morning, facing pressure of his own from angry customers locked out of their Gemini accounts and a lawsuit alleging fraud, Cameron Winklevoss published an open letter saying he had provided Silbert with multiple proposals to resolve the issue, including as recently as Dec. 25. He told Silbert “this mess is entirely of your own making,” citing some $1.675 billion owed to Genesis by DCG, which it used for other business purposes within Silbert’s conglomerate. “This is money that Genesis owes to Earn users and other creditors.”

    “It’s not lost on us that you’ve been working desperately to try and firewall DCG from the problems that you created at Genesis,” Winklevoss added, strongly hinting that the relationship between DCG and Genesis is similar to that between FTX and Alameda. And in case that wasn’t clear, the next sentence strikes it home: “You should dispense with this fiction because we all know what you know — that DCG and Genesis are beyond commingled.”

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    An Open Letter to Barry Silbert

    Barry — today marks 47 days since Genesis halted withdrawals. I am writing on behalf of more than 340,000 Earn users who are looking for answers. These users aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet, they are real people. A single mom who lent her son’s education money to you. A father who lent his son’s bar mitzvah money to you. A husband and wife who lent their life savings to you. A school teacher who lent his children’s college funds to you. A policeman, and so many more. All together, these people entrusted more than $900 million of their assets to you. They deserve concrete answers and we are here to get them.

    For the past six weeks, we have done everything we can to engage with you in a good faith and collaborative manner in order to reach a consensual resolution for you to pay back the $900 million that you owe, while helping you preserve your business. We appreciate that there are startup costs to any restructuring, and at times things don’t go as fast as we would all like. However, it is now becoming clear that you have been engaging in bad faith stall tactics.

    For example, on December 2nd we expressed our belief “that getting everyone in a room together as soon as possible will be the most productive path towards reaching a resolution.” You agreed, but stated you would only do so after there was a proposal on the table. On December 17th, a proposal was delivered to you. On December 25th, Christmas Day, an updated version of this proposal was delivered to you. Despite this, you continue to refuse to get into a room with us to hash out a resolution. In addition, you continue to refuse to agree to a timeline with key milestones. Every time we ask you for tangible engagement, you hide behind lawyers, investment bankers, and process. After six weeks, your behavior is not only completely unacceptable, it is unconscionable.

    The idea in your head that you can quietly hide in your ivory tower and that this will all just magically go away, or that this is someone else’s problem, is pure fantasy. To be clear, this mess is entirely of your own making. Digital Currency Group (DCG) — of which you are the founder and CEO — owes Genesis (its wholly owned subsidiary) ~$1.675 billion. This is money that Genesis owes to Earn users and other creditors. You took this money — the money of schoolteachers — to fuel greedy share buybacks, illiquid venture investments, and kamikaze Grayscale NAV trades that ballooned the fee-generating AUM of your Trust; all at the expense of creditors and all for your own personal gain. It is now time for you to take responsibility for this and do the right thing.

    It’s not lost on us that you started your career as a bankruptcy restructuring associate. And it’s not lost on us that you’ve been working desperately to try and firewall DCG from the problems that you created at Genesis. You should dispense with this fiction because we all know what you know — that DCG and Genesis are beyond commingled. Everyone takes orders from you and always has. And anything you have done after the fact to pretend otherwise, won’t hold up. If instead, you had put all of this energy towards finding a resolution, we would have been done by now. Everyone would be in a better place, including you.

    Earn users are tired. They’re scared. Many are now in dire straits. And yet despite all that they have had to endure, they have been remarkably patient and supportive. But there is only so much more they can take. They deserve a resolution for a recovery of the assets they lent to you and an end to this nightmare. To that end, and for the final time, we are asking you to publicly commit to working together to solve this problem by January 8th, 2023. We remain ready and willing to work with you, but time is running out.

    Sincerely,

    Cameron Winklevoss

    Winklevoss claims the $1.675 billion borrowed by DCG from Genesis was used “to fuel greedy share buybacks, illiquid venture investments, and kamikaze Grayscale NAV trades,” referring to another of Silbert’s businesses, Grayscale Investments, whose largest vehicle is the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. This came, he said, “all at the expense of creditors and all for your own personal gain.”

    Winklevoss also asked Silbert to “publicly commit to working together to solve this problem,” which he says affects more than 340,000 Earn customers, by Jan. 8. He didn’t say what would happen if no agreement was reached by then.

    Silbert prompted responded in kind, tweeting a refutation to several of Wilkevoss’s accusations, saying “DCG did not borrow $1.675 billion from Genesis” and “never missed an interest payment to Genesis and is current on all loans outstanding,” without providing more detail. Silbert also claimed DCG delivered a proposal for resolving the dispute to Genesis and Winklevoss’s advisers on Dec. 29, but had received no reply.

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    That would not be the last of it, and moments later, Cameron Winklevoss doubled down, urging Silbert to “stop trying to pretend that you and DCG are innocent bystanders and had nothing to do with creating this mess. It’s completely disingenuous. So how does DCG owe Genesis $1.675 billion if it didn’t borrow the money? Oh right, that promissory note…”

    And then, in an apparent attempt to avoid the nuclear option and filing a notice of default against Genesis – an event that will likely lead to even more havoc and mayhem across the crypto community – WInklevoss tweeted “Will you, or will you not, commit to solving this by January 8th in a manner that treats the $1.1 billion promissory note as $1.1 billion?”

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    Previously Silbert’s DCG has been trying to emphasize that it’s separate from Genesis and insulated from its troubles. After Genesis suspended redemptions, DCG said in a tweet that “this temporary action has no impact on the business operations of DCG and our other wholly owned subsidiaries.”

    Silbert, in a letter to shareholders last month, said that intercompany loans were made “in the ordinary course of business.” He noted that DCG has a liability of $575 million to Genesis. In the letter, he also described a $1.1 billion promissory note, due June 2032, which he said came about as the parent company stepped in to assume liabilities from Genesis related to the collapse of digital-assets hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.

    As Bloomberg notes, Winklevoss’s aggressive stance comes as Gemini and its founders faces a lawsuit from investors who accuse the company of fraud, claiming the Earn product was in effect an interest-bearing account that it failed to register as a security.

    As for the public spat between Winklevoss and Silbert, which is all too reminiscent of what happened between CZ and SBF in the days before the failure of FTX, as twitter user Jeremey Padawer summarizes “When these sorts of issues become public, almost every single time the worst is still to come… good luck crypto community.” Indeed.

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    And even Edward Snowden is bracing for what’s coming.

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 15:25

  • David Stockman On The Parallels Between The COVID Hysteria And The Salem Witch Trials
    David Stockman On The Parallels Between The COVID Hysteria And The Salem Witch Trials

    Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,

    It would not be going too far to say that the eruption of irrationality and hysteria in America during the COVID-19 period of 2020-2021 most resembled not 1954, when Senator McCarthy set the nation looking for communist moles behind every government desk, or 1919, when the notorious raids of Attorney General Mitchell were rounding up purported Reds in their tens of thousands, but the winter of 1691-1692. That’s when two little girls—Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams of Salem, Massachusetts—fell into the demonic activity of fortune-telling, which soon found them getting strangely ill, having fits, spouting gibberish, and contorting their bodies into odd positions.

    The rest became history, of course, when a malpracticing local doctor claimed to have found no physical cause for the girls’ problems and diagnosed them as being afflicted by the “Evil Hand,” commonly known as witchcraft. Other ministers were consulted, who agreed that the only cause could be witchcraft and since the sufferers were believed to be the victims of a dastardly crime, the community set out to find the perpetrators.

    Within no time, three witches who were famously accused —the Parris’ slave, Sarah Good, an impoverished homeless woman and Sarah Osborne, who had defied conventional Puritan society. Many more followed, and as the hysteria spread, hundreds were tried for witchcraft and two dozen hanged.

    But there is a lesson in this classic tale that is embarrassing in its verisimilitude. Namely, one of the best academic explanations for the outbreak of seizures and convulsions which fueled the Salem hysteria was a disease called “convulsive ergotism”, which is brought on by ingesting rye grain infected with a fungus that can invade developing kernels of the grain, especially under warm and damp conditions.

    During the rye harvest in Salem in 1691 these conditions existed at a time when one of the Puritans’ main diet staples was cereal and breads made of the harvested rye. Convulsive ergotism causes violent fits, a crawling sensation on the skin, vomiting, choking, and, hallucinations—meaning that it was Mother Nature in the ordinary course working her episodically unwelcome tricks, not the “Evil Hand” of a spiritual pathogen, which imperiled the community.

    Similarly, in 2020 there Was no Evil Hand Sci-Fi Pathogen

    The truth is, in 2020 it was also Mother Nature—likely abetted by the Fauci-sponsored gain-of-function researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—who disgorged one of the nastier among ordinary respiratory viruses.

    Such viruses, of course, have afflicted humankind over the ages, which, in turn, has evolved marvelous adaptive immune systems to cope with and overcome them. So again, there was no Evil Hand sci-fi pathogen at large that was something new under the sun, nor a disease that was extraordinarily lethal for 90% of the population.

    In the grand scheme of things, therefore, the COVID-19 pandemic has already been recorded as an unfortunate bump on the road to longer and more pleasant lives for Americans and much of the rest of the world, too. That truth is strikingly depicted in the chart below.

    While the all-cause mortality figure for 2020 did not exist when the CDC published the chart above, the green line would have depicted it as only a tiny upward blip—of which there have been several during the last 120 years shown above.

    Was COVID-19 an Analogue of the Spanish Flu?

    Indeed, the true analogue is the year 1918 when an estimated 675,000 Americans succumbed to the Spanish Flu from a population (100 million) just 30% of today’s level.

    In that case, the green line in the chart above (all cause deaths) pushed up by nearly 400 per 100,000 population compared to the pre-war baseline (1914). By contrast, the excess rate in 2020 over 2019 was just 118 per 100,000.

    And, yes, there is the sad fact of senseless dough-boy deaths on the killing fields of France embedded in these 1918 numbers, but it turns out that upwards of 45% of the conventionally reported 117,000 GI (gastrointestinal) deaths were not from German bullets, but the Spanish Flu that ripped through the massive US training camps that were hastily-assembled after Wilson foolishly declared war in April 1917 with no meaningful standing army to fight it.

    So on the true measure of pandemic lethality—deaths from all causes—the COVID-19 was not even in the same ballpark as the Spanish Flu. And as the chart also shows, the former occurred way down the green line curve that is actually the ultimate rebuke to today’s on-going COVID-policy disaster.

    The US age-adjusted death rate in 2020 (828 per 100,000) was actually 67% lower than it had been in 1918 (2,542 per 100,000) because since then a free capitalist society has gifted the nation with the prosperity and freedom to progress that has ushered in better sanitation, nutrition, shelter, life-styles and medical care.

    It is those forces which have pushed the green line relentlessly to the lower-right corner of the chart, not the Federales atop their bureaucratic perches in Washington.

    Hope for a New Great Barrington Declaration to Serve as Antidote to the Totalitarian Lockdown

    At length, perhaps some future historian will need to find the “convulsive ergot” theory of 2020 to explain the COVID-Hysteria because the explanation will not be found in the “science” embedded in what will be a tiny blip in the green line of the chart above.

    The Great Barrington Declaration was penned by three fearless world leading epidemiologists—Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Sanford—and was a powerful antidote to the Evil Hand theory then raging through the MSM and political class of almost every stripe.

    At essence, it said the real science was that America was not being attacked by a Grim Reaper visiting death upon one and all regardless of age, health status or physical circumstances, but, instead, was a highly selective respiratory disease variant that honed-in tightly on the immunity-impaired aged and co-morbid.

    Accordingly, the one-size-fits all Lockdown policy was dead wrong, and what was needed was highly targeted help, protections and treatments for the smallish minority of the vulnerable, which policy would presently lead to the attainment of “herd immunity” and the ultimate extinguishment of the pandemic in the normal way.

    Colonial America found its way out of the Salem aberration in 1692, and surely 330 years and much science later it can do so again, exposing the 21st century miscreants who brought on this insensible hysteria as it does.

    *  *  *

    We’ve seen governments institute the strictest controls on people and businesses in history. It’s been a swift elimination of individual freedoms. But this is just the beginning… Most people don’t realize the terrible things that could come next, including Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), the abolition of cash, and much more. If you want to know how to survive what the central bankers and the Deep State have planned, then you need to see this newly released report from legendary investor Doug Casey and his team. Click here to download it now.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 14:50

  • Huge Death Toll After US-Supplied Himars Leveled Russian Barracks In Donetsk, Possibly Hundreds Killed
    Huge Death Toll After US-Supplied Himars Leveled Russian Barracks In Donetsk, Possibly Hundreds Killed

    Russian forces have just suffered what may be their single biggest loss of the war in an attack, after a Ukrainian strike killed multiple dozens, or possibly hundreds, of newly mobilized troops in the east of the country. Moscow is now pointing to a US role in the devastating attack.

    “Russia’s Defense Ministry said Monday that Ukrainian forces used a U.S.-supplied Himars rocket system to destroy a facility used as a base for mobilized troops in the city of Makiivka,” The Wall Street Journal reports of the attack in Russian-occupied Donbas.

    The leveled Russian troop facilities, described as a training school for conscripts, in Makiivka. RIA Novosti/Sputnik via AP

    The defense ministry confirmed that 63 Russian troops died in the blast, saying that a wave of HIMARS rockets delivering “high-explosive warheads” struck the facility that housed the troops.

    A statement by top Russian commanders carried in state-run TASS reads: “The Kiev regime delivered a strike firing six projectiles from the US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launcher on a Russian unit near Makeyevka in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). The attack left 63 Russian service members killed.”

    Though only revealed for the first time Monday, the strike reportedly took place soon after midnight on Sunday, New Year’s Day. Some Russian sources are suggesting an ammunition depot was next to the targeted facility, which likely resulted in a deadlier, expanded blast. 

    The Ukrainian side is meanwhile claiming the true numbers among the Russian dead is much higher, with the Ukrainian military asserting that some 400 were killed and other 300 wounded – though Kiev didn’t directly take responsibility in the immediate aftermath.

    Blasts at an oil depot after missiles struck the facility in Russian-held Makiivka, via AP.

    Western media, including CNN and Reuters, have acknowledged being unable to independently verify the casualty numbers, however, some notable pro-Russian separatist officials have suggested it is more that the 63 dead officially cited by the Kremlin: 

    Igor Girkin, a former Federal Security Service officer who helped Russia annex the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and then organize pro-Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine, said on Monday that “the number of dead and wounded runs into many hundreds.”

    That same official is one among several Russian military commentators who lashed out at top commanders for the apparent lack of protection for the hundreds of personnel staying in a small area. Russian sources say at least two of the inbound missiles among the six fired by the Ukrainians were shot down by anti-air defenses.

    Girkin said on Telegram: “This is not the only such [extremely dense] deployment of personnel and equipment in the destruction zone of HIMARS missiles,” also in reference to reports of ammunition stored dangerously close.

    Other pundits are saying troops’ use of cellular phones or other possible open source communications could have tipped off the Ukrainians as to the presence and location of the base, given the potential for intercepted signals…

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    Additionally, Reuters references the following source from the Russian side:

    One Russian pro-war military blogger known as Rybar, who has more than one million subscribers on the Telegram messaging app, said more than 100 people had been wounded in the strike and that rubble was still being cleared.

    Rybar said there had been about 600 people in the building, and that ammunition had been stored in the same facility.

    And The Telegraph points out this could surpass the prior single most disastrous event from early on in the invasion:

    Ukraine estimated the death toll at “about 400”, with some pro-Russian separatists in the region agreeing “hundreds” had died. The Kremlin, in a rare admission, said 63 men had been killed – far outweighing the official death toll from the sinking of the flagship Moskva.

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    Beyond the issue of the disputed death toll, another question is whether the Ukrainians had targeting assistance from US intelligence.

    Interestingly, Ukraine’s defense ministry on the same day as the attack posted footage of what appears to be Himars system launching a strike in the dark.

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    In the past months, mainstream US press has increasingly acknowledged that the Ukrainians are receiving direct battlefield targeting help, based on the admissions of anonymous Pentagon and US intelligence officials. 

    However, there’s currently no confirmation or clear evidence that US-supplied HIMARS were indeed used, as the Russians allege. But the fact that the facility struck was significantly behind the front lines may point to a longer range weapon being used, such as has been supplied by Western powers. Ukraine also seems to now be openly boasting of its US-supplied capabilities in the wake of the mass casualty attack on Makiivka.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 14:15

  • 2023 Outlook: Pain
    2023 Outlook: Pain

    By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

    2023 Outlook – PAIN

    First, I need to apologize for last weekend’s Bah Humbug! T-Report. I meant to give a shout out to “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses, which starts with the line “Bah Humbug, now that’s too strong”. If I had to listen to one holiday song on infinite replay all December, that song would be the one (apologies to Mariah Carey). But enough delaying, let’s get to the heart of the matter, which is why I think that 2023 (at least for the start of the year) will be a big bust! Maybe, much like the A-Team always won in the end, this year could finish well (for markets and the economy), but it will start with “PAIN” (okay, I’m mixing Mr. T lines, but let’s just roll with it).

    • Not much help from the bond markets. I’m a bond bull and expect a “risk-off” trade early in the year, but bonds just aren’t going to help portfolios or the economy enough to stem the tide.

    • The wealth effect (on individuals, companies, and governments) will weigh on the economy and markets. The amount of wealth destruction was large by historical standards and was more “circular” than in previous bouts of wealth destruction.

    • Unlike Weebles (which wobble, but don’t fall down), economic data will fall down. Consumers and jobs, two areas that have given many people reasons to support an optimistic outlook, will succumb to the same problems that the rest of the economy is facing and it will finally show up in the data.

    • There is a chance for some geopolitical respite, but globalization in 2023 and beyond will never go back to where it was in 2017.

    • The valuation re-valuation is not done, and that will reduce whatever earnings (or free cash flow) we have to multiply these metrics by to calculate valuations. Credit contraction is a risk.

    Those are the main points driving much of this very bleak outlook (but just because it is bleak, doesn’t mean that it is pessimistic because bad things can and do happen).

    The Foundation – Key Building Blocks

    There are some ongoing themes in last year’s work that set the stage for some of this analysis. We will refine the points listed in the first section, but it is important to lay the foundation.

    We had several non-traditional factors that drove inflation, many of which are gone. Using responses that worked for “traditional” inflation when we have a unique fact set this time around is going to lead to large and difficult policy mistakes.

    • See Rise and Fall of Inflation Risk Factors which examines the roles of the Fed, Stimulus, Supply Chains, War, and “Disruption” on inflation.

    • 2 + 2 = 5 explores why the Fed seems to be looking at data very “weirdly” and the problems that these views are likely to cause.

    • The last piece in this series, the Path to Q1 Deflation, lays out how this comes together to shock the system (deflation is not healthy when it is caused by an economy hitting a wall).

    These are important pieces of the “PAIN” outlook, but they are not the only elements. Even if you disagree with the above, there is plenty of wiggle room to come to the “PAIN” conclusion and those arguments just help make the case stronger.

    Relationships with China have changed and aren’t going to revert to what passed as “normal” any time soon. It isn’t just at the government level (where national security concerns are paramount), but at the company level where there is a threat to IP and supply chains. There is also unwillingness to truly provide open and equal access to the domestic economy. All these factors have left C-Suites working on alternatives to China.

    It is almost sad (but true) that by the time markets and the mainstream media catch up to Academy’s view on China, our view will have become more negative. However, the gap is finally narrowing for most investors and corporations.

    • The Beijing Olympics as Cultural Bookends is a “thought” piece but looks at the changes since China’s “coming out” party at the Beijing Summer Olympics and their “going away” party at the Winter Olympics last year. Topics include the reassertion of the Communist Party, Digital Yuan, Debt Diplomacy/Economic Colonization, Military Expansion, and the Real-Estate bubble. While that report is almost a year old, it sets the tone for much of how people should think about China.

    • The Recentralization of China (August 2021) set the stage for the move from seeing China as a Strategic Competitor (December 2019) to more of an enemy across the globe.

    • China’s zero-COVID policy. I dismissed the re-opening as being a “big deal” on national TV just a couple weeks ago (supply chain issues have been largely dealt with and the last thing this economy needs is more cheap goods). However, it is still interesting that it failed to help markets rally. Maybe that is because few people want to risk travelling to China at this stage (getting COVID there seems precarious at best in terms of treatment). Maybe it is because China’s importance to our economy has been greatly diminished. The full story hasn’t played out here, but I remain in the camp that China’s re-opening is only helpful at the margins given how companies and countries have adapted to the past few years of behavior.

    Again, this “foundation” isn’t critical in coming to the “PAIN” conclusion, but it is an important building block.

    Bond Market – Supply/Demand Imbalances?

    I want to be bullish on bonds despite the fact that this is rapidly becoming a consensus view. I’m fully committed to the high probability of a “risk-off” trade that brings bond yields lower and takes stocks below their 2022 lows. Yet, things seem “off” in the bond world.

    It is somewhat “difficult” (at least from this seat) to put a finger on exactly what is wrong, but let’s highlight a few potential risks to the bond world. These are primarily risks to the Treasury market, but many of those risks would cause problems for credit especially if the economy slows as rapidly as I expect it to (it is already slowing rapidly based on PMI data and other reports).

    • Will foreign buyers of dollar denominated debt continue to buy? This question first got some serious attention as dollar strength and FX volatility made it more difficult for foreigners to buy dollar denominated debt and hedge out the FX risk (primarily a Treasury and investment grade bond issue). With Japan starting to increase the target levels on their bonds, will we see more buying of yen denominated bonds vs. buying dollar denominated bonds with the associated FX hedging? I am a strong believer that the “0% bound” is non-linear. Basically, a number of market participants will do a lot to avoid 0 or near-0 returns and will quickly revert to “simpler” strategies once they can achieve even a modicum of yield. Large/sophisticated institutions don’t think that way, but many smaller institutions seem to.

    • Japanese investors (for the first time in well over 5 years) can achieve a little over 20 bps by investing in 5-year JGBs. Certainly not an earth-shattering return, but it isn’t a particularly long maturity and it alleviates the need to run FX hedging strategies. This will be a small problem for bond markets, not material, but not entirely inconsequential. It is a risk that increases as Japanese yields rise (presumably while global bond yields are also rising) creating a negative feedback loop. This isn’t keeping me awake at night, but I am keeping an eye on it.

    • Higher deficits? As yields rise, the cost of running existing debt burdens for countries goes up. Yes, it takes a long time for rising yields to have a significant impact on average coupons outstanding, but the U.S. has $3.8 trillion of bills and $2.6 trillion of bonds maturing in 2023, all of which will need to be refinanced at higher coupons than the bonds that are maturing. In 2021, the Federal Reserve helped reduce the government deficit by $107 billion. Since the Fed uses accrual accounting, the higher cost of borrowing impacted the remittance for 2022 (guessing around breakeven). This means that at the end of 2022, the Treasury Department did not receive the $100 billion it got in 2021. Unless the Fed does some form of “Operation Twist”, where they work with Treasury to retire longer-dated bonds (trading well below par) to book profits, this year’s number will end up being a significant loss. We could also see decreased remittances, especially if financial assets continue to struggle (which is my base case). Lots of moving parts, but we could see increased supply from governments which won’t be completely offset by lower supply from corporates.

    • Quantitative Tightening. Quantitative tightening does not behave like rate hikes (see Rube Goldberg Translating QT to bps). I find quantitative easing much easier to explain. Every day, investors in every asset class get forced to take on more risk to get a similar expected return. If a T-bill is bought by the Fed, someone who used to be able to buy that T-bill now either needs a longer T-bill or something with slightly more risk (say Agency Discount Notes or CP) or something slightly less liquid (maybe ABS related or private credit). Their decision thrusts the same decision on the investors who used to buy what they are now buying. That goes on and on until it impacts the riskiest of assets (unprofitable tech and crypto certainly seemed to fit the bill). This is Newton’s Cradle in action (where you drop a ball at one end and the ball it hits doesn’t move, but the ball at the far end of the chain moves). Quantitative tightening acts in reverse (though with less impact since it is relying on bonds that are maturing, limiting the “duration” being taken out of the market). But every day investors seem to wake up with the ability to take less risk (less credit risk, shorter maturities, or more liquidity) for similar expected returns.

    • This is not the “best” chart (and I’m sure that there are some Chart Crimes committed here). However my view is that QE is extremely prone to asset price inflation and the Fed knows it (even if they don’t harp on it) and they will keep QT even when they are done hiking rates because they want to “fix” this “problem”. This doesn’t get enough discussion in the inflation dialogue. This point also bothers me when thinking about the potential for bond or stock strength this year.
    • The shape of the yield curve is not conducive to a great year for bonds. With 2s vs 10s still inverted by 55 bps, we need one heck of a bull market across the entire curve to generate big returns. While 20-year bonds seem to offer some respite, no one wants to touch them because the long bond only highlights these issues. As much as bond investors want long duration, the pickup in yield (relative to the risk/reward by moving to shorter-dated bonds) could be attractive and would be completely in line with how we see QT working.
    • Corporate bond risk/reward. High end corporates should do “okay”, but if our theory plays out, there will be pressure on credit spreads. My “rough” thinking is that for every basis point Treasury yields rise, corporate spreads will tighten by less than a ½ of a bp. Overall yields on corporates will go up if Treasury yields rise. For every bp Treasury yields fall, beyond a threshold of say 10 to 20 bps from current levels, spreads will widen 1:1 or worse (it will be a risk-off trade, not as bad as in March 2020 or 2008, but still serious considering the IG level of risk). From an all-in yield basis, the risk/reward for corporates seems slightly worse than for Treasuries themselves. Less supply will help corporate credit, but liquidity is worse, which amplifies any hiccup. If I was an issuer I’d start the year trying to issue, but if I was an investor, I’d start the year reducing exposure.

    I want to be a “pound the table” bond bull, but I struggle due to all these risks (5-year, highest quality paper is the best option here.)

    The “Circular Error” in “Disruption”

    Company XYZ raises money (public or private) at a new (and higher) valuation.

    Company XYZ’s employees feel richer as the new valuation increases the value of their options.

    Company XYZ’s other investors are also richer based on these new valuations.

    Company XYZ’s employees spend money because they are (in some cases) “rich”. They buy fancy cars (mostly EV), big houses, and expensive vacations. They also take some of their newfound wealth to invest in companies similar to XYZ (and apparently in crypto).

    • Real estate agents, lawyers, house sellers, auto dealers, etc., benefit from this surge in spending.

    Company XYZ spends money on equipment (mostly tech), office spaces (to highlight their prowess in a physical manifestation), and on advertising so people hear about their product. Their mentality is “the faster I spend, the sooner I can do my next raise at an even higher valuation”.

    • Real estate agents, lawyers, big tech, small tech, venues, ad sites, etc., all benefit from this spending.

    The “second” order effect of this spending is smaller, but not only do the outside investors spend more, so do the real estate agents, lawyers, house sellers, tech companies, etc. The money multiplier increases the wealth “shock” that spreads throughout the economy.

    Peloton, a company whose product I’m trying to use with more regularity this winter, went from $6 billion to $49 billion in market cap. This was one of hundreds of public companies that saw that sort of gain! That doesn’t include crypto/private equity investments and doesn’t even try to put a number on SPACs (though NKLA hit a market cap of $28 billion and is now at $1 billion). This is a good segue to the “circular” nature of all this.

    If there was a “virtuous cycle” on the way up, it seems plausible that the cycle will be “unvirtuous” on the way down. That is the problem with “circularity”. Things circle back on themselves and you do not have the ability to get the correct answer.

    This is probably the area on which I seem to differ most from many economists (I’m just a strategist). I see circularity and spirals where others see straight line extrapolations. Maybe I’m wrong, but this feels an awful lot like 2000/2001 (tech bubble), 2007/2008 (housing was the main culprit), and 2015/2016 (energy boom/bust), but with the focus being on “disruption” this time around in 2022/2023.

    This keeps me awake at night.

    Weebles

    We will get a lot more information on jobs in the first week of January. I expect that the data will disappoint and we can do a retrospective on that in next weekend’s T-Report. At that point, it will hopefully be clear whether we were right or wrong (though given the quality of the data collected, the week will probably prove to be far less conclusive on the job front than it should be).

    The health of the consumer is a big question mark.

    • 2022 hurt low wage earners the most. Low income households were hit by inflation, but they had benefitted the most from stimulus (as a percentage of income) and an incredibly robust job market.
    • 2023 may play out as the “high income” hit year. The wealth effect is taking a toll, but more importantly this part of the work force seems to be facing the brunt of recent layoffs. This year won’t be about the number of jobs lost, but it will be a function of the number of jobs lost multiplied by the average income (which could be surprisingly high). Employees at the “granular” level are still in high demand (though that could tail off too), but it will be a combination of job fears (even if unfounded) coupled with the wealth effect that will make the consumer seem much weaker in 2023 than in 2022.

    I need to improve my charting capability on the “consumer” health side of things, but this chart caught my eye.

    Similar to the alleged “inventory” build story (which we will revisit next week), this is just playing catch-up to the “excess savings”. But what if consumers are living beyond their means to an uncomfortable degree? Will Q4 and the holiday season be the last binge as the consumer embarks on a “dry January”?

    I’m not optimistic on the consumer coming into 2023. Again, not keeping me up at night, but a definite concern and one that we need to do a lot more work on in the coming days and weeks.

    “Positive” Geopolitical Surprises?

    Last year we saw a shock to the system with a war in Europe! A year into this, it is still difficult to conceptualize that there is a war in Europe.

    Academy’s current take is that Russia will make one more big push this winter, but if that fails, some sort of negotiations should begin, which would be a boost to global markets. But, like so many other things, nothing is returning to how it used to be! Russia has found new buyers for its energy products. These buyers care little about their behavior and are in no rush to shift away from traditional energy products. Probably, from the Russian perspective, this is a better client base.

    I need to highlight that the U.S. changed the nature of global commerce permanently the minute “we” weaponized Russia’s dollar reserves. That was not lost on any country, but was most noticed by autocratic nations swimming in natural resources. This will impact policies and trade negotiations for decades to come and will put “us” at a distinct disadvantage to China and India. As we deal with the reality of what resources we will need in the future, this will be another hurdle.

    So, the situation in Russia could result in some change globally, but more of a “Potemkin village” than a real change to the global commodity industry (and therefore to the global economy).

    China may back down on some rhetoric (they are good at taking “5 steps forward, 1 step back” and highlighting their “1 step back” hoping that no one noticed they gained 4 steps.)

    There is the opportunity to work with China, but they are now truly viewed as a competitor and a possible threat, so we cannot and will not go back to how it was (this applies to both nations and companies).

    Geopolitics might provide some boosts, but they will be mild and temporary, and we will need to remain vigilant with China, Taiwan, Russia, Turkey and many other regions in the world as the geopolitical landscape continues to evolve, and not in a good direction!

    Bottom Line

    I’m not optimistic on risk (equities will do worse than IG credit spreads, but risk across the continuum is still not priced cheaply enough).

    I’m not as optimistic on bonds as I’d like to be. That, sadly, is not comforting.

    Hopefully I’m wrong! Maybe like Mr. T, we can go from being the adversary to a much-loved character, but for now my New Year’s message is anything but happy.

    I’ll be looking for reasons to become more optimistic and a “pound the table bull” (I’m okay being “long for a trade” here), but think that we are best served by being cautious and seeing if whether the “straight line extrapolation” people were correct or there is a spiral effect that has been put in motion and has its own energy.

    Good luck and on behalf of Academy Securities; we look forward to working with you in 2023.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 13:40

  • Tesla Delivers Record 405,278 Vehicles In Q4 2022, But Misses Wall Street Estimates
    Tesla Delivers Record 405,278 Vehicles In Q4 2022, But Misses Wall Street Estimates

    In a press release put out midday on Monday, Tesla announced it had delivered a record 405,278 vehicles for the Q4 2022 quarter. The number marks a record for the company, but comes in below most Wall Street estimates, even some that were revised lower. Consensus estimates for deliveries stood at 420,760 into the report, according to Bloomberg.

    “In 2022, vehicle deliveries grew 40% YoY to 1.31 million,” the company’s press release says. This falls short of the 50% growth figure the company had once projected for the year. 

    Tesla commented: “We continued to transition towards a more even regional mix of vehicle builds which again led to a further increase in cars in transit at the end of the quarter. Thank you to all of our customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders and supporters who helped us achieve a great 2022 in light of significant COVID and supply chain related challenges throughout the year.”

    The breakdown of vehicles included 388,131 Model 3 and Model Y deliveries, which fell short of the 405,597 estimated:

    And 17,147 Model S/X deliveries, which fell short of the 18,578 estimate:

    Perhaps an interesting delta to keep an eye on is the company’s production versus delivery – production numbers all beat Wall Street estimates across the board, per Bloomberg:

    *TESLA 4Q PRODUCTION 439,701 VEHICLES, EST. 438,840

    *TESLA 4Q MODEL S/X PRODUCTION 20,613, EST. 18,611

    *TESLA 4Q MODEL 3/Y PRODUCTION 419,088, EST. 411,828

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

    Despite the delivery number missing most consensus estimates, we noted days ago that Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas had actually revised his Q4 delivery estimate to as low as 399,000 vehicles. 

    Jonas seems to think headwinds out of China, which have been cited as part of the reason for Tesla’s recent share price plunge, may continue: “According to Morgan Stanley lead China auto analyst Tim Hsiao, Nio just announced a cut to its 4Q delivery target given Covid-related disruption to production and registrations. Despite sequential volume improvement MTD, the uptick of auto/NEV sales has come in weaker than expected given a surge in Covid cases following reopening.”

    Jonas also continues to believe that Tesla is well suited to face macro headwinds heading into 2023. He wrote last week:

    “On a relative basis, the reiteration of our OW rating must be seen vs. more challenged EV-related peers such as EW-rated Fisker (FSR), UW-rated Lucid (LCID),and UW-rated QuantumScape (QS). Between a worsening macro backdrop, record high unafforability,and increasing competition, there are hurdles to overcome. Yet we do believe that in the face of all these pressures, TSLA will widen its lead in the EV race, as it leverages its cost and scale advantages to further itself from the competition.”

    Tesla has also started 2023 by continuing to offer 10,000 yuan incentives in China in a bid to help boost sales, we noted this weekend. The company may also see another subsidy shot-in-the-arm in the U.S. heading into the new year. 

    Days ago we asked whether or not the Biden administration could work as a tailwind heading into 2023: “At the start of the new year, buyers will once again enjoy a tax credit when they purchase a Tesla vehicle. The original 2010 EV tax credit had a quota of 400K units. For Tesla, the tax credits fully disappeared in early 2020 when Tesla reached that unit sales quota. But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that Congress passed earlier this year and Biden signed [last week], the tax credits are back in 2023.”

    We continued:

    “In the IRA there is a $7,500 tax credit for buyers of EVs, including TSLA and GM, who lost their previous tax credits. However, there are other strict limits on which brands would be eligible for the full credit, based on the selling price and where the cars and components are made. Unless the car is made in North America (NAFTA), the buyer is not eligible for the full tax credit. In addition, at least 50% of the battery parts will need to be made in North America. Lastly, a minimum of 40% of minerals used in the batteries must be sourced from the US or countries with free trade agreements with the US. So even buyers of GM and Tesla cars might only be eligible for half ($3,750) of the tax credit because their batteries and minerals come from a “foreign entity of concern” (China/Russia).”

    To finish the year, Tesla has traded the furthest below its 200DMA (61% lower) in the company’s history – whether or not this is a sign of continued bearishness or a setup for a whipsaw higher remains to be seen…

    Shares initially fell, before bouncing, in Europe where equity futures trading is open, versus the U.S. where markets are closed for the New Year’s holiday.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 13:10

  • The Final "Tale Of The Tape": The 13 Most Striking Market Facts Of 2022
    The Final “Tale Of The Tape”: The 13 Most Striking Market Facts Of 2022

    By Tony Pasquariello, Goldman head of hedge fund sales

    For only the third time since 1926, both US stocks and bonds lost money in 2022 (the other two occurrences were 1931 and 1969).

    The intra-year path was extraordinary — be it the high print on inflation (I wonder when we’ll see a 9.1% headline on CPI again), the Fed’s response (425 bps of hikes across just seven meetings) or the geopolitical backdrop (one variable that very much carries through to 2023).

    Then consider this fundamental oddity: US real GDP growth should only amount to +0.7% this year (Q4/Q4) … yet, there’s been over 4.5mm new jobs created (payrolls survey) [ZH: with even the Philly Fed confirming our speculation that the BLS is fabricating job numbers it’s no longer much of an oddity].

    In that context, I’ll borrow a line from Barton Biggs, which I think captures the raw material of what served folks well in 2022:

    Although those quantitatively inclined would disagree, to me, investing is much more an art than a science … experience, diligence, a knowledge of history, an open mind, and an obsessive nature are all important ingredients for the successful [investor] … as are intuition, imagination, flexibility and maybe just a touch of the seeing eye.

    What of 2023?

    For the macro crowd, my instinct is these tensions won’t go quietly into the night and the opportunity set will remain decently target rich (e.g. China and Japan could be very actionable theaters).

    At the same time, I concede that the broad setup across asset prices today is far less asymmetric than it was at the start of this year.

    Therefore, I suspect we’re shifting from a macro environment that favored aggressive trading (see chart below) and brute force (i.e. US 2-year notes surged from 70 bps to 470 bps, that’s about as good as it gets for trend following strategies) to one that is more nuanced, featuring less volatility and more dispersion across markets (which should play to the strengths of RV and equity long/short).

    With thanks to Ben Snider in Goldman Research, what follows from here is a check-down of the score board … I also included the recap on last year at the very bottom of this note, if only for a compare-and-contrast that speaks (quite loudly) for itself.

    * * *

    The tale of the tape in 2022:

    1. The S&P 500 fell by 19%. Including dividends, the total return was -18%. This ranks in the 5th percentile of all annual returns since 1962.

    2. Realized volatility was 24%. This ranks in the 92nd historical percentile.

    3. Putting those together, the ratio of S&P return-to-vol was -0.7, ranking in the 12th historical percentile.

    4. The largest S&P peak-to-trough drawdown during the year was 25%, almost 2x the median historical annual drawdown.

    5. The market traded higher on just 43% of days in 2022, the second worst year since WWII (after 1974). This is interesting: the median gain on those days was 115 bps, the highest in postwar history.

    6. 31% of S&P stocks posted positive returns, including 66 names up 20% or more and 18 names up 50% or more. On the other side, 188 stocks closed down more than 20% and 26 names were down 50% or more.

    7. NDX returned -32%, lagging S&P by 14 percentage points and registering the worst year of underperformance since 2002.

    8. US Treasury 10-year notes returned -16%, the worst return on record.

    9. Only two of the GICS level one sectors generated positive returns: energy +65%, utilities +2%.

    10. The worst sectors: communication services -40%, consumer discretionary -37%, information technology -28%.

    11. The best global markets (in local FX): Venezuela +254%, Turkey +207%, Argentina +142%.

    12. The worst: Russia -37%, South Korea -24%, China A-shares -20%.

    13. Finally, I’ll conclude with a chart, from Ryan Hammond in GIR: as mentioned before, you have probably seen work suggesting that one should not try to time the markets, as missing the best days is a serious drag on returns. While that rang true again (see the gray line), for the world’s best traders, note how dodging the worst days this year generated an immense amount of alpha (see the light blue line):

    More in the full Pasquariello note available to pro subs.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 01/02/2023 – 12:40

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Jan 02

Today’s News 2nd January 2023

  • How China Changed Its Zero-COVID Policy To A 'Zero Non-COVID' Policy
    How China Changed Its Zero-COVID Policy To A ‘Zero Non-COVID’ Policy

    Authored by Nathan Su via The Epoch Times,

    “Zero non-COVID” is the name that people in China are calling the regime’s new pandemic management policy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has aggressively pushed the whole country towards an all-COVID-positive state.

    China’s annual rubber-stamp legislature is usually in session during the month of March. It is widely expected that the coming session will focus on saving China’s economy because it is on the edge of collapse after the three-year long zero-COVID policy.

    Party leader Xi Jinping is clearly willing to pay any price to reopen the country.

    Government employees of Chongqing City in Sichuan Province and Zhejiang Province received notices telling them return to their offices to work even if they have tested positive for COVID-19, as long as their symptoms are mild.

    The total population of Chongqing City is more than 31 million, and Zhejiang province more than 57 million.

    Rumors on the Chinese internet talked about local governments of Chongqing City and Zhejiang Province being criticized by Beijing because these regions were too slow to reach a high percentage of COVID positive patients.

    A local official in Shanghai told The Epoch Times on Dec. 27 that his office had received instructions to do whatever it could to push the city into the COVID peak status.

    “Let those who are supposed to become positive become positive, and let those who are supposed to die, die,” said Song Wen (pseudonym).

    All state-owned media are mute about the current situation in the country, and reports from different government agencies are conflicting.

    The Zhejiang Provincial government recorded one million new COVID cases on Dec. 25, while the Chinese national CDC only reported 2,983 new cases in the whole nation for the same day.

    The regime announced that on Jan. 8, 2023, China will totally reopen travel in and out of the country, which has triggered concern in countries around the globe. Italian officials reported on Dec. 28 that 50 percent of passengers on two flights from China tested positive for COVID.

    Chinese travelers leave the arrival hall of Rome Fiumicino International Airport, near Rome, after being tested for COVID-19 on Dec. 29, 2022. (Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images)

    China, a country with a population of more than 1.4 billion, moved from the zero-COVID policy to a zero non-COVID policy within a month. The sudden change has left health experts worldwide feeling uncertain, because the explosion in COVID cases in China may lead to the whole world being exposed to new variants.

    The Western media have widely attributed the sudden policy change to the late November White Paper protests against the zero-COVID policy in China. However, according to World Health Organization (WHO) emergencies chief Michael Ryan, the COVID spike in China was not due to the lifting of the government mandated restrictions.

    Before the policy change, “the disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease. And I believe China decided strategically that was not the best option anymore,” Ryan said.

    The regime’s change from Zero-COVID to a Zero non-COVID policy did not come without signs.

    Starting in late September, many Chinese state-owned media openly discussed not overly enforcing the zero-COVID policy.

    On Sept. 30, Xi Jinping and all top CCP leaders went to Tiananmen Square for a memorial service on Marty’s Day. Xi and others brought flowers to the People’s Heroes Monument, a stone that was erected to remember those who died for the Party in the past. The pictures of the service show hundreds of people at the event who are not wearing masks.

    For a country that has been enforcing the mask wearing principle as a part of its zero-COVID policy, the event was the first clear sign of the regime’s impending policy change.

    On Oct. 28, Xi said during his short stay in Henan Province: China’s socialist system was established with the sacrifice of human lives. He said that this sacrifice is also needed in the modern era. Xi visited the province after the CCP’s 20th Congress earlier in the month, in which he was re-elected to a third term as the head of the CCP.

    On Nov. 24, a fire started in a high-rise apartment building in Urumqi City that caused many deaths and injuries because the fire escape was locked. The incident later caused widespread protests in many cities. On Dec. 7, Beijing officially lifted its three-year long zero-COVID policy.

    It is obvious that the CCP started the policy change quietly as early as in late September. The widespread protests after the Urumqi fire on Nov. 24 became the perfect excuse for the regime to openly adopt a new policy.

    The reason for the regime’s policy change is clear: to save the regime’s ruling power at the cost of Chinese people’s lives.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/01/2023 – 23:15

  • Top Heavy: Visualizing Every Country's Share Of The Global Economy
    Top Heavy: Visualizing Every Country’s Share Of The Global Economy

    As 2022 comes to a close we can recap many historic milestones of the year, like the Earth’s population hitting 8 billion and the global economy surpassing $100 trillion.

    In this chart, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop visualizes the world’s GDP using data from the IMF, showcasing the biggest economies and the share of global economic activity that they make up.

     Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a broad indicator of the economic activity within a country. It measures the total value of economic output—goods and services—produced within a given time frame by both the private and public sectors.

    The GDP Heavyweights

    The global economy can be thought of as a pie, with the size of each slice representing the share of global GDP contributed by each country. Currently, the largest slices of the pie are held by the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and India, which together account for more than half of global GDP.

    Here’s a look Top 10 country’s share of the world’s $101.6 trillion economy:

    Just five countries make up more than half of the world’s entire GDP in 2022: the U.S., China, Japan, India, and Germany. Interestingly, India replaced the UK this year as a top five economy.

    Adding on another five countries (the top 10) makes up 66% of the global economy, and the top 25 countries comprise 84% of global GDP.

    The World’s Smallest Economies

    The rest of the world — the remaining 167 nations — make up 16% of global GDP. Many of the smallest economies are islands located in Oceania.

    Here’s a look at the 20 smallest economies in the world:

    Tuvalu has the smallest GDP of any country at just $64 million. Tuvalu is one of a dozen nations with a GDP of less than one billion dollars.

    The Global Economy in 2023

    Heading into 2023, there is much economic uncertainty. Many experts are anticipating a brief recession, although opinions differ on the definition of “brief”.

    Some experts believe that China will buck the trend of economic downturn. If this prediction comes true, the country could own an even larger slice of the global GDP pie in the near future.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/01/2023 – 22:30

  • Fauci Fibbed On The Day Everything Changed
    Fauci Fibbed On The Day Everything Changed

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

    Anthony Fauci is finally gone from his government perch. Let us recall that it was he who set this calamity in motion, squandering his credibility, while taking down public health and much else with it. More than anyone, he bears responsibility, even if he was acting on others’ behalf. That is especially true if he was carrying out a hidden agenda (take your pick of theories). 

    There was already growing political and societal panic on March 11, 2020, when the House Oversight and Reform Committee convened a hearing on the new virus circulating. Fauci was the key witness. The only question on everyone’s mind came down to the most primal fear: am I going to die from this thing, like in the movies?

    This was one day before Trump’s announcement of the travel ban from Europe, the UK, and Australia, essentially sealing the borders of the US to an extent never before attempted, thus separating families and loved ones and trapping billions of people in their nation states. It was five days before the evil declaration by all health authorities to immediately shut down all places where people could congregate. 

    These few days will remain a case study in irrationality and crowd madness. Fauci, on the day of his testimony, however, seemed like a paragon of stability. He was calm and clear, nearly bloodness in his tone. The substance of what he said, at the same time, was clearly designed to generate panic and create the conditions for a full lockdown. 

    He had the countenance of a doctor who was telling the family that a beloved father was terminally ill with 30 days to live. 

    In particular, and in contrast to the testimony prepared by CDC/NIH, Fauci spoke to the severity of the virus. To the average member of Congress, the answer here was crucial because it addressed the only two serious issues: “Am I going to die?” and “Will I be blamed and politically punished if my constituents die?”

    To this, he responded with what seemed like science but was actually completely wrong, dreadfully wrong, catastrophically wrong. He claimed that we knew for sure that at best Covid was 10 times deadlier than the flu. In fact, he threw around so much data confetti that a person could have easily believed that he was downplaying the severity to promote calm. His intention was the opposite. 

    Here is what he said, and please read carefully to catch the implications: 

    SARS was also a Coronavirus in 2002. It infected 8,000 people and it killed about 775. It had a mortality of about 9 to 10 percent. So, that is only 8,000 people in about a year. In the two-and-a-half months that we have had this Coronavirus, as you know, we now have multiple multiples of that.

    So, it clearly is not as lethal, and I will get to the lethality in a moment, but it certainly spreads better. Probably for the practical understanding of the American people, the seasonal flu that we deal with every year has a mortality of 0.1 percent. The stated mortality over all of this when you look at all the data including China is about three percent. It first started off as two and now three.

    I think if you count all the cases of minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection, that probably brings the mortality rate down to somewhere around one percent, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu. I think that is something that people can get their arms around and understand….

    I think the gauge is that this is a really serious problem that we have to take seriously. I mean people always say, well the flu, you know, the flu does this, the does that. The flu has immortality of 0.1 percent. This has mortality of ten times that, and that is the reason why I want to emphasize, we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.

    Just think through the flim-flam here. He begins with the figure of a 10 percent case fatality rate from a similar virus. The thinking in the room is already stuck on 10. Then he says this virus has killed more in a shorter period of time, which implies more severity. He quickly dials that back but warns that this is more easily spread, which suggests that perhaps it is even higher. Then he dials that back and says that so far the mortality rate is 3 percent. 

    But then he quickly adds in “minimally symptomatic or asymptomatic infection” and comes to a rough number of 1 percent, thus failing completely here to distinguish between cases and infections, which used to be a core metric that he and so many others completely obliterated. 

    That’s a side point but an important one. The distinction between cases and infections has been crushed, leaving us utter data chaos. 

    Fauci spoke this final number with so many other numbers before it that no one could figure out which way was up. The main takeaway anyone would have is that there is going to be vast bloodshed. 

    It’s best to watch this. You can almost feel the fear in the room as he blinds these political critters with fake science. 

    So what do we do? Fauci here was quick with the answer:

    How much worse it will get will depend on our ability to do two things, to contain the influx in people who are infected coming from the outside and the ability to contain and mitigate within our own country. 

    In other words: lockdown. 

    Thus was the stage set. To be sure, there is some mental connection between severity and policy response but there probably should not be. Even if this virus had a 10 percent fatality rate, what does locking down achieve? It was never even clear what the point was. The “spread” could not be stopped forever. The hospitals weren’t really overcrowded, as we seen. There was never a chance for Zero Covid, as the catastrophic experience of China and New Zealand has shown. 

    In the end, the pandemic of a respiratory virus is solved through exposure, upgraded immune systems, and herd immunity, regardless of severity. And again, please recall that biological evolution has made such pandemics self-limiting: there is a trade between severity and prevalence subject to latency. Latency here was never a factor, contrary to the lies in the early weeks. So the more infectious this virus would be, the less severe it would be, nearly by definition. 

    Fauci could have used his time in Congress to give a basic explanation. He did not. He chose to spread irrational fear instead. 

    So how can we evaluate Fauci’s murky suggestion that SARS-CoV-2 will have a 1 percent fatality rate? What actually happened? These data are pretty settled by now. 

    • 0-19 years: 0.0003% 

    • 20-29 years: 0.002% 

    • 40-49 years: 0.035% 

    • 50-59 years: 0.123% (flu) 

    • 60-69 years: 0.506% (bad flu) 

    In other words, for the most affected demographic, he was off by two times. For youth, he was off by 3,333 times – an exaggeration of more than 300,000 percent! And he did it with a straight face. The rest of the population falls between there for a total of 0.095 percent. So in general for the whole population he was off by 10 times, meaning that the actual infection fatality rate is just slightly less (if this is right) than the seasonal flu.

    Throughout the entire pandemic, from the beginning to now, the average age of the 0.09 percent of infected people who died remained at the medium age of death in absence of the pandemic. If this same virus arrived decades early, it would have hardly been noticed at all. 

    Which is to say: Fauci was correct on February 28, 2020, when he wrote that this is more or less the flu, except with a large age gradient. His change of mind in the course of two weeks prior to this testimony is based on absolutely no evidence. What changed was his tactics but why?

    We mapped out many times already that there was plenty of information available, even in the popular press, that this bug would be more-or-less like the flu, except with an extreme age gradient – which we knew already in mid-February. All the misinformation that followed was just that. And they knew it. Certainly Fauci knew it. No doubt about it. 

    So why? Here we get into interesting theorizing. Brownstone has done a lot of this for the better part of 18 months, and we will continue to do so. We can talk all evening about this. We already do. And we continue to collect evidence too. 

    The point is that the world is not the same. Fauci pulled the lever on the wall that set this in motion. He never should have been given that deference, that power, that influence. There should have been a check on him. And some people tried but the censors then flew into action. 

    The entire mess began not just with a bad prediction but an outrageously bad falsehood – spoken in front of deeply ignorant and terrified politicians – one that was followed by an egregious demand that we get rid of normal social and market functioning. The consequences are for the ages. Fauci had his own masters and minions but it is impossible to avoid the reality that he bears primary responsibility as the voice of panic that shut down freedoms hard won over a millennium. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/01/2023 – 21:45

  • Twitter Sued For Not Paying San Fran Office Rent As Some Workers Bring Their Own Toilet Paper
    Twitter Sued For Not Paying San Fran Office Rent As Some Workers Bring Their Own Toilet Paper

    With Twitter now private, roughly three quarters of its employees laid off (yet somehow not only has twitter not crashed but is faster then ever, not to mention mostly uncensored) and its financials only of concern to the company’s owner Elon Musk, a troubling development suggests that the recent boycott by woke, liberal advertising companies who hate free speech is starting to sting.

    According to Bloomberg, Twitter was sued for failing to pay $136,250 in rent for its office space in San Francisco.

    In the lawsuit filed by Columbia Reit – 650 California LLC (docket # CGC-22-603719, Superior Court, State of California), the landlord says it notified Twitter on Dec. 16 that it would be in default on its lease for the 30th floor of the Hartford Building in five days unless the rent was paid. The tenant failed to comply, Columbia Reit said in the complaint, filed last Thursday in state court in San Francisco.

    According to a Dec 13 report by the New York Times, Twitter hasn’t paid rent on its headquarters, or any of its other global offices, in weeks. The company was also sued earlier this month for refusing to pay for two charter flights. According to a more recent NYT report, in order to save money, Twitter has also shut down at least one Sacramento data center, stopped paying rent for its Seattle office, and has cut janitorial and security services, in some cases forcing employees to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

    Last week, Twitter got rid of the cleaning staff at its New York offices and 10 people from corporate security, signaling that it may close one of its two buildings there.

    At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, where the company has also missed rent payments, Musk has done the same, consolidating workers onto two floors and closing four. He also canceled janitorial services this month, after those workers went on strike for better wages. That has left the office in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home, according to the NYT.

    According to an internal doc seen by the NYT, since early November, Musk has sought to save about $500 million in nonlabor costs.  Cost-cutting has been overseen by Steve Davis, the head of Musk’s tunneling start-up, the Boring Company, and Jared Birchall, the head of the billionaire’s family office. Twitter managers who didn’t lose their jobs in mass layoffs last month have been told to approach their spending with a tactic known as “zero-based budgeting,” or operating under the assumption that spending should start at nothing and teams should justify individual costs, according to the costs-savings document.

    Davis has directed Twitter employees to delay paying various contractors or vendors and try to negotiate those bills to smaller amounts. The cost of one of the company’s largest contracts, with the consulting megafirm Deloitte, has been a point of particular concern for Twitter’s leadership, which wants to reduce the fees the company pays for security, tax preparation and other services. The company has skipped payments to KPMG, an accounting and consulting firm that had been working on matters related to compliance with the Federal Trade Commission. While missed payments to those firms have now been paid, according to a person familiar with the expenditures, it’s unclear if the company will retain their services beyond this year.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/01/2023 – 21:00

  • Israel Has The World's Highest Digital Quality Of Life In 2022, USA Only 12th
    Israel Has The World’s Highest Digital Quality Of Life In 2022, USA Only 12th

    Life and work in the 21st century is increasingly reliant on modern technology, with a country’s digital quality of life playing a massive role on people’s day-to-day.

    Some countries excel in internet access and affordability, while others have more modern digital systems and relevant laws. And, as Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach details below, many regions of the world suffer with lacking digital infrastructure and access across the board.

    The 2022 Digital Quality of Life Index (DQL) from Surfshark analyzes countries on digital wellbeing, based on data from the UN, World Bank, Freedom House, and the International Communications Union.

    5 Metrics for Measuring Digital Wellbeing

    The DQL Index covers 117 countries with readily available data, making up 92% of the global population. Each country is scored on five pillars:

    • Internet Affordability—How much time people have to work to afford a stable internet connection.

    • Internet Quality—How fast and stable the internet connectivity in a country is and how well it’s improving.

    • Electronic Infrastructure—How well developed and inclusive a country’s existing electronic infrastructure is.

    • Electronic Security—How safe and protected people feel in a country.

    • Electronic Government—How advanced and digitized a country’s government services are.

    Visualizing The World’s Digital Quality of Life

    Overall, Europe and Asia led the digital quality of life rankings in 2022. Israel took the top spot with an incredibly strong score in internet affordability. Here are the countries sorted by rankings and their weighted scores in each category:

    Rank Country Affordability Quality E-infrastructure E-security E-government
    1 Israel 0.1917 0.0981 0.1668 0.1503 0.1541
    2 Denmark 0.047 0.1186 0.1968 0.1878 0.1844
    3 Germany 0.0718 0.0926 0.1922 0.1946 0.1612
    4 France 0.0534 0.111 0.1834 0.1878 0.1749
    5 Sweden 0.0213 0.1059 0.1958 0.1878 0.1787
    6 Netherlands 0.0241 0.0985 0.1956 0.1865 0.1796
    7 Finland 0.0171 0.0973 0.192 0.1892 0.1869
    8 Japan 0.0684 0.1024 0.1846 0.1462 0.177
    9 U.K. 0.0413 0.0898 0.1882 0.1611 0.188
    10 South Korea 0.0252 0.1139 0.1884 0.1516 0.1868
    11 Lithuania 0.0508 0.087 0.1705 0.1973 0.1592
    12 U.S. 0.0326 0.113 0.1944 0.1224 0.1947
    13 Switzerland 0.0337 0.1114 0.1914 0.1597 0.1607
    14 Estonia 0.0219 0.0759 0.1852 0.1946 0.1779
    15 Singapore 0.0717 0.1134 0.1852 0.0943 0.19
    16 Spain 0.0257 0.0924 0.1777 0.1919 0.1656
    17 Norway 0.0136 0.0923 0.194 0.1649 0.174
    18 Luxembourg 0.0272 0.0911 0.1878 0.1689 0.1597
    19 Italy 0.0362 0.082 0.1733 0.1824 0.159
    20 Portugal 0.0085 0.1101 0.1576 0.1932 0.1565
    21 Belgium 0.0162 0.0868 0.1823 0.1973 0.1409
    22 Austria 0.0279 0.0717 0.1782 0.1716 0.1719
    23 Poland 0.0242 0.0869 0.1566 0.1905 0.1568
    24 Ireland 0.0217 0.0874 0.1799 0.1662 0.1596
    25 Czechia 0.023 0.0755 0.1707 0.196 0.1472
    26 Canada 0.0228 0.0967 0.1831 0.1289 0.1723
    27 Hungary 0.0206 0.1046 0.1647 0.1676 0.1425
    28 New Zealand 0.0166 0.1027 0.1731 0.1341 0.1702
    29 Slovakia 0.0233 0.0807 0.161 0.1865 0.1417
    30 Bulgaria 0.0308 0.1025 0.1352 0.177 0.1452
    31 Croatia 0.0133 0.0911 0.1625 0.1865 0.1346
    32 Slovenia 0.0102 0.0934 0.1619 0.1622 0.1591
    33 Latvia 0.0235 0.0918 0.1628 0.1784 0.1289
    34 Romania 0.0299 0.105 0.1427 0.1743 0.1327
    35 Australia 0.0453 0.0706 0.1755 0.1089 0.1802
    36 Malta 0.0104 0.093 0.1639 0.1527 0.1547
    37 Cyprus 0.0139 0.0718 0.1589 0.1689 0.1548
    38 Malaysia 0.0319 0.0838 0.1636 0.1224 0.1561
    39 Greece 0.0085 0.0713 0.142 0.2 0.1344
    40 Chile 0.0251 0.1202 0.1469 0.1022 0.1538
    41 Uruguay 0.0051 0.1054 0.1569 0.13 0.1498
    42 Russia 0.0556 0.0794 0.1512 0.0943 0.152
    43 China 0.0241 0.1045 0.1485 0.0741 0.175
    44 U.A.E. 0.0071 0.1148 0.1779 0.0419 0.1712
    45 Argentina 0.0073 0.0694 0.1575 0.13 0.1464
    46 Qatar 0.0077 0.1077 0.1705 0.0808 0.1421
    47 Armenia 0.1009 0.07 0.1356 0.0765 0.1221
    48 Serbia 0.0184 0.0739 0.1387 0.1238 0.1429
    49 Thailand 0.0081 0.1045 0.151 0.0876 0.1391
    50 Ukraine 0.0259 0.0581 0.1613 0.1184 0.1256
    51 Saudi Arabia 0.0057 0.0873 0.1635 0.0865 0.1408
    52 Turkey 0.0153 0.0679 0.1526 0.0968 0.1488
    53 Brazil 0.0078 0.0884 0.1388 0.0686 0.1558
    54 Moldova 0.0357 0.0687 0.1359 0.0927 0.1226
    55 Philippines 0.0044 0.0779 0.1371 0.1062 0.1265
    56 Bahrain 0.0084 0.0878 0.166 0.047 0.1396
    57 Colombia 0.0051 0.0775 0.1248 0.0954 0.1433
    58 Costa Rica 0.0042 0.0721 0.1523 0.0954 0.1206
    59 India 0.0266 0.071 0.1149 0.0822 0.1489
    60 N. Macedonia 0.0095 0.0684 0.1409 0.0981 0.1237
    61 Kazakhstan 0.0185 0.0639 0.1408 0.07 0.1473
    62 Mexico 0.0111 0.0688 0.1291 0.0792 0.142
    63 Paraguay 0.0091 0.0724 0.1424 0.0862 0.113
    64 Albania 0.0087 0.0567 0.1313 0.09 0.1328
    65 Oman 0.0053 0.065 0.1455 0.0473 0.1502
    66 South Africa 0.0198 0.0689 0.1171 0.0778 0.1294
    67 Georgia 0.0097 0.0577 0.1408 0.0941 0.1103
    68 Mauritius 0.0149 0.0459 0.1311 0.09 0.1298
    69 Belarus 0.0224 0.068 0.1396 0.0554 0.123
    70 Vietnam 0.0145 0.0712 0.1396 0.0578 0.1241
    71 Morocco 0.0068 0.0603 0.1247 0.113 0.1004
    72 Indonesia 0.0064 0.0639 0.1382 0.0605 0.1342
    73 Peru 0.0037 0.069 0.126 0.0819 0.1213
    74 Azerbaijan 0.0093 0.0618 0.1361 0.0592 0.1253
    75 Montenegro 0.0149 0.0566 0.1339 0.0765 0.1064
    76 Bangladesh 0.024 0.0681 0.1204 0.0703 0.1021
    77 Tunisia 0.011 0.0484 0.1225 0.0886 0.1142
    78 Kenya 0.0047 0.0492 0.1391 0.0714 0.1193
    79 Dominican Republic 0.0047 0.0597 0.1163 0.0754 0.1229
    80 Bosnia and Herzegovina 0.0127 0.0634 0.1353 0.0697 0.0974
    81 Panama 0.0032 0.0851 0.1279 0.05 0.1111
    82 Ecuador 0.0045 0.0656 0.132 0.0365 0.1256
    83 Trinidad and Tobago 0.0094 0.0622 0.1277 0.0551 0.1074
    84 Iran 0.0149 0.0585 0.1482 0.0149 0.1113
    85 Egypt 0.0064 0.0583 0.1098 0.0595 0.1135
    86 Nigeria 0.0014 0.0552 0.1187 0.0768 0.0916
    87 Jordan 0.0048 0.0754 0.1434 0.0297 0.0862
    88 Ghana 0.0025 0.0531 0.0957 0.0724 0.1091
    89 Sri Lanka 0.0071 0.0658 0.0943 0.0446 0.1184
    90 Mongolia 0.015 0.059 0.135 0.0189 0.0951
    91 Kyrgyzstan 0.0105 0.0603 0.0986 0.0457 0.1074
    92 Algeria 0.005 0.0601 0.1312 0.0551 0.0707
    93 Bolivia 0.0051 0.0583 0.1287 0.0324 0.0941
    94 Nepal 0.0069 0.0684 0.1132 0.0497 0.0762
    95 Senegal 0.0036 0.055 0.1048 0.0603 0.0906
    96 Pakistan 0.006 0.0616 0.0938 0.0446 0.1015
    97 Jamaica 0.0047 0.0584 0.113 0.0432 0.0859
    98 Uganda 0.0007 0.0489 0.0777 0.0768 0.0943
    99 El Salvador 0.0028 0.0662 0.1066 0.0257 0.0944
    100 Ivory Coast 0.0006 0.0465 0.0881 0.0724 0.0869
    101 Cambodia 0.0043 0.0631 0.1178 0.0162 0.0831
    102 Mali 0.0011 0.0548 0.0969 0.0603 0.0689
    103 Namibia 0.0046 0.0517 0.0955 0.0322 0.0899
    104 Guatemala 0.0029 0.059 0.0877 0.0257 0.0878
    105 Zambia 0.0034 0.0241 0.0935 0.0781 0.0613
    106 Botswana 0.0051 0.0523 0.0977 0.023 0.0777
    107 Tanzania 0.0021 0.0517 0.0813 0.0257 0.0924
    108 Honduras 0.004 0.0675 0.0838 0.0108 0.0861
    109 Zimbabwe 0.0019 0.034 0.0907 0.0362 0.0854
    110 Angola 0.0047 0.0567 0.0576 0.0495 0.0748
    111 Laos 0.0066 0.0489 0.0955 0.0189 0.059
    112 Tajikistan 0.0108 0.0485 0.073 0.0108 0.0754
    113 Cameroon 0.0014 0.0178 0.073 0.0338 0.0832
    114 Mozambique 0.0021 0.0378 0.0526 0.0295 0.0815
    115 Ethiopia 0.0032 0.0472 0.048 0.0338 0.0682
    116 Yemen 0.007 0.0644 0.0479 0.0081 0.0527
    117 Congo DR 0.0063 0.0596 0.0446 0.0027 0.0394

    Overall, 15 of the top 20 highest-scoring countries were located in Europe, including #2 Denmark and #3 Germany, reflecting the region’s strong scores in electronic infrastructure and security.

    In addition to Israel, the Asia region was represented at the top by #8 Japan, #10 South Korea, and #15 Singapore. The only non-Asian and non-European country to make the top 20 was the United States at #12.

    GDP’s Impact on Digital Infrastructure

    Of the 117 countries that had data available for the index, the majority of the lowest-ranking countries were in Africa or Asia. This includes the bottom five: Cameroon, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Yemen, and DR Congo.

    In fact, when the DQL Index was charted against GDP per capita, a clear and unsurprising trend emerges:

    As countries have to grapple with limited resources and capital for increasing their digital wellbeing, we can see different priorities emerge. For example. many countries scored poorly on internet affordability and electronic government while prioritizing investments in internet quality and electronic infrastructure.

    And despite the proliferation of mobile phones across the world, more countries were able to set up stable broadband internet over mobile internet.

    To find out more interesting insights, dive in to the full Digital Quality of Life Index.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/01/2023 – 20:15

  • Tesla Tax Loss And Positive Catalysts
    Tesla Tax Loss And Positive Catalysts

    Submitted by Larry McDonald, author of The Bear Traps Report

    This week, TSLA equity traded 61% below the 200-day moving average, the most in a decade — Tesla reports Q4 unit sales before trading starts Tuesday, January 3rd.

    Tesla vs. CAT, the Mad Rush into Industrials

    “Investors falling all over themselves to exit tech stocks and increase exposure to industrials. Hard asset plays have dramatically outperformed financial assets – and long-duration “growth” equities. The street is looking for $112B of sales in 2023 vs. a $384B equity market capitalization for TSLA stock.  She used to trade at 80x sales, just wow.”

    A $1T Loss?

    If TSLA touches $98, the market cap loss is near $1 trillion, stock traded at $105 pre-market this week. Close to $25B value of shares traded Tuesday, more than Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google combined. Nearly 700m shares in 3 days this week, that´s 25% of the float. This is an epic retail exit – tax loss selling. Daily RSI was near 17 this week, the lowest of all time for this capitulation measuring stick. Tesla was 5th largest in the S&P, now 18, now less than UNH, Lilly, and Chevron. If you sell TSLA equity in December – the investor can buy the stock in 31 days and still book the loss for tax purposes. In years with LARGE Q4 equity market losses – the “January Effect”* can be fairly impressive. Looking back over the last 50 years – when you have a down December, stocks are up 1.2% in January. Since 1991, with stocks off more than -2% in December, they have been up +3.7% on average in January, Bloomberg terminal data.

    **The January Effect is a tendency for increases in stock prices during the beginning of the year, particularly in the month of January. The cause behind the January Effect is attributed to tax-loss harvesting, consumer sentiment, year-end bonuses, raising year-end report performances, and more. – CFI.

    That said,  a recent analysis from Goldman found that the January effect has largely shifted to November since 1990.

    “Historic forced margin calls for Tesla – it´s all retail Larry, ALL retail – rather than sentiment shift, see large scale TRF (Schwab, Ameritrade, etc) volume. The SIZE TSLA margin calls are forcing (triggering) ALOT of cross-selling through the entire long duration – speculative equity campgrounds.” — Equity Portfolio Manager on the West Coast, in our Bear Traps Portfolio

    TSLA normally reports quarterly unit sales in the first weekend after the end of each quarter. Consensus is looking for a total of ~420K cars sold (down from 450K est. a few weeks ago). Given that New Year falls on the weekend, there is some uncertainty as to when exactly TSLA reports Q4 unit sales. Either Monday or Tuesday, January 3rd around the market open is most likely.

    Previous January Report Date / Time

    • Sunday 1/2/2022 11am Stock +13.5% the next day
    • Friday 1/2/2021 9:55am Stock +3.4% the next Monday
    • Friday 1/3/2020 8:17am Stock +3% that day
    • Wednesday 1/2/2019 8:34am Stock -1.5% that day

    Is Team Biden coming to Tesla’s Rescue?

    At the start of the new year, buyers will once again enjoy a tax credit when they purchase a Tesla vehicle. The original 2010 EV tax credit had a quota of 400K units. For Tesla, the tax credits fully disappeared in early 2020 when Tesla reached that unit sales quota. But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that Congress passed earlier this year and Biden signed yesterday, the tax credits are back in 2023. In the IRA there is a $7,500 tax credit for buyers of EVs, including TSLA and GM, who lost their previous tax credits. However, there are other strict limits on which brands would be eligible for the full credit, based on the selling price and where the cars and components are made. Unless the car is made in North America (NAFTA), the buyer is not eligible for the full tax credit. In addition, at least 50% of the battery parts will need to be made in North America. Lastly, a minimum of 40% of minerals used in the batteries must be sourced from the US or countries with free trade agreements with the US. So even buyers of GM and Tesla cars might only be eligible for half ($3,750) of the tax credit because their batteries and minerals come from a “foreign entity of concern” (China/Russia).

    However, the Treasury Department recently said that the final decision on the critical minerals’ requirement won’t be available until March. As a result, all the requirements in the IRA governing EV cars, minerals, and parts will be waived. This means that, until Treasury issues its final set of rules, it will allow the full $7,500 tax incentive on all qualifying models.**

    “We don’t expect them to reach 400K (unit sales) in Q4, data comes next week – early January. But, we also don’t think they always tell the truth. So, who knows? The IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) is about the only thing here between TSLA and a complete collapse in demand from what we can see. Also, many other countries have subsidies that are ending on December 31st. So, TSLA is benefiting from demand pull forward in those other countries. That will reverse in the March quarter, and may offset some of the benefits stated by the bulls.” – CIO, Large Fund.

    So, prospective EV buyers in the US will be extremely motivated to buy their EV before the Treasury issues their final list of requirements in March, as it could potentially save them thousands. We could therefore see demand for Tesla cars and other EVs (2 out of every three EVs sold in the US are Tesla’s) being pulled forward into Q1.

    Musk is keenly aware that all this might have led EV car buyers to postpone purchases until Q1 and he increased year-end rebates to $7,500 and 10K miles of free charging in early December. Whether this was enough to meet Tesla’s estimates for 420K unit sales for Q4 remains to be seen. We will know this before trading starts on January 3. But the IRA waiver could still cause a burst in US sales in early 2023.

    This is not the only boon for Tesla starting next year. The EPA is proposing to increase the cellulosic ethanol component in the renewable fuel standard will climb to 2.13 billion gallons from 630 million. Refiners will be allowed and by necessity required to comply with these mandates by buying “eRINs” credits from EV manufacturers. Since Tesla has by far the most EV cars on the road, refiners will have to buy most eRINs from Tesla.

    In years past Tesla always boosted gross margins from “Zero Emission Credits” that other car makers bought from Tesla to offset carbon emissions. Now the administration is giving Tesla another back door subsidy, although it is yet unclear when these rules go into effect.

    ** EV and plug-in models were manufactured in North America in the 2022 and 2023 model years that DOE says are eligible: Audi, BMW, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Ford, GMC, Jeep, Lincoln, Lucid, Nissan, Rivian, Tesla, Volvo, Cadillac, Mercedes and Volkswagen. Yet because of price limits or battery-size requirements, not all these vehicle models will qualify for credits. Note that IRS details issued on Dec 29 indicated that only 20% of Model Y would be eligible for full tax credit, unless Tesla lowers their price on certain versions of the Y.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/01/2023 – 19:30

  • America's Top New Year's Resolutions For 2023
    America’s Top New Year’s Resolutions For 2023

    The plan to live a healthier life is once again top of mind for Americans making resolutions for 2023.

    Vowing to exercise more, eat healthier and to lose weight were the top 3 New Year’s resolutions in the U.S. this year, according to the Statista Global Consumer Survey.

    Infographic: America's Top New Year's Resolutions for 2023 | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    In a year that was marked by high inflation, the resolution to save more money comes in rank 4.

    Classics like spending more time with family and friends instead of on social media also ranked high in the survey.

    19 percent of American adults also want to reduce stress on the job next year.

    Less popular resolutions had to do with reducing use of alcohol and cigarettes as well as doing more for the environment, for example by becoming a vegetarian or vegan. Still, 10 percent of respondents were planning the latter for the new year.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/01/2023 – 18:45

  • In War For Control Of Humanity, Thoughts And Emotions Are The Battlefield: Dr. Robert Malone
    In War For Control Of Humanity, Thoughts And Emotions Are The Battlefield: Dr. Robert Malone

    Authored by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Inventor of mRNA vaccines Dr. Robert Malone, having worked with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) for many years, warns that a war is being waged by the government for control of people’s minds, and that social media platforms are being weaponized in this war and are “actively employed” by the intelligence community to influence what people think and feel.

    Dr. Robert Malone, author of “Lies My Gov’t Told Me,” in Washington on Dec. 19, 2022. (Jack Wang/The Epoch Times)

    “This new battleground, in which your mind and your thoughts, your very emotions are the battleground. It is not about territory,” Malone said during a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. “Twitter, it’s clear now, has become the premium platform for shaping emerging global consensus about the topics of the day.”

    During his work with the DOD, Malone became aware of companies researching multilingual programs that assess the emotional content of the language used on social media, which those companies then use to “map relationship clouds,” including what topics people are discussing, who the influencers are, and who is at the fringe of that cloud, said Malone.

    A sign at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on Dec. 8, 2022. (Jeff Chiu/AP Photo)

    Phenomena like being deplatformed, shadowbanned, and a “tweet” going viral is a part of this weaponizing of social media.

    Twitter prevented users from sharing former President Donald Trump’s post. (Screenshot/Twitter)

    “By using these tools of manipulating what information, what tweets you put out, what messages you put out to your influencer cloud, they can modulate how those people behave,” he said. “You can actually very actively control what individuals are thinking, the information that they’re gathering, what they’re being influenced to do.”

    The people who control information warfare weapons can modulate the messaging within the influencer clouds that can be readily mapped, Malone said.

    “Your current state of mind, based on the language that you’re using and the topics that you’re talking about, can be mapped very precisely, psychologically,” he said. “It can be tied into a web of influence relationships.”

    High-Tech Surveillance

    Members of a specific “influencer cloud” can be tracked using the military spy technology called the Gorgon Stare, said Malone. This spy technology is capable of detecting movements including what car you drive, who gets in your car, and where you go, he said.

    The Gorgon Stare is a surveillance technology, originally created to target terrorist groups, that utilizes high-tech cameras mounted on drones to capture video images of large areas, such as entire cities. Then artificial intelligence is used to analyze the surveillance footage.

    Arthur Holland Michel, author of the book, “Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All,” called this technology the “pinnacle of aerial surveillance” during a 2019 interview with the CATO Institute and said the things he learned while writing the book were so troubling, they kept him up at night.

    Elon Musk speaks at the 2020 Satellite Conference and Exhibition in Washington on March 9, 2020. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

    Collusion During the Pandemic

    Elon Musk has brought more transparency to Twitter, but the information he revealed only confirmed that the FBI and intelligence agencies had major influence over the platform, said Malone.

    “Elon now is in a position where he has access to incredibly damaging information about the willingness of the U.S. government to collude with industry and compromise the First Amendment,” said Malone.

    Musk’s purchase of Twitter is significant, but only time will tell what the final outcome of it will have for our democracy and the First Amendment, Malone added.

    Since the start of the pandemic, Malone and his wife and fellow scientist, Jill Glasspool Malone, have become aware of the government’s breach of all guardrails, said Malone, in terms of ethics and the norms of drug development, bioethics, biodefense, and pharmaceutical development.

    “We have all been subjected, over the last three years, to military-grade psychological operations that were using technology developed for offshore conflicts, and they had been deployed against the citizens of virtually the entire Western world.”

    The same strategies that are used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control the Chinese citizens have been used by elites in the United States, said Malone.

    “We’re now seeing the documentation on a daily basis released to us by Twitter, of this intense collusion between the U.S. government, tech, and corporate media,” said Malone.

    A man using a laptop at an office of Sina Weibo, widely known as China’s version of Twitter, in Beijing on April 16, 2014. (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images)

     

    Citizens Are Manipulated

    Millions of Americans accepted a new product (the mRNA vaccine) that skipped normal safety and efficacy protocols and is still only in use under emergency use authorization because “the government felt that it was acceptable to deploy these military-grade technologies against all of us to coerce, compel, and mandate that we accept an unlicensed product that turns out to not be safe, nor effective,” said Malone.

    People were coerced into taking this experimental vaccine because they were manipulated on a scale that is hard to fathom, said Malone. This is how entities like the CCP are able to carry out human rights atrocities, like live organ harvesting, where prisoners of consciousness are murdered for their organs, he added.

    China grew its organ “transplant” industry from 1999 to now, with a wait time in China for a major organ transplant being months rather than the years it can take in western countries.

    This happens because people cannot conceive of “the possibility that these things might be happening in this way, whether it’s organ harvesting, or it’s the darkness of what appears to be the emergence of a pharmaceutical corporatist, global, centralized state,” said Malone.

    Most people cannot fathom such evil exists because they are still good, said Malone.

    “Not only have we been subjected to this barrage of coordinated propaganda, we’ve been subjected to a barrage of intentional manipulation of our very language to support this initiative and this agenda,” said Malone.

    Dr. Robert Malone, chief medical officer of the Unity Project, at a rally at Hagerstown Speedway in Hagerstown, Md., on Mar. 26, 2022. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)

    The New Book

    Malone’s new book attempts to sort through the events of the last three years to understand what happened and why, which he said is important to start to chart a healthy path forward.

    “Each of these chapters derives from a kind of a real-time assessment of events that were occurring,” he said, and the events were also cited in Malone’s substack writings.

    Readers should discern the truth for themselves by finding credible sources of information, he said, adding that his goal is to provide factual information to the public so they can make informed decisions because society is in a time when people are being inundated with “totalitarian propaganda.”

    In the final third of the book, Malone suggests some concrete actions that could help restore democracy and alleviate the corruption that has besieged the federal government by changing laws to allow for term limits for the federal bureaucracy.

    “This has to do with things like the legal underpinning that enables the existence of this permanent cadre that we call the Senior Executive Service, these thousands of people that cannot be fired, that functionally run the government,” said Malone.

    Former President Donald Trump’s attempt to reassign classification for upper-level federal employees in the state department, with his schedule F executive order, was a crucial step to restoring balance in the three branches of the government, said Malone.

    However, after President Joe Biden took office, he nullified the Schedule F executive order, which Malone said was “an example of how powerful these entrenched administrative state interests are.”

    Another crucial step to end government corruption is to separate the power of federal agencies to both regulate and promote the industry they are in charge of, said Malone.

    “[Dr.] Peter McCullough likes to point out the FDA, under emergency use authorization, acts as both the sponsor and the regulator of these medical products,” said Malone. “And the corruption of the FDA and the CDC is at such a stage now that I think it is so self-evident that only the most hypnotized deny it.”

    Envisioning a New Future

    These actions alone will likely not end the deep-rooted corruption and collusion of the intelligence community within the agencies, said Malone, but it is a step forward.

    People like Dr. Anthony Fauci are working in tandem with the intelligence agencies, and this can be seen by the development of the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) department, the Advance Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), said Malone.

    The Epoch Times reached out to the NIH for comment.

    This new department is led by a former officer with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and has a budget of about $1 billion. Malone said the purpose of the department “appears to be the advancement of transhumanism and a biometric identification and all of that agenda within NIH. It’s basically the intelligence community moving in within NIH.”

    Malone asked how humans can “enable a decentralized future for all of us, as opposed to this very dark, Fourth Industrial Revolution, transhumanism central command economy.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/01/2023 – 18:00

  • These Are The Security Features Of American Money
    These Are The Security Features Of American Money

    In 1739, Benjamin Franklin sought to tackle the issue of counterfeit money in America, using a printing press and leaves to create unique raised patterns on the colonial notes.

    Almost 300 years later, Benjamin Franklin is the face of the U.S. $100 bill, and it is protected by a myriad of security features including secret images, special ink, hidden watermarks, and magnetic signatures, among others.

    In this infographic below, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop and Mark Belan have broken down the $100 bill to showcase the anatomy of American currency.

    The Makeup of American Money

    There are 6 key features that identify real bills and protect the falsification of American money.

    ① Serial Numbers & EURion Constellation

    The most basic form of security on an $100 bill is the serial number. Every bill has a unique number to record data on its production and keep track of how many individual bills are in circulation.

    The EURion constellation is star-like grouping of yellow rings near the serial number. It is only detectable by imaging software.

    ② Color Changing Ink

    This ink changes color at different angles thanks to small metallic flakes within the ink itself. The $100 bill, like all other paper bills in the U.S., has its value denoted in color changing ink on the bottom right-hand corner; unlike other bills, it also features a liberty bell image using the ink.

    ③ Microprinting

    Microprinting allows for verifiable images that cannot be scanned by photocopiers or seen by the naked eye. The $100 bill has phrases like “USA 100” written invisibly in multiple places.

    ④ Intaglio Printing

    Rather than regular ink pressed onto the paper, intaglio printing uses magnetic ink and every different bill value has a unique magnetic signature.

    ⑤ Security Threads & 3D Ribbons

    The security thread is a clear, embedded, vertical thread running through the bill. It can only be seen under UV light, contains microprinted text specifying the bill’s value, and on each different bill value it glows a unique color.

    Additionally, 3D ribbons are placed in the center of $100 bills with a pattern that slightly changes as it moves.

    ⑥ Paper, Fibers, & Watermarks

    Because American money is made of cotton and linen, blue and red cloth fibers are woven into the material as another identifying feature. Finally, watermarks are found on most bills and can only be detected by light passing through the bill.

    The Relevance of Cash

    Here’s a look at the total number of each paper bill that is physically in circulation in the U.S.:

     

    Interestingly, a number of $500-$10,000 dollar bills are in someone’s pockets. And while they are not issued anymore, the Fed still recognizes the originals of these bills that were legally put into circulation in the past.

     

    A $10,000 Federal Reserve Note (1934)

    Additionally, there is fake money passing hands in the U.S. economy. Being the most widely-accepted currency in the world, it’s no wonder many try to falsely replicate American money. According to the U.S. Department of Treasury, there are approximately $70 million in counterfeit bills currently circulating in the country.

    Finally, a natural question arises: how many people still use cash anyways?

    Well, a study from Pew Research Center found that it while it is a dwindling share of the population, around 58% of people still use cash for some to all of their weekly purchases, down from 70% in 2018 and 75% in 2015.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 01/01/2023 – 17:15

  • Comparing The Boom/Bust Cycle In Deregulated Power, Oil & Gas Services, With Recent Events In Bitcoin Mining
    Comparing The Boom/Bust Cycle In Deregulated Power, Oil & Gas Services, With Recent Events In Bitcoin Mining

    Doug Wilson, Portfolio Manager, One River Digital Asset Management LLC

    Just Another Cycle

    Commodities are the lifeline to the global economy. We eat energy. Periods of strong demand often reveal strains in supply chains that lead to rapid price appreciation. Capital investment follows, with return expectations extrapolated from high prices and record margins. A downdraft in demand exposes excess investment, prices decline, and the weakest links in the supply chain are culled. Long periods of low prices lead to complacency, strong demand strains supply chains, and a rhythmic cycle emerges: boom, bust, recovery.

    Natural gas in the early 2000s is an interesting example. From 2002 to 2008, natural gas prices experienced a period of dramatic price appreciation from $2.00/MMBtu to $16.00/MMBtu as economic activity accelerated and existing supply sources strained to keep pace. The market was sending a clear price signal to energy producers: to discover and capitalize on new sources of supply. This price signal had a ripple effect, as it also impacted associated sectors like power production, chemicals, and coal mining.

    Cash flows from flush production found their way into Research & Development budgets that discovered technologies like Hydraulic Fracturing and Horizontal Drilling. A few hundred feet at first, now well laterals are measured in miles. Natural Gas Turbine efficiency (Heat Rate) improved dramatically. This new capital equipment and production were financed with organic cash flows initially, but then quickly morphed into aggressive rounds of debt and equity financing. This debt-fueled capital expansion of commodity industries was justified by the fact that prices were high, margins were at record levels, and the new technology allowed producers to be more efficient – lowering the unit cost of production. Recovery of capital was projected to happen in record time. It also brought rounds of leverage buyouts and acquisitions, most notably the 2007 TXU Energy LBO.

    As we all know, the influx of new capital underwritten based on peak commodity prices and peak operating margins resulted in an unprecedented amount of supply additions across the natural gas, power sectors, uranium, and coal. This influx of supply, combined with a global downturn, compressed BOTH prices and margins significantly. Debt service could not be sustained. As a result:

    • TXU went bankrupt – along with many other Independent Power Producers (Mirant, Reliant, Calpine, etc.),

    • Countless gas exploration & production (E&P) companies sought bankruptcy protection,

    • Every single public coal company declared bankruptcy.

    Ultimately, ownership was transferred from equity holders to lenders. The market participants that had eagerly embraced these assets quickly wrote them off as worthless – “Going to ZERO.” This presented a terrific entry point for longer-term, patient capital.

    These ignored assets are now generating amongst the highest free cash flow yield across all industries. The catalyst for recovery was the rationing of new investment, enabled by the restructuring of capital.

    Bitcoin Mining is following the same pattern now.

    For context, the Bitcoin mining sector experienced an unprecedented BOOM in the autumn of 2021. This was driven by elevated commodity prices (Bitcoin at $67,734 on 11/9/2021) and record mining margins (Hash Spread1 of $550/MWh) brought about by the reduction in competition post China’s ban on Bitcoin Mining. This combination of high prices and record margins attracted new capital to the sector with the promise of rapid payback underwritten by continued projections of success.

    View Image Here

    ​​Similar to past energy sector commodity BUSTS, the influx of new investments in Bitcoin mining resulted in a dramatic compression of Bitcoin mining margins from a peak of $550/MWh to $50/MWh.

    View Image Here

    Mining operations are currently profitable, but unable to service their financial obligations. So, they now must turn to bankruptcy. Since our webinar in July, our investment pipeline has expanded significantly as more Bitcoin mining lenders and borrowers find themselves in distress.

    Similar to prior commodity cycles, our expectation is that ownership will pass from equity owners to lenders. We expect these new owners will run these businesses for cash flow as opposed to growth. Growth capital will avoid this sector for years, like prior commodity busts. 

    Even with the depression of prices, there are real cash flows in Bitcoin mining. The Bitcoin network rewarded miners with $15.3 million of Bitcoin rewards per day thus far this month, which annualizes to $5.8 billion.

      Bitcoin is going through yet another brutal adjustment. Each one is different. The unique feature in this cycle is that institutional miners were far more involved in this recent bull market, and the unwinding of that looks like a classic BOOM to BUST cycle in commodity markets. It will pass with discipline. Traders are hunting for the bottom in asset markets. Credit markets are providing the pristine opportunity to earn very strong yields in a low-price environment with considerable optionality to a recovery. The credit opportunity steers you away from calling the bottom of the cycle and focuses more on the necessary ingredients to get ready for the next upturn – disciplined capital.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 01/01/2023 – 16:30

    • Man With Bomb & Knife Arrested Trying To Enter Lula's Inauguration Celebration
      Man With Bomb & Knife Arrested Trying To Enter Lula’s Inauguration Celebration

      Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in as Brazil’s next president Sunday, and was greeted to cheers by hundreds of thousands of celebrating supporters packing the streets of the capital of Brasilia, after he defeated far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in what was the tightest presidential race in over three decades.

      “Our message to Brazil is one of hope and reconstruction,” Lula said in an inaugural speech to Congress’ Lower House as his first act as president. “The great edifice of rights, sovereignty and development that this nation built has been systematically demolished in recent years. And to re-erect this edifice, we are going to direct all our efforts.”

      Image via Associated Press

      Thus he’s vowing to heal a deeply divided nation, and at a moment many of Bolsonaro’s most die-hard supporters are still pushing for the Lula victory to get overturned. 

      The Associated Press observed Sunday, “Many have gathered outside military barracks since, questioning results and pleading with the armed forces to prevent Lula from taking office.”

      And further, the Left is labelling some Bolsonaro supporters who believe the election was fraudulent as ‘terrorists’:

      His most die-hard backers resorted to what some authorities and incoming members of Lula’s administration labeled acts of “terrorism” – something the country had not seen since the early 1980s, and which has prompted security concerns about inauguration day events.

      Security was especially beefed up in response to a mid-week incident wherein a man, now in custody, was believed plotting to assassinate the president-elect.

      But on Sunday, another potential assassination plot was foiled, the military described, as a man was reportedly caught with a bomb trying to gain entry to inauguration day celebration events.

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

      As Sky News reports, “A man carrying an explosive device and a knife has been arrested while attempting to enter the inauguration of Brazil’s new president, according to military police.”

      “The man was trying to enter Brasilia’s esplanade for the inauguration of President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, according to a spokesperson from the city’s military police force,” the report details.

      Journalists present in the capital on Sunday estimated some 300,000 were gathered along the esplanade to take part in the party in aftermath of Lula’s swearing-in ceremony.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 01/01/2023 – 15:45

    • The Truth About Gold And Silver
      The Truth About Gold And Silver

      Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

      In the midst of all this incredible political and economic chaos, I was tasked with packing up my mother’s things to prepare for her move to assisted living. It’s a gravely emotional experience for anyone, as I’m sure you know.

      I adore that woman. It’s hard to see her get old. Also, that house contained 100 years or more of family history. All this stuff takes up space. With everyone on the move, it’s hard to find a good home for things anymore. We had to make some hard choices.

      Anyway, along the way, I opened a small safe and found a lockbox, and opened it. It was my father’s collection of coins. What was in there hadn’t been seen by anyone for perhaps 25 years (he died rather young).

      It was startling and amazing to see. It was like finding buried treasure. There were coins from all over the world, gold, and silver. I’m not sure that I knew that he was a collector.

      There were all the usual gold and silver bullion coins from all lands, all worth the price of their metal content. All are vastly up in value from when he bought them. There were also hundreds of silver dimes. And there were plenty of numismatics too and because I don’t know my way around this world, I’ll let the experts determine their value.

      Good as Gold

      I won’t tell you the total value for reasons of privacy but I will say that he made a very good investment. Stocks are fun and swing this way and that but these coins are stable, true, and always faithful. Dad knew that. He was right.

      And thumbing through the collection always reminded me of his personal values. Yes, he was old-fashioned, you could say. He rallied around faith, family, honesty, hard work, productivity, great art, hard history, big books, deep learning, prayer, community service, and caring for others, all those things.

      He was not only an astute investor. He was a compassionate and caring man. I recall walking with him on a hot windy day in the Texas mountains of the Southwest when a man of Mexican heritage passed us by and then stopped. “Dr. Tucker! You taught me to read! God bless you! God bless you!” My father smiled and shook his hand and we walked on.

      I asked Dad what that was about. He said he once taught a class in English language for immigrant adults and that must have been a student. “Part of your job?” I asked. Dad said no, just as community service.

      Okay, that was Dad. Talented. Dedicated. Humble too.

      The Meaning of Coins

      Back to the coins. They embody firmness of value. You can tell the history of the world through coins. There is an element of tragedy here, looking through coins from a time when money was sound, government was small, and Americans believed in liberty and independence.

      The Constitution was taken seriously: gold and silver were minted as money.

      The coinage suggested that too. The dimes were silver. The nickels were larger because they had less silver and more…nickel. Dollars were silver from the old Spanish world Thaler. The half dollar was…half a dollar. What does this suggest?

      It suggests that government did not create money; it inherited it from the long history of commercial enterprise, dating even back to the late middle ages.

      Then there is the gold. Dad must have loved the American Eagle coin because it suggested hope. Instead of banning gold ownership, the U.S. Treasury was now minting it for the people to own. He could not buy enough. But he also loved gold coins from all over the world. I found memos alongside some, in which he explained why he liked this one or that.

      Truth in Coinage

      These coins symbolize hope even today, a look back and a reminder that such times did exist. It is not in our imagination. Citizens used to carry truth and honesty in their pockets! Trade was calculated in something unchanging and valuable independent of government control.

      A government that mints and distributes sound money trusts its people with their own lives. They also make inflation as we know it essentially impossible.

      The Fed is a good printer. It is a terrible alchemist. So if you want to get rid of inflation once and for all, there is a way. Get rid of the Fed and make the dollar good as gold again. Make the dimes silver. Forget this embarrassing baloney-sandwich stuff we use today.

      Let’s get back to truth. Not lies, like the Inflation Reduction Act or whatever they call it.

      What are the chances? Almost none, sadly. The government is in too much debt and the people are too dependent on inflationary meddling. Leviathan would be impossible under a sound money regime. And tragically today so much of American life is about the perpetuation of Leviathan.

      People everywhere are asking what they should do with their money because there seems to be few ways of making it without losing it. That’s how inflation works. You have to earn a high return above the inflation rate to feel good. It’s a rat race, even if it is a necessary one. But you know what’s not a rat race? Getting a safe, a cotton bag, and filling it with coins, a bit at a time.

      Keep them for years, decades, and generations.

      Preserving Value

      It’s a truism in the investment world that you buy gold and silver not for its short-term return but for long-term security.

      What does this mean?

      Thousands of years of history have taught us the value of precious metals. No amount of crypto tokens, much less meta worlds of NFTs, are going to change that, as fun as they might be.

      Gold keeps its value. But more than that, it symbolizes what it means to keep our values, as people, as societies, and as nations. They are physical objects but more than that, they embody a philosophy of living.

      Think about this.

      One day your children or grandchildren will be rifling through your stuff and they might come across your collection of gold and silver. Do you think their esteem for you will rise? Absolutely it will. It shows that you thought about the very long-term, not just the next investment cycle or election but lifetimes and generations.

      And you know what I’m going to do with my Dad’s collection? So long as I don’t need to use them, I will keep them the same way he did. It’s my connection to him, his values, and also to a world that might seem long gone but did in fact exist. It’s an ideal. And we all need ideals. Ideals can be abstract but they can also be physical. That’s what these coins mean to me.

      In a world of fleeting values and ceaseless and often pointless change, here we have something that we can both believe in and own. It’s real wealth, wealth for the ages, stuff we can carry in our pockets.

      Now we carry “smartphones” that have become spying devices for government.

      It was an emotional day. Mostly I will never forget the smile on my mother’s face when she saw all of this for the first time in decades. She remembered what a great man he was and how much she loved him.

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 01/01/2023 – 15:00

    • "The Consequences Could Be Fatal": Abandoned US Military Equipment Found On Ebay Risks Afghan Lives
      “The Consequences Could Be Fatal”: Abandoned US Military Equipment Found On Ebay Risks Afghan Lives

      After the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from transfer of power to the Taliban in Afghanistan, abandoned US military equipment which contain biometric data have been popping up on Ebay.

      A Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, or SEEK II, purchased by German researchers on eBay.Credit…Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times

      Over the past year, German security researcher Matthias Marx and a small group of researchers at Chaos Computer Lab, a European hacker association, have bought six SEEK II (Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit) on the popular auction website, according to the NY Times.

      The device, built as part of the Pentagon’s vast biometric collection expansion following the Sept. 11, 2011 attacks, has a tiny screen, a little keyboard, and a mouse pad. It also contains a thumbprint reader under a hinged plastic lid, an iris scanner, and a camera. They contained biometric data at detainment facilities, on patrols, during screenings of local hires, and after the explosion of an IED. Officials at the time were concerned over a rash of shooting in which Afghan police and soldiers fired on American troops, and were hoping that biometric data could help identify any possible Taliban agents within their bases.

      The shoebox-shaped device, designed to capture fingerprints and perform iris scans, was listed on eBay for $149.95. A German security researcher, Matthias Marx, successfully offered $68, and when it arrived at his home in Hamburg in August, the rugged, hand-held machine contained more than what was promised in the listing.

      The device’s memory card held the names, nationalities, photographs, fingerprints and iris scans of 2,632 people.

      Most people in the database, which was reviewed by The New York Times, were from Afghanistan and Iraq. Many were known terrorists and wanted individuals, but others appeared to be people who had worked with the U.S. government or simply been stopped at checkpoints. Metadata on the device, called a Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, or SEEK II, revealed that it had last been used in the summer of 2012 near Kandahar, Afghanistan. -NY Times

      In response to the story, Defense Department spox Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said: “Because we have not reviewed the information contained on the devices, the department is not able to confirm the authenticity of the alleged data or otherwise comment on it,” adding “The department requests that any devices thought to contain personally identifiable information be returned for further analysis.”

      “It was disturbing that they didn’t even try to protect the data,” said Marx. “They didn’t care about the risk, or they ignored the risk.”

      Mr. Marx used the SEEK II to scan his fingerprint.Credit…Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times

      DC lawyer Stewart Baker, a former national security official, said that the biometric devices were useful tools in war zones, but that the data collected needed to be kept under control. He suggested that a data breach would “make a lot of people who helped the U.S. and are still in Afghanistan really uncomfortable.“

      “This should not have happened,” Baker added. “It is a disaster for the people whose data is exposed. In the worst cases, the consequences could be fatal.”

      Of the six devices the researchers bought on eBay — four SEEKs and two HIIDEs, for Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment — two of the SEEK II devices had sensitive data on them. The second SEEK II, with location metadata showing it was last used in Jordan in 2013, appeared to contain the fingerprints and iris scans of a small group of U.S. service members. -NY Times

      In one case, an American’s biometric data was found in one of the databases. He was formerly a Marine intelligence specialist who still works in intelligence, and said that his data was most likely collected during a military training course. He asked that his biometric file be deleted.

      According to the Defense Logistics Agency, which is tasked with equipment disposal, the SEEK II and HIIDE devices never should have made it to the open market. Gear such as this is supposed to be destroyed on-site when no longer needed by the military.

      One of the Ebay sellers, surplus equipment reseller Rhino Trade, said they bought the SEEK II at a military auction of government equipment and did not realize it had sensitive data on it.

      “I hope we didn’t do anything wrong,” said David Mendez, the company’s treasurer.

      “The irresponsible handling of this high-risk technology is unbelievable,” said Marx. “It is incomprehensible to us that the manufacturer and former military users do not care that used devices with sensitive data are being hawked online.”

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 01/01/2023 – 14:15

    • 'Radicalized' Times Square Attacker Was On FBI Watchlist
      ‘Radicalized’ Times Square Attacker Was On FBI Watchlist

      Update (1331ET): 

      19-year-old Trevor Bickford, from Wells, Maine, is the kid who injured three NYPD officers with a machete in an unprovoked attack in Times Square. He was on the FBI’ watchlist’ after being radicalized. 

      UK’s Daily Mail wrote, “the FBI in Boston do have an open case on him,” and “he is on a ‘guardian list’ because of his radicalization.”

      Sources told NYPost that Bickford traveled via Amtrak train to NYC with “camping gear, a diary and a last will and testament” before he pulled off the machete attack. 

      “Published reports reveal that Bickford appeared to be a typical American teenager before he allegedly became radicalized in the years after sources said his father died of an overdose in 2018,” NYPost continued. 

      Daily Mail published pictures of Bickford via his mother’s Facebook. 

       

      Here’s a picture of the young man after the NYPD shot him. He was rushed to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, along with the two cops he injured — all three are expected to survive. 

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      News Center Maine’s Jack Molmud reported the FBI arrived at the suspect’s family home this afternoon. 

      It seems like the case every time… 

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      *  *  * 

      Chaos erupted in Times Square on New Year’s Eve when a machete-wielding man injured three New York Police Department (NYPD) officers. 

      New York Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell told reporters early Sunday that a 19-year-old man attempted to strike the first officer in the head with a machete, unprovoked. Sewell said the man hit two other officers on the head with the machete. 

      Sewell said one officer received a laceration to the head while the other received a skull fracture and a large laceration. Another officer discharged his firearm, striking the suspect in the shoulder. 

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      The incident occurred around 9:30 p.m. ET at West 52nd Street and 8th Avenue. One police source told NYPost that an investigation had been opened to see whether the suspect is a radical Islamic extremist. 

      “We are working with our federal partners for this investigation, and it is ongoing,” Commissioner Sewell said. 

      NYPD Crime Stoppers released a picture of the machete. 

      Mike Driscoll, assistant director in charge of the New York FBI Field Office, who is also investigating, told local news NBC New York that the knife attack appears to be the work of a “sole individual at this time, there’s nothing to suggest otherwise.” The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is also investigating.

      Nearby onlookers were startled by the attack and gunfire — many revelers fled amid the chaos. 

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      “No backpacks or umbrellas in Times Square. They forgot to mention machetes,” a police source told The Post. 

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 01/01/2023 – 13:31

    • 15 Million Americans Set To Lose Medical Coverage As Public Health Emergency Ends
      15 Million Americans Set To Lose Medical Coverage As Public Health Emergency Ends

      Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

      America is facing a health crisis and it isn’t made up of bacteria or viruses—instead, it’s an impending medical insurance meltdown.

      A patient at the Lestonnac Free Clinic talks with a doctor about her health issues using a telemedicine machine in Orange, Calif., on June 21, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

      There is an expectation that as of Jan. 11, 2023, an estimated 15 million Americans will begin to lose health coverage.

      The reason is that after three years of a COVID-19 public health emergency, the shield of continuous coverage offered by Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) will end.

      Once the state of emergency expires, regular income requirements and restrictions will apply. This will disqualify millions who’ve benefited from congressional legislation passed in 2020 preventing disenrollment for the duration of the COVID pandemic.

      Health care administrators are already bracing for the fallout as the end looms large.

      The administration of President Joe Biden has set a tentative termination date for Jan. 11, though many analysts believe it will be extended. That’s because White House officials promised a 60-day notice before making it official.

      Even with an extension, it’s only delaying the inevitable, according to industry insiders. An avalanche of newly uninsured Americans will still tumble into the national health care system.

      An estimated 15 million adults and children will be unenrolled once the health emergency ends, according to an analysis from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning Evaluation. Within that group, 8.2 million will no longer be eligible for Medicaid. Another 5.3 million children also won’t qualify for CHIP.

      Barely a third of those in line to be ejected into the insurance marketplace will qualify for tax credits or other programs. That will leave millions in limbo, scrambling to find affordable insurance.

      With such a high volume of newly uninsured patients, some analysts predict cost increases for doctor visits, especially in the emergency room.

      Coverage Too Expensive

      Others say it will contribute to America’s spiraling mental health crisis, which currently affects more than 50 million people.

      “We talk about this at work a lot. From the human perspective, it’s not just CHIP and Medicaid, it’s also disability plans. That’s what we’re most worried about, disability and seniors,” Amanda Jones told The Epoch Times.

      Jones is a senior health professional who has worked with U.S. government health-care programs for 14 years. She says it won’t be as simple as just rolling back into the program once the state of emergency expires.

      Because for many using subsidized programs, other coverage is just too expensive. Those who don’t qualify for alternative, affordable care plans will likely just go without, according to Jones.

      Affordable private coverage options can also vary drastically from state to state.

      Slipping Through Cracks

      One study in 2022 showed a staggering 112 million U.S. adults struggle to afford medical insurance. In the same report, 93 percent said they felt the benefits aren’t worth the high price tag.

      The other part of the problem is coverage gaps. Even short breaks in coverage can create a bottleneck at the administrative level for many doctors and specialists.

      “With a lapse in coverage, getting people back into their routine with their medical doctors is complicated,” Jones explained.

      Another harsh reality is many will fall through the gap between income requirements and being able to afford private insurance. Those who slip through will be the most likely to forego coverage. This translates into a price hike in medical services in the long run. “Higher administrative costs in health care will get passed onto other customers. There will also be a lot more emergency room visits,” she said.

      Jones also noted that a lot of current Medicaid and CHIP members wouldn’t lose total coverage, but a lot of their benefits. This is especially prevalent for those who rely on prescription medications and regular doctor visits.

      Medicaid enrollment surged to record levels in 2021, topping 80 million members. Much of that is because many lost employment during the pandemic and lacked affordable coverage options.

      After Congress passed legislation in March 2020 to protect insurance coverage, enrollment soared, because the main caveat for states to access the enhanced federal funding under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act was the prohibition on disenrolling people using Medicaid during the emergency.

      Jones says Biden’s 60-day notice is a drop in the bucket. “Sixty days in the business world is like, a week. It’ll be a huge strain on care coordinators.”

      With disabled people, seniors, and children set to feel the biggest impact, some industry workers say the U.S. mental health crisis will escalate.

      Read more here…

      Tyler Durden
      Sun, 01/01/2023 – 13:30

    • 2022 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead
      2022 Greatest Hits: The Most Popular Articles Of The Past Year And A Look Ahead

      One year ago, when looking at the 20 most popular stories of 2021, we said that the year would be a very tough act to follow as “the sheer breadth of narratives, stories, surprises, plot twists and unexpected developments” made 2021 the most memorable year yet in our brief history, and that it would be an extremely tough act to follow. And yet despite the exceedingly high bar for 2022, not only did the year not disappoint but between the constant news barrage, the regime shifts, narrative volatility, market rollercoasters, oh and the world being on the verge of a nuclear Armageddon for much of the year, the past year was the most action, excitement, and news (including fake news)-packed yet.

      Where does one even start?

      While covid – which was the story of 2020 – finally faded away from the front page and the constant barrage of fearmongering coverage (with recent revelations courtesy of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files” showing just how extensively said newsflow was crafted, orchestrated and -y es – censored by the government, while a sudden U-turn by China in its Covid Zero policy prompting a top Chinese research to admit that the “fatality rate from the omicron variant of the virus is in line with the flu“), and the story of 2021 was the scourge of soaring inflation (which contrary to macrotourist predictions that it would prove “transitory” just kept rising, and rising, and rising, until it hit levels not seen since the Volcker galloping inflation days of the 1980s)…

      … then the big market story of 2022 was the coordinated central bank crusade to put the inflation genie back into the bottle and to contain soaring prices (which were no longer transitory, especially after Putin launched his “special military operation” in Ukraine which we will discuss shortly)…

      … even if it meant crushing the housing market…

      … sparking a global recession, or as Goldman calls it a “broad-based but necessary slowdown in global growth”…

      … and leaving millions out of work (the BLS still pretends hundreds of thousands of workers are being added to payrolls even though as we all know – as does the Philadelphia Fed – that is a lie, and the real employment number has not changed since March)…

      … not to mention triggering the worst bear market in both stocks and bonds since the global financial crisis. Yes, less than a year after the S&P hit a record just above 4800 in January of this year, both global stock and bond markets have cratered, and in a profound shock to an entire generation of “traders” who have never lived through a hiking cycle and rising inflation, for the first time since 2008 no central banks are riding to the market’s rescue. Meanwhile, with a drop of more than 20% in 2022 translating into a record $18 trillion wipeout, the MSCI All-Country World Index is on track for its worst performance since the 2008 crisis, amid the Fed’s relentless rate hiking campaign.

      Add bond market losses – because in 2022 everything was sold – and you get a staggering $36 trillion in value vaporized, which in absolute terms is nearly double the damage from the Lehman failure and the global financial crisis.

      None of this should come as a surprise: the staggering liquidity injections that started in 2020, continued throughout 2021 and extended into the first half of 2022 before gently reversing as QT finally returned; the final tally is that after $3 trillion in emergency liquidity injections in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic to “stabilize the world”, the Fed injected another $2 trillion in the subsequent period, most of which in 2021, a year where economists were “puzzled” why inflation was soaring (this, of course, excludes the tens of trillions of monetary stimulus injected by other central banks as well as the boundless fiscal stimulus that was greenlighted with the launch of helicopter money). And then, when a modest $500 billion in Fed balance sheet liquidity was withdrawn… everything crashed.

      This reminds us of something we said two years ago: “it’s almost as if the world’s richest asset owners requested the covid pandemic.” Well, last year we got confirmation for this rhetorical statement, when we calculated that in the 18 months after the covid pandemic hit, the richest 1% of US society saw their net worth increase by over $30 trillion, which in turn officially made the US into a banana republic where the middle 60% of US households by income – a measure economists use as a definition of the middle class – saw their combined assets drop from 26.7% to 26.6% of national wealth, the lowest in Federal Reserve data, while for the first time the super rich had a bigger share, at 27%. Yes, for the first time ever, the 1% owned more wealth than the entire US middle class, a definition traditionally reserve for kleptocracies and despotic African banana republics.

      But as the Fed finally ended QE and started draining its balance sheet in 2022, the party ended with a thud, and this tremendous wealth accumulation by the top 1% went into reverse: indeed, just the 500 richest billionaires saw their fortunes collapse by $1.4 trillion with names such as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Masa Son and Larry Page and Sergey Brin all losing more than a third (in some cases much more) of their net worth.

      This also reminds us of something else we said a year ago: “this continued can-kicking by the establishment – all of which was made possible by the covid pandemic and lockdowns which served as an all too convenient scapegoat for the unprecedented response that served to propel risk assets (and fiat alternatives such as gold and bitcoin) to all time highs – has come with a price… and an increasingly higher price in fact. As even Bank of America CIO Michael Hartnett admits, Fed’s response to the the pandemic “worsened inequality” as the value of financial assets – Wall Street –  relative to economy – Main Street – hit all-time high of 6.3x.”

      In other words, for all its faults, 2022 was a year in which inequality finally reversed – if only a little – and as Michael Hartnett said in one of his final Flow Shows, “Main St finally outperformed Wall St significantly in 2022” as the value of financial assets relative to the economy slumped from 6.3x to 5.4x.

      Sadly, we doubt that this will cheer anyone up – be it workers – who have seen their real, inflation-adjusted earnings decline for a record 20 consecutive months (or virtually all of Joe BIden’s presidency)…

      … or investors who have seen crushing losses across all industries, with the exception of the one sector we have been pounding-the-table-on bullish on since the summer of 2020: energy (with our favorite stock, Exxon, blowing away the competition with its nearly triple digit return YTD).

      There is some good news for jittery bulls looking ahead at 2023: statistics show that two consecutive down years are rare for major equity markets — the S&P 500 index has fallen for two straight years on just four occasions since 1928, and they usually marked market crashes or social cataclysms –  the Great Depression, World War II, the 1970s oil crisis and the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The scary thing though, is that when they do occur, drops in the second year tend to be deeper than in the first. And with Joe Biden at the helm, betting on a second great depression may be prudent. Even if that sounds hyperbolic, when it comes to markets the big question for 2023 is simple: have markets bottomed or is there much more room to fall, in other words, are we facing a hard or soft landing.

      And speaking of Joe Biden at the helm, another glaring risk factor for 2023 is – of course- nuclear war. Because while the great inflation fight and Biden bear market were the defining features of 2022 from an economic and capital markets standpoint, the biggest event in terms of geopolitical and social importance was the war between Russia and Ukraine.

      While one could write – pardon the pun – the modern day equivalent of “war and peace” on the causes behind the war in Ukraine, for the sake of brevity we will merely note that a conflict that had been simmering for years if not decades…

      … finally got its proverbial spark in February when – encouraged by NATO to join the military alliance in an act that Russia had repeatedly warned would be casus belli against Ukraine – Putin ordered a “special military operation” against Ukraine, sending Russian troops to invade the country because, as he subsequently explained, “if Russia did not do this now, it itself would be invaded by neighboring NATO countries a few years later.” And speaking of what else Putin said in the lead up to the Ukraine war, the following snapshots reveal much of the Russian leader’s thinking about the biggest geopolitical conflict since World War II.

      And while the geopolitical implications of the war are staggering and long-reaching, the single most important consequence to the world, and especially Europe, is the threat of persistent energy shortages over the coming years as Russian energy output has been sanctioned and curtailed for the foreseeable future…

      … in the process sending energy prices in Europe and elsewhere soaring, and pushing inflation sharply higher. Which is especially ironic, because the same central banks we showed above that are hiking rates like crazy in hopes of containing inflation are doing precisely nothing to address the elephant in the room, namely that inflation is not demand-driven (which the Fed can control by adjusting the price of money) but entirely on the supply-side. And since the Fed can’t print oil or gas, all that central banks are doing is executing Vladimir Putin’s indirect bidding and pushing the world into a global recession if not all out depression as they hope to crush enough energy demand to lower prices in a world where energy supply is also much lower. What they forget is that this will lead to tens of millions of unemployed people, and while that is not a major issue yet, something tells us that the coming mass layoffs – both in the US and around the globe – and not just in tech but across all industries, will be the story of 2023.

      One final thing worth mentioning in the context of the Ukraine war is what it means strategically for the future of the world, and here we would argue that some of the best analysis belong to former NY Fed repo guru, Zoltan Pozsar whose periodic dispatches throughout 2022 (all of which are available to professional subscribers), and whose year-end report on the fate of Bretton Woods III, the petrodollar, the petroyuan and petrogold, are all must-read for anyone who hopes to be ahead of the curve in today’s rapidly changing world.

      Away from Inflation and the Ukraine war, the next most important topic in the past year, were the revelations from the Twitter Files, exposed by the social medial company’s new owner, Elon Musk, who paid $44 billion so that the world can finally see first hand just how little free speech there really is in the so-called land of the free and the home of the First Amendment, and how countless three-lettered, deep-state alphabet agencies – and the military-industrial complex – will do anything and everything to control both the official discourse and the unofficial narrative to keep their preferred puppets in the White House, and keep those they disapprove of – censored and/or locked up, both literally and metaphorically… or simply designate them “conspiracy theorists.” None other than Matt Taibbi wrote the best summary of what the Twitter Files revealed, namely America’s stealthy conversion into a crypto-fascist state where some unelected government bureaucrat tells corporations what to do:

      This last week saw the FBI describe Lee Fang, Michael Shellenberger and me as “conspiracy theorists” whose “sole aim” is to discredit the agency. That statement will look ironic soon, as we spent much of this week learning about other agencies and organizations that can now also be discredited thanks to these files.

      A group of us spent the last weeks reading thousands of documents. For me a lot of that time was spent learning how Twitter functioned, specifically its relationships with government. How weird is modern-day America? Not long ago, CIA veterans tell me, the information above the “tearline” of a U.S. government intelligence cable would include the station of origin and any other CIA offices copied on the report.

      I spent much of today looking at exactly similar documents, seemingly written by the same people, except the “offices” copied at the top of their reports weren’t other agency stations, but Twitter’s Silicon Valley colleagues: Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, even Wikipedia. It turns out these are the new principal intelligence outposts of the American empire. A subplot is these companies seem not to have had much choice in being made key parts of a global surveillance and information control apparatus, although evidence suggests their Quislingian executives were mostly all thrilled to be absorbed. Details on those “Other Government Agencies” soon, probably tomorrow.

      One happy-ish thought at month’s end:

      Sometime in the last decade, many people — I was one — began to feel robbed of their sense of normalcy by something we couldn’t define. Increasingly glued to our phones, we saw that the version of the world that was spat out at us from them seemed distorted. The public’s reactions to various news events seemed off-kilter, being either way too intense, not intense enough, or simply unbelievable. You’d read that seemingly everyone in the world was in agreement that a certain thing was true, except it seemed ridiculous to you, which put you in an awkward place with friends, family, others. Should you say something? Are you the crazy one?

      I can’t have been the only person to have struggled psychologically during this time. This is why these Twitter files have been such a balm. This is the reality they stole from us! It’s repulsive, horrifying, and dystopian, a gruesome history of a world run by anti-people, but I’ll take it any day over the vile and insulting facsimile of truth they’ve been selling. Personally, once I saw that these lurid files could be used as a road map back to something like reality — I wasn’t sure until this week — I relaxed for the first time in probably seven or eight years.

      Well said Matt, and we say this as one of the first media outlets that was dubbed “conspiracy theorists” by the authorities, long before everyone else joined the club. Oh yes, we’ve been there: we were suspended for half a year on Twitter for telling the truth about Covid, and then we lost most of our advertisers after the Atlantic Council‘s weaponized “fact-checkers” put us on every ad agency’s black list while anonymous CIA sources at the AP slandered us for being “Kremlin puppets” – which reminds us: for those with the means, desire and willingness to support us, please do so by becoming a premium member: we are now almost entirely reader-funded so your financial assistance will be instrumental to ensure our continued survival into 2023 and beyond.

      The bottom line, at least for us, is that the past three years have been a stark lesson in how quickly an ad-funded business can disintegrate in this world which resembles the dystopia of 1984 more and more each day, and we have since taken measures. Two years ago, we launched a paid version of our website, which is entirely ad and moderation free, and offers readers a variety of premium content. It wasn’t our intention to make this transformation but unfortunately we know which way the wind is blowing and it is only a matter of time before the gatekeepers of online ad spending block us for good. As such, if we are to have any hope in continuing it will come directly from you, our readers. We will keep the free website running for as long as possible, but we are certain that it is only a matter of time before the hammer falls as the censorship bandwagon rolls out much more aggressively in the coming year.

      Meanwhile, for all those lamenting the relentless coverage of politics in a financial blog, why finance appears to have taken a secondary role, and why the political “narrative” has taken a dominant role for financial analysts, the past three years showed conclusively why that is the case: in a world where markets gyrated, and “rotated” from value stocks to growth and vice versa, purely on speculation of how big the next stimulus out of Washington will be, now that any future big stimulus plans are off the table until at least 2024 thanks to a divided Congress, and the Fed is still planning on hiking until it finally crushing inflation, we would like to remind readers of one of our favorite charts: every financial crisis is the result of Fed tightening, and something always breaks.

      Which brings us to the simplest forecast about the coming year: 2023 will be the year when something finally breaks.

      As for more nuanced predictions about the future, as the past three years so vividly showed, when it comes to actual surprises and all true “black swans”, it won’t be what anyone had expected. And so while many themes, both in the political and financial realm, did get some accelerated closure, dramatic changes in 2022 persisted and new sources of global shocks emerged, and will continue to manifest themselves in often violent and unexpected ways – from the ongoing record polarization in the US political arena, to “populist” upheavals around the developed world, to the gradual transition to a global Universal Basic (i.e., socialized) Income regime, to China deciding that the US is finally weak enough and the time has come to invade Taiwan.

      As always, we thank all of our readers for making this website – which has never seen one dollar of outside funding (and despite amusing recurring allegations, has certainly never seen a ruble from either Putin or the KGB either, sorry CIA) and has never spent one dollar on marketing – a small (or not so small) part of your daily routine.

      Which also brings us to another critical topic: that of fake news, and something we – and others who do not comply with the established narrative – have been accused of. While we find the narrative of fake news laughable, after all every single article in this website is backed by facts and links to outside sources, it is clearly a dangerous development, and a very slippery slope that the entire developed world is pushing for what is, when stripped of fancy jargon, internet censorship under the guise of protecting the average person from “dangerous, fake information.” It’s also why we are preparing for the next onslaught against independent thought and why we had no choice but to roll out a premium version of this website.

      In addition to the other themes noted above, we expect the crackdown on free speech to only accelerate in the coming year – Elon Musk’s Twitter Files revelations notwithstanding, especially as the following list of Top 20 articles for 2022 reveals, many of the most popular articles in the past year were precisely those which the conventional media would not touch with a ten foot pole, both out of fear of repercussions and because the MSM has now become a PR agency for either a political party or some unelected, deep state bureaucrat, which in turn allowed the alternative media to continue to flourish in an information vacuum (in less than a decade, Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter will seem like one of the century’s biggest bargains) and take significant market share from the established outlets by covering topics which established media outlets refuse to do, in the process earning itself the derogatory “fake news” condemnation.

      We are grateful that our readers – who hit a new record high in 2022 – have realized that it is incumbent upon them to decide what is, and isn’t “fake news.”

      * * *

      And so, before we get into the details of what has now become an annual tradition for the last day of the year, those who wish to jog down memory lane, can refresh our most popular articles for every year during our no longer that brief, almost 14-year existence, starting with 2009 and continuing with 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.

      So without further ado, here are the articles that you, our readers, found to be the most engaging, interesting and popular based on the number of hits, during the past year.

      • In 20th spot with just over 510,000 views, was one of the seminal market strategy reports of 2022 by the man who has become the most prescient and accurate voice on Wall Street, former NY Fed repo guru Zoltan Pozsar, whose periodic pieces previewing the post-war world – one where Bretton Woods III makes a stunning comeback, where the petrodollar dies, and is replaced by the Petroyuan – have become must-read staple fare for Wall Street professionals. In “Wall Street Stunned By Zoltan Pozsar’s Latest Prediction Of What Comes Next“, Zoltan offered his first post-Ukraine war glimpse of the coming “Bretton Woods III” world, “a new monetary order centered around commodity-based currencies in the East that will likely weaken the Eurodollar system and also contribute to inflationary forces in the West.” Subsequent events, including the growing proximity of Russia, China and various other non-G7 nations, coupled with stubborn inflation, have gone a long way to proving Zoltan’s thesis. The only thing that’s missing is the overhaul of the world reserve currency.

      • In 19th spot, some 526,000 learned that amid the relentless crackdown against free speech by a regime which Elon Musk’s Twitter Files have definitively revealed is borderline fascist (as in real fascism, not that clownish farce which antifa thugs pretend to crusade against) Zero Hedge was among the first websites to be targeted by the CIA when that deep state mouthpiece, the Associated Press, said that “intelligence officials accused a conservative financial news website [Zero Hedge] with a significant American readership of amplifying Kremlin propaganda.” As we explained in “Now We’ve Done It: We Pissed Off The CIA” – the 19th most viewed article of 2022 – we have done no such thing but as the AP also revealed, the real motive behind the hit piece is that “Zero Hedge has been sharply critical of Biden and posted stories about allegations of wrongdoing by his son Hunter.” Of course, only a few weeks later we would learn that reports of wrongdoing by “his son Hunter” as unveiled in the infamously censored laptop story fiasco, were indeed accurate (despite dozens of “former intel officials” saying it is Russian disinfo) but since only “Kremlin propaganda” sites dare to attack Joe Biden while the MSM keeps deathly silent, nobody in the so-called “free press” bothered to mention it. Incidentally, since the CIA did a full background check on us and republishing some pro-Russian blogs was the best they could find, we are confident that  On the other hand, since being designated a pro-Russian operation meant that we have been blacklisted by most advertisers, we are increasingly reliant on you, dear readers (and not Vladimir Putin) for support, and we would be extremely grateful to everyone who can sign up for our premium product to support us into 2023 and onward.

      • In 18th spot, and suitably right below our little tete-a-tete with the CIA, was the disclosure of a huge trove of corruption Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell.” In April, with over 568,000 page views, readers learned that “450GB Of ‘Deleted’ Hunter Biden Laptop Material To Be Released Within Weeks.” The ultimate result was the long overdue confirmation by the mainstream press (NYT and WaPo) that the Biden notebook was indeed real (again, despite dozens of “former intel officials” saying it is Russian disinfo) but since the state-corporatist apparatus had already achieved its goal, and suppressed and censored the original NYPost reporting just ahead of the 2020 presidential election and Biden had been elected president, few cared (just a few months later, thanks to Elon Musk and the Twitter files would we learn just how deep the censorship hole went, and that it involved not only the US government, the Democratic Party, the FBI, but also the biggest tech and media companies, all working together to censor anything that they found politically unpalatable).

      • Yes, 2022 was also a midterm year, and with more than 617,000 views, was our snapshot of what happened on Nov 8 when in a carbon copy of 2020 it initially seemed like Republicans would sweep Congress as we described in the 17th most popular article of 2022, “Election Night Results: FL “Catastrophic” For Dems, Vance Takes OH, Fetterman Tops Oz“… but it was not meant to be and as the mail-in votes crawled in days and weeks later, the GOP lead not only fizzled (despite a jarring loss among Florida Hispanics), but in the end Democrats kept the Senate. Ultimately the result was anticlimatic, and with Congress divided for the next two years, governance will be secondary to what the Fed will do, which in our humble view, will be the big story of 2023.

      • For all the political, market and central bank trials and tribulations of 2022, one could make the argument that the biggest story of the past year was Elon Musk’s whimsical takeover of twitter, which started off amicably enough as laid out in the 16th most popular article of 2022 (with more than 627,000 page views) “Buffett Says “Musk Is Winning…It’s America” As TWTR Board Ponders Poison Pill“, then turned ugly and hostile, transitioned into a case of buyer’s remorse with Musk suing to back out of the deal only to find out he can’t, and culminated with the release of the shocking Twitter Files, Musk’s stunning expose of the dirt and secrets of how the world’s most popular news outlet had effectively become a subsidiary not only of the Democratic party but also of the FBI, CIA and various other deep state alphabet agencies, validating once again countless “conspiracy theories” and confirming once and for all that any outlet that still dares to oppose the official party line is the biggest enemy of the deep state.

      • And speaking of the deep state, we had a glaring reminder in September why one should be very careful when crossing the US secret police FBI when pro-Trump celeb pillow entrepreneur Mike Lindell was intercepted by the Feds during a hunting trip and had his cell phone seized as described in “FBI Tracks Down Mike Lindell On Hunting Trip, Surrounds His Car And Seizes Cell Phone“. That this happened to one of the most vocal critics of the 2020 election just two months before the midterms, was surely a coincidence, as over 625,000 readers obviously concluded.

      • 2022 was not a good year for markets, and certainly wasn’t good for retail investors whose torrid gains from the meme stock mania of 2021 melted down almost as fast as the Fed hiked rates (very fast). But not everyone was a loser, and one story stood out: that of 20-year-old student Jake Freeman (who together with his uncle) bought up a substantial, 6.2% stake in soon-to-be-broke retailer Bed Bath and Beyond, and piggybacking on the antics of one Ryan Cohen, quietly cashed out after making a massive $110 million by piggybacking on one of the most vicious short/gamma squeezes in recent history. The “Surreal Story Of A 20-Year-Old Student Who Acquired 6% Of Bed Bath & Beyond, And Made $110 Million In 3 Weeks” was the 14th most read article of 2022.

      • The 13th most read story of 2022 with over 668,000 reads was the bizarre interlude involving superstar-trader and outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, and his bizarre attack by a “right wing” progressive as described in “Paul Pelosi Undergoing Brain Surgery Following ‘Brutal’ Attack; Suspect Identified.” While authorities have struggled to craft a narrative that the attacker, nudist transient David Depape of Berkeley, was a pro-Trumper and the attack was politically motivated, the evidence has indicated that he suffered from serious mental illness and drug addiction and lacked any coherent political ideology; some have even claimed that there was a sexual relationship between him and Pelosi, a theory that could be easily disproven if only the police would release the bodycam footage from the moment of the arrest. Unfortunately, San Fran PD has vowed to keep it confidential. Depape’s trial is set to be 2023’s business, so expect more fireworks.

      • 2022 was also a year in which Europeans realized how brutally expensive electricity can be when the biggest commodity, nat gas and oil supplier to Europe, Russia, is suddenly cut off. And judging by the 668,500 people who read “How In The Name Of God”: Shocked Europeans Post Astronomical Energy Bills As ‘Terrifying Winter’ Approaches” and made it into the 12th most popular article of the year, the staggering number were also news to our audience: indeed, the fact that Geraldine Dolan, who owns the Poppyfields cafe in Athlone, Ireland, and was charged nearly €10,000 for just over two months of energy usage, was shocking to everyone. To be sure, there were countless other such stories out of Europe and with the Russia-Ukraine war unlikely to end any time soon, Europe’s commodity hyperinflation will only continue. Adding insult to injury, Europe is on a fast track to a brutal recession, but the ECB remains stuck in tightening mode, perhaps because it somehow believes that higher rates will ease energy supplies. Alas that won’t happen and instead the big question for 2023 will be whether Europe is merely hit with a recession or if instead the ECB’s actions escalates the local malaise into a full-blown depression.

      • Earlier we said that one of the most prophetic voices on Wall Street in 2022 (and prior) was that of Zoltan Pozsar, who laid out his theory of a Bretton Woods III regime in the days immediately following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Well, just one month later we saw the first tentative steps toward just such a paradigm shift when in April the Russian central bank offered to buy gold from domestic commercial banks at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram; by doing so the Bank of Russia both linked the ruble to gold and, since gold trades in US dollars, set a floor price for the ruble in terms of the US dollar. We described this in “A Paradigm Shift Western Media Hasn’t Grasped Yet” – Russian Ruble Relaunched, Linked To Gold & Commodities“, an article red 670,000 times making it the 11th most popular of the year. This concept of “petrogold” was also the subject of extensive discussion by Pozsar who dedicated one of his most recent widely-read notes to the topic; if indeed we are witnessing the transition to a Bretton Woods 3 regime, 2023 will see a lot of fireworks in the monetary system as the dollar’s reserve status is challenged by eastern commodity producers.

      • The 10th most popular article of 2022, with 686K views was a reminder of just how much “the settled science” can change: as described in “You Murderous Hypocrites”: Outrage Ensues After The Atlantic Suggests ‘Amnesty’ For Pandemic Authoritarians, many were shocked when after pushing for economy-crushing lockdowns, seeking to block children from going to school (and stunting their development), and even calling for the incarceration or worse of mask, vaccine and booster holdouts, the liberal left – realizing that it was completely wrong about everything to do with covid, a virus with a 99% survival rate – suddenly and politely was hoping to “declare a pandemic amnesty.” Brown Professor Emily Oster – a huge lockdown proponent, who now pleads from mercy from the once-shunned – wrote “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.” The response from those who lost their small business, wealth, or worse, a family member (who died alone or from complications from the experimental gene therapy known as “vaccines” and “boosters”) was clear and unanimous; as for those seeking preemptive pardons from the coming tribunals, their plea was clear: “We didn’t know! We were just following orders.” 

      • And from one covid post we segue into another, only this time the focus is not on the disease but rather the consequences of mandatory vaccines: over 730K readers were shocked in February when a former finance professional discovered a surge in “excess mortality”, or unexplained deaths among otherwise healthy young adults, yet not linked directly to covid (thus leaving vaccines as the possible cause of death), as we showed in “Long Funeral Homes, Short Life Insurers? Ex-Blackrock Fund Manager Discovers Disturbing Trends In Mortality.” This wasn’t the first time we had heart of a surge in excess mortality: a month earlier it was the CEO of insurance company OneAmerica to observe that the death rate for those aged 18-64 had soared by 40% over pre-pandemic levels (this was another post that received a lot of clicks). While the science is clearly not settled here – on either covid or the vaccines – the emerging trend is ominous: at this rate the excess deaths associated with covid (and its vaccines) will soon surpass the deaths directly linked to covid. And anyone who dares to bring this up will be branded a racist, a white supremacists, or a fascist, or all three.

      • One of the defining features of 2022 was the record surge in the price of food. And while much of this inflation could be attributed to the trillions in helicopter money injected over the past three years, as well as the snarled supply chains due to the war in Ukraine, a mystery emerged when one after another US food processing plant mysteriously burned down. And with almost 800,000 page views, a majority of our readers wanted to know why “Another US Food Processing Plant Erupts In Flames“, making it the 8th most read post of the year. While so far no crime has been alleged, the fact that over 100 “accidental fires” (as listed here) have taken place across America’s food facilities since the start of 2021, impairing the US supply chain, remains one of the biggest mysteries of the year.

      • While some will argue that runaway inflation was the event of 2022, we will counter that the defining moment was the war between Ukraine and Russia, which broke out in February after what the Kremlin said was a long-running NATO attempt to corner Russia (by pushing Ukraine to seek membership in the military alliance), forcing it to either launch an invasion now, or wait several years and be invaded by all the neighboring NATO countries. Still, many were shocked when Putin ultimately gave the order to launch the “special military operations”, as most had Russia to merely posture. But it was not meant to be and nearly 840K readers followed the world-changing events on February 2 when “Putin Orders “Special Military Operation” In Ukraine’s Breakaway Regions.” The war continues to this day with no prospects of peace or even a ceasefire.

      • And from one geopolitical hotspot we go to another, namely China and Taiwan, which many expect will be the next major military theater at some time in the near future when Beijing finally invades the “Republic of China” and officially brings it back into the fold. Thing here got extra hot in early August when Democrat Nancy Pelosi decided to make an unexpected trip to the semiconductor-heavy island, sparking an unprecedented diplomatic escalation, with many speculating that China could simply fire at Nancy’s unsanctioned airplane. In the end, however, as nearly 950,000 found out, the situation fizzled as “China Summoned US Ambassador Overnight, Says Washington “Must Pay The Price“.” Since then Pelosi’s political career has officially ended, and while China has not yet invaded Taiwan, it is only a matter of time before it does.

      • While Covid may have been a 2021 story, that was also the year when nobody was allowed to talk about the Chinese pandemic. Things changed in 2022 when liberal censorship finally crashed under its own weight, and long overdue discussions of Covid became mainstream. nowhere more so than on Twitter where Elon Musk fired all those responsible for silencing the debate over the past three years, and of course, the show of the always outspoken Joe Rogan, where mRNA inventor Robert Malone, gave a fascinating interview to Joe Rogan which aired on New Year’s Eve 2022 and which took the world by storm in the first days of the new year. It certainly made over 908,000 readers click on “COVID, Ivermectin, And ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’: Dr. Robert Malone Gives Blistering Interview To Joe Rogan.” The doctor, who had been suspended by both LInkedIn and Twitter, for the crime of promoting “vaccine hesitancy” argued that if the risks of vaccines are not discussed, informed consent is not possible. As Malone concluded “Informed consent is not only not happening, it’s being actively blocked.” Luckily, now that Elon Musk has made it possible to discuss covid – and so much more – on twitter without fears of immediate suspension, there is again hope that not only is informed consent once again possible, but that the wheels of true justice are starting to steamroll liberal censorship.

      • A tragic and bizarre interlude took place in early July when “Former Japanese PM Abe Shot Dead During Speech, “Frustrated” Assassin Arrested“, a shocking development which captured the attention of some 927,000 readers.  While some expected the assassination to be a Archduke Ferdinand moment, coming at a time of soaring inflation around the globe and potentially catalyzing grassroots anger at the ruling class, the episode remained isolated as it did not have political motives and instead the killer, Yamagami, said that he killed the former PM in relation to a grudge he held against the Unification Church, to which Abe and his family had political ties, over his mother’s bankruptcy in 2002. That’s the good news. The bad news is that with the fabric of society close to tearing across most developed nations, it is only a matter of time before we do get a real Archduke 2.0 moment.

      • Just days after Rogan’s interview with Malone (see above), another covid-linked “surprise” emerged when Projected Veritas leaked military documents hidden on a classified system showing how EcoHealth Alliance approached DARPA in March 2018, seeking funding to conduct illegal gain of function research of bat borne coronaviruses. But while US infatuation with creating viral bioweapons is hardly new (instead it merely outsourced it to biolabs in China), one of the discoveries revealed in “Ivermectin ‘Works Throughout All Phases’ Of COVID According To Leaked Military Documents” – the third most popular post of 2022 with 929K page views, is that the infamous “horse paste” Ivermectin was defined by Darpa as a “curative” which works throughout all phases of the illness because it both inhibits viral replication and modulates the immune response. Of course, had that been made public, it would have prevented Pfizer and Moderna from making tens of billions in revenue from selling mRNA-based therapies (not vaccines) whose potentially deadly side effects we are only now learning about (as the 9th most popular post of 2022 noted above confirms).

      • The fake news apparatus was busy spinning in overtime this past year (and every other year), and not only when it comes to covid, inflation, unemployment, the recession, but also – or rather especially – the Ukraine fog of propaganda war. A striking example was the explosion of both pipelines connecting Russia to Europe, Nord Stream I and II, which quickly escalated into a fingerpointing exercise of accusations, with Europe blaming Putin for blowing up the pipelines (even though said pipelines exclusively benefit the Kremlin which spent billions building them in the recent past), while the Kremlin said it was the US’ fault. This we learned in “EU Chief Calls Nord Stream Attack “Sabotage”, Warns Of “Strongest Possible Response“, which was also the 2nd most read article of the year with just over 1,050,000 page views. In the end, there was no “response” at all. Why? Because as it emerged just two months later in that most deep state of outlets, the Washington Post, “Evidence In Nord Stream Sabotage Doesn’t Point To Russia.” In other words, it points to the US, just as professor Jeffrey Sachs dared to suggest on Bloomberg, leading to shock and awe at the pro-Biden media outlet. The lesson here, inasmuch as there is one, is that the perpetrators of every false flag operation always emerge – it may take time, but the outcome is inevitable, and “shockingly”, the culprit almost always is one particular nation…

      • Finally, the most read article of 2022 with nearly 1.1 million page views, was “White House Says Russian Forces 20 Miles Outside Ukraine’s Capital.” It cemented that as least as far as ZH readers were concerned, the biggest event of the year was the war in Ukraine, an event which has set in motion forces which will redefine the layout of the world over the next century (and, if Zoltan Pozsar is right, will lead to the demise of the US dollar as a reserve currency and culminate with China surpassing the US as the world’s biggest superpower). Incidentally, while Russian forces may have been 20 miles outside of Kiev, they were repelled and even though the war could have ended nearly a year ago and the world would have returned to some semblance of normalcy, it was not meant to be, and the war still goes on with little hope that it will end any time soon.

      And with all that behind us, and as we wave goodbye to another bizarre, exciting, surreal year, what lies in store for 2023, and the next decade?

        We don’t know: as frequent and not so frequent readers are aware, we do not pretend to be able to predict the future and we don’t try, despite repeat baseless allegations that we constantly predict the collapse of civilization: we leave the predicting to the “smartest people in the room” who year after year have been consistently wrong about everything, and never more so than in 2022 (when the entire world realized just how clueless the Fed had been when it called the most crushing and persistent inflation in two generations “transitory”), which destroyed the reputation of central banks, of economists, of conventional media and the professional “polling” and “strategist” class forever, not to mention all those “scientists” who made a mockery of both the scientific method and the “expert class” with their catastrophically bungled response to the covid pandemic. We merely observe, find what is unexpected, entertaining, amusing, surprising or grotesque in an increasingly bizarre, sad, and increasingly crazy world, and then just write about it.

        We do know, however, that with central banks now desperate to contain inflation and undo 13 years of central bank mistakes – after all it is the trillions and trillions in monetary stimulus, the helicopter money, the MMT, and the endless deficit funding by central banks that made the current runaway inflation possible, the current attempt to do something impossible and stuff 13 years of toothpaste back into the tube, will be a catastrophic failure.

        We are confident, however, that in the end it will be the very final backstoppers of the status quo regime, the central banking emperors of the New Normal, who will eventually be revealed as fully naked. When that happens and what happens after is anyone’s guess. But, as we have promised – and delivered – every year for the past 14, we will be there to document every aspect of it.

        Finally, and as always, we wish all our readers the best of luck in 2023, with much success in trading and every other avenue of life. We bid farewell to 2022 with our traditional and unwavering year-end promise: Zero Hedge will be there each and every day – usually with a cynical smile (and with the CIA clearly on our ass now) – helping readers expose, unravel and comprehend the fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that defines every aspect of our increasingly broken economic, political and financial system.

        Tyler Durden
        Sun, 01/01/2023 – 13:05

      • "Doom Cycle Of Default, Fraud, And Contagion" Could Give Way To Crypto Spring
        “Doom Cycle Of Default, Fraud, And Contagion” Could Give Way To Crypto Spring

        Crypto endured a major hangover year in 2022 after a 2020-21 boom during the central banks’ Covid liquidity party. The emerging blockchain space was battered by central banks removing the punch bowl, harsh macroeconomic environment, bankruptcies, exchange blowups, stablecoin implosions, and even criminal charges against top crypto executives. 

        “Consistent interest rate hikes and quantitative tightening in 2022 granted us a devastating hangover. Fortune did not favor the brave, and we entered a consistent doom cycle of default, fraud, and contagion. A financial crisis with seemingly no end that still ravages our industry. In 2022, the naked swimmers were exposed and bad apples got eliminated. This is promising through long-term lenses, while ever so painful in the short term,” Vetle Lunde, research analyst at Arcane, wrote. 

        Lunde wrote if 2022 had one key lesson for the crypto industry, it would be the following: “your funds in someone else’s custody is someone else’s liability, and their intentions could be harmful. While there are good arguments for storing funds at exchanges, traders should strive to avoid concentrating risks on one venue.”

        Arcane’s analyst put together the top headlines that defined the crypto industry in 2022 — much of the headlines were doom and gloom. 

        Lunde pointed out Bitcoin recorded the second worst year-to-date returns in existence. He called the down move in crypto “a painful ride.” 

        Lunde continued with an outlook for 2023, expecting a calmer market due to declining volatility. 

        We expect the market to calm down in 2023, with declining volumes and falling volatility. Overall, we expect interest and headlines related to crypto to be fewer and the market to be less hectic in general. This will be a year to accumulate and build exposure. It will be a year for the patient, and we do not anticipate prices nearing former all-time highs in 2023. We believe BTC and ETH will increase their relative strength in the market and that altcoin returns will be subdued for most of the year.

        And he revealed further the current drawdown in Bitcoin appears to follow similar bear market patterns in previous cycles.  

        The 2018 bear market saw a 364-day long duration from peak to through, while the 2014-15 bear market lasted for 407 days. For now, BTC has bottomed 376 days after peaking, right in between the duration of earlier cycle peak to through periods. If a new bottom is reached in 2023, this will be the longest-lasting BTC drawdown ever.

        And one silver lining the analyst said about the FTX debacle is that it might increase “more rapid progress with regulations, and we view both positive signals related to U.S. spot BTC ETF launches and more coherent classifications of tokens as a plausible outcome by the end of the year, with exchange tokens being particularly exposed for potential security classifications.”

        Here is Lunde’s core 2023 forecast for crypto:

        While the tightening macro landscape and BTC’s correlated relationship to macro complicate analogies to previous bear markets, we firmly believe that this is an excellent area to build gradual BTC exposure. However, we expect low activity to be the key trend throughout most of 2023, with diminishing trading volumes and volatility in a significantly more boring market than the previous three years. As we advance into the next year, patience and long-term positioning will be key. 

        Much of the crypto down cycle has come since the Federal Reserve embarked on its most aggressive tightening scheme in decades. 

        And rate traders are already pricing in the possibility the Fed might have to begin cutting late in the second half of 2023. 

        He also noted Bitcoin liquidity is drying up as the coins are being pulled off the markets. 

        This has direct implications for BTC liquidity and, in particular, experienced BTC scarcity. With fewer BTC available to trade, the impact of the net buyer or net seller will be more significant, and we believe the market is slowly headed towards a scenario where the net buyer will once again make a difference.

        The backward-looking review and forward outlook might suggest crypto winter has peaked, while others, such as David Marcus, CEO and founder of Lightspark, recently warned crypto will need until at least 2024 to “recover from the abuse of unscrupulous players.” 

        Tyler Durden
        Sun, 01/01/2023 – 12:45

      • It's A New Era
        It’s A New Era

        Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

        This dynamic – making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era – receives little attention or understanding.

        Eras may last decades, and only those who’ve lived long enough to recall previous eras have experienced the transition from one era to the next. The era of financialization, globalization and low-cost, abundant oil/natural gas began over 40 years ago in 1981.

        The era of digital / Internet technologies took off about 30 years ago. All of these dynamics accelerated in the early 2000s, roughly 20 years ago.

        Only those 60 and older experienced working in a previous era (pre-1981).

        All of these dynamics are entering a phase of nonlinear turbulence as the changes are outpacing these highly streamlined / optimized systems’ ability to self-correct.

        This nonlinear instability is being accelerated by doing more of what worked in the previous era, in the mistaken belief that the 2020s are simply an extension of the eras that began 40 and 30 years ago.

        The fixes that worked in the past won’t resolve the nonlinear instability because all these dynamics have reached saturation: adding more debt no longer generates organic expansion of productivity, all it does is inflate an even larger and more unstable credit-asset bubble.

        Globalization has been optimized to the point of saturation: the potential downsides to national security outweigh any remaining marginal gains in corporate profitability.

        Financialization has so distorted the economy that gambling on useless speculations is now viewed as the best (or only) way to get ahead.

        When a system has absorbed all it can absorb, adding more is just a waste of resources.

        We’ve entered a new era, and so the fixes and incentives that worked in the past 40 years no longer work.

        The idea that the past 30 years were not a permanent era but an anomaly that’s come to an end doesn’t compute for everyone who has only experienced the “glorious 30” years of cheap energy, soaring assets and falling prices due to hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization.

        The idea that this new era may evolve unpredictably is also anathema to a technocratic culture and economy that prides itself on forecasting and controlling everything with credit and money.

        The previous 40 years of material abundance has nurtured a belief that the solution to any scarcity is to create more money, as some of this new money will inevitably flow into eliminating the scarcity.

        The idea that some scarcities cannot be fixed by creating more money doesn’t compute.

        It may turn out that all the lessons we learned in the past 40 years will not only be useless in this new era, they will be disastrously counter-productive.

        Their unparalleled success for decades may blind us to the power of previous solutions to make our problems worse than they would have been had we recognized the new era for what it is rather than seeing the future as a seamless extension of the previous era.

        This dynamic–making problems much worse by forcing more of whatever worked in the previous era into a saturated, increasing unstable new era–receives little attention or understanding.

        This dynamic helps us understand why systems that seemed permanent and forever can destabilize and fall apart with astonishing speed.

        We thought we were fixing it by doing more of what worked in the past, but we were actually accelerating the turbulence and destabilization.

        We have a hard time letting go of the idea that the recent past is an accurate guide to the future. In stable eras, it generally is, but not when an era ends and a new one begins.

        *  *  *

        My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.  Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

        Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

        Tyler Durden
        Sun, 01/01/2023 – 12:00

      • American Airlines Worker Killed After Being Sucked Into Jet Engine
        American Airlines Worker Killed After Being Sucked Into Jet Engine

        The Montgomery Regional Airport in Alabama reported on New Year’s Eve that an American Airlines worker was killed in an “industrial” accident. 

        American Airlines Flight 3408, an Embraer E175, was scheduled to depart Montgomery for Dallas-Forth Worth Saturday afternoon when a baggage handler was sucked into the plane’s jet engine. 

        “Today around 3 pm an American Airlines ground crew piedmont employee was involved in a fatality, no additional information is available at this time,” the airport tweeted. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of the deceased.”

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

        Reuters confirmed with two sources the baggage handler died in “an accident involving one of the airplane’s engines that was running.”

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

        All outbound and inbound flights were briefly halted and resumed normal operations by late Saturday. 

        Tyler Durden
        Sun, 01/01/2023 – 11:15

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      Jan 01

      Today’s News 1st January 2023

      • Top 10 Conspiracy Theories That Will Be Validated In 2023
        Top 10 Conspiracy Theories That Will Be Validated In 2023

        Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,

        A female recruit receives her badge during an FBI graduation ceremony. / IMAGE: FBI – Federal Bureau of Investigation via YouTube

        There has been a lot of talk lately about the “word of the year.”

        Some say it is “gaslighting,” which happens to be a personal favorite of mine.

        Others say “goblin mode,” a bizarre term linked to Kanye West and Elon Musk that the Left’s semantic gatekeepers have rushed to redefine from a meme that was funny precisely because it had no obvious definition.

        In the spirit of New Year’s predictions, I will boldly assert that the same may be true of 2023’s future word of the year, “conspiracy theory.”

        Like “gaslighting” and “goblin mode,” it is a term that has taken on a new meaning in light of current events—and one that the Left–Establishment hegemony has desperately sought to appropriate and weaponize for its own purposes.

        But in the next 12 months, we will see conservatives successfully reclaim it. In fact, the early adopters are already lighting the way on social media.

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

        Increasingly, we are seeing the corruption of the Biden administration start to come out in the wash, with growing backlash. Questions that the media tried to deny and deride in service to their agenda have since had the curtain lifted. More and more, even averred leftist idealogues, like ex-Planned Parenthood leader Leana Wen, are admitting that they lied about various aspects of the COVID pandemic. https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jshttps://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

         While the Twitter Files have played a huge role in exposing the unseemly and unconstitutional collusion between U.S. spy agencies and Big Tech, a flurry of GOP-led investigations in the House will bring at least the semblance of accountability back to The Swamp, even if it is more or less a paper tiger.

        Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who was named Media Matters’s “Misinformer of the Year,” recently reflected on the origin of the term “conspiracy theory,” which emerged from the Warren Commission’s efforts to cover up the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy.

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

        JFK may have been the first time that deep-state operatives in the intelligence community succeeded in overthrowing a sitting president.

        Since then, it has happened at least two more times, with FBI and CIA fingerprints all over both the Watergate scandal and the 2020 election fraud.

        But having overplayed their hand, the entire house of cards now seems poised to collapse, validating skeptics’ belief that everything they have been told for the past half-century has been part of the real Big Lie, and that our idea of democracy has been but an illusion.

        With that in mind, here are 10 things that the powers-that-be in D.C. have yet to cop to, but which will soon be impossible to ignore, in no particular order:

        1. The role that the intel community and the Justice Department played in fomenting violence through psy-ops on Jan. 6, 2021, will be exposed.  Sadly, in their expected counter-investigation responding to the Pelosi-run Jan. 6 committee, even House Republicans may withhold state secrets from us. But the FBI’s damaging partisan conduct has generated a multitude of whistleblowing defectors who should be willing to shed light on the dubious allegations of right-wing extremism and violence at the U.S. Capitol—and in the 2017 Charlottesville riot that was its dress rehearsal.
        2. The deadly impact of the COVID vaccines will become undeniable. Initially, I had considered writing about how the GOP House will expose Anthony Fauci’s role in developing the COVID-19 virus, but that already has been scrutinized to death, and without any accountability to back it up, it makes no difference. But there are plenty of other COVID abuses that will keep on yielding new storylines. And none may be greater than the decision by pharmaceutical companies to suppress therapeutics and overplay the importance of their untested and experimental new vaccines. The evidence is mounting that the vaccines themselves may have been as deadly and damaging as the virus—something to which many life-insurance actuaries may be able to attest. Whether the vaccines do, indeed, have nanobots that self-assemble and transmit wi-fi, there is a lot of reason to suspect that they are harmful on some level.
        3. The scope of China’s control over the U.S. government will become clearer. We know about the various financial ties between the Biden family and the CCP. We know that other top leaders, including Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell are heavily invested in Chinese industry. But what we have yet to fully explore is the way that China-linked companies like BlackRock have also completely infiltrated the White House and are effectively writing U.S. foreign policy.
        4. The true nature of David DePape’s relationship with Paul Pelosi will be revealed. While court hearings have kept a tight lid on the evidence in the Paul Pelosi assault case, including body-cam footage, it will be harder for Nancy Pelosi to flex her authority after stepping down as House speaker. It is very clear that the assailant, David DePape, is no right-wing extremist and that there is more going on that meets the eye.
        5. We will find out what Trump’s purloined Mar-a-Lago files really contained. Punting the DOJ probes that resulted in the unprecedented raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to corrupt special counsel Jack Smith was a good way to keep them out of the reach of GOP oversight in the U.S. House. But, eventually, the clock will run out and it will be necessary to explain why, exactly, this norm-violating measure was taken. Odds are it was a CYA operation by the FBI to prevent Trump from exposing the Russia-hoax documents that he already had publicly declared to be declassified.
        6. We will learn what the Democrats intend to do with Joe Biden and who will be tapped to replace him. Will it be Michelle Obama, as I and others have long predicted? Or could they pull out another yet-unknown figure who has been carfully vetted and groomed in secret, like her husband, Barack? Once the Democrats finally decide that Biden has outlasted his usefulness, their reasons for installing him in the first place may become clear. When Barack Obama was overheard telling a Democrat donor “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f**k things up,” there is a good chance it was a sales pitch more than a warning.
        7. We will discover the truth about the U.S.–Ukrainian partnership to research and develop bioweapons. Congress has allocated in excess of $100 billion to defend something in Ukraine, but it sure ain’t democracy. While their personal investments in Burisma—or in weapons manufacturers like Raytheon—may be prime motivators, all indications are that the country is a rat’s nest of CIA operations.
        8. The Left’s plans to normalize and mainstream pedophilia will come to fruition. The initial push to sexualize and groom children in schools and on kid-friendly mediums like Disney may have fallen flat, but leftists will only redouble their efforts to foist this onto the population because the ability to control and manipulate young minds is pivotal to their long-term plans for control. By acclimating children to sex at an early age, they can add it as another weapon in their quiver, which also includes cultivating ignorance and racial grievances, so that the plebian class is as pliable as possible.
        9. The World Economic Forum will lead the way in trying to turn humans into glorified Matrix-style batteries. The convergence of artificial intelligence technology, the metaverse, the decline of office culture, growing clamor about digital passports and currencies, guaranteed incomes and an ever-increasing scarcity of resources suggest that the global plans to collectivize all nations under a one-world government are being gamed out as we speak.
        10. As the relationship between Big Tech and the spy agencies becomes clearer, we will learn that our personal devices are tracking our every move. Knowing what we know about the interest that the FBI and the CIA have in manipulating technology companies to perform extralegal operations, and what we know about the reprehensible virtue signaling of Google and Apple, is there really any doubt that they have empowered our intel community to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance from any device at any time and that our phones are being used to monitor us, in true Big Brother fashion, around the clock?

        Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at truthsocial.com/@bensellers or twitter.com/realbensellers.

        Tyler Durden
        Sun, 01/01/2023 – 00:31

      • Pornhub's 2022 Year In Review Reveals World's Darkest And Dirtiest Searches
        Pornhub’s 2022 Year In Review Reveals World’s Darkest And Dirtiest Searches

        Yet another website has published its year-in-review. This one comes from Pornhub’s statisticians, who have published its users’ consumption habits in colorful infographics for the ninth year. 

        Let’s begin with the US, the country with the highest daily traffic to Pornhub this year. 

        Pornhub’s global average visit duration decreased by 1 second to 9 minutes and 54 seconds. The US saw a 3-second decrease to 9 minutes and 41 seconds. 

        On a state-by-state basis, users in many southern states, including Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi, had the highest visiting times on the website. Ohio, Washington, and South Dakota users had some of the lowest. 

        Worldwide, Friday was the least favorite time to watch porn, while Sunday afternoon into the evening was the best time. 

        Here are the world’s most viewed categories. 

        The average user age is 37 years old.

        A breakdown of searches by generation. 

        How most users access the website. 

        A breakdown of most searched terms, pornstars, trending searches, top categories, and relative categories for the US. 

        Oh, and there’s this…

        In a separate report, data from SimilarWeb shows Pornhub is one of the top-trafficked websites in the world. 

        Digging deep into Pornhub data can provide a glimpse into society’s darkest and dirtiest secrets. 

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 22:15

      • A Multipolar Shift With Energy And Dollar Disruptions
        A Multipolar Shift With Energy And Dollar Disruptions

        Authored by Victor Xing via The Mises Institute,

        Executive Summary

        • In the near term, China’s reopening and buying of ESPO crude would likely erode the role of Brent & energy indices

        • Gulf nations envision the scope of petroyuan to be on par with demands for Chinese goods & technology transfer

        • Rising yuan payments for Russian energy and more China-Gulf bilateral trade imply future dollar demand decline

        • In the long term, more local currency trade settlements would erode dollar flows and Federal Reserve’s influence

        China’s yuan denominated Russia crude rivals Saudi imports

        In 2021, China imported 79.6 million tons of crude from Russia (1.6 million barrels per day) vs. 87.6 million tons from Saudi Arabia (1.8 million barrels per day). These two producers respectively accounted for 15.5% and 17.1% of China’s total crude import at 513.2 million tons (10.3 million barrels per day), which was near Saudi Arabia’s total 2021 output of 515 million tons. At present demand, China is both Saudi Arabia and Russia’s top energy customer:

        Following the onset of the war in Europe, rising yuan-denominated Russian crude export and omission of Russia’s Eastern Siberia Pacific Ocean (ESPO) grade crude from broader commodity indices would likely erode Brent crude’s role as a global oil benchmark. Investors focusing solely on Brent may overlook key market shifts.

        China’s energy demand was subdued in 2021 and 2022 due to pandemic restrictions, and a broader economic reopening would likely accelerate demand for both Russian and Saudi energy products (by 2+ million barrels a day). However, Brent would only reflect part of the demand surge due to ESPO shipment and direct Russo-China pipeline flows. In 2022, sale of Russian pipeline crude to China totaled 33.3 million tons by October (nearly half of Russian flows to China over the period). Given crude pipelines would not use EU or G7 insurance services, the products would trade at uncapped prices into 2023.

        Meanwhile, seaborne ESPO crude traded at $79 per barrel in Asian markets after the G7 + EU price cap came into effect at $60 per barrel, because the presence of a Russian tanker fleet that uses its own insurance.

        The Bloomberg Commodity Index, as well as its futures instruments, uses WTI and Brent crude to construct its crude constituents, and it would underrepresent energy market developments in Asia if ESPO decouples from Brent:

        Currently, yuan-denominated purchases of Russian crude uses a quasi-barter system: Chinese buyers would settle Russian crude purchases in yuan, and Russia would subsequently use the yuan to purchase Chinese technology products.

        This is the same petroyuan model discussed at the China-Saudi Summit.

        Saudi-China Summit and long-term impacts

        A key market focus on the Saudi-China Summit attended by Crown Prince Bin Salman and President Xi was petroyuan. Xi proposed making “full use of the Shanghai Petroleum and National Gas Exchange as a platform to carry out yuan settlement of oil and gas trade.” A Saudi source previously said a decision to sell small amounts of oil in yuan to China could make sense in order to pay for Chinese imports directly, but “it is not yet the right time” to take the step.

        This ambiguous stance preserved policy option for the Kingdom, for the Saudis do not see the yuan as an alternative reserve currency as Russia does. Riyadh, like Hong Kong, pegs its currency to the dollar, and it would require an ample dollar reserve to defend the riyal. As long as this system persists, Saudi Arabia would use petrodollar as a liquidity source, and it would reinvest reserves in interest-bearing dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. Treasury securities or corporate bonds. This supports the dollar and contributes to easier dollar-based financial conditions by boosting dollar asset prices. Ultimately, the petrodollar system plays a role to elevate the Federal Reserve as the dollar system’s central bank that affects global financing costs.

        Yet, Saudi Arabia’s willingness to consider a system modeled after yuan-based Russian crude trade reflects its pragmatic considerations: it creates an incentive for Beijing to broaden economic ties with Riyadh. Greater the overall bilateral trade in yuan, greater the Kingdom’s demand for renminbi to pay for Chinese goods and technology, and petroyuan would fulfill a similar purpose as petrodollar to supply Riyadh with a non-dollar invoicing currency.

        Overtime, greater the Saudi-China bilateral trade, greater the likelihood of more crude transactions settled in yuan, thus smaller the role of the dollar (and Fed policy) on global asset markets. While petroyuan would hardly replace petrodollar given its limited scope, less dollar in commodity settlement would result in less reinvestment of dollar reserves into dollar assets. This has ramifications from U.S. fiscal policy (less demand for dollar debt) to U.S. fixed income and equity markets.

        Combined with India’s work on rupee transactions with Russia, a slow grind toward a multipolar (fragmented) world would likely weaken the dollar and erode existing asset correlation paradigms to create new market opportunities.

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 21:30

      • 2022's Ten Most 'Conspiratorial' Events
        2022’s Ten Most ‘Conspiratorial’ Events

        Via 21st Century Wire,

        It’s New Year’s Eve again, and with that our time-honoured tradition of looking back at the most conspiratorial events of the past year. 

        It goes without saying that 2022 has seemed like an extended nightmare for many, but it has also served as a reoccurring revelation too. Still, many are glad to see the back of it, while cautiously optimistic that this next year ‘couldn’t get any worse.’ That remains to be seen, and more insights on that front are available in our other annual opus, Trends and Predictions for 2023.

        Another important truism: the tin foil hat conspiracy theorists continue to be vindicated as significant events unfold. So much so, that we can now lay the common trope, “Oh, it’s just a coincidence” – safely to rest. Henceforth, those who still insist on referring to bona fide conspiracies as mere coincidences, shall be dubbed as coincidence theorists.

        Before we get to the top ten list, here are some of the honourable mentions from the past year…

        Here are some of this past year’s standout stories which didn’t make the top tier. We should first mention that the ongoing fallout from the experimental mRNA ‘vaccine’ roll-out and the vaccine passport/digital ID could easily be at the top of any list of conspiracies and scandals, and will unfortunately remain as a looming threat to the lives of billions of people for many years, if not decades to come. That said, some other controversial events of note from this past year include the incredible Canadian Truckers Protest against a vaccine-obsessed Trudeau regime and its unprecedented draconian attack on Canadian citizens demanding a restoration of their basic human rights. We also saw the mysterious demolition of the infamous Georgia Guide Stones monument to Malthusian eugenics, the precarious trial of Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in crime Ghislane Maxwell which somehow netted no VIP client names (and amazingly, she’s still alive in one piece), and also the bizarre political tale of Nancy Pelosi’s husband Pauli P. supposedly getting mauled with a hammer by a known local personality in their San Francisco mansion – a story promptly buried my the MSM right before the election. On the tech front, we should point to the ominous unleashing by Google’s OpenAI of their new ChatGPT artificial intelligence bot. It was a moderate year for false flags and mass shootings, with a few heavily politicized high-profile anomalous events like the Uvalde School Shooting in Texas and the Club Q Shooting in Colorado Springs. In Europe, the Dutch Farmers Revolt exposing a pernicious anti-farming and GMO food agenda by the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates networks, along with meat shortages and continued supply chain disruptions – all converging to form the perfect financial storm which now threatens to ravage an already weak and unstable global economy. Later in the year came a real blast from the past, reports of an imminent document release which contains some evidence of the CIA’s role in the JFK Assassination. Granted, these are just a few in a long list of major events which didn’t make our final cut.

        So without further ado, here are the top ten conspiracies of 2022…

        10. US Midterm Election Fraud

        Considering all that is going on in the US and internationally at this time, most Americans would agree that the 2022 Midterm Election was one of the most important and consequential elections of their lifetime. Both the House of Representatives and US Senate were up for grabs, and there was a real opportunity to correct a serious imbalance of power in Washington. However, before Nov. 8th there was a real air of trepidation, as the shadow of the controversial 2020 Election still loomed large, with accusations of widespread and systemic election fraud still unresolved. The sum of all fears became real again in the key swing state of Arizona: on election morning most of the voting machines in the state’s largest population center, Maricopa County, just happened to malfunction. Officials claimed it was just an unfortunate coincidence. That was only the beginning, as boxes with thousands of ballots continued to mysteriously turn up after election day. In short, the Arizona election became a national and international embarrassment. As it goes, the state’s election and processes were being controlled by Democratic Party operatives – who then slow-walked the vote counting for two weeks after the election was meant to be over. Not surprisingly, the favorite in the governor’s race, Republican, Kari Lake (image, above) barely lost to an unremarkable Democrat candidate Katie Hobbs (if you believe the final contested result), and to add insult to injury, the person in charge of the state’s election debacle… was Katie Hobbs, who happened to also be serving as Arizona’s Secretary of State. Kari Lake sued the state to demand a recount and a run-off, but political and media pressure on the courts prompted the judge to dismiss her challenge – despite having truckloads of evidence proving foul play. Lake has appealed the decision. What’s important is that this time the world saw what happened, and the state and Democratic Party machine was widely exposed – effectively vindicating millions of Americans who still hold well-founded suspicions about the infamous 2020 Election which managed to install the corrupt, deep state candidate Joe Biden into power. Similar anomalies were observed in 2022 – in states like Nevada and Pennsylvania. In the end, the Republicans still managed to flip the House of Representatives by a slim margin, while losing the US Senate by an even slimmer margin. In a country where half the population still do not trust the democratic process, civility and stability are now teetering on borrowed time.

        9. Monkeypox

        As the Covid gravy train began to break down, the globalists’ Government-Media-Pharma Complex grew desperate for a new ‘pandemic’ to maintain the structures of control and human surveillance which they erected during the contrived Covid-19 ‘state of emergency’. Enter a relatively unknown and exotically-titled alleged pathogen, Monkeypox. Attempts were made to portray this mythical epidemic as some sort of universal threat, and when that failed, the Establishment then pivoted to try and promote it as a new “gay disease” in an attempt to emulate a familiar template used to reproduce the perennial (and highly questionable) HIV crisis. In the end, their fear campaign never really took off, but not before a brand-new vaccine was created to “protect the public from another potentially deadly epidemic.” And after all that failed, efforts were then made to use it in order to harvest some political capital – by sacrificing this brand at the altar of political correctness, as social justice clerics demanded the mythical virus be rebranded due to fears that name “Monkeypox” was somehow racist…? But how? Against primates? No one was quite sure what they meant. Oh well. Introducing “MPOX”. Rinse, and repeat. Welcome to the world of Modern Virology (aka Big Pharma’s main meal ticket). Meanwhile, we’re all waiting with bated breath for Bill Gates’ self-confessed “next pandemic.”

        8. China Lockdown Redux 

        Just when the Chinese were beginning to get a taste of freedom again, the Central Party decide to fire-up the pandemic control grid again. In February 2022, an alleged COVID-19 ‘outbreak’ was announced in the city of Shanghai. Central Party claimed that the alleged ‘outbreak’ was caused by the Omicron variant. The state then proceeded to decree a new “Zero Covid” policy, before locking-down more cities, and dragging the country back into the authoritarian hell of February 2020. As it turned out, the real reason this new ‘Covid wave’ materialized was because of nondiagnostic PCR testing ‘case’ data generated through more meaningless mass COVID-19 testing. Finally, after 8 months of Covid madness, foreign investment began drying up, and China’s already fragile economy was destabilizing. The state’s overzealousness then triggered mass protests against Orwellian government restrictions, with millions of Chinese taking to the streets across the country to demand their basic freedom. This prompted Central Party to quickly abandon its failing social control program, and not surprisingly their economy began to rebound as people and business got back to work. Rather interestingly, the US government seemed unhappy that China was taking its foot off the authoritarian pedal, and so Biden then levied an administrative punishment against China by slapping a new mandatory Covid test travel restriction on any Chinese travelers arriving in the USA. It really seems that as the world’s most populous nation, without China’s total compliance the globalists’ New Normal agenda will quickly fall apart. This incident should tell us all we need to know about the so-called ‘global pandemic.’

        7. The Trans Agenda

        On March 17, 2022, Lia Thomas (formerly named William Thomas), 22, became the first openly transgender athlete to win America’s top college sports title – following a cringe worthy  victory in the women’s 500 yard freestyle. Let us explain: because Thomas believes he is now a woman, some institutions like the NCAA – who have come under political pressure from the radical leftist wing of the political machine – now feel obligated to allow a biological male like Thomas to compete against physically inferior biological females (aka real women). The victory was short-lived though, as the woke bombast of the Thomas debacle quickly became a lightning rod in the debate about so-called “trans women” in sports – triggering a massive backlash against this extreme ideological invasion of womens’ competitive sports. Not long after, international sporting organizations ruled that biological male athletes like Thomas can no longer compete in top races. FINA, the world swimming’s governing body, also announced plans to create a new “open” category of competition to include “transgender women” (aka men who believe they are female). Now that the debate has been blown wide open, expect further course corrections as people gradually return to their senses on the issue. But do not expect radical leftists to surrender just yet, as the culture wars will continue to rage on.

        6. FTX and SBF Ponzi Scheme

        Like the S&L scandal of the 1980’s, and the Eron and Bernie Madoff financial scams – this latest iteration of the classic Ponzi Scheme managed to destabilize markets and rob countless investors of their life savings. Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), a 30-year-old crypto celebrity icon and celebrated savant, founded what he claimed were two separate companies: a hedge fund called Alameda Research and FTX cryptocurrency exchange, before going the whole hog by hyping his own fiat crypto token and then used it as collateral to create hundreds of millions of loans for himself, before robbing his depositors to embezzle and gamble away untold fortunes on the markets. And that’s just the beginning. It turns out that SBF was the number two political donor to the Democratic Party, and used his laundered proceeds to bankroll a sizeable portion of the Democrats’ 2020 Midterm Election campaigns, not to mention his mother just happening to be a chief organizer for the Democratic Party as well. Not surprisingly, the Biden Administration waited until after the Midterm Election to begin an investigation into the floppy haired SBF and his FTX ponzi empire. SBF was eventually arrested in the Bahamas and awaits federal trial in the Southern District of New York. The trial is sure to be both shocking and entertaining in equal measure. But the real question remains: how will this drama effect the government’s role in the world of cryptocurrency? More crucially: is the FTX takedown really a controlled demolition of crypto designed to pave the way for an oppressive Central Bank Digital Currency global ‘cashless’ takeover? We shall see…

        5. CBDC

        2022 was the year the CBDC has made landfall, and is currently waiting in the wings of the halls of power. For the last few years, elites have been gathering at globalist confabs like Bilderberg and the World Economic Forum in Davos to wax lyrical about the need to abolish the ‘old money’, or ‘dirty cash’ – and to make way for the central bankers’ new Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC) – turning the planet into a full-blown cashless society. In the US, this technocratic overhaul is being hatched under the guise of “Project Hamilton” as a joint effort between the Boston Federal Reserve Bank and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to design and plan the release of a “digital dollar” – which will destroy the value of old dollar in order to force people onto the new monetary matrix. As cash disappears from the economy, so does privacy.  Essentially, CBDCs are meant to be an electronic form of fiat money in a particular country or region, but unlike Bitcoin, this digital coin is centralized and regulated by the governments and their central banks. Without ever putting this matter to a public vote, elites and technocrats have simply been moving ahead to implement this authoritarian monetary system. While the mainstream media and globalist think tanks claim that the CBDC is designed to reign in crypto currencies, and supposedly tackle crimes like money laundering, and tax avoidance (something which elites partake in daily), the reality of the CBDC is something altogether different. They plan to issue a programmable currency whereby the bank can control where and what you are allowed to spend your CBDC’s on. They can also shut your money off. Imagine this digital money system combined with a Chinese-style social credit score, or a vaccine passport/digital ID. This dystopian digital control grid will transform commerce and human society in ways we can possibly imagine. For these reasons, many rightly believe that this is the road to digital slavery. The window of opportunity to push back against this massive authoritarian assault is now closing.

        4. The Twitter Files

        This is the biggest tech scandal in modern history – and it’s gone mostly unreported by 90% of the mainstream media because of the partisan nature of its revelations. The Twitter Files have provided an unprecedented look behind the dirty inner workings of the firm’s opaque censorship regime, and exposes an openly fascist merger of Silicon Valley’s ‘Big Tech’ companies and the bloated National Security State. In early December, under new management of owner and CEO Elon Musk, Twitter HQ began disseminating a massive trove of internal documents revealing the direct collusion between former CEO Jack Dorsey’s corporate regime and the US Federal Government – to censor and cancel users from the platform for speech or political views which went against globalist or government policies. This included copious evidence of election interference. It seems that in their desperation to conjure up proof of alleged “foreign influence” on Twitter, FBI and other federal government officials doubled-down to try and save their sinking Russiagate narrative, and creating a monster in the process. New revelations also exposed the FBI’s role in leaning on Twitter to expedite illegal censorship operations, and how so-called ‘public health’ officials strong-armed Twitter into sanitizing all speech relating to COVID-19 and the experimental mRNA ‘vaccine’ injections. The FBI were also drawing-up shadowbanning and censorship blacklists in an attempt to cleanse the platform of effective opposition to the Biden campaign in 2020 and later into his first term. Under Dorsey, the platform became an open cesspool for spooks and government operatives – many of whom appeared to be allowed to spy on users’ DMs, and to dictate terms of censorship on the platform. Watch this space. This is only the beginning.

        3. Sabotage of the Nordstream Pipelines

        Back in late September, the world woke up to truly horrific news – both the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines were reported to be leaking gas into the Baltic Sea and into the atmosphere – after what looked like a deliberate act of sabotage. While the media played dumb, pretending not to know who carried out this attack, sane onlookers were well aware of the only entity who had the motives, means and opportunity to carry out this state-sponsored act of terror – namely the United States and its NATO partners. Incredibly, the entire western media quickly began blaming Russia for blowing up its most important energy infrastructure project. The result of this attack was a further devastation of Europe’s energy supplies and hyperinflationary EU and UK consumer prices for the fall and winter – not to mention the millions of cubic meters of methane which were released into the Earth’s atmosphere. Despite all the vacant US denials, the facts are clear as day: Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland were both on record beforehand promising they would “end the Nordstream pipeline.” Of course, this is a hugely dangerous red line which the US and its allies have crosses: by declaring a no-holds-barred geopolitical energy war, the gates are now open for further escalations – which may lead to WWIII. History has shown this can happen. Consider the Anglo-American energy embargo and strong-arming of Japan which led up to the Attack on Pearl Harbor which opened the door for the US to enter WWII. Think of the Nordstream attack as just that, but worse – as it was also direct attack on the day-to-day energy and finances of people living in the EU and the collective West. Indeed, the West is playing an extremely dangerous game, which is really the Great Game 2.0.

        2. The Energy Shock

        In the future, we will look back at 2022 as one of the most consequential years of young 21st century history. If you live in the collective West or the EU, you know that the energy crisis is now a reality. The real question is: is all of this by simply by happenstance, or is it being done by design? And can it be traced back to a much older global agenda, and forward through to the WEF’s Great Reset? The answer to all those questions is course, yes. But this is only the surface of this issue. For Brussels and Berlin, this ‘green’ road to energy scarcity pure economic suicide. Rather than change this policy course and work to stabilise global energy and agricultural markets – the gallant virtue-signalling West has opted instead to double-down on their precarious stance by further tightening anti-Russian sanctions, as well as pursue even deeper commitments towards de-nulearisation and the not-so-green ‘Net Zero’ carbon reduction agenda. The cancelation of Russia, coupled with the disastrous ‘green’ energy policies are only accelerating inflationary cycles globally. All of this is a recipe for disaster – all due to policies directly created by western governments. By blocking inbound energy supplies from the Nordstream and other Russian pipelines which supplied them with affordable and reliable gas and oil into the EU, Europe has painted itself into a very perilous corner. Behind the energy wars and even beyond Klaus Schwab’s globalist facade – you will find hardcore geopolitics at play. The main Anglo-American objective: the deindustrialization of Germany and EU, the separation of Russian resources and political leadership from western markets. We live in truly perilous times.

        1. The Ukraine War

        In late February 2022, the unthinkable happened: Russia launched its military intervention into neighboring Ukraine. War is hell, and while Russia seems intent on seeing its “Special Military Operation” through, the US and its allies are going to have to decide just how long they plan to fight Russia down to the last Ukrainian. How many dead Ukrainian soldiers and lost territory will it take for the West to instruct Ukraine’s President Zelensky to finally sue for peace? Welcome to NATO’s ultimate proxy war of attrition in Ukraine, driven by the greatest western media propaganda campaign of all-time. Suffice to say that Russia, Ukraine, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance are now at war – with each party firmly in the belief that they are fighting an existential war, not over any particular political or territorial dispute, but for the future existence of their countries, or in the case of NATO, over their ability to maintain regional hegemony for the Atlanticist power bloc. Will this near frozen conflict escalate to a WWIII situation, or a thermo-nuclear exchange between the great powers? The US and British invasion of Iraq nearly two decades ago is a particularly pertinent and telling counterpoint to events in Ukraine. Then, as now, the ‘free and democratic Western World’ was supposedly faced with a dangerous, unhinged despot in Saddam Hussein, who, like Putin is said to be unwilling to compromise. It’s a well-worn script for the West, and will likely remain the justification of another endless war. Of course, Zelensky could end it all tomorrow if he declared his intentions to disavow any NATO aspirations, demilitarize the country, and declare Ukraine a neutral state. Such a declaration would certainly be welcome by Russia today, but the West are determined to keep this proxy war going, and cancel Russia from the global economic system. Besides, business is just too good for Ukraine who have managed scrape more than $100 billion from the US and EU treasuries so far, not to mention the billions in profits for shareholders in the US defense industry. Oh, and on the backend of this war, the WEF and BlackRock are eyeing Ukraine’s remaining assets, as private oligarchs hatch their plan to carve up and reshape the post-war landscape there. The future world order is at stake.

        What an unbelievable year. Expect some seriously impactful moments in 2023.

        HAPPY NEW YEAR.

        *  *  *

        SEE PREVIOUS TOP TEN CONSPIRACIES:

        2021 Top Ten Conspiracies
        2020 Top Ten Conspiracies
        2019 Top Ten Conspiracies
        2018 Top Ten Conspiracies
        2017 Top Ten Conspiracies
        2016 Top Ten Conspiracies
        2015 Top Ten Conspiracies
        2014 Top Ten Conspiracies

        PLEASE HELP SUPPORT 21ST CENTURY WIRE’S WINTER FUNDRAISING DRIVE HERE

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 21:15

      • The US Is The Champagne-Drinking Champion Of The World
        The US Is The Champagne-Drinking Champion Of The World

        The United States and the UK are leading the way when it comes to procuring real champagne with 34.1 and 29.9 million 750 milliliter bottles imported in 2021, respectively.

        As Statista’s Felix Richter shows in the chart below, based on data by the trade association Comité Champagne, most of the biggest import nations are located in Europe.

        Infographic: The Champagne Champions of the World | Statista

        You will find more infographics at Statista

        With the exception of the U.S., Japan and Australia, Western European countries like Germany, Belgium and Italy are dominating last year’s top 10.

        This is not to say that other countries don’t enjoy sparkling wine, but the numbers only refer to the higher-priced, regionally produced drink from the French region of Champagne.

        The area was officially designated in 1927 and is home to winemakers like Veuve Clicquot, Moët & Chandon and Krug.

        While French champagne only makes up around nine percent of the global sparkling wine consumption, it’s responsible for 33 percent of the market value, generated with only 0.5 percent of the world’s total vineyard area. Overall, champagne exports from France amounted to $5.7 billion in 2021, with the U.S. alone being responsible for roughly $793 million.

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 20:45

      • China Conducts Military Maneuvers Near US Bases At Guam, Okinawa
        China Conducts Military Maneuvers Near US Bases At Guam, Okinawa

        Authored by Kyle Anzalone & Will Porter via The Libertarian Institute,

        The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning has sailed near the Japanese island of Okinawa and the US territory of Guam over the past two weeks. The naval operations came at the end of a year which saw several military escalations between Washington and Beijing.

        Tokyo reported that the Liaoning and at least four other large warships operated in waters near Okinawa, adding that the ships remained about 150 miles offshore for several days. While in the area, the Chinese carrier conducted over 200 takeoff and landing drills.

        The Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy aircraft carrier Liaoning is seen in waters near Hong Kong, via Wikimedia Commons.

        On Thursday, Japanese officials confirmed that, after sailing away from Japan, the flotilla then traveled near the US territory of Guam. According to the Global Times, a Chinese newspaper closely linked with the country’s ruling Communist Party, the operation “showed that the Chinese carrier is ready to defend the country against potential US attacks launched from there.”

        The relationship between Washington and Beijing has continued to deteriorate in 2022, perhaps best exemplified by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan last summer and a massive round of Chinese military drills launched near the island in retaliation. 

        President Joe Biden has further fueled tensions by repeatedly asserting that US forces would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese invasion. However, Taiwan is not recognized as a sovereign nation under US law, which instead endorses Beijing’s claim to the island and calls for a position of “strategic ambiguity” towards Taipei. 

        While a number of past US administrations have refrained from openly saying whether Washington would intervene against China on Taiwan’s behalf, Biden has increasingly eroded that position, prompting senior White House officials to walk back his statements on multiple occasions. Proponents of strategic ambiguity contend that the policy acts as a deterrent against any future attack by Beijing, and stops short of emboldening Taipei to take aggressive actions of its own. 

        Biden recently met with Chinese President Xi on the sidelines of the G20 summit. While the goal was to seek to resolve various outstanding issues between the two powers, both countries continue to conduct provocative military exercises. 

        Map source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

        Tokyo – which is part a three-way security pact with Washington and Seoul created to confront Beijing – has also escalated regional tensions by announcing an end to its post-WWII defense-oriented military and plans to become the world’s third-highest weapons spender over the next five years. Moreover, the United States has worked to persuade its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to take part in its operations in Chinese-claimed waters, while Canada recently announced plans to conduct more military transits through the disputed Taiwan Strait. 

        Beijing has significantly deepened its security and diplomatic ties with Moscow this year, with the two allies striking a “no limits strategic partnership” in the days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February. The Asian superpowers have conducted joint drills in the waters and skies around both Japan and Taiwan in recent weeks, having just wrapped up naval exercises in the East China Sea on Tuesday. Another round of wargames on December 14 saw Chinese warships cross multiple Japanese straits as Russian fighters and bombers flew near Japanese airspace over the Sea of Japan. 

        Underscoring the rising hostilities, earlier this week the Pentagon released a video, captured on December 21, showing a Chinese fighter that approached an American spy plane over the South China Sea, accusing the pilot of performing an “unsafe maneuver” that risked a collision. 

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 20:00

      • Laid-Off Silicon Valley Workers Panic Sell Start-Up Shares As Valuations Crash
        Laid-Off Silicon Valley Workers Panic Sell Start-Up Shares As Valuations Crash

        Silicon Valley tech companies have benefited from over a decade of low-interest rates and easy money. But since the Federal Reserve turned off the liquidity taps to combat inflation — at least for now — tech firms have been forced into aggressive cost-cutting measures, such as reducing headcount. 

        This brings us to the workers who were fired this year. Financial Times reported, “employees of embattled tech groups are flooding secondary markets — where stakeholders in a private company sell shares to third parties.” And as they unload shares on the private market, the valuations of these startups are collapsing. 

        The latest data from Crunchbase shows more than 91,000 workers in the U.S. tech sector have been laid off this year. 

        “We are seeing an inflow of people being laid off trying to sell their shares,” Greg Martin, managing director of Rainmaker Securities, which facilitates private stock transactions. “These companies have built their headcounts up so much, so there are a lot of people highly motivated to get a sale done,” he said.

        Martin added while there’s an increasing number of laid-off workers trying to cash out, many of these sales are happening during valuation declines of “30-80% from a year ago.” 

        A valuation reset for startups has led venture capitalists to sit on the sidelines and wait for the smoke to clear. The selling of private stock has also pushed down startup valuations. 

        FT published market valuations of private companies that show a rollercoaster ride in the last year. 

        The highly illiquid market for private secondary markets, such as those operated by Rainmaker, further complicates assessing valuations in times of market turmoil. 

        Data from Rainmaker showed that shares in Anduril, a defense artificial intelligence company backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz valued at $8.5bn, traded at $16.95 per share in November, down from $31.50 in March. Brokers such as Rainmaker trade Anduril shares indirectly through special purpose vehicles, as Anduril prohibits direct trading of its shares on secondary markets.

        Shares in SoftBank-backed Chime Bank, which was valued at $25bn when it last raised external capital in August 2021, have lost a quarter of their value since then on secondary markets, trading at $60 per share, according to the most recent data. –FT

        Rainmaker’s Martin warned there’s a wave of laid-off employees who are dumping private stock into illiquid markets. The collapse in fundraising for the IPO market has complicated things for private companies, who are now scrambling to find lending lifelines.  

        On public markets, unprofitable tech companies have underperformed this year and are likely to continue doing so until the Fed pivots. Interest rate swaps suggest the Fed could begin cutting by late 2023. 

        The basket of money-losing tech companies compiled by Morgan Stanley has plunged 54% — an epic roundtrip back to pre-Covid days. 

        Profitability has become necessary for investors in these challenging times. There may come a time when unprofitable companies outperform again, but that widely depends on Fed policy. 

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 19:15

      • Crypto 2022: A Disastrous Year That Saw Few Winners Among A Sea Of Losers
        Crypto 2022: A Disastrous Year That Saw Few Winners Among A Sea Of Losers

        Authored by Prashant Jha via CoinTelegraph.com,

        2022 was supposed to be the year crypto went mainstream, with a significant chunk of traditional venture capital firms betting heavily on the ecosystem in 2021. However, with one disaster after another, 2022 turned out to be a catastrophic year for the nascent crypto ecosystem. Some of the biggest names touted as pivotal to taking the crypto ecosystem forward turned out to be the orchestrators of its worst year in recent memory.

        That said, quite a few protagonists rose to the occasion. These winners proved that crypto is not just about a few select individuals and companies but a vibrant ecosystem that can survive significant setbacks.

        Let’s start with some of the biggest winners of the crypto ecosystem in 2022. The list includes individuals, companies and anonymous groups working for the betterment of the industry.

        The winners

        In a year that saw the multibillion-dollar collapses of the Terra ecosystem, FTX and Three Arrows Capital, it’s hard to pick winners. However, crypto has faced adversaries before, and 2022 was no different. Several positives came out of the year despite the collapse of several centralized entities.

        Ledger and Trezor

        When Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, a core idea was to give people financial sovereignty that made them less dependent on centralized intermediaries.

        With offers of lucrative interest rates on yield products and derivatives trading services, most crypto users preferred to keep their crypto assets on centralized exchanges. However, these lucrative offerings become a nightmare when millions of customers lose their funds in the wake of a centralized exchange collapse.

        In the rubble of the FTX collapse, crypto investors lost trust in centralized exchanges. Hardware wallet providers like Ledger and Trezor have benefitted from investors shifting their behavior toward self-custody.

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

        By December, self-custody services and hardware wallets became the preferred choice of many. After the collapse of FTX, Trezor saw a 300% surge in sales and revenue and Ledger saw its biggest sale day ever.

        White hat hackers

        The crypto ecosystem is relatively new, and several use cases like decentralized finance (DeFi) are in early development. This makes it prone to bugs and exploits. According to DefiLlama, DeFi protocols were exploited for nearly $5.93 billion in 2022

        Total value hacked (USD) from DeFi protocols in 2022. Source: DefiLlama

        However, the figures would have been much higher if not for white hat hackers. These white hats returned millions of dollars in stolen funds and flagged security bugs that could have led to more exploits. Security service provider Immunefi claims to have prevented the theft of $20 billion worth of crypto assets alone through its bug bounty program for white hat hackers..

        While many projects tend to ignore white hats, 2022 showed that it’s better to pay out millions in bug bounties than lose billions in exploits.

        Tether

        Amid the chaos of 2022, the Tether stablecoin has successfully manoeuvred its way through the wreckage of both the Terra and FTX collapses.

        USDT price and volume on a 1-year chart. Source: CoinMarketCap

        The centralized stablecoin has been at the forefront of critics’ commentary for as long as it has existed. When Terra’s native stablecoin depegged, there were rumors about Tether’s exposure to the doomed ecosystem.

        However, USDT managed to overcome the scare, and throughout 2022, it has significantly decreased its volatile exposure. The firm also pledged to stop lending out funds from its reserves and put a full stop to all the fear, uncertainty and doubt, or FUD.

        Tether has become more transparent over time, with 82% of its reserves in liquid assets. The firm had total assets of $68.06 billion at the end of the third quarter, exceeding its total liabilities of $67.8 billion.

        The losers

        The crypto ecosystem saw many losers in 2022, with Sam Bankman-Fried the first to earn a mention. The former CEO of crypto exchange FTX started 2022 with a $20 billion net worth. In less than a year, that net worth disappeared and Bankman-Fried is now out on bail for allegedly stealing customers’ funds and committing securities fraud. Terra’s co-founder Do Kwon, whose last known location was Serbia, also makes the list.

        TerraUSD

        Algorithmic stablecoins were a novel, promising concept during the bull market. The Terra ecosystem rose to new highs based on this hype. However, the flawed design of TerraUSD (UST), now known as TerraClassicUSD (USTC), aided by the reckless decision-making of Kwon, led to its eventual downfall. The failure of Terra’s native stablecoin also tainted the concept of algorithmic stablecoins, with regulators warning against them.

        The collapse of UST obliterated $40 billion of investor capital and caused a contagion that claimed nearly half a dozen other crypto firms with exposure to Terra. While many firms and individuals could qualify in the losers list, Terra’s UST implosion was the catalyst that precipitated more upheaval in 2022.

        Alameda Research, FTX and centralized exchanges

        At the start of 2022, FTX was valued at $32 billion, while its sister company Alameda Research boasted a several-billion-dollar valuation of its own. However, the November bank run on FTX soon turned into bankruptcy. As more details emerged, it turned out FTX and Alameda Research were not as independent as they claimed. Even FTX US, which was supposed to be a separate entity regulated under United States law, was found to be embroiled in the complex saga.

        According to the authorities, FTX and Alameda funneled funds to each other, and the two firms were also involved in the embezzlement of customers’ funds. Alameda used FTX funds to loan billions of dollars to other firms. FTX, on the other hand, used nonexistent in-house projects with inflated valuations as collateral to take out significant loans. The whole Ponzi came crashing down in November.

        The downfall of FTX and Alameda created more contagion in the crypto ecosystem and single-handedly erased trust in centralized exchanges and the broader crypto ecosystem practically overnight.

        Crypto investors

        Among all the chaos and downfall of many crypto exchanges and leading venture capital firms, the biggest losers are crypto investors. If the burn of the bear market was not enough, millions of crypto investors who had their funds on FTX lost their life savings overnight.

        Terra was once a $40 billion ecosystem. Its native token, LUNA — now known as Terra Classic (LUNC) — was one of the top five biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. With millions of customers invested in the ecosystem, the collapse brought their investment to zero within hours. After the Terra collapse, crypto investors lost their funds on a series of centralized exchanges and staking platforms like Celsius, BlockFi and Hodlnaut. Crypto investors also lost significantly in the nonfungible token market, with the price of many popular collections down by 70%. Overall, crypto investors are among the biggest losers of the year.

        2022 will go down in crypto history as an annus horribilis. Crypto investors will want to forget the year and start fresh. Venture capital firms and investors in crypto projects are reevaluating their investment strategies. After such a tumultuous year in crypto, a likely outcome will be the acceleration of regulations in the industry throughout the coming year. This may restore some of the lost confidence in the industry.

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 18:40

      • Russian Military Says Victory "Inevitable" In New Year Message
        Russian Military Says Victory “Inevitable” In New Year Message

        A New Year message issued by the Russian defense ministry declared that it sees victory in Ukraine as “inevitable” – even after the Russian ground forces’ advance in the east in south has appeared stalled for months, and as aerial forces take aim at the national power grid across Ukrainian cities.

        “In the coming year, I want to wish everyone good health, fortitude, reliable and devoted comrades… Our victory, like the New Year, is inevitable,” Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in a Saturday video address soon before Russia rings in the new year.

        Sputnik via AP

        The military campaign is now it its 11th month, and will reach one full year on Feb.24. Shoigu explained that 2022 included times that “we all faced serious trials” and that the New Year has come during a “difficult military-political situation.” 

        “The outgoing year will forever enter the military chronicle of the Fatherland, filled with your immortal deeds, selfless courage and heroism in the fight against neo-Nazism and terrorism,” Shoigu said.

        “We will always remember our comrades who sacrificed themselves while performing combat missions in the name of saving civilians from genocide and violence only for the right to speak Russian,” he added. In mentioning the “right to speak Russian” – he was referencing a crackdown on Russian culture and language, which has included recent moves to push forward new laws, by the Zelensky government which Moscow had complained about even before the war.

        Two weeks ago, Russia admitted to just 5,937 military deaths in Ukraine, despite some Western estimates putting the figure as high as 100,000. Estimates of Ukrainian troop deaths are also difficult to assess accurately.

        Recently, the US military said it estimates that some 200,000 have been killed on both sides. Citing the US Joint Chiefs chairman, a November report gave the following grim tally and breakdown:

        The most senior US general estimates that around 100,000 Russian and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or injured in the war in Ukraine.

        Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, also suggested that around 40,000 civilians had died after being caught up in the conflict.

        The estimates are the highest offered yet by a Western official.

        This past week, the United Nations updated its numbers of civilian casualties over the course of the war since Feb.2022. An OHCHR press release cited a total number of 17,831 civilian casualties in Ukraine, including 6,884 killed and 10,947 injured. 

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

        For now the conflict remains essentially stalemated, with Russia exercising clear air superiority given it has of late been ramping up airstrikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure – but with Ukraine forces receiving more and more powerful, longer-range weapons from the West. The US says Patriot anti-air missiles are en route, but these are expected to take six months minimum to go operational in the country.

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 18:05

      • Elon Musk Calls Out "Corporate Journalism" Over Twisted Coverage Of His 'Twitter Files'
        Elon Musk Calls Out “Corporate Journalism” Over Twisted Coverage Of His ‘Twitter Files’

        Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

        Elon Musk has criticized mainstream media outlets over their coverage of the so-called “Twitter Files.”

        “Why is corporate journalism rushing to defend the state instead of the people?” Musk wrote on Twitter on Dec. 27, in response to a tweet from journalist and documentary filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse. The latter was sharing his new Substack post about how corporate media rushed to defend the FBI and the state instead of exposing them.

        “The Hunter Biden laptop story shows the extent to which the corporate media has become the propaganda arm of the state,” Woodhouse wrote in his Substack, pointing to the recent release of the seventh installment of Twitter’s internal documents.

        Tesla CEO Elon Musk smiles as he addresses guests at the Offshore Northern Seas 2022 (ONS) meeting in Stavanger, Norway, on Aug. 29, 2022. (Carina Johansen/NTB/AFP via Getty Images)

        Independent author Michael Shellenberger published the seventh installment on Dec. 19, revealing how there was an “organized effort” by federal law enforcement agents to discredit the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop report, by targeting social media and news companies.

        Other installments of Twitter’s internal communications have shown how the media giant placed certain individuals on “secret blacklists,” debates over how to handle former President Donald Trump’s account before it was suspended in January 2021, and how the FBI allegedly flagged accounts and tweets for Twitter to take action against.

        The FBI has dismissed the “Twitter Files,” alleging that “conspiracy theorists” are attempting to discredit the bureau.

        A Twitter user responded to Musk’s question by writing, “Simple… it’s Corporate Journalism… Not Journalism.”

        To which Musk replied: “Exactly. Why would anyone trust corpo journalism?”

        Substack

        In the same thread, Musk also said that he was “open to the idea” of buying the Substack platform, while responding to a tweet from Wall Street Silver.

        The latter wrote, “Twitter plus Substack creates instantly massive competition for obsolete legacy corporate media.”

        Substack allows independent writers and podcasters to publish directly to their audiences and get paid through subscriptions, the platform’s website says.

        Tuesday was not the first time that Musk has expressed an interest in buying Substack.

        On Dec. 8, conservative commentator Dave Rubin started a thread by alleging that Google and YouTube’s “manipulation for political purposes is FAR worse than Twitter’s.”

        A Twitter user continued the thread and recommended Musk buy Substack.

        The Twitter user wrote: “You would have the information layer with Twitter and the narrative layer. Corporate media would then have [to] specialize on reporting government leaks, from ‘people familiar with the matter.’”

        “I’m open to the idea,” Musk wrote in response to the recommendation.

        Reputation

        On Dec. 28, Musk responded to a Twitter clip posted by CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” during which Axios reporter Hope King said the new Twitter chief’s reputation was “in danger.”

        “All of the macro conditions are against his favor. Market-share for $TSLA is down year-over-year. His reputation with Twitter is impacting his reputation when it comes to all of his companies,” she said.

        In response, Musk wrote: “The legacy media should worry about its reputation. We have only just begun.”

        Musk has promised to promote free speech after acquiring Twitter and his decision to release the company’s internal documents is tied to his promise.

        “The Twitter Files on free speech suppression soon to be published on Twitter itself. The public deserves to know what really happened,” Musk wrote on Twitter on Dec. 28, just days before the first batch of the “Twitter Files” was released by independent journalist Matt Taibbi.

        The first installment exposed how the social media giant’s efforts to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story published just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

        Emails from the laptop’s hard drive and Treasury records revealed how then-Vice President Joe Biden, his brother James, and Hunter Biden were involved in various foreign business ventures, in countries such as Ukraine, Russia, and China. At the time, many media outlets discredited the revelations as “Russian disinformation” and the news was blocked by social media platforms.

        Hunter Biden recently hired high-profile defense lawyer Abbe Lowell to his legal team, as House Republicans plan to launch probes into his overseas business interests.

        Congressional Probe

        Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, said Congress needs to probe “Big Tech” companies, following the revelations made by the “Twitter Files.”

        “These explosive revelations show the enormous power that a handful of liberal tech executives have over our public discourse,” Wicker wrote in his weekly report published on Dec. 26.

        “We should be grateful that new leadership is lifting the hood on Twitter, but Congress needs to follow up with wider investigations into Big Tech companies, including Facebook and Google,” he said.

        Read more here…

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 17:30

      • Visualizing The Smartphone Effect On The Camera Market
        Visualizing The Smartphone Effect On The Camera Market

        The smartphone camera has come a long way since the early 2000s, and its impact on the overall camera market cannot be understated.

        In fact, modern smartphones have become so sophisticated that the CEO of Sony’s semiconductor manufacturing company predicts that smartphone cameras will soon produce better quality images than DSLR cameras.

        Whether smartphones will be able to completely replace standalone cameras is still a contentious debate topic, but one thing is clear—while smartphone sales have skyrocketed over the last decade, digital camera sales have plummeted.

        As Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang notes, this animation by James Eagle compares annual sales data for film cameras, digital cameras, and smartphones over the years to show just how much smartphones have impacted the camera market.

        Charting the Smartphone Effect on the Camera Market from Visual Capitalist on Vimeo.

        A (Brief) History of Standalone Cameras

        Below, we’ve broken down the history of cameras into three overarching periods: early cameras, film cameras, and digital cameras.

        Early Cameras

        Cameras have been around for thousands of years, with descriptions of camera-like devices found in historical writings dating back as far as the 4th century:

        • 330 AD: Ancient Chinese texts describe a device known as a camera obscura. Similar to pinhole cameras, these didn’t produce actual photographs, but rather reflected light onto screens which could then be traced to produce a lasting image.

        • Early 1800s: It’s generally accepted that Joseph Nicéphore Niépce invented the first photographic camera in 1816. Using silver chloride, Niépce managed to develop an image that’s still around today.

        • 1840s: Early cameras produced negative images which had to be color corrected, until mirrored cameras were invented. Alexander S. Wolcott was the first person to patent a mirrored camera in 1840.

        • 1871: Richard Leach Maddox came up with an invention that led to instantaneous exposure, meaning cameras only needed to be exposed to light for a few seconds before producing an image.

        These early inventions were critical milestones in the development of the modern-day camera. However, cameras and film weren’t available to the masses until Kodak’s Brownie camera made photography relatively cheap.

        The Emergence of Film Cameras

        Released in 1900, the Kodak Brownie was a handheld, inexpensive roll film camera invented by George Eastman.

        When it first launched, the camera sold for $1.00, equivalent to about $35.48 in 2022 dollars. With more than 100,000 cameras sold within the first year, Eastman is often credited for making photography accessible to the masses.

        Fast forward a few decades, and technological advancements led to features in cameras like viewfinders, different shutter speeds, and detachable lenses. These features were possible on what’s known as twin lens reflex cameras, or TLR for short, but they were soon replaced by single lens reflex cameras (SLR).

        Digital Cameras Enter the Scene

        By the late 1990s, digital cameras were invented and began quickly outselling film cameras.

        Unlike their film counterparts, digital cameras feature a digital sensor, and store images on a memory card which could store thousands of pictures.

        Digital camera sales grew throughout the early 2000s—in 2005 the Photo Marketing Association International even estimated that 52% of households would own a digital camera by the end of the year.

        The Smartphone Camera Changes the Game

        In the early 2000s, camera phones were far less powerful than their standalone counterparts.

        For instance, one of the first camera phones to hit the market, Samsung’s SCH-V200, could take 20 pictures at 0.35-megapixel resolution. In contrast, Canon’s EOS D30 digital camera released the same year had a resolution of 3 megapixels.

        But the advent of the iPhone, and the rollout and accessibility of modern smartphones with powerful cameras, quickly saw many non-enthusiasts switch to smartphone cameras only. In 2022, Google’s Pixel 7 has multiple built-in cameras, with both a 50 megapixel wide rear camera and a 12 megapixel ultrawide rear camera. In comparison, Canon’s ​​enthusiast EOS 850 has a 24.1 megapixel sensor.

        The animated chart above highlights the direct impact on the digital camera market after its 2009/2010 peak:

         

        So does that make a modern smartphone camera better? Not at all, as there are other a multitude of factors to consider when assessing a camera’s quality besides resolution. But in an article in Wired Magazine, tech journalist Sam Kieldsen explains how the market has shifted:

         

        [Smartphones have] effectively killed off the cheap pocket point-and-shoot camera already, but there’s still so much they can’t do in comparison to a true purpose-built mirrorless or DSLR camera. Low light image quality, convincing bokeh effects and extreme close-up macro photography are all still significantly better on a real camera.

        Smartphones may not be fully replacing DSLR cameras anytime soon, but they’ve certainly changed the industry and game in which it plays.

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 16:55

      • 28-Year-Old Charged in Killing Of 4 Idaho College Students
        28-Year-Old Charged in Killing Of 4 Idaho College Students

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

        Authorities in Pennsylvania arrested a suspect in the killings of four University of Idaho students who were found stabbed to death in their beds in November, authorities announced in a Friday news conference.

        Bryan Christopher Kohberger was taken into custody by police in Pennsylvania on Dec. 30. (Monroe County Correctional Facility)

        Bryan Christopher Kohberger, 28, was arrested early Friday morning by the Pennsylvania State Police at a home in Chestnuthill Township, authorities announced. He is being held for extradition to Idaho on a warrant for first degree murder, according to arrest paperwork filed in Monroe County Court.

        Latah County prosecutor Bill Thompson confirmed in the Friday press conference that a criminal complaint was filed against Kohberger with four counts of murder and other charges in connection to the case. An affidavit has been sealed until Kohberger returns to Idaho to be served with a warrant, Thompson said.

        The prosecutor said that Kohberger is being held without bond in Pennsylvania, also confirming earlier reports that he was a graduate student at Washington State University. In the news conference, few details were given about the suspect, including a possible motive.

        “Once he gets here, he will have an initial appearance with a magistrate,” Thompson said.

        Officers investigate a homicide at an apartment complex south of the University of Idaho campus on Nov. 13, 2022. (Zach Wilkinson/The Moscow-Pullman Daily News via AP)

        Earlier Friday, a mugshot of Kohberger was released to various news outlets by the Monroe County Correctional Facility in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Reports indicated that he was arrested near the Pocono Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania

        Kohberger graduated from Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania with an associate of arts degree in psychology in 2018, according to college spokesperson Mia Rossi-Marino. A Ph.D. student by the same name is listed in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University, which is a short drive across the state line from the University of Idaho.

        DeSales University in Pennsylvania confirmed that a student by that name received a bachelor’s degree in 2020 and completed graduate studies in June 2022.

        In a post that was deleted from Reddit after his arrest, a student associated with DeSales University named Bryan Kohberger sought participation in a project “to understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision-making when committing a crime.”

        “In particular, this study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense, with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience,” the post read.

        Other Details

        Four Idaho students identified as Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin were stabbed to death at a rental home near the campus sometime in the early morning of Nov. 13. Investigators were not able name a suspect or locate a murder weapon for several weeks, triggering widespread online speculation about a possible suspect and motive.

        Read more here…

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 16:20

      • Here's A List Of Biden Tax Hikes Which Take Effect Jan. 1
        Here’s A List Of Biden Tax Hikes Which Take Effect Jan. 1

        When the Democrats finally passed the “Inflation Reduction Act” in 2022 (how’s that going?), they included several tax hikes set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2023.

        Americans for Tax reform‘s Mike Palicz has conveniently compiled a list of them, along with his take on their intended effects:

        $6.5 Billion Natural Gas Tax Which Will Increase Household Energy Bills   

        Think your household energy bills are high now? Just wait until the three major energy taxes in the Inflation Reduction Act hit your wallet. The first is a regressive tax on American oil and gas development. The tax will drive up the cost of household energy bills. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the natural gas tax will increase taxes by $6.5 billion.

        And of course, this tax hike violates Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on Americans making under $400,000 per year. According to the American Gas Association, the methane tax will slap a 17% increase on the average family’s natural gas bill.

        $12 Billion Crude Oil Tax Which Will Increase Household Costs

        Next up – a .16c/barrel tax on crude oil and imported petroleum products which will end up on the shoulders of consumers in the form of higher tax prices.

        The tax hike violates President Biden’s tax pledge to any American making less than $400,000 per year.

        As noted above, Biden administration officials have repeatedly admitted taxes that raise consumer energy prices are in violation of President Biden’s $400,000 tax pledge.

        As if it weren’t bad enough, Democrats have pegged their oil tax increase to inflation. As inflation increases, so will the level of tax.

        $1.2 Billion Coal Tax Which Will Increase Household Energy Bills

        This one increases the current tax rate on coal from $0.50 to $1.10 per ton, while coal from surface mining would increase from $0.25 per to to $0.55 per ton, which will raise $1.2 billion per year in taxes that will undoubtedly be passed along to consumers in the form of higher energy bills.

        $74 Billion Stock Tax Which Will Hit Your Nest Egg — 401(k)s, IRAs and Pension Plans

        Democrats are now imposing a new federal excise tax when Americans sell shares of a stock back to a company.

        Raising taxes and restricting stock buybacks harms the retirement savings of any individual with a 401(k), IRA or pension plan.

        Union retirement plans will also be hit.

        The tax will put U.S. employers at a competitive disadvantage with China, which does not have such a tax.

        Stock buybacks help grow retirement accounts. Raising taxes and restricting buybacks would harm the 58 percent of Americans who own stock and more than 60 million workers invested in a 401(k). An additional 14.83 million Americans are invested in 529 education savings accounts.

        Retirement accounts hold the largest share of corporate stocks, accounting for roughly 37 percent of the outstanding $22.8 trillion in U.S. corporate stock, according to the Tax Foundation.

        In 2017, corporate-sponsored funds made up $4.45 trillion in market value; union-sponsored funds accounted for $409 billion; and public-sponsored funds, which benefit teachers and police officers, added up to $4.25 trillion.

        A tax on buybacks could dissuade companies from doing so, and US companies will face significant compliance costs, which will – again, be passed along to consumers.

        $225 Billion Corporate Income Tax Hike Which Will Be Passed on to Households

        American businesses reporting at least $1 billion in profits over the past three years will now face a 15% corporate alternative minimum tax, which will be passed along in the form of higher prices, fewer jobs and lower wages, according to Americans for Tax Reform.

        A Tax Foundation report from last December found a 15 percent book tax would reduce GDP by 0.1 percent and kill 27,000 jobs.

        Preliminary cost estimates from the Congressional Budget Office found the provision would increase taxes by more than $225 billion.

        According to JCT’s analysis, 49.7 percent of the tax would be borne by the manufacturing industry at a time when manufacturers are already struggling with supply-chain disruptions.

        Which industry will likely be most affected? According to the Tax Foundation, “the coal industry faces the heaviest burden of the book minimum tax, facing a net tax hike of 7.2 percent of its pretax book income, followed by automobile and truck manufacturing, which faces a 5.1 percent tax hike.”

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 15:45

      • The 10 Most Influential Figures In The History Of Oil
        The 10 Most Influential Figures In The History Of Oil

        Authored by Josh Owens via OilPrice.com,

        Oil has been the single most influential resource in modern history, driving industrialization, building nations, and deciding the outcome of wars. It has been responsible for raising millions of people out of poverty and for razing entire cities to the ground. From technological advancements to environmental disasters, few, if any, industries have left as large a mark on the earth.

        While the history of oil can be traced back as far as 3000 BC, when builders in Mesopotamia began to use bitumen to strengthen bricks, the story of the modern oil industry really began in the 1850s. Since then, explorers, investors, kings, journalists, spies, and scientists have all attempted to leave their mark on the industry. This is a list of the ten people who, for better or worse, are responsible for shaping the oil industry as we know it today.

        10. Winston Churchill

        Churchill may be best known as the stubborn wartime Prime Minister of Britain, but it was in his role as the First Lord of the Admiralty that he transformed the oil industry forever. In 1911, as tensions between Germany and Britain were mounting ahead of the First World War, Churchill made the fateful decision to convert the British fleet from coal power to oil power. While today such a decision may seem an obvious one, at the time it was considered both reckless and wasteful. 

        The conversion was not only expensive and experimental, but it left the British navy vulnerable as it would now have to rely on oil from Persia rather than coal produced at home. In 1914, in order to secure a reliable oil supply for the navy, Churchill convinced the British Government to buy 51% of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which would later become BP).

        When the First World War broke out in July 1914, Churchill’s decision was vindicated, the new British navy was faster and more efficient than its counterparts. It was now accepted that oil would indeed be the fuel of the future, and securing it was a matter of national security. Thanks to Churchill, the international oil industry would now forever be intertwined with foreign policy. The battle for control over both the production and trade routes of this critical resource continues to this day.

        9. T Boone Pickens

        For the oil industry, the 1980s were a time of great upheaval. In the aftermath of the 1979 oil crisis, Ronald Regan completely deregulated oil, boosting competition and leading to consolidation across the industry. In 1983, the New York Mercantile Exchange introduced a futures contract in crude oil. Up until the creation of a futures market, the price of oil had been set by oil companies like Standard Oil, by regulators such as the Texas Railroad Commission, and by OPEC. Now, the price of oil was decided by traders on the open market. These events combined to mean efficiency and value were the two most important traits for oil companies, and one man more than any other would take advantage of this new age in oil.

        T Boone Pickens positioned himself at the intersection of the oil industry and Wall Street, styling himself as a servant of shareholder value. He was a master of mergers and acquisitions in the industry and would play a key role in making the industry leaner and more efficient. His strategy involved finding a company whose stock price did not reflect the value of its oil and gas reserves, acquiring a significant block of its stock, and then forcing the company’s management to act to increase its share value. His most famous deals included Gulf Oil,  Phillips Petroleum, and Unocal. Every corporate raider and activist investor in the industry today owes a debt to T Boone Pickens, the man who showed investors how to take power back from the oil giants.

        8. Harry St John Bridger Philby

        While he isn’t even the most famous person in his family (his son Kim was the notorious British intelligence officer who acted as a double agent for the Soviet Union), Harry Philby played an integral role in the development of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, helping to form what would ultimately become the largest oil company on earth, Saudi Aramco. 

        Philby was born in modern-day Sri Lanka, studied at the University of Cambridge, and in 1915 was recruited to the Indian Civil Service where he helped to organize the Arab Revolut against the Ottoman Empire. This first posting marked the beginning of his life-long obsession with Arabic culture and languages. In 1917, he was chosen to lead a mission to the Arabian Peninsula where he would meet a tribal chieftain by the name of Ibn Saud – the future founder of Saudi Arabia. His meeting with Ibn Saud would ultimately lead Philpy to leave the Indian Civil Service, convert to Islam, and play a central role in negotiating what could be considered the biggest oil deal of all time.

        By 1930, Philby was convinced that Ibn Saud and his government were sitting on a great untapped natural resource, but the King was more interested in drilling for water than oil. It was only in 1932 when Standard Oil of California made a discovery in Bahrain that the King began to consider his country’s oil potential. Standard Oil of California had already approached Philby in the hopes of gaining an introduction to the King, but Philby, in order to drive the price up, reached out to Anglo-Persian and started a bidding war. Ultimately, in May 1933, Standard Oil of California managed to outbid Anglo-Persion, marking the United State’s entry into Saudi Arabia, a decision that would have far-reaching consequences for both the oil industry and the geopolitical dynamics in the region.

        7. Mohammad Mosaddegh 

        The Prime Minister of Iran from 1951-1953, Mohammad Mosaddegh was the first leader of a Middle Eastern oil nation to exercise the ‘nuclear option’ of nationalizing its oil concessions. In response to this nationalization, Britain implemented an embargo on Iranian oil that saw the country’s production plummet from 660,000 barrels per day in 1950 to just 20,000 barrels per day in 1952. 

        Despite the growing economic pressure, Mosaddegh refused to relent, infuriating negotiators from both Britain and the U.S. In August 1953, the CIA and MI6 initiated Operation Ajax, an operation designed to overthrow Mosaddegh in a coup. The operation was a success, but the dynamics of the oil industry had already changed forever.

        Even with the Shah back in power, there was no reversing the nationalistic fervor regarding oil that Mossadegh had fanned. Resentment towards the British government and the Anglo-Iranian oil company was as strong as ever in Iran. Meanwhile, U.S. companies were reluctant to get involved in what they saw as a high-risk venture. Without pressure from governments, it seemed that there was no way back for Iran’s oil industry.

        In the midst of the Cold War, the U.S. government was worried that Iran would fall into the Russian sphere of influence if its oil industry wasn’t resurrected by Western companies. In the end, seven companies, supported by the U.S. and British governments, agreed to form a consortium in Iran. Critically, the consortium was forced to acknowledge that the National Iranian Oil Company now owned the country’s oil resources and facilities. Mosaddegh may have been overthrown and would spend the rest of his life under house arrest, but he had earned a vital victory for oil nations. The concept of foreigners owning an oil concession had now changed forever, and the Middle East would never be the same.

        6. Wanda Jablonski

        Referred to as “the most influential oil journalist of her time” in Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, Wanda Jablonski founded Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, the journal which came to be known as “the bible of the oil industry”. Yet it is not her remarkable journalism nor her legacy as a trailblazer for women in the industry that gets her on this list. ‘Wanda’, as she was referred to in the industry, played a critical role in the formation of one of the world’s most influential oil organizations: OPEC.

        The year was 1959, and tensions between international oil companies and oil-exporting countries were soaring. Russia had just returned to international oil markets and supply was climbing faster than demand. This led to a price war that saw oil companies cut the posted price of oil – unilaterally reducing the national revenues of oil-exporting nations. At the same time, the first Arab Oil Congress was taking place in Cairo, with 400 people in attendance, including, of course, Wanda. At the conference, she invited two of the most ardently anti-oil company individuals in the world to her room for a meeting. This was the first time that Saudi Oil Minister Abdullah Tariki met Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, Venezuela’s Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons. As Wanda had predicted, the two men immediately established a rapport and went on to organize a secret meeting with other oil ministers on the side of the Cairo conference. It was at this meeting that the concept of an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was first established.

        5. Nick Steinsberger

        Now, this could be a controversial one. Frequently, it is George P. Mitchell who is credited with solving one of the most consequential problems in the history of oil: how to economically extract oil and gas from shale rock. But it was Nick Steinsberger, an engineer at Mitchell’s company, who in 1997 first successfully applied the slickwater fracturing technique that ultimately led to the U.S. shale boom. Mitchell already has the moniker “father of fracking”, so it seems only fair that Steinsberger should have his place on this list.

        Technically, the fracturing of rock to stimulate oil wells can be traced all the way back to 1864 when Edward A. L. Roberts developed the first torpedo as a way of boosting production. Hydraulic fracturing, using a pressurized liquid to fracture rocks, can be traced back to an experiment in 1947. But it wasn’t until Steinsberger’s 1997 well that it was proven to be economically viable. U.S. oil production, which had been in terminal decline, began to soar on the back of this technological breakthrough. In 2018, thanks in large part to the shale boom, the United States became the largest oil producer in the world. At the same time, fracking came to the attention of environmental groups as it was seen to poison groundwater, induce earthquakes, and emit huge levels of methane. To this day, it remains a controversial topic, with some countries banning fracking altogether while others see it as a path to economic independence. Whatever you think of it, there are few technological breakthroughs that have had the same geopolitical, environmental, and economic impact as hydraulic fracturing.

        4. Ida Tarbell

        No history of the oil industry would be complete without the woman who took on the wealthiest American of all time, John D. Rockefeller. Ida Tarbell was an investigative journalist, or muckraker as they were then known, who was determined to hold the oil industry to account. Every anti-trust lawsuit or environmental claim that has been brought against the oil industry since her time is building upon her legacy.

        In her illustrious career, Tarbell wrote biographies of both Napoleon and Lincoln, but is most famous for her 1904 book titled “The History of Standard Oil”. The book, described by historian J. North Conway as a “masterpiece of investigative journalism”, detailed how Standard Oil would use its wealth, power, and an expansive intelligence network to put immense pressure on independents and other competitors. She wrote that Rockefeller had “systemically played with loaded dice” and painted him, in the words of Daniel Yergen, as an “amoral predator”. Ultimately, Tarbell’s work led to the dissolution of the world’s largest oil company and, in time, the birth of the U.S. oil majors that we know today.

        3. John D. Rockefeller

        John D. Rockefeller’s career in the oil industry began in 1865 when he bought his business partner out of their produce-shipping firm and slowly but surely refocused it on refining oil. Five years later, in an effort to consolidate the industry during a price crash, he joined with four other oilmen to form what would become the most powerful oil company in history, Standard Oil. In the following years, as kerosene and gasoline became a cornerstone of life in America, Rockefeller used his profits to buy up more and more of the industry – reportedly controlling 90% of U.S. oil by 1880.

        Rockefeller’s main goal was to tame the new and out–of–control oil industry in order to ensure it was as efficient and healthy as possible. In pursuing that goal, Rockefeller created the first-ever integrated oil company, initiated price wars to crush competitors, and, as Tarbell uncovered, ultimately built an oil monopoly. 

        When Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, the sum of its parts ended up being worth more than the company as a whole, and Rockefeller became even wealthier. While his focus largely shifted to philanthropy in the 20th century, the shadow of Rockefeller still looms large over the oil industry. In fact, the modern oil giants Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Marathon Petroleum can all trace their origins back to the 1911 breakup of Standard Oil.

        2. Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo

        Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo’s list of achievements in the oil industry is as long as it is impressive. He is perhaps best known as one of the two founders of OPEC, an organization he later described as “my little idea that has changed the history of the world.” But OPEC was simply the logical conclusion of work he had started years earlier. 

        One of the most intractable problems in the oil industry is the division of ‘rent’. In economic terms, oil rent is the difference between the value of crude oil produced and the total cost of production. From 1943 to 1948, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo played a key role in shaping what would become the global norm for dividing these rents between companies and countries. Under the 50/50 deal that he helped shape, Venezuela and the international oil companies agreed to divide that rent evenly. The deal resulted in Venezuela’s oil income increasing by 600% between 1942 and 1948. 

        Yet Perez Alfonzo wasn’t done. He recognized that low-cost producers in the Middle East posed a threat to Venezuela’s market share, and so had the documents translated into Arabic and brought to the Middle East by a Venezuelan delegation. Suddenly, Saudi Arabia wanted a 50/50 split of rents, while Iran’s Mosaddegh wanted to go further still. Once the concept of dividing the oil income equally between countries and companies had been established, it was near impossible for oil companies to fight it. The 50/50 formula remained the global norm until the 1973 oil crisis disrupted markets once again.

        In 1948, following the coup that toppled President Rómulo Gallegos, Perez Alfonzo obtained political asylum in the United States and spent years studying the Texas Railroad Commission and how it had dealt with the oil crash of the 1930s. It was during this period that many of his first thoughts of how OPEC should operate were formed, ideas that he then shared with Abdullah Tariki when Wanda introduced them in Cairo. 

        It may surprise some that a man who was so central to shaping the oil industry considered himself an ecologist and was primarily focused on the conservation of energy. He believed that OPEC would ultimately lower the use of energy around the world. 

        1.  George Bissell

        Commonly referred to as the “father of the American oil industry”, George Bissell was the spark that ignited the inevitable march of oil from a relatively unimportant liquid that oozed from rocks to the most important resource on earth. 

        Bissell recognized that ‘rock oil’, which he had seen being gathered with rags in order to make medicine, could actually be used as an illuminant. If he and his business partner James Townsend could only extract the liquid in sufficient quantities, it could compete with the whale fat and ‘coal oils’ that were then being used in lamps. After confirming that this ‘rock oil’ had the desired chemical characteristic, Bissel and his business partners launched the first-ever oil company, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company.

        The Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company decided that the best way to go about extracting the oil would be to drill for it using the same technique that had been developed to bore for salt. The company employed Edwin L. Drake, an out-of-work railway conductor who was staying in the same hotel as James Townsend, to carry out the project. Drake traveled to the tiny village of Titusville, secured the title to the land, and employed William A. Smith to help him drill. On August 27th, 1859, the two men hit oil for the very first time in history. Bissell immediately rushed to Titusville to buy up and lease as many farms as he could, becoming the first of many who would make their fortune off an industry that was about to change the world forever.

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 15:10

      • Home Depot Co-Founder Rails Against Socialism And "Woke People," Warns 'Capitalism In Dire Straits'
        Home Depot Co-Founder Rails Against Socialism And “Woke People,” Warns ‘Capitalism In Dire Straits’

        The 93-year-old billionaire co-founder of Home Depot railed against “socialism” for why nobody wants to work and warned capitalism is in dire straits. 

        In an interview published Thursday, Bernie Marcus told Financial Times that “nobody works, nobody gives a damn,” blaming socialists and “the woke people” for the country’s troubles. 

        “‘Just give it to me. Send me money. I don’t want to work — I’m too lazy, I’m too fat, I’m too stupid,'” Marcus said, adding if he founded Home Depot in today’s toxic environment, it might not succeed. 

        On a video call for the interview, Marcus spoke from his home in Boca Raton, Florida, warning that he’s “worried about capitalism … it’s the basis of Home Depot [and] millions of people have earned this success and had success. I’m talking manufacturers, vendors and distributors and people that work for us [who have been] able to enrich themselves by the journey of Home Depot.” 

        “That’s the success. That’s why capitalism works,” he added. 

        Marcus then called President Biden “the worst president in the history of this country,” noting that former President Trump’s policies were “spot on,” but “it’s going to be very interesting in ’24 because I think that DeSantis will challenge him. And may the better man win.”

        Marcus was unapologetic for his support for Republicans:

         “I give money to them because I hope they’re going to do the right thing.” Since 1978, he has donated $63,801,322 to political campaigns, according to Bussiness Insider. 

        Insider reached out to Home Depot about Marcus’ FT interview. They said:

        “Our co-founder Bernie Marcus left The Home Depot more than 20 years ago, and his views do not represent the company.”

        Marcus’ warning is similar to co-founder and retired CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, who recently warned “socialists are taking over” and ‘capitalism cannot be replaced with disastrous socialism‘. 

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 14:35

      • 2022 Same Shit, Different Year: 55 Years Of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions
        2022 Same Shit, Different Year: 55 Years Of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions

        Authored by Myron Ebell and Steven Milloy via CEI.org,

        Thanks go to Tony Heller, who first collected many of these news clips and posted them on RealClimateScience. 

        SUMMARY

        Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today.

        None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true.

        What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.

        More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science.

        While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.

        1967: ‘Dire famine by 1975.’

        Source: Salt Lake Tribune, November 17, 1967

        1969: ‘Everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam by 1989.’

        Source: New York Times, August 10 1969

        1970: Ice age by 2000

        Source: Boston Globe, April 16, 1970

        1970: ‘America subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980.’

        Source: Redlands Daily Facts, October 6, 1970

        1971: ‘New Ice Age Coming’

        Source: Washington Post, July 9, 1971

        1972: New ice age by 2070

        Source: NOAA, October 2015

        1974: ‘New Ice Age Coming Fast’

        Source: The Guardian, January 29, 1974

        1974: ‘Another Ice Age?’

        Source: TIME, June 24, 1974

        1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’

        But no such ‘great peril to life’ has been observed as the so-called ‘ozone hole’ remains:

        Sources: Headline

        NASA Data | Graph

        1976: ‘The Cooling’

        Source: New York Times Book Review, July 18, 1976

        1980: ‘Acid Rain Kills Life in Lakes’

        Noblesville Ledger (Noblesville, IN) April 9, 1980

        But 10 years later, the US government program formed to study acid rain concluded:

        Associated Press, September 6, 1990

        1978: ‘No End in Sight’ to 30-Year Cooling Trend

        Source: New York Times, January 5, 1978

        But according to NASA satellite data there is a slight warming trend since 1979.

        Source: DrRoySpencer.com

        1988: James Hansen forecasts increase regional drought in 1990s

        But the last really dry year in the Midwest was 1988, and recent years have been record wet.

        Source: RealClimateScience.com

        1988: Washington DC days over 90F to from 35 to 85

        But the number of hot days in the DC area peaked in 1911, and have been declining ever since.

        Source: RealClimateScience.com

        1988: Maldives completely under water in 30 years

        Source: Agence France Press, September 26, 1988

        1989: Rising seas to ‘obliterate’ nations by 2000

        Source: Associated Press, June 30, 1989

        1989: New York City’s West Side Highway underwater by 2019

        Source: Salon.com, October 23, 2001

        1995 to Present: Climate Model Failure

        Source: CEI.org

        2000: ‘Children won’t know what snow is.’

        Source: The Independent, March 20, 2000

        2002: Famine in 10 years

        Source: The Guardian, December 23, 2002

        2004: Britain to have Siberian climate by 2020

        Source: The Guardian, February 21, 2004

        2008: Arctic will be ice-free by 2018

        Source: Associated Press, June 24, 2008

        2008: Al Gore warns of ice-free Arctic by 2013

        But… it’s still there:

        Source: WattsUpWithThat.com, December 16, 2018

        2009: Prince Charles says only 8 years to save the planet

        Source: The Independent, July 9, 2009

        2009: UK prime minister says 50 days to ‘save the planet from catastrophe’

        Source: The Independent: October 20, 2009

        2009: Arctic ice-free by 2014

        Source: USA Today, December 14, 2009

        2013: Arctic ice-free by 2015

        Source: The Guardian, July 24, 2013

        The paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02550-9 (open access)

        Gas hydrate dissociation off Svalbard induced by isostatic rebound rather than global warming

        Abstract

        Methane seepage from the upper continental slopes of Western Svalbard has previously been attributed to gas hydrate dissociation induced by anthropogenic warming of ambient bottom waters. Here we show that sediment cores drilled off Prins Karls Foreland contain freshwater from dissociating hydrates. However, our modeling indicates that the observed pore water freshening began around 8 ka BP when the rate of isostatic uplift outpaced eustatic sea-level rise. The resultant local shallowing and lowering of hydrostatic pressure forced gas hydrate dissociation and dissolved chloride depletions consistent with our geochemical analysis. Hence, we propose that hydrate dissociation was triggered by postglacial isostatic rebound rather than anthropogenic warming. Furthermore, we show that methane fluxes from dissociating hydrates were considerably smaller than present methane seepage rates implying that gas hydrates were not a major source of methane to the oceans, but rather acted as a dynamic seal, regulating methane release from deep geological reservoirs.

        2013: Arctic ice-free by 2016

        Source: The Guardian, December 9, 2013

        2014: Only 500 days before ‘climate chaos’

        But…

        Sources: Washington Examiner

        Since then the climate catastrophists have only escalated.

        And bringing us up to date in 2022…

        As CEI reports, climate alarmists and their media allies once again made a slew of claims about natural disasters being caused by man-made emissions in 2022. And once again, these claims clashed with reality and science.

        Here are 10 fact checks of climate disaster claims made by the Associated Press and other media outlets in 2022.

        The Bottom Line: There is not a single natural disaster, nor trend in any type of natural disaster that can be credibly linked with emissions or whatever gradual “climate change” may be occurring for whatever reason, including natural climate change. Attributing natural disaster damages to emissions and climate change is without a factual or scientific basis. And that certainly goes for 2022.

        Regardless of one’s view of what passes as “climate science,” the good news is that even researchers who believe that “climate change” is a problem acknowledge that the number of weather-related deaths and the cost of weather-related damage are actually on the decline – despite ever-increasing emissions and whatever slight warming may be occurring.

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 14:00

      • Russia Beefs Up Air Defenses Over Moscow For New Year Celebrations
        Russia Beefs Up Air Defenses Over Moscow For New Year Celebrations

        Russia says it has beefed up its anti-air defenses surrounding Moscow and other high population places across the country for the New Year’s weekend, given there’s expected to be large public gatherings celebrating the coming of 2023.

        The defense ministry was quoted in TASS as saying that some 2,000 service personnel are currently manning Moscow’s air defenses while “on duty at combat posts on New Year’s Eve.”

        Past New Year celebrations in Moscow, file image

        “In total for the period of the New Year holidays and weekends, about 20 thousand military personnel of the air defense-missile defense formation of the Aerospace Forces will be on combat duty for air defense,” the TASS statement continued.

        While there’s as yet to be any recorded Ukrainian missile or drone attack on Moscow (and the reality is that Ukrainian forces unlikely have this capability at this point), there has been a spate of recent attacks on Russian soil, especially in the Belgorod region near the Ukrainian border.

        Additionally, in December there’s been no less than three drone attacks on Engels airbase, which lies over 600km from the Ukrainian border.

        Meanwhile, on Saturday the Ukrainian capital was rocked by more airstrikes. “Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko said there had been several blasts in the capital, causing at least one death. A hotel has also been damaged,” BBC reports.

        And in Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, which also witnessed large blasts, regional Governor Vitaly Kim stated: “The occupiers have decided to try to spoil the day for us” – in reference to New Year’s Eve celebrations.

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

        Ahead of these Saturday attacks Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky had warned the population that Russia was readying more attacks to make Ukrainians “celebrate the New Year in darkness.” Indeed much of the country is still without power, or else subject to rolling emergency blackouts. 

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 13:25

      • 9 Controversial California Laws Taking Effect On Jan. 1
        9 Controversial California Laws Taking Effect On Jan. 1

        Authored by Sophie Li via The Epoch Times,

        As Californians get ready to turn the page on 2022, hundreds of new laws will go into effect starting Jan. 1. From increasing the minimum wage to legalizing jaywalking to shielding criminal records, the new laws will impact employment, health care, housing, public safety, and consumer protection.

        The California State Capitol building in Sacramento on April 18, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

        Here’s a look at what to expect in 2023.

        Minimum Wage (SB 3)

        California’s minimum wage will increase by 50 cents to $15.50 per hour, which will also expand to nearly all workers—regardless of the number of employees at a business.

        This 3.33 percent increase is less than half of the 7.9 percent inflation increase between 2021 and 2022 calculated by California’s Department of Finance.

        According to the law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2016, if annual inflation increases by more than 7 percent, it triggers the minimum wage to increase.

        Currently, the minimum wage is $15 per hour for companies with 25 or more employees and $14 per hour for those with 25 or fewer employees.

        Jaywalking (AB 2147)

        Under the new “Freedom to Walk Act,” pedestrians will no longer be fined for crossing the street outside of designated intersections or crosswalks unless the person causes a hazard on the street.

        Supporters of the law state that it will reduce inequitable policing toward certain racial groups. Some also suggest that the law will encourage more people to walk instead of drive.

        Opponents worry that it will lead to more accidents and ultimately cause more pedestrian deaths.

        In California, the base fine for jaywalking is $25 and it can go up to $250 per ticket.

        COVID Misinformation (AB 2098)

        This law allows doctors to face discipline for spreading so-called misinformation or disinformation about COVID-19—including information about vaccine effectiveness and other treatments—and categorizes it as unprofessional conduct.

        Physicians and surgeons are regulated by the Medical Board. Under current law, the board is required to act against any licensed doctor who is charged with unprofessional conduct.

        Criminal Records (SB 731)

        At least 225,000 Californians with prior convictions or arrests will be able to have their records automatically sealed from criminal background checks due to a new law.

        While these records will be automatically sealed once people complete their sentence and go four years without new arrests, others will be able to petition a judge to have theirs sealed.

        In California, there are around 8 million people that have criminal records, according to Californians for Safety and Justice.

        Loitering (SB 357)

        A new California law decriminalizes loitering for the intent to engage in prostitution.

        Also known as the “Safer Streets for All Act,” the law was introduced last year by Sen. Scott Weiner (D-San Francisco). In a statement, Weiner said it “eliminates an anti-loitering offense that leads to harmful treatment of people for simply ‘appearing’ to be a sex worker.”

        However, opponents said that the law will place the community at risk by encouraging higher numbers of prostitutes and “Johns” in public. Los Angeles Sheriff Department officials also stated it will take a major tool away from law enforcement, especially for targeting sex buyers.

        Los Angeles Sheriffs Department (LASD) deputies patrol at Venice Beach in Los Angeles on June 16, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

        Parking Requirements (AB 2097)

        The law will prohibit cities across the state from enforcing a minimum number of parking spaces on a development project if the project is located within a half-mile of public transit.

        The law was established to support the development of affordable housing units by reducing the cost and land space required for development.

        Critics of the law say that it will, instead, reduce developers’ efforts to build affordable housing, because many cities are already reducing parking requirements as an incentive for developers to include affordable units in their projects.

        FAST Recovery Act (AB 257)

        The new law applies to fast-food chains that have 100 or more locations nationally and would create a council that would set industry-wide minimum standards on wages, working hours, and other conditions.

        Under the law, minimum wages could rise to as high as $22 an hour for 2023, with the option to increase further each year based on inflation.
         

        Read the rest here…

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 12:50

      • "Somebody Was Lying": Biden Doesn't Trust Secret Service Detail, Thinks They Fabricated Dog Biting Incident
        “Somebody Was Lying”: Biden Doesn’t Trust Secret Service Detail, Thinks They Fabricated Dog Biting Incident

        President Biden doesn’t trust members of his Secret Service detail, and thinks they lied about details of the dog biting incident involving his dog Major, according to a new book which covers the administration.

        According to author Chris Whipple in his book “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,” Biden’s distrust stems from the fact that some agents are strong supporters of former President Trump.

        “A bigger problem was Biden’s discomfort with his Secret Service detail; some of them were MAGA sympathizers. He didn’t trust them,” Whipple wrote, according to The Hill.

        Biden’s detail as president is much larger than it was when he was vice president, and now many agents are “MAGA sympathizers” and “the Secret Service is full of white ex-cops from the South who tend to be deeply conservative,” Whipple wrote.

        The Secret Service response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol after Trump tried to politicize the agency and made Tony Ornato deputy White House chief of staff for operations added to the president’s concerns. -The Hill

        “Surrounded by a new phalanx of strangers, Biden couldn’t help but wonder, Do these people really want me here?” wrote Whipple.

        What’s more, when news emerged that the Secret Service had deleted most messages from Jan. 6, Biden allegedly felt that the “Secret Service had looked both incompetent and politicized.”

        As for the dog – specifically, a March 2021 incident in which the president’s German shepherd, Major, allegedly bit a Secret Service agent – Biden was reportedly skeptical, and “wasn’t buying the details” – such as where the incident occurred, Whipple wrote. According to Biden, Secret Service agents are ‘never’ at the location of the incident – the second floor of the White House.

        “Somebody was lying, Biden thought, about the way the incident had gone down,” according to Whipple.

        Except there were two dog biting incidents; one on March 8, 2021, and another one several weeks later which took place on the White House South Lawn.

        Major, believed to be the first shelter rescue animal to live at the White House, received private training following the incident.

        Tyler Durden
        Sat, 12/31/2022 – 12:15

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      Dec 31

      Today’s News 31st December 2022

      • 2022's Danger Signs: From Totalitarian Paranoia To Authoritarian Madness
        2022’s Danger Signs: From Totalitarian Paranoia To Authoritarian Madness

        Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

        The danger signs were everywhere in 2022.

        With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, we were reminded that in the eyes of the government and its corporate accomplices, “we the people” possess no rights except for that which the Deep State grants on an as-needed basis.

        Totalitarian paranoia spiked. What we have been saddled with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it has conspired to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority. In a Machiavellian attempt to expand its powers, the government unleashed all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace in order to justify its demands for additional powers to protect “we the people” from emerging threats, whether legitimate, manufactured or overblown.

        The state of our nation suffered. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. The combined blowback from a contentious presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Americans being subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, and the criminalization of lawful activities.

        Thought crimes became a target for punishment. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly. In 2022, those who criticized the government—whether that criticism manifested itself in word, deed or thought—were flagged as dangerous alongside consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information.”

        Speech was muzzled. Those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech continued to push for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online. Of course, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act. If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

        Kill switches aimed to turn off more than just your car. Vehicle “kill switches” were sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, but they were a perfect metaphor for the government’s efforts to not only take control of our cars but also our freedoms and our lives. For too long, we have been captive passengers in a driverless car controlled by the government, losing more and more of our privacy and autonomy the further down the road we go.

        Currency went digital. No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough, so the government came up with a new plan to make it even easier for its agents to seize Americans’ bank account. In an Executive Order issued in March 2022, President Biden called for the federal government to consider establishing a form of digital money. Digital currency will provide the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.

        The government spoke in a language of violence. Police violence killed three people a day. Warrior cops—trained in the worst-case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—did not make us or themselves any safer. Despite this, President Biden’s pledged to expand law enforcement and so-called crime prevention through a $30 billion “Fund the Police” program.

        Cancel culture became more intolerant. Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs. Everything has now become fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

        Homes were invaded. Government agents routinely violated the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime used surveillance technology to invade homes: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices.

        Political theater kept the public distracted. Having devolved into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population, the political scene provided ample diversions with its televised Jan. 6 committee hearings, the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings, and more.

        Bodily integrity was undermined. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property “interest” in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Although the Supreme Court overturned its earlier rulings recognizing abortion as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment, it did nothing to resolve the larger problem that plagues us today: namely, that all along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the aged—the government continues to play fast and loose with the lives of the citizenry.

        The government’s fiscal insanity reached new heights. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) hit $30 trillion. That translates to roughly $242,000 per taxpayer. It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2051.

        Surveillance got creepier. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. With every new AI surveillance technology that was adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry were marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.

        Precrime became more fact than fiction. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies were used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating was done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. Where this becomes particularly dangerous is when the government takes preemptive steps to combat crime or abuse, or whatever the government has chosen to outlaw at any given time.

        The government waged psychological warfare on the nation. The government made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded. Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government weaponized violence; surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns; digital currencies, social media scores and censorship; desensitization campaigns; fear; genetics; and entertainment.

        Gun confiscation laws put a target on the back of every American. Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others) gained traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats. Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.

        The burden of proof was reversed. Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head. Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

        The Supreme Court turned America into a Constitution-free zone. Although the Court’s rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating. The bottom line: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.

        The FBI went rogue. The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people ran the gamut from surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, and intimidation tactics to harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.

        The government waged war on political freedom. In more and more cases, the government declared war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

        The military industrial complex waged more wars. America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.

        The Deep State went global. We’ve been inching closer to a new world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. This new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations owes its existence in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations. This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

        Authoritarian madness escalated. You didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to recognize the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate. When any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and an utter disregard for the rights of the individual, there should be reason for concern.

        The takeaway: the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

        As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests—as it always has—at the local level, with “we the people.”

        Unless we work together to push back against the government’s overreach, excesses and abuse, 2023 will be yet another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom.

        Tyler Durden
        Fri, 12/30/2022 – 23:30

      • Suicide Among The Most Common Causes Of Death In The US
        Suicide Among The Most Common Causes Of Death In The US

        Homicide as well as suicide are common causes of death for young age groups in the United States, second only to accidents for those between the ages of 15 and 34.

        After that age, cancer, heart disease and more recently Covid-19 become bigger killers.

        Even for children aged 5-9, homicide is a big danger and was the fourth most common cause of death for the age group in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

        For those 10 to 14 years old, both homicide and suicide are among the top 4 killers.

        According to a study published this week in scientific journal Jama Pediatrics, homicide rates in children have been rising in recent years, increasing by as much as 50 percent for Black children and those between the ages of 16 and 17 just between 2018 and 2020.

        They also shot up for adults in 2020 and 2021. Suicide rates also increased for those under the age of 45 in the past decade, including very young children from the age of 5.

        Infographic: Suicide Among the Most Common Causes of Death in the U.S. | Statista

        You will find more infographics at Statista

        Of approximately 46,000 suicides recorded by the CDC in the U.S. in 2020, between 6,000 and 8,000 deaths occurred per ten-year age cohort above the age of 15.

        Despite being a relatively large killer of children who are 10 to 14 years old, only around 600 suicides occurred in this age group in 2020. The situation is similar for homicides, where around 200-300 death in the age groups 5-9 and 10-14 constitute rank 4 of the most common causes of death. Between 6,000 and 7,000 homicide deaths occurred for those 15 to 24 years old and those 25 to 34 years old in 2020.

        For older age groups, the number decreases gradually.

        Tyler Durden
        Fri, 12/30/2022 – 23:00

      • Biden Admin Expands Crackdown On Ghost Guns
        Biden Admin Expands Crackdown On Ghost Guns

        Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

        The Biden administration has dialed up its crackdown on so-called “ghost guns” by issuing guidance that basically expands the definition of what “readily converted” means in a new federal rule and making more do-it-yourself pistol parts subject to restrictions.

        President Joe Biden holds up a ghost gun kit during an event in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on April 11, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

        In an open letter to firearms dealers (pdf) dated Dec. 27, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) told firearm vendors that nearly-complete handgun frames or receivers—basically the pistol grip and firing mechanism—will be treated the same as fully completed firearms.

        Ghost Gun Rule

        Firearm vendors who sell near-complete pistol frames and receivers—often as kits that can be relatively easily turned into untraceable homemade guns—were hit with the new rule in August, which required that frames and receivers that could be “readily converted” into fully operational guns are subject to the same regulations as traditional firearms.

         President Joe Biden holds up a ghost gun kit during an event at the White House in Washington on April 11, 2022. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

        The August regulation, dubbed the Ghost Gun Rule, meant that kits containing partially complete frames or receivers plus assembly tools and instructions were subject to licensing, background check, and serialization requirements.

        But ambiguity around the definition of the word “readily” in the regulation meant that some vendors continued to sell nearly-complete unserialized frames and receivers as standalone products while additional components needed to finalize their at-home manufacture were offered separately, or by third parties.

        Such was the argument made in an October letter (pdf) by a dozen or so Democrat lawmakers to the ATF and Justice Department, which claimed that a number of ghost gun companies were continuing to sell unserialized frames and receivers by interpreting “readily” in a way that amounted to a loophole.

        A “ghost gun” is displayed before the start of an event about gun-related violence in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on April 11, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

        “The final rule, however, is clear and unambiguous: a nearly-complete frame or receiver is a firearm,” the lawmakers wrote.

        “The rule does not cover only frames and receivers sold as part of a kit, but also frames and receivers that can be readily completed,” they continued, urging the ATF to issue enforcement guidance that basically expands the definition of what it means for pistol components to be considered as “readily converted” into a functional firearm.

        They asked the ATF and the Justice Department to consider a nearly-completed frame or receiver as “readily convertible” not only when it’s sold as part of a kit containing things like jigs, molds, templates, and tools for assembly but also when such auxiliary equipment is available to the general public.

        “In particular, we urge the Department and ATF to confirm that how ATF reviews the ‘readily convertible’ nature of a nearly-complete frame or receiver will not be limited to what tools, equipment, and instructions are included in the same sale or distribution of the part sold, but rather premised on the tools, equipment, and instructions that are readily available to the general public, including those easily obtainable online through third parties,” the lawmakers wrote.

        ATF agreed and by issuing the new guidance, the agency is making clear that it will now be requiring relevant firearm frames to have serial numbers and to be sold by licensed dealers who carry out background checks just like with fully completed guns.

        “Ghost guns” seized in federal law enforcement actions are displayed at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) field office in Glendale, Calif., on April 18, 2022. (Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)

        “Today’s open letter is another important step in implementing the crucial public safety rule regarding privately made firearms, or Ghost Guns,” ATF Director Steven Dettelbach said in a press release. “Ghost Guns can kill like other firearms if they are in the wrong hands, so they are treated as firearms under the law.” 

        According to explanatory remarks to the Ghost Gun Rule published in the Federal Register, from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2021, there were around 45,000 homemade ghost guns recovered by law enforcement from potential crime scenes, including 692 homicides or attempted homicides.

        Before Regulating ‘Ghost Guns,’ Enforce Existing Laws

        Several current and former law enforcement members told The Epoch Times that the proliferation of ghost guns at crime scenes is a problem, but that being insufficiently tough on repeat offenders under current laws is a much bigger problem.

        “If we are going to invest energy to fight crime, we should invest energy to get repeat offenders off the street,” Al Maresca, a deputy U.S. marshal in the District of Maryland, told The Epoch Times in an earlier interview.

        “Felon in possession of a gun is already illegal, a straw purchase is already illegal—there are all these other laws on the books that we can be focusing our efforts on,” he added.

        Roberto Alaniz, a recently retired sergeant from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), told The Epoch Times that focusing on ghost guns is unlikely to make a dent in violent crime.

        Read more here…

        Tyler Durden
        Fri, 12/30/2022 – 22:30

      • Seattle Tech Worker Inspired By 'Office Space' Nets $300,000 In Alleged Software Scheme
        Seattle Tech Worker Inspired By ‘Office Space’ Nets $300,000 In Alleged Software Scheme

        A Seattle tech worker was charged this week in a criminal theft scheme which netted around $300,000 from his employer.

        28-year-old Ermenildo Castro of Tacoma allegedly told detectives he was inspired by the 90’s movie “Office Space” when he allegedly wrote software code to manipulate shipping fees paid to his employer, Zulily.com, to go into his own bank accounts.

        According to KOMO news, citing court documents, Castro netted around $260,000 in shipping fees.

        What’s more, he used his position as a software engineer to alter the price of around $41,000 in merchandise for ‘pennies on the dollar.’

        According to police, the company’s cybersecurity staff found a document on Castro’s laptop titled ‘OfficeSpace project’, which outlined Castro’s scheme to ‘cleanup evidence’ by manipulating audit logs and disabling alarm logging. The theft began in February and by March the company had identified discrepancies in the shipping fees being charged to customers, an SPD report states.

        Castro was part of the team assigned to investigate the discrepancies in shipping fees, according to the report. –KOMO

        Investigators for the company eventually caught on to Castro’s scheme and visited his house, where they found several boxes of merchandise piled up in the driveway and around the front door. 

        He claimed the orders, which included more than 1,000 items, were sent to his house in error.

        “When asked why he never returned the items to Zulily, he said that once they fired him his opinion was, ‘f— ‘em’,” reads the police report.

        Seattle police wrote a narrative on how Castro’s alleged scheme was like “Office Space.”

        “In the Initech office, the insecure Peter Gibbons hates his job. His best friends are two software engineers Michael Bolton and Samir Nagheenanajar, that also hate Initech. When he discovers that Michael and Samir will be downsized, they decide to plant a virus in the banking system to embezzle fraction of cents on each financial operation into Peter’s account. However[,] Michael commits a mistake in the software on the decimal place and they siphon off over $300,000. The desperate trio tries to fix the problem, return the money and avoid going to prison.”

        Apparently Castro thought he could avoid ‘pound me in the ass prison.’

        Tyler Durden
        Fri, 12/30/2022 – 22:00

      • Are You A "Thought Criminal"?
        Are You A “Thought Criminal”?

        Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

        If we are not free to think what we want, we do not have a free society.  It really is that simple.  Unfortunately, there is now an overwhelming consensus among elitists in the western world that radical measures must be instituted to control what people think.  If you insist on being a rebel, there is a very good chance that you will be punished for holding unorthodox views.  You won’t necessarily be put in prison, but our system has countless other ways that it can punish you.  For example, those that insist on embracing unacceptable thoughts will find that their career choices are quite limited, and there are certain positions that they will be prohibited from ever holding under any circumstances.  Not only that, but if your thoughts are offensive enough you may have a financial account suddenly shut down or credit denied for seemingly no reason.  This sort of thing was unheard of a decade ago, but now it is happening all the time.  Of course you can forget about having any sort of a substantial social media presence if your thoughts do not conform to current “societal norms”.  Even the “free speech platforms” are banning and shadowbanning countless accounts every single day.

        If any of the things that I have just described have happened to you, that is probably because you are a “thought criminal”.

        You are not supposed to contradict the conditioning that you have received from our education system, from the news media, from our politicians and from the corporate entertainment that you are being fed for hours each day.

        When you deviate from socially acceptable viewpoints, you are guilty of “thoughtcrime”.  This is how “thoughtcrime” is defined by Wikipedia…

        Thoughtcrime is a word coined by George Orwell in his 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It describes a person’s politically unorthodox thoughts, such as beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc (English Socialism), the dominant ideology of Oceania. In the official language of Newspeak, the word crimethink describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of the Party controls the speech, the actions, and the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania.

        Sadly, we truly have become an “Orwellian society” at this point.

        In fact, a woman in the UK was just arrested for thoughts that she was thinking within her own mind…

        The U.K. March for Life director was recently arrested after police found her praying silently outside of an abortion clinic, according to a press release by Alliance Defending Freedom U.K.

        Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a charity volunteer and Christian, was approached by police officers outside of BPAS Robert Clinic in Birmingham, England, and asked if she was praying, according to ADF’s press release. Vaughan-Spruce told the officers she “might be praying silently” and was later arrested.

        “It’s abhorrently wrong that I was searched, arrested, interrogated by police and charged simply for praying in the privacy of my own mind,” Vaughan-Spruce stated in the release. “Nobody should be criminalized for thinking and for praying, in a public space in the UK.”

        Once she was taken in to the station, you would think that those in charge would realize that a huge mistake has just been made.

        But instead of releasing her, she was ruthlessly interrogated.

        Apparently they were absolutely determined to discover whatever evil thoughts that this vicious thought criminal had been thinking.

        And apparently they found something, because now she has been charged on four counts…

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

        She insists that she is not a criminal.

        But she doesn’t understand that the world has changed.

        Anyone that thinks unauthorized thoughts in now a criminal in this system.

        And at this moment there are countless intelligence agents all over the western world that are scouring social media sites for more thought criminals.

        Thanks to the release of the Twitter Files, we now know that the FBI has spent an enormous amount of time, effort and energy looking for unauthorized thoughts on our largest social media platforms.

        When the FBI found unauthorized thoughts on Twitter, requests were made to ban specific accounts.  This represented a gross violation of our First Amendment rights, and apparently it kept happening over and over again.

        The FBI was confronted about this, and this is how they responded…

        “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our tradition, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.

        As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.

        The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public.

        It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

        And it has also come out that the FBI has been paying Twitter and other social media companies millions of dollars for some reason…

        The Federal Bureau of Investigation is declining to specify what other social media companies the federal agency gave money to after Fox News confirmed that it paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million.

        FBI officials told Fox News that the nearly $3.5 million payment to Twitter was a “reimbursement” for the “reasonable costs and expenses associated with their response to a legal process… For complying with legal requests, and a standard procedure.”

        The FBI officials also said that Twitter isn’t the only social media company that is being paid by the federal agency, telling Fox News “We don’t just reimburse Twitter.”

        What exactly was that money for?

        We deserve to know.

        New Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently stated that “almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.”

        Reading that should chill you to the core.

        Of course many other big tech companies have also been colluding with the government to suppress free speech, and one recent survey found that the vast majority of Americans want answers…

        A recent poll shows that 63 percent of Americans want Congress to investigate “whether the FBI was involved in censoring information on social media sites.”

        The Twitter Files disclosures show that not only did Twitter collude with the FBI, it also worked with other government agencies like the CIA and the Pentagon to suppress information.

        Musk said in a post on Dec. 27 that “*Every* social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government.”

        As time rolls along, those that choose not to conform to “societal norms” will be increasingly pushed to the utter fringes of society.

        If you continue to choose to be an “independent thinker”, getting a “good job” will be exceedingly difficult.

        Just think about it.  Right now, how many of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are “independent thinkers” that have unacceptable belief systems?

        If you want to rise in the pyramidal structure of our society, you have got to believe what the system tells you to believe.

        Of course if all independent thought is eliminated, our society will become the sort of dystopian nightmare that authors such as George Orwell and myself have been warning about for a very long time.

        Even though I do not like much of what my fellow Americans have to say, I vigorously defend the right to say those things.

        Freedom of thought and freedom of speech are non-negotiable, and our system of government simply will not work without them.

        *  *  *

        It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

        Tyler Durden
        Fri, 12/30/2022 – 21:30

      • Russia To Supply Iran With 24 Advanced Sukhoi Fighter Jets
        Russia To Supply Iran With 24 Advanced Sukhoi Fighter Jets

        Starting a week ago reports began emerging in Middle East regional media, including in both Iranian and Israeli news sources, that Russia will soon provide Islamic Republic with dozens of Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets. Israeli reports are even citing “Western intelligence officials” in making the claim.

        Iranian state Tasnim wrote days ago that “Iran will soon receive 24 of the fourth-generation twin-engine, super-maneuverable fighter jets that are primarily used for air superiority missions,” in what seems to be some level of confirmation.

        The state-run outlet noted that Iran hasn’t been able to acquire any new aircraft from outside countries in years, and the last time jets were transferred from Russia was in the 1990’s.

        The Times of Israel also recently reported the following, citing the country’s Channel 12 network: 

        The report by Channel 12 said the deal could include as many as 24 jets that were originally intended for Egypt, in a deal that the United States thwarted.

        This left Moscow looking for a new potential buyer, which it has reportedly found in Tehran. The report comes after Iranian media said in September that Tehran was weighing such a purchase.

        Intelligence indicated that Iranian pilots were already using the jets for training, the report said, without elaborating.

        In all of these reports, the sourcing is anonymous and thus somewhat dubious, given also even Iranian state media is citing “reports say…”. However, the fact that state media is running headlines about acquiring the Sukhoi Su-35s is hugely significant nonetheless. 

        It could mean that Tehran and Moscow are at least in the early phases of negotiating such a transfer. This would indicate that their deepened military ties which has been on display throughout the Ukraine war, based largely on Iran controversially supplying its ‘Kamikaze’ drones which have been in use by the Russian army in Ukraine, is going the other way too as far as the defense supply chain.

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

        On Thursday, Forbes asked the qestion: who will operate these sophisticated and advanced jets if they are acquired? Likely there would be a significant Russian-overseen training program…

        The IRGC-AF has never operated more advanced aircraft than those vintage Soviet-era Su-22 Fitter or Su-25 Frogfoot attack planes — ex-Iraqi warplanes that fled from Operation Desert Storm to Iran in 1991, which Tehran promptly confiscated. The IRGC-AF returned the Su-25s to Iraq in mid-2014 to help Baghdad fend off the threat posed by the rampaging Islamic State (ISIS) group.

        Forbes further reviews of Iran’s ageing air force planes: “Aside from procuring Chengdu F-7 fighters from China during the 1980s, post-1979 Iran only made one significant fighter procurement, in 1990 when it bought MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter jets and Su-24 Fencer bombers for the IRIAF from the Soviet Union.”

        Thus any advanced fighter transfer could see the rare instance of Russian advisers training IRGC pilots. Meanwhile, the US and UK have continued to ratchet up sanctions on Iran’s defense manufacturing sector, especially in light of the drone supplies which appear to be ongoing in relation to the war in Ukraine.

        Tyler Durden
        Fri, 12/30/2022 – 21:00

      • Millions Of Earners, Businesses To See State Tax Cuts Beginning On Jan. 1
        Millions Of Earners, Businesses To See State Tax Cuts Beginning On Jan. 1

        Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

        With state legislatures entering their third sessions since the 2020 pandemic pumped trillions in federal recovery and stimulus assistance into state and local government coffers, tax reform across a range of levies is among front-burner priorities for lawmakers in 2023.

        Taxpayers across at least 38 states will see significant changes in state taxes in 2023 with 11 states trimming their income tax levies beginning Jan. 1. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

        During 2022 sessions, Washington, D.C.-based Tax Foundation reports at least 38 states adopted “noteworthy tax changes” with most going into effect on Jan. 1, including trims in personal income tax rates in 11 states and flat income tax structures being implemented in three states, Arizona, Idaho, and Mississippi on New Year’s Day.

        Here is a round-up of “noteworthy tax changes” that go into effect Jan. 1 provided by analysts at the Tax Foundation, Council On State Taxation, and Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:

        * ARIZONA: A flat personal income tax rate of 2.5 percent will replace Arizona’s tiered, or progressive, income tax structure that had a top rate of 4.5 percent.

        * IDAHO: Under 2022’s House Bill 1, Idaho will move to a flat personal income tax rate of 5.8 percent, replacing a progressive tax structure with a top assessment rate of 6 percent, on Jan. 3.

        * INDIANA: Under 2022’s HB 1002, Indiana’s flat personal  income tax rate will drop from 3.23 to 3.15 percent through 2024. Afterwards, the personal income tax rate will incrementally decline to 2.9 percent by 2029, depending on state revenues.

        * IOWA: On Jan. 1, Iowa’s nine personal income tax rates will be consolidated into four, with the top declining from 8.53 to 6 percent. The state is set to implement a flat income tax rate of 3.9 percent in 2026.

        Also beginning in 2023, Iowa will exempt retirement income, certain farm rental income, diapers, and menstrual products from taxation. The state will phase out its inheritance tax by 2025, with this levy also being incrementally slashed beginning in 2023.

        On the other side of the ledger, Iowans will no longer be able to claim a state deduction on federal income and property taxes.

        * KENTUCKY: Under 2022’s HB 8, Kentucky’s income taxes will go down, and some sales taxes will go up on Jan. 1.

        The state’s flat personal income tax rate will dip from 5 to 4.5 percent in 2023 and to 4 percent in 2024. Depending on state revenues, state lawmakers plan to implement further incremental cuts until the personal income tax is eliminated.

        The income tax cuts will be countered by new or increased sales taxes on a range of services, such as a 6 percent levy on limousine, car rental, ride-sharing, car-sharing, and taxicab services. A 1 percent transient room tax will now apply to campgrounds and RV parks.

        Kentucky will also impose a new excise tax of 3 cents per kilowatt hour for electric vehicle power distributed in the state by an electric vehicle power dealer or by electric charging stations located on state property. 

        * MISSISSIPPI: Under 2022’s HB 531, Mississippi will adopt a flat personal income tax beginning Jan. 1. The state’s 4 percent levy on income between $5,000 and $10,000 will be eliminated and a 5 percent tax on income above $10,000 imposed. 

        Under the bill, the 5 percent flat rate will decrease to 4.7 percent in 2024, 4.4 percent in 2025, and 4  percent in 2026.

        But hold everything: Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and House Speaker Philip Gunn (R-Clinton) will spearhead divergent efforts to eliminate the state’s personal income tax altogether in 2023.

        * MISSOURI: Under 2022’s Senate Bill 3, Missouri’s top personal income tax rate will be reduced from 5.3 to 4.95 percent, and the amount of income exempt from income taxation will increase from $100 to $1,000. The measure calls for incremental reductions in the top income rate levy to 4.5 percent.

        Also on Jan. 1, Missouri will become the last state to assess state and local sales taxes on remote or online transactions under a 2021 bill.

        * NEBRASKA: Under 2021 and 2022 bills, Nebraska will reduce its top personal income tax rate from 6.84 to 6.64 percent, and in its top corporate tax rate from 7.5 to 7.25 percent. The state will lower its top corporate income tax rate to 5.84 percent by 2027. 

        Also beginning in 2023, beneficiaries can deduct 60 percent of Social Security benefits, up from 40 percent in 2022, and exemptions from taxation for retirement and military pension incomes will be increased. 

        Property owners will also get some breaks in 2023 under 2022’s Nebraska Property Tax Incentive Act, which sets aside $660.7 million for income tax credits that will offset portions of school district and community college property taxes.

        * NEW HAMPSHIRE: Under 2022’s HB 2, New Hampshire will start phasing out its income tax on interest and dividends income, lowering the levy from 5 to 4 percent on Jan. 1. The rate will decline by 1 percent until the tax is no more by 2027.

        Under 2022’s HB. 1221, the state’s corporate income tax, or ‘Business Profits Tax,’ will drip from 7.6 to 7.5 percent beginning Jan. 1.

        * NEW YORK: Under 2022’s SB 8009, New York will accelerate reductions in the state’s personal income tax rated for “middle-income earners” first adopted in 2016. 

        Beginning Jan. 1, the tax rate applied to income between $13,900 and $80,650 for single filers, and between $27,900 and $161,550 for joint filers, will be 5.5 percent, down from 5.85 percent. The tax rate on income between $80,650 and $215,400 for single filers, and between $161,500 and $323,200 for joint filers will decline from 6.25 percent to 6 percent. 

        Also beginning Jan. 1, New York will resume assessing its gas tax. The state’s 16 cents per gallon motor fuel tax had been suspended since June 1, 2022.

        * NORTH CAROLINA: Under 2021’s SB 105, North Carolina’s flat personal income tax rate will decline from 4.99 to 4.75 percent on Jan. 1. 

        The rate is set to continue declining 3.99 percent by 2027, with North Carolina’s current 6.9 percent corporate income tax to disappear entirely by 2030.

        Also beginning in 2023, the state’s franchise tax will be a simplified net worth levy instead of the three different franchise tax liability rates previously assessed.

        * ALABAMA: Under 2022’s HB 162, Alabama will exempt the first $6,000 of retirement and military pension income for those 65 or older from income taxes beginning Jan. 1.

        State lawmakers in 2022 also revised Alabama’s “business privilege tax,” reducing the minimum payment of $100 to $50 a year. 

        * DELAWARE: Under 2022’s SB 188, Delaware will increase its exemption from taxation on retirement and military pension income from $2,000 to $12,500 for those 60 and older beginning Jan. 1.

        * RHODE ISLAND: Under 2022’s HB 7123, Rhode Island will boost its exemption on taxation on retirement and military pension income from $15,000 to $20,000 beginning Jan. 1. 

        * ILLINOIS: Under SB 157, Illinois’ Child Tax Credit will increase from 18 to 20 percent of the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) beginning Jan. 1.

        On the other side of the ledger, the state’s gas tax inflation adjustment will be implemented on Jan. 1 following a six-month freeze. The state’s 42.3 cent tax on a gallon of gas will increase by 3.1 cents. Another inflation adjustment will be implemented in July.

        * ARKANSAS: Under 2022’s HB 1002, reductions in personal and corporate income tax rates will be accelerated. Beginning Jan. 1, the top tax rate on personal income will dip from 5.5 to 4.9 percent, and the state’s corporate income tax rate will go down from 5.9 to 5.3 percent.

        * PENNSYLVANIA: Under 2022’s HB 1342, Pennsylvania’s corporate income tax rate will be reduced from 9.99 percent to 8.99 percent on Jan. 1. The corporate tax rate will decline by a half-percent until it reaches 4.99 percent by 2031. 

        * OKLAHOMA: Under 2022’s HB 3418 in May 2022, Oklahoma will become the first state to make permanent a 100 percent bonus depreciation allowance for investments in machinery and equipment beginning Jan. 1. 

        The state will also require that local sales taxes be levied on retail sales of tangible personal property in 2023.

        * VIRGINIA: Under several 2022 bills, Virginia will exempt groceries and essential hygiene products, including menstrual products, from the state’s 1.5 percent sales tax beginning Jan. 1.

        Also, retired military pensioners 55 and older will be eligible to subtract up to $20,000 in military benefits from taxable income in 2023, up from $10,000. That exemption will increase to $30,000 in 2024 and $40,000 in 2025.

        * KANSAS: Under 2022’s HB 2106, Kansas will begin phasing out its 6.5 percent sales tax on groceries to 4 percent on Jan. 1. The sales tax on groceries will decline to 2 percent in 2024 before disappearing in 2025. 

        * COLORADO: Under 2022’s HB 22-1055, Colorado will exempt diapers and menstrual products from sales taxes.

        Read the rest here…

        Tyler Durden
        Fri, 12/30/2022 – 20:35

      • Brazil's First Corn Shipment To China Indicates Shifting Trade Flows Could Endanger US Dominance
        Brazil’s First Corn Shipment To China Indicates Shifting Trade Flows Could Endanger US Dominance

        Brazil, the world’s second-largest corn exporter, sent its first vessel carrying corn to China this month. Global trade flows are shifting away from the US, the largest exporter of corn, as China reduces its reliance on the Midwestern US farm belt. 

        Commodity traders have tracked the Star Iris, the bulk carrier hauling 68,000 metric tons of grain for Chinese trader Cofco Corp., which left Brazil late last month and just arrived in Singapore. 

        Bloomberg said Beijing decided to purchase Brazilian grains in May to “reduce dependence on the US and replace supplies from Ukraine cut off by the Russian invasion.” 

        Reuters recently quoted Brazil’s National Association of Grain Exporters as saying Brazilian corn exports could surge next year because of China. 

        There’s still a while until Brazil threatens the US dominance of the China ag market. More than 20 bulk carriers with US corn are currently en route to China. Still, Brazil’s first corn shipment to China might indicate global trade flows are shifting. 

        Tyler Durden
        Fri, 12/30/2022 – 20:10

      • How Did EVs Handle America's Arctic Blast?
        How Did EVs Handle America’s Arctic Blast?

        Authored by Ross Pomeroy via RealClearScience.com,

        There are now an estimated 1.7 million electric vehicles (EVs) on U.S. roads, compared to roughly 400,000 in spring 2018. That means that a lot more Americans are experiencing the joys and pitfalls of EV ownership, from silent, swift acceleration and emission-free driving on the positive side to slower fueling times and shorter driving ranges on the negative side.

        More Americans are also learning that frigid temperatures affect EVs differently than internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, chiefly by cutting into their driving range to a greater extent. While a typical ICE vehicle might have its range reduced by 15% to 25% in below-freezing temperatures, an EV’s range will be slashed 20% to 50% depending upon driving speed, temperature, and interior climate preferences. Combustion reactions occur more inefficiently at colder temperatures, accounting for the range decline in ICE vehicles. But cold slows the physical and chemical reactions in EV batteries to a larger degree, limiting the energy and power the battery can deliver to the motors. Moreover, while ICE vehicles utilize otherwise wasted heat from the engine to warm car interiors in winter, EVs use electric heaters to perform much of the climate control, further draining the already hamstrung battery.

        The Arctic blast that chilled much of the “Lower 48” last week showcased the EV range hit to more Americans than ever, and also yielded a few more lessons.

        EV owners sounded off about their experiences on social media and subreddits. Here are a few of the takeaways:

        1. EVs are not ready for frigid road trips. 

        I warned about this in August: Driving an EV on the highway in extreme cold will produce a range loss of 40% or more. EV owners of various brands traveling for the holidays shared numerous stories verifying this annoying (and potentially dangerous) reality. Drivers traveling in temperatures at or around zero with a headwind could go only 100 to 150 miles before needing to stop and recharge, depending upon the car, significantly increasing travel time. When they did charge, they had to deal with another disconcerting problem with EVs and winter…

        2. EV fast-chargers operate much more slowly in extreme cold, if they work at all.

         The colder the EV battery, the slower the rate of charge that it will accept, making “fast-charging” in subzero temperatures a potentially miserable and plodding experience. Think a 45 to 60 minute charge instead of a 25 to 35 minute one. To top it off, users reported that fast-charging equipment, particularly from Electrify America, often just didn’t work in temperatures below -10 °F. Tesla’s proprietary Superchargers didn’t seem to have the same reliability issues. The generally sorry state of charging infrastructure shed light on another takeaway…

        3. EVs driven in regions with a cold winter need to be charged at home. 

        Preferably with a garage. Owners simply can’t rely on public infrastructure in its present state with current battery technology. However, this situation could easily change in five to ten years with novel batteries that suffer less range loss and more widely available chargers, preferably housed indoor.

        4. Aside from range issues, EVs handled the Arctic air well. 

        Owners reported that their cars started without issue, drove well (albeit with slightly reduced power), and heated quickly thanks to their fast-acting electric heaters. For drivers who didn’t need to worry about traveling long distances, their EVs were functional, comfortable, and relatively untroubled by the cold.

        Tyler Durden
        Fri, 12/30/2022 – 19:45

      • Sullivan To Visit Israel, Meet With Netanyahu, On Concerns Of Democratic Backsliding
        Sullivan To Visit Israel, Meet With Netanyahu, On Concerns Of Democratic Backsliding

        On Thursday we took note of President Joe Biden’s strained and slightly awkward congratulation message sent to newly sworn-in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his most hard-right wing and religious government in the nation’s history.

        In issuing the formal congratulations, Biden stressed that his administration will “oppose policies that endanger” the two-state solution or “contradict our mutual interests and values” – given Netanyahu’s newly formed far-right government has vowed precisely to expand West Bank settlements, directly threatening the possibility of the kind of future two-state solution Washington says it’s long sought.

        On Friday it’s been revealed the White House is planning to dispatch national security adviser Jake Sullivan to Israel after the start of the new year, in mid-January.

        White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, via AP

        Israeli and US officials confirmed to Axios that Sullivan will hold talks with PM Netanyahu over his government’s controversial policies, especially the most concerning ones which threaten to harm US-Israeli ties.

        Listed among Sullivan and the White House’s list of concerns is the potential for Israel’s backsliding on democracy and human rights, given the new government plans to legalize Jewish outposts in the occupied West Bank.

        According to Axios: 

        • U.S. concerns extend to policies that could harm Israeli democracy.
        • Those include measures that would decrease the independence of Israel’s judicial system, and challenge the rights of its Arab minority and the LGBTQ+ communities.

        What’s more is that a visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken could soon follow the Sullivan trip. While high-ranking US officials have frequently visited Israel across US administrations, and Israel continues receiving $3.3 billion annually in foreign military aid from America, the hardline make-up of the new government has apparently sent the White House scrambling.

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        Other issues expected to be focus US-Israel intense dialogue in the coming months will likely be Iran and its nuclear program, as well as normalization efforts with Saudi Arabia.

        Netanyahu is expected to get more hawkish on Iran, and could mull the possibility of preemptive strikes on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities. As for the Saudis, the new prime minister has been vocal of late in wanting to normalize relations, with the Trump era Abraham Accords serving as the foundation.

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 19:20

        • Bovard: Liberals Learned Nothing In 2022
          Bovard: Liberals Learned Nothing In 2022

          Authored by Jim Bovard,

          Though 2022 was a feast for cynics, The Washington Post is confident that next year will be much happier — at least for Democrats. The DC newspaper this week published a piece called “15 Reasons You Should be Hopeful for 2023.”It should have been called ­“liberals have learned nothing in the Biden era.”

          The vast power of the Justice Department is at the top of the article’s list for reasons for “hope.” Post columnist Jennifer Rubin gushes over the likelihood that Donald Trump will be indicted on criminal charges and hectors readers: “Accountability is a critical component for democracies, and . . . we are seeing the guardrails of democracy and the rule of law reestablished.”

          But the Post’s glorified guardrails include a “Do Not Enter” sign for Hunter Biden’s laptop and plenty of other federal rascality.

          Post columnist E.J. Dionne whoops up “the next generation” and valorizes “democratization powered by the energy of the young.” But the most visible example of Millennials’ and Gen Z’s activism is their endless clamoring to have their federal student debt expunged. When did forcing other people to pay your debts become the height of idealism?

          Post columnist Jonathan Capehart trumpets the “Democrats’ Senate Majority” as the Great Hope of 2023. Capehart says that Senate majority was achieved “by some kind of gravity-defying political sorcery (and incredible candidates).” He didn’t mention the shift to mail-in ballots, or President Biden’s shameless demagoguery (denouncing Republicans as fascists) on the campaign trail.Regardless, Democratic senators will help safeguard “the constitutional rights that make us a beacon for the world.” As long as the Post continues ignoring how federal agencies trample those constitutional rights, Americans will live happily ever after.

          Post cartoonist Michael de ­Adder finds hope in “A less polarized world.” But that is no thanks to de Adder. When Canadian truckers protested the Trudeau government’s compulsory-vaccine mandate, de Adder ridiculed their convoy as the incarnation of “fascism” and portrayed truckers as mindless sheep.

          Post columnist Helaine Olen ­laments that “the past few years have not been kind to in-person gatherings,” leaving people “isolated.” Happily, people are “again going to gatherings large and small.” This is “no fault” punditry at its worst. It would be bad form to castigate the politicians and officials whose lockdowns destroyed freedom, subverted education and spurred soaring rates of suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism that dismally failed to stop the spread of COVID. Instead, people are supposed to forget everything that happened before they were let out of their cages.

          On the same day that the Post published its “15 reasons for hope” piece, it gave a booster shot to the hatred and intolerance permeating liberals and much of the ­media. The Post proudly revealed that its investigation of more than 400 statues, paintings and other artworks in the US Capitol had discovered representations of “141 enslavers and 13 Confederates.” Does the Post favor Stalin-style photo editing? If the Post expanded its list of villains to include presidents and congressmen who violated the Constitution, the US Capitol would have more empty space than a looted Dollar General store.

          The Post omitted one of the biggest reasons why liberals are hopeful for 2023.

          “Big Brother is protecting you,” Mayor Adams declared last week. The fierce backlash against Elon Musk for exposing FBI censorship of social media vivifies how liberals trust federal blindfolds to keep people in their place, paying and obeying. Perhaps liberals are confident that G-men will yank the same strings to boost Biden’s ­reelection campaign that they illegally pulled to aid his 2020 ­victory.

          Regardless of the Post’s wacky list, there are plenty of reasons for hope next year. Republican-controlled congressional committees could expose so many federal crimes that even The Washington Post will have to notice. Backlashes in financial markets may compel politicians to cease spending trillions of dollars that they don’t have. And more Americans are finally recognizing that, regardless of Biden’s preening or the media’s cover-ups, the federal government is the most dangerous threat to their rights and ­liberties.

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 18:55

        • Researcher Reveals Google Home Speakers Could've Been Hijacked And Turned Into Wiretaps
          Researcher Reveals Google Home Speakers Could’ve Been Hijacked And Turned Into Wiretaps

          Security researcher Matt Kunze revealed a serious vulnerability in Google smart home speakers that could’ve enabled threat actors to gain remote access over the devices.

          Kunze was experimenting with his own Google Home speaker in early 2021 when he found a hacker could install a ‘backdoor’ account on the device over the web. He detailed the security flaw at length on his blog, indicating someone could send commands to the speaker remotely, access its microphone, scrape Wi-Fi passwords, and access other devices on the network. 

          He said the hacker would have to trick the target or victim into installing a malicious Android app, which allowed the attacker’s account to connect with the smart speaker. Once the hacker was in, the microphone in the Google Home speaker would be easily accessible to snoop on conversations. 

          The victim would be clueless about the hack. Kunze said, “the only thing they might notice is that the device’s LEDs turn solid blue, but they’d probably just assume it’s updating the firmware or something.” 

          He reported the security flaw to Google in early 2021, and a patch was provided to all devices in April of the same year. The tech giant rewarded him with more than $100,000 for his efforts. 

          “I was recently rewarded a total of $107,500 by Google for responsibly disclosing security issues in the Google Home smart speaker that allowed an attacker within wireless proximity to install a “backdoor” account on the device, enabling them to send commands to it remotely over the internet, access its microphone feed, and make arbitrary HTTP requests within the victim’s LAN (which could potentially expose the Wi-Fi password or provide the attacker direct access to the victim’s other devices). These issues have since been fixed,” he wrote on his blog. 

          “It’s worth noting that Google Home was released in 2016, scheduled routines were added in 2018, and the Local Home SDK was introduced in 2020, so an attacker finding the issue before April 2021 would have had plenty of time to take advantage,” Tech blog Bleeping Computer pointed out. 

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 18:30

        • The Twitter Files Have Confirmed (Again) That Conspiracy Theorists Are Not Crazy
          The Twitter Files Have Confirmed (Again) That Conspiracy Theorists Are Not Crazy

          Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper blog,

          So…it turns out we crazy conspiracy theorists aren’t so crazy after all. In fact, we can knock “crazy” right off that moniker. Again. Elon Musk has allowed the curtain to be pulled back on Twitter to reveal corruption, collusion, and straight-up propaganda that have changed the course of American history. Musk is catching all sorts of flack for the Twitter Files from the mainstream media, who are somehow trying to defend the indefensible actions that have taken place behind the scenes and paint Musk as the bad guy for exposing it.

          Many things that non-liberals have been saying for years have been shown to be true. There was indeed collusion between the Biden campaign and Twitter, conservatives were absolutely shadowbanned, the FBI is involved in social media, and points-of-view that were not in line with the narrative were suppressed by the social media giant.

          What are the Twitter Files?

          Elon Musk has provided journalists like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss,  Lee Fang, and Michael Schellenberger access to years of internal documents and chat logs showing the trend of biased moderation behind the scenes. (You can sift through Musk’s own Twitter account to read these reveals yourself.

          It’s a story of censorship cloaked as moderation and political bias cloaked as safety. Favors were done, and stories were either suppressed or allowed to trend based on the whims of a handful of people behind the scenes. Regardless of how many times the MSM says “alleged” in conjunction with these revelations, it’s very clear that there’s a real problem.

          And keep in mind this is only the tip of the iceberg. I’d be willing to bet everything I have that similar conversations have gone on behind the scenes at Google and Facebook too. That means that Big Tech has been responsible for illicitly influencing the course of history, something we here at The Organic Prepper have been saying for a decade. While you personally may not have been influenced by things on social media, the people around you have been and the consensuses that were formed in America were based on biased information.

          That’s a real problem. Propaganda works and the position our country is in shows the heinous aftermath of it.

          Here’s what we learned from the Twitter Files so far.

          The best synopsis I’ve seen of the Twitter Files comes from the account of journalist Benjamin Carlson. Carlson wrote, “No agency should be unaccountable. No institution is indispensable.”

          Here’s his breakdown.

          What is the real story of the Twitter Files? It’s a much bigger deal than many realize.

          I’ve spent hours reading the great reporting (now thousands of words in 7+ parts) by
          @mtaibbi, @bariweiss, and @ShellenbergerMD

          Here are 7 crucial takeaways everyone needs to know:

          1. History changed because of this:

          • Hunter Biden’s alleged corruption censored

          • Covid 19 lockdown debate stifled

          • Trump silenced

          You may agree with each decision. But there is no denying that halting information flow and free debate had real consequences.

          2. Many things called conspiracy theories were true:

          • FBI was working w Twitter and paid TW $ millions

          • Blacklists & shadow bans were real

          • US intel lobbied to censor accounts

          • Covid-19 convo heavily manipulated

          • Twitter rules changed & enforced by whim

          3. Censorship is being cloaked in the language of safety:

          • ‘Safety, harm, violence’ redefined to apply to ideas

          • Opinions & info deemed ‘unsafe’ subject to silencing

          • Jokes, memes, questions about origin of covid off limits

          4. The government is policing opinion:

          • FBI has 80 staff monitoring speech

          • Small accounts on left and right flagged

          • FBI held frequent meetings w TW

          • Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram = similar?

          • Private censors & police control what you say to whom.

          5. Social media executives lie freely:

          • Twitter execs repeatedly and publicly denied shadow bans

          • In reality, bans were in place as “visibility filtering”

          • Ultimately, no accountability to public

          6. Free speech is controlled by a small group:

          • Biggest decisions in Twitter Files made by 3-4 individuals

          • Despite misgivings and doubts, once made, decisions stuck

          • Now it’s Musk.

          One difference: his embrace of public polls to set policy.

          7. The slippery slope is real:

          • Staff rebellion led to Trump ban

          • Staff called for more covid-19 censorship

          • 2021-22 saw increase of bans and ‘one-offs’

          This is how you get Billy Baldwin in the crosshairs.

          Once you silence a president, who has a right to speak?

          8. Musk has made enemies:

          • Leaking to indy media

          • Expressing opinions on Fauci

          • Suspending journalist accounts

          I expect his businesses will see counterattacks. Now is a good time to refocus—and let the users decide how to uphold free speech.

          TLDR

          1. History changed

          2. Conspiracy theories true

          3. ‘Safety’ = censorship

          4. Government policed ideas

          5. Executives lied

          6. Speech controlled by small group

          7. Slippery slope is real

          8. Musk must watch out

          The MSM is outraged.

          Unsurprisingly, those who have been shown to be biased and corrupt are displeased and the MSM is leaping to their defense and attacking Musk for using his platform to expose it.

          Tech Crunch said breathlessly:

          Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, is feverishly promoting his “Twitter Files”: selected internal communications from the company, laboriously tweeted out by sympathetic amanuenses. But Musk’s obvious conviction that he has released some partisan kraken is mistaken — far from conspiracy or systemic abuse, the files are a valuable peek behind the curtain of moderation at scale, hinting at the Sisyphean labors undertaken by every social media platform.

          Vanity Fair dismisses the claims in the Twitter Files and focuses its wrath on Musk.

          Right-wingers are reveling in the latest batch of Elon Musk’s Twitter Files, which Republicans continue to dubiously frame as bombshell revelations into the platform’s squelching of far-right accounts. But amid all the brouhaha, a simple question remains: What new information has actually emerged from these splashy document dumps?

          …All that can be gleaned from the latest Twitter Files release is this: Musk, likely under pressure from spooked advertisers to justify his conservative rebrand of the company, wants everyone to know that at least a few right-wing users were sent to varying degrees of Twitter time-out.

          The Intelligencer is equally dismissive and but far more sarcastic as they strive to discredit Musk.

          ..the Twitter Files are best understood as an egregious example of the very phenomenon it purports to condemn — that of social-media managers leveraging their platforms for partisan ends…

          …The Constitution does not give you an inalienable right to retweet Hunter Biden’s genitals…

          …The Twitter Files provide limited evidence that the social-media platform’s former management sometimes enforced its terms of service in inconsistent and politically biased ways. The project offers overwhelming evidence that Twitter’s current management is using the platform to promote tendentious, partisan narratives and conservative misinformation. In that sense, Taibbi and Weiss have performed revelatory journalism.

          NPR suggests that Musk is a big, mean bully.

          Musk’s conspiracy-baiting has quickly turned ugly, as he uses a project that purports to be about transparency to discredit Twitter’s former leadership and harass people he disagrees with. That’s giving his 120 million Twitter followers easy targets…

           …many tech journalists, social media experts and former Twitter employees say Musk’s claims are over-hyped, given that the documents shared so far largely corroborate what is already known about the messy business of policing a large social network.

          “What is really coming through in the Twitter Files for me is: people who are confronting high-stakes, unanticipated events and trying to figure out what policies apply and how,” said Renée DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who studies how narratives spread on social networks…

          …But with his drumbeat of Twitter Files releases and gleeful tweets dunking on the company’s former employees, Musk has successfully hijacked the conversation.

          “It is being processed as punitive and sort of owning the last regime, as opposed to saying, ‘Here are things that we can see in these files and here is how it’s going to be done differently under our watch,’” DiResta said.

          I suppose the bottom line here is that when faced with one set of facts, people with different philosophies will always draw diverse and strongly held conclusions.

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 18:05

        • Biden Family Disowns Hunter's 4-Year-Old Daughter, Remains "Estranged From The Child"
          Biden Family Disowns Hunter’s 4-Year-Old Daughter, Remains “Estranged From The Child”

          The Biden family has remained “estranged” from Hunter Biden’s 4-year-old daughter, and ‘seemingly wants nothing to do with the child,’ according to the Daily Beast, citing the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

          The woman who mothered Hunter’s secret lovechild, Lunden Alexis Roberts, filed paperwork on Tuesday requesting that an Arkansas court allow the child, Navy Joan Roberts, be given the Biden name, claiming that the toddler would “benefit from carrying the Biden family name” because it’s “now synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute, and politically powerful.”

          The Bidens, meanwhile, have completely ignored the President’s grandchild – striking her attendance from the 46th presidential inauguration and allegedly refusing to offer security aid to the mother-daughter pair, despite domestic violence threats from Roberts’ ex.

          The filing cites President Biden, Jill Biden and Hunter’s late brother Beau as examples of successful individuals bearing the last name, and says that the Biden family remains “estranged from the child. To the extent this is misconduct or neglect, it can be rectified by changing her last name to Biden so that she may undeniably be known to the world as the child of the defendant and member of the prestigious Biden family.”

          Roberts, originally from Batesville and an Arkansas State University graduate, met Hunter Biden while she was living in Washington, D.C., and worked for him, Lancaster previously said.

          The child, initially referred to in the case as “Baby Doe,” was born in August 2018; the paternity suit followed in May 2019, days after Hunter Biden’s marriage to a South African filmmaker, the former Melissa Cohen.

          A DNA test showed, “with near scientific certainty,” that Biden is Baby Doe’s father, Judge Holly Meyer declared in a January 2020 order. That month the parties agreed on temporary child support until the issue was resolved. -Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette

          Hunter Biden wrote in his 2021 book “Beautiful Things” that he fought Roberts’ paternity suit because, being a crackhead, he had no recollection of the incident that led to the pregnancy.

          Photo via the Daily Mail

          “The other women I’d been with during rampages since my divorce were hardly the dating type. We would satisfy our immediate needs and little else,” wrote Hunter, adding “I’m not proud of it.”

          According to Roberts, Hunter has a “long, and lengthy, history of attempting to avoid discovery by filing endless and recurrent motions for protective orders. Additionally, this case was finally resolved the first time when this court denied the defendant’s motion for a protective order relating to discovery.”

          Roberts has requested a list of Hunter’s residences for the past 10 years, along with vehicles he’s owned or driven for the past five years in order to obtain evidence of his “well-established history of a lavish lifestyle.”

          “[Biden] objects and refuses to provide all the requested information. Instead, [Biden] seeks a protective order,” reads a filing. She’s also requested information related to a federal investigation into Hunter’s “tax affairs.”

          “This information is relevant to determine if, as Federal authorities insinuated, the defendant failed to disclose all his income as this goes to earning capability and Mr. Biden’s credibility.”

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 17:40

        • 2022: The Year ESG Fell To Earth
          2022: The Year ESG Fell To Earth

          Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearEnergy.org,

          The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: a year that saw the end of the post–Cold War era and the return of geopolitics; the first energy crisis of the enforced energy transition to net zero; and the year that brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%. The three are linked. By restricting investment in production of oil and gas by Western producers, ESG increases the market power of non-Western producers, thereby enabling Putin’s weaponization of energy supplies. Net zero—the holy grail of ESG—has turned out to be Russia’s most potent ally.

          It wasn’t only a bad year for ESG on the stock market. Earlier this month, Vanguard announced that it was quitting Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (NZAM), set up by former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney a little over a year ago. “We have decided to withdraw from NZAM so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds and about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks,” the world’s second-largest asset manager said. 

          Two months ago, Alex Edmans, coauthor of the latest edition of the standard textbook on the principles of corporate finance and professor of finance at the London Business School, published a paper titled “The End of ESG”—without a question mark. Edmans criticizes what has become the primary justification for ESG: the claim that business can generate higher returns for investors by tackling climate change. Since governments are democratically elected by a country’s citizens, they are best placed to address externalities, whereas investors disproportionately represent the elites. “If ESG is pursued for its externalities, companies and investors should be very clear that it may be at the expense of value,” Edmans says.

          October also saw the publication of Terrence Keeley’s Sustainable, where the former BlackRock senior executive penned what amounts to a requiem for ESG. Rather than “doing well by doing good,” the logic of Keeley’s case, as I reviewed for RealClear Books, is that investors in conventional ESG investment products are likely to end up not doing very well and leave investors feeling good, not doing good.

          It has not all been going one way. In May, HSBC terminated Stuart Kirk, its global head of research at HSBC’s asset-management arm, for voicing some hard truths about ESG. Earlier this month, HSBC announced that it will stop financing new oil and gas fields, putting the West’s third-largest bank on Putin’s side in Russia’s energy war on the West. 

          What is now a negative factor disadvantaging the West in a world increasingly characterized by East–West geopolitical tensions originated after a period when the United Nations had been fostering a horizontal global division between a rich North and an exploited South. As University of Pennsylvania’s professor Elizabeth Pollman records in her June 2022 paper “The Origins and Consequences of the ESG Moniker,” through the 1970s and early 1980s, the UN promoted the New International Economic Order that called for the regulation of transnational corporations on the alleged grounds that they were widening the gap between developed and developing countries. 

          After Kofi Annan became secretary-general in 1997, the UN shifted from a strategy of confrontation to co-optation. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 1999, Annan launched a Global Compact between business and the UN. In 2004, the Global Compact’s financial-sector initiative published a report titled “Who Cares Wins”—a rip-off of the British special-forces SAS motto “Who Dares Wins”—arguing for “better consideration of environmental, social and governance factors” in investment appraisals, claiming that this would both improve outcomes for investors and help the UN achieve its sustainable development goals. 

          ESG means different things, depending on whom you’re talking to. Is it about risk disclosure? Or about factors driving long-term shareholder value? Or is it about society holding business to account? One thing is clear: ESG’s unsustainable dual mandate of boosting shareholder returns and at the same time making the world a better place— “doing well by doing good”—was present at the creation of ESG. It was a masterstroke by ESG’s designers to incorporate “G” for governance. No investor can be against improved governance, and it helped mainstream ESG, whereas previous iterations, such as Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), remained niche. 

          The 2008 financial crisis subsequently turbocharged the uptake of ESG. Having caused the financial crisis, Wall Street was going to redeem itself by saving the world from a planetary catastrophe. Without climate change, ESG would have vastly less salience. Although marketed as a climate risk analysis tool, ESG is no such thing. In reality, it’s about investors and debt providers driving the decarbonization of Western companies and sunsetting its oil and gas companies. 

          According to ESG doctrine, there are two types of climate financial risk—physical risk and transition risk—and it’s straightforward to demonstrate that both are spurious. Take the Bank of England. For its climate stress tests, the Bank of England uses a scenario derived from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) extreme and physically implausible RCP8.5 climate scenario. Roger Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado–Boulder, and Justin Ritchie have documented how use of the RCP8.5 scenario represents “a stubborn commitment to error,” with its absurd projection of a sixfold growth in per-capita coal consumption to 2100, based on erroneous reports in the late 1980s of virtually unlimited coal deposits in Siberia and China. The Bank of England compounds implausibility with impossibility by taking the RCP8.5 pathway of 4 degrees by the turn of the century and telescoping it into a 3.3-degree Celsius rise by 2050. Central banks resorting to these types of games constitutes strong evidence that climate physical risk is a nonissue for financial stability. 

          When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney gave an agenda-setting speech alleging a tragedy of the horizon as the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors. Climate catastrophes are presumed to be triggered by tipping points, one of the earliest being the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. In its sixth assessment report, the IPCC declared that with sustained warming, there was limited evidence that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would disappear “over multiple millennia.” That is some time horizon. Despite the best efforts of central bankers, geologic timescales of millennia and human timescales of decades are completely out of whack.

          Similarly, climate transition risk and the stranded assets trope defy economic and financial logic. If you restrict the flow of capital into a sector producing stuff that people want and are willing to pay for, the price of the output of a capital-embargoed sector will rise, as will the value of its invested capital. This, in essence, is what has been happening in energy and capital markets over the past year and explains why ESG as an investment strategy does not work. In the absence of draconian government policies to suppress demand for oil and natural gas, ESG policies strangling the supply of capital to Western oil and gas producers have two effects: they push up the price of hydrocarbons; and they displace supply from Western producers to neutral or hostile ones, with major detriment to the economies and security interests of the West.

          Although the disintegration of ESG as an investment strategy became unmistakable in 2022, its existence as a political doctrine will continue until it is challenged and defeated politically. This is already happening in Red states such as Florida, Texas, West Virginia, and Utah. It also requires concerted leadership at a national level to get central bankers and financial regulators to quit playing covert climate policy and to shame banks such as HSBC into switching their support from Russia in the energy wars by dropping their anti–oil and gas financing policies. Defeating ESG not a case of “who cares wins” but “who fights wins.”

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 17:15

        • 'I Also Orchestrated It': Uncharged J6 Witness Ray Epps Transcript Released
          ‘I Also Orchestrated It’: Uncharged J6 Witness Ray Epps Transcript Released

          Ray Epps, the uncharged man identified as a key instigator behind the January 6, 2020 Capitol Breach for telling people to storm the Capitol, said in a text message to his nephew that he “orchestrated” things, according to newly released witness transcripts from the January 6th Committee.

          “At that point, I didn’t know that they were breaking into the Capitol,” Epps told Congressional investigators, adding “I didn’t know anybody was in the Capitol. … I was on my way back to the hotel room.”

          But the night before, Epps was seen going around to various groups of Trump supporters, telling them they need to storm the capitol. 

          In two interviews with the FBI in 2021, Epps explained his actions on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. He admitted he was guilty of trespassing on restricted Capitol grounds and confessed to urging protesters to go to—and into—the Capitol on Jan. 6.

          Epps also told members of the Committee that he found himself playing peacekeeper between Trump supporter “Baked Alaska” and the police – who called Epps a Fed.

          “I was trying to find some common ground,” said Epps. “This guy was trying to turn people against me…he was calling me ‘boomer,’ and it’s his generation’s fault that we’re in the position we’re in.”

          Despite the admissions, the FBI never arrested Epps and he was not charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with any Jan. 6 crimes. The non-action has fueled a crop of theories that he might have been working for the FBI or another agency.

          Epps, 61, has repeatedly denied those suggestions through his attorney.

          Ray Epps encourages protesters to go into the Capitol the night before the siege of January 6, 2021. (Villain Report/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

          Speculation that Epps was a ‘fed’ intensified after a Revolver News reported with the headline: “Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol“

          Revolver also determined, and will prove below, that the the FBI stealthily removed Ray Epps from its Capitol Violence Most Wanted List on July 1, just one day after Revolver exposed the inexplicable and puzzlesome FBI protection of known Epps associate and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. July 1 was also just one day after separate New York Times report amplified a glaring, falsifiable lie about Epps’s role in the events of January 6.

          Lastly, Ray Epps appears to have worked alongside several individuals — many of them suspiciously unindicted — to carry out a breach of the police barricades that induced a subsequent flood of unsuspecting MAGA protesters to unwittingly trespass on Capitol restricted grounds and place themselves in legal jeopardy. -Revolver News

          As speculation over Epps grew, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) claimed that Epps had “cooperated with the Jan 6 committee,” and was removed from the FBI’s most wanted list “because apparently he broke no laws.”

          We’re sure Epps, who claims he wasn’t working for the feds, ‘cooperated’ indeed.

          And who’s this guy?

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 16:50

        • Jim Quinn: It's Not A Lie If You Believe It
          Jim Quinn: It’s Not A Lie If You Believe It

          Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

          “The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” – George Orwell, 1984

          “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

          I wish I could go through a day without having to reference Orwell and Huxley when observing how the ruling class is able to manipulate, subjugate, and propagandize the willfully ignorant masses through lies, deceptions, disinformation, and fear. But here we are, living through a dystopian nightmare blending the worst aspects of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.

          It’s as if O’Brien and Mustapha Mond are running the show, using behavioral conditioning, restricting freedom of speech, adhering to a strict caste system, surveilling everything we say or do, using our fears to control us, utilizing propaganda to produce false narratives, and ultimately threatening to stomp a boot on our faces forever if we do not obey and conform. Virtually everything we are told by politicians, government bureaucrats, military brass, “esteemed” journalists, medical “experts”, bankers, and corporate executives is lies. They do not believe their lies, but they know it benefits themselves financially to lie, and as long as they work together, they know the ignorant masses will believe them.

          George tells Jerry “It’s not a lie if you believe it” as he is going to take a lie detector test. I wonder how Fauci, Biden, Hillary, Obama, Comey, Wray, Pelosi, and the slew of other Deep State coup conspirators would fare on a lie detector test about Russiagate, Covidgate, J6 Insurrectiongate, and Vaccinegate. Based on the titanic volume of lies they have spewed over the last several years, I’m sure the machine would overheat and explode if hooked up to any of this traitorous vile scum.

          The humorous phrase uttered by George Costanza on a sitcom twenty-seven years ago captures a significant kernel of truth about the mindset of the vast majority of non-critical thinking drones roaming the aisles of Wal-Marts and waiting in the drive-thru at McDonalds across our dystopian states of America. The lies run so deep you need hip-boots to wade through them on a daily basis. The reason our leaders lie is because we let them lie. The majority prefer comforting lies to unpleasant truths, because accepting unpleasant truths would require them to act and they prefer being distracted by trivialities like sports, reality TV, social media likes and otherwise being addicted to their technological gadgets.

          “The process of mass-media deception has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.” – George Orwell

          Orwell’s explanation of mass-media deception is a brilliant assessment of how the ruling class changes the narrative to suit their needs, and without blinking an eye are able to deny what they have said and done. Orwell saw this manipulation of the truth before TV, the internet, social media, or professionally created government propaganda existed. In his day only newspapers, radio, and speeches existed to push deception upon the public.

          The proliferation of technologically enhanced mass-media deception has accomplished everything the ruling class/oligarchs/Big Brother surveillance state could hope for. Lies and deception are nothing more than a means to their ends of control, wealth, and power. Right and wrong; good and evil; justice and injustice; truth and falsity; humanity and inhumanity; are meaningless concepts to the corrupt, greedy, power hungry, immoral, deviant, evil overlords who wield their wealth to maintain and expand their control over the ignorant masses, unwilling and unable to resist because their indoctrination runs deep, and the unceasing propaganda keeps them confused and angry at phantom enemies.

          The perfect example of Orwell’s mass media deception in practice has been this entire Covid hoax, which has been built on a foundation of lies from the very beginning. At the outset Fauci scoffed at the concept of masks providing any protection from a microscopic virus while being interviewed on 60 Minutes. He wasn’t lying. Numerous scientific studies documented by the CDC proved beyond a doubt, masks are absolutely useless in preventing the spread of viruses. But a few weeks later the covid controllers realized the usefulness of masks as the perfect fear inducing symbol of a fake pandemic and the first step in demanding compliance and obedience by the masses.

          Suddenly Fauci and his Big Pharma bought medical “expert” lackeys discarded the inconvenient facts that masks do not work, and piously preached that everyone must mask or mass death would occur. Any dissenting voice speaking the truth about masks was the enemy and needed to be silenced, scorned, ridiculed, and destroyed. The deception was aided and abetted by Twitter, Facebook, Google and the feckless MSM doing the bidding of the ruling elite, while being paid off by Big Pharma.

          This was only the beginning of a worldwide conspiracy of lies. The videos from China of bodies in the streets were fake. Evidently to provoke fear among the global community. The purported origin of the virus being bats in a wet market in Wuhan was a lie concocted by Fauci, Daszik, and their Chinese co-conspirators to cover-up their illegal weaponization of viruses in the Wuhan Bio-weapon lab. This cover-up was maintained by the dying legacy media, Twitter, Facebook, and Google through the censorship and banning of anyone (ZeroHedge) who dared question the government approved narrative.

          The demand for national lockdowns was built on the lies of Neil Ferguson, a 3rd rate academic, and his fear mongering Imperial College model of deaths if the world didn’t shut down. His ludicrous outcomes, based on false assumptions, were the basis for the disastrous decisions made by corrupt politicians across the world. The results in Sweden, which did not lockdown, have proven his model to be worthless, and responsible for the destruction of the lives of millions across the globe.

          They lied about social distancing, based on a 3rd grade girl’s school paper. They used a PCR test improperly to falsely produce “positive” cases in order to terrify the masses into a mass formation psychosis. A case was not a sickness. They drastically overestimated the fatality rate and attributed the deaths of extremely old sick people to covid when they died from their existing malady. Only 6% of covid deaths can be attributed to strictly covid. The overall survival rate if you contracted covid is 99.7%, with anyone under 70 years old 99.9%. Virtually no one under 21 years old died from covid. It was less lethal than the annual flu to young people.

          The overlords and their bevy of apparatchik whores in the government, media, and academia needed to ramp up the fear through rising cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in order to get rich off this plandemic, while planting the seeds of their Great Reset scheme to turn the world into a compliant surveillance state. The coup de grace of lies was to be the miraculous “Operation Warpspeed vaccine” which would rid the world of this perilous pestilence. Supposedly brilliant virologists developed amnesia over the concept of herd immunity, which has been known for centuries.

          This War on Covid has gone as well as the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, meaning it has been a complete and utter failure in defeating its supposed foe, but has been hugely successful in enriching politicians, corporations, and the multitude of toadies in the media, academia, and the bureaucracy who perpetuate the lies and disinformation they are paid handsomely to disgorge. The lies engulfing the supposed vaccine run deep and wide.

          The entire vaccine scheme is built on an altar of lies, mistruths, misinformation, deception, and censorship. mRNA gene therapies have existed for decades and had consistently failed in application as every animal tested using these concoctions died. Pfizer faked their trial data, lied about adverse reactions, lied about long-term safety, lied about effects on pregnant women, and tried to keep these results hidden for seventy-five years. The tripe about these “vaccines” being safe effective has been and continues to be the Big Lie.

          The emergency use authorization for these experimental jabs could only be given if there were no existing medications which were an effective treatment for the illness. There were dozens of scientific studies and world-renowned physicians acknowledging the effectiveness of both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in treating covid and alleviating its symptoms safely and effectively – and cheaply. That was the real problem. The hundreds of billions in profits to be made by Big Pharma, and then divvied up to politicians, legacy media companies, the FBI, and social media censorship arms of the ruling class, would be impossible if the truth about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin was allowed to be acknowledged.

          Therefore, Fauci and his sycophants claimed they were dangerous, horse de-wormer medicine, and ineffective. Twitter, Facebook, and Google censored and banned doctors who posted anything positive about either treatment. Meanwhile, Fauci sentenced tens of thousands to death by pushing Remdesivir, a treatment he financially benefitted from, and recommending ventilators for those with covid. Fauci sentenced tens of thousands to death by not allowing these treatments to be used. He deserves the same fate for his treacherous actions but is treated like a saint by the left-wing media and the Biden minions.

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

          The biggest Orwellian mass-media deception of them all was what the “experts” unequivocally declared about their glorious vaccines. Just as every vaccine in history was supposed to keep you from contracting the illness you were vaccinated against, Fauci, Biden, Walensky, Gates, the Pfizer CEO, and a myriad of other paid “experts” told the global population they would not contract or spread covid once they were vaxxed. They are on video and in print declaring this to be true.

          But when it was proven to be not true, they just denied they had ever said so. As long as the masses could be convinced the lie had become the truth, then the lie was the truth, according to the Party and its journalistic narrative guardians. Controlling the narrative through suppressing and censoring the truth is how they continue to maintain control. The release of the Twitter files by Musk confirms every “conspiracy theory” put into the public domain by the naysayers, critical thinkers, and a few honest journalists. They have lied about everything.

          “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” – Orwell

          When confronted by the reality these experimental, toxic, gene altering, spike protein generating brews do not prevent anyone from contracting the virus, being hospitalized by the virus, or dying from the virus, the powers that be just changed the definition of a vaccine and attempted to alter the narrative and pretend they had never said what they said. How Orwellian of our Big Brother overlords. The past is alterable in a totalitarian regime.

          “The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” ― George Orwell, 1984

          Even the current definition of vaccination is a lie. Not only does it not protect you from the virus, but the Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE), warned about by highly regarded doctors like Robert Malone, Peter McCullough, and Pierre Kory over a year ago, is now happening to the vaxxed and boosted victims. Biden’s lie about this being a pandemic of the unvaccinated has transformed to the truth we are experiencing a pandemic of the vaccinated. The vaccinated are now 4x as likely to contract covid as an unvaxxed person who has recovered from covid. Natural immunity, which has protected humanity for centuries, is real and far superior to these Big Pharma jabs.

          The cognitive dissonance of the vaxxed runs deep. They are too embarrassed and ashamed to admit they were duped and lied to. How many more young people need to “die suddenly” before they turn on Fauci, Biden, Big Pharma CEOs, media talking heads, politicians, and the sickcare industrial complex, and hold them accountable? Is the mass formation psychosis too ingrained in their psyche to ever revolt?

          The lies about the covid vaccines being safe and effective, promulgated through a multi-billion-dollar advertising campaign running non-stop for the last two years, paying famous athletes, Hollywood stars, social media influencers, and unethical doctors, are proving to be the most diabolical and fatal falsehoods ever perpetrated on global humanity. The “effective” nonsense was put to bed last year when covid spread faster after more than half the country was berated and threatened into getting the jab, then a 2nd jab, then a 3rd jab, and then a booster, because the previous three failed.

          And still half the country refuses to accept the truth because they don’t want to question the narrative or abandon their fellow vaccine cultists. The “safe” garbage narrative is collapsing on a daily basis as factual data about sudden deaths, real scientific studies proving the extreme dangers of these vaxxes, fertility data, excess mortality data, a constant stream of reports about young people contracting myocarditis, having heart attacks, and developing blood clots, has swamped Fauci and his ship of lying fools – with the ultimate result of breaking the mass formation psychosis of the masses.

          Essentially, these vaccines are creating a slow-motion mass casualty event, and everyone involved in their premature use in human beings should stand trial for murder, but they won’t. That is because the totalitarian Deep State has grown too powerful, too arrogant, and too filled with contempt for those they rule over. They feel invincible, as they blatantly steal elections, keep peaceful protestors in dungeons, assassinate those who might implicate them in child trafficking conspiracies, use the mechanisms of the surveillance state to crush all opposition, and collude with mass media networks and the Silicon Valley mafia media to suppress the truth and censor those who dare question the Deep State sanctioned narrative. The Twitter files confirm the deceit and treason at the highest levels of government, media, and military. Hannah Arendt describes how totalitarian regimes depend on fabrications to maintain their power.

          “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

          At this point in history virtually everything uttered by the president, any politician, government bureaucrat, media personality, corporate executive, medical “expert”, and faux journalist is a fabrication, exaggeration, disinformation or outright lie. The list of lies is never ending, and has been going on since Adam and Eve, but the quantity and audaciousness of the lies in recent times has accelerated to a point where the totalitarians no longer fear revelations about their lies. They are comfortable knowing the masses will believe absurdities as long as they confirm their ideologies, biases, and beliefs.

          The masses do not mind being lied to because they are entranced by narratives created to keep them under control and focused on whichever enemy they are propagandized to hate, whether it be Trump, lockdown and mask dissenters, anti-vaxxers, phantom white supremacists, J6 “insurrectionists”, the Russians, or “election deniers”. Provenly bold faced liars like Biden and Fauci are admired and celebrated for their dedication to the narrative, despite its falseness. It happened in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union, Mao’s Communist China, and today as we plunge towards a new world order totalitarianism of unknown outcomes and atrocities.

          “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

          I think a list of big lies is sufficient to prove we are ruled by totalitarian ideologues who don’t care their lies are destroying our country, culture, and societal norms. During my lifetime: they lied about JFK’s assassination; they lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to get us into the Vietnam War; they lied about 9/11; they lied about WMD in Iraq; they lied about the 2008 financial collapse; they lied about the 2014 CIA coup in the Ukraine creating the havoc we have today; they lied about global warming and had to switch to climate change when the original lie was revealed; they lied about Russiagate and their coup against Trump, they lied about the “peaceful” BLM protests; they lied about the cause of George Floyd’s death (fentanyl overdose); they lie about child trafficking and grooming; they lie about butchering children in the name of gender identity; they lied about Hunter Biden’s computer and the Biden family crime syndicate; they lied about rigging the 2020 election; they lied about Epstein’s “suicide”; they lied about the FBI and Pelosi staging the January 6 “insurrection”; they lied about colluding with Twitter, Facebook, and Google to influence elections and create a fake pandemic; they are lying about our border being safe and secure; they are lying that Biden isn’t a dementia ridden puppet controlled by Obama, Soros, and Gates; they are lying that Sam Bankman-Fried and his FTX money laundering operation wasn’t an arm of the Democrat party, using ill-gotten funds and funneling it to Democrat candidates; and they are lying about their intentions to destroy our society through suicidal economic, social, and legal policies in order to usher in a totalitarian Great Reset New World Order run by wealthy elites and their detestable acolytes. Our dystopian nightmare is on-par with Orwell’s.

          “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.” – George Orwell

          Totalitarian regimes have tremendous success using fake data and fake charts to give the appearance of truth to a populace too willfully ignorant to investigate whether the data and charts are a truthful and accurate reflection of reality. It is so much easier to believe supposed experts than it is to think critically and question the narrative, especially when they are telling you what you want to hear. Even though the average person knows their financial situation has steadily deteriorated over the last two decades, along with the financial situation of the country, they still believe the fake data vomited on a daily basis by the government and Wall Street banking cabal.

          They are lying about the inflation rate being 7%. It is more than double the government reported figure, based upon the calculation from 1980 when Volker needed to raise the Fed Funds Rate to 18%.

          They are lying about the 3.7% unemployment rate. The total working age population is 265 million, up from 212 million in 2000. There are 158 million employed today, versus 137 million in 2000. The unemployment rate in 2000 of 4% is virtually the same as the rate reported today. How could that be if the working age population went up by 53 million, but employment only went up by 21 million? Quite a conundrum. It’s easy if you lie. According to the government 100 million working age Americans choose not to work, therefore they aren’t unemployed. That number was 70 million in 2000. Fully 40% of our working age citizens are not working today, but the government tells you our unemployment rate is 3.7%. This might be the biggest lie ever told.

          The government has reported positive real GDP growth for most of the past two decades, with short-term dips in 2008/2009 and due to covid in 2020. Those figures are lies. Using a truthful inflation figure shows GDP has barely stayed flat for the last 20 years. The great American economy hasn’t grown in 20 years. We are a dying lying empire of debt. Our national debt grew from $5.7 trillion in 2000 to $31.5 trillion today. The debt to GDP ratio has gone from 55% in 2000 to 122% today. Throughout history, when this ratio exceeds 90%, economic disaster follows.

          The biggest lie has been perpetrated by the Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve, whose mandates are a stable currency and low unemployment. With a straight face these jokers declare they have succeeded, while the USD has lost 97% of its purchasing power since the deceitful inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913, and the real unemployment rate is north of 20%. Losing the last 3% of purchasing power guarantees to be the most painful.

          After documenting the outrageous multitude of lies being told by those controlling the levers of society, I’m torn regarding whether I trust enough people can be awakened from their self-induced stupor of belief in authority to mount a counter-offensive of truth. I guess I wouldn’t be writing articles about these subjects unless I thought there was a kernel of hope I could plant with my reasoning. But I find myself drawn more towards the conclusion reached by Alexandre Koyré over fifty years ago about mobs and the ease with which totalitarian authority figures can manipulate them:

          “The mob believes everything it is told, provided only that it be repeated over and over. Provided too that its passions, hatreds, fears are catered to. Nor need one try to stay within the limits of plausibility: on the contrary, the grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed. Nor is there any need to avoid contradictions: the mob never notices; needless to pretend to correlate what is said to some with what is said to others: each person or group believes only what he is told, not what anyone else is told; needless to strive for coherence: the mob has no memory; needless to pretend to any truth: the mob is radically incapable of perceiving it: the mob can never comprehend that its own interests are what is at stake.” ― Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le mensonge

          When the mob has been essentially hypnotized by totalitarian authority figures, unbound from the law through illegally invoking “emergency” powers to ensure the safety of the masses, it takes massive bloodshed and enormous upheaval before the mob will come to their senses and realize their dreadful misplacement of trust in tyrants. Personally, I hope I am wrong about what lies ahead, but I don’t see a pathway towards a peaceful, reasoned resolution of what plagues our country and the world.

          Fools, knaves, and low IQ ideologues control the narrative, the political power, the media messaging, the banks, and the minds of the mob. We can attempt to distance ourselves from the onslaught, but there really is no way to escape the impact of a Fourth Turning, whether it be global conflict, civil chaos, financial Armageddon, or the wrath of the mob for being right about the vaccines, politicians, or the financial markets. I am not surprised or upset about the lies told to me by those running the show. Neitzsche and Carlin, two brilliant thinkers, pretty much sum up my feelings.

          “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

          “My first rule:  I don’t believe anything the government tells me.  Nothing.  Zero.” – George Carlin

          Very few people who need to awaken from their propaganda induced stupor of believing absurdities will read this article. Those who are already awake and can see what is happening clearly have few or no options to impact the course we are traveling. Too few see the iceberg dead ahead as the U.S. Titanic accelerates towards its rendezvous with destiny. We can shout and wave our hands, but there is nothing we can do to alter the course of an empire run by idiot ideologues, hellbent on the destruction of our ship of state. As Bradbury presciently noted in his masterpiece of societal self-immolation, I can’t make people listen to a message they don’t want to hear.

          “But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.” ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

          At this point I’m torn between the darkness of Orwell’s vision and the stoic attitude put forth by Tolkien. We are living in a time of universal deceit and telling the truth feels like a revolutionary act when the mob is under the spell of mass formation psychosis. It is an interesting dichotomy that this article will only be read by a small audience of people who already agree with most of my arguments. If it ever reached a wider audience, I would be attacked by the mob, censored, threatened, and doxed in an attempt to destroy my life. So be it.

          I will do what I can do with my limited resources, protect my loved ones, strengthen relationships with like-minded hobbits, disconnect from this warped and deviant society as much as possible, distance myself from the government, prepare for an uncertain future, and try my best to navigate the perils ahead. We only have a limited time on this earth to make a difference. We each must decide what we do with the time given us. God help us.

          “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

          “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

          *  *  *
          It is Jim’s sincere desire to provide readers of his site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions.

          To donate via Stripe, click here.

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 16:25

        • 'Worst Year Ever' For Stocks & Bonds – Global Inflation Fight Bursts 'Everything Bubble'
          ‘Worst Year Ever’ For Stocks & Bonds – Global Inflation Fight Bursts ‘Everything Bubble’

          Before we get to the big picture on the month, quarter, and year, this week has ended with no ‘Santa Claus’ rally this year for US stocks…

          Until the last few minutes, the S&P 500 pinning around 3835 just as we said as JPM’s Collar trumped 0-DTE chaos, then everything melted up into the close…

          As SpotGamma remarked earlier, as January is a put-heavy OPEX, any downside start to January could energize those puts, and serve to press markets lower.

          This could lead to higher IV, and a reflexive selling loop to the downside. We’d then look for a rally after OPEX, as those puts expire.

          Conversely, should January start off with strength, those puts could help to fuel a rally as their values collapse leading to an early, material stock rally.

          OPEX could then trigger a reversal of that market strength. We currently assign edge to this scenario.

          Trade the first week of January should help shed light on the timing of the rally (i.e. pre-OPEX or post-OPEX) as the machines show the way…

          The dollar slipped lower, gold higher, and bitcoin lower on the week as Treasury yields surged into year-end…

          Source: Bloomberg

          December saw stocks behave rather oddly with the S&P 500 cumulatively unchanged overnight and the massive bulk of selling occurring during the US day session…

          On the year, global stocks suffered a 20% decline in 2022, the 2nd worst year since 1974, as central banks fought inflation in the face of supply chain shortages and an energy crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine…

          Source: Bloomberg

          Worse still, as The FT reports, a traditional portfolio consisting of 60% US stocks and 40% US bonds will have seen its worst performance since 1932, when the U.S. was in the midst of the Great Depression.

          As US bond returns are suffering their worst stretch in over a century…

          US equity and bond markets lost a combined $17.4 trillion in 2022 at their October lows…

          Source: Bloomberg

          And while The Dow ‘only’ fell 9% in 2022, Nasdaq plunged over 33% (worst year for US stocks since 2008 in percentage terms)…

          Source: Bloomberg

          Over $7 trillion in stock market cap has been erased from the Nasdaq 100. While the Nasdaq 100”s drop was bigger in 2008 (down 41.9%), it was only down about $1 trillion in 2008 though, because the denominators have gotten so much bigger…

          Source: Bloomberg

          European stocks were also slammed lower (worst year since 2018) with UK worst and Spain the prettiest horse in the glue factory…

          Source: Bloomberg

          With the ‘longest duration’ stocks having been hammered the hardest…

          Source: Bloomberg

          Energy stocks turned in a dramatic performance and were the only US equity sector with gains in 2022 (as Consumer Discretionary and Tech underperforming)…

          Source: Bloomberg

          “This has been a year to be in the bunker,” says John Bilton, head of global multi-asset strategy at JPMorgan Asset Management.

          Gold ended the year unchanged as the dollar surged; and while bonds and stocks were monkeyhammered lower, crypto was really clubbed like a baby seal…

          Source: Bloomberg

          The volume of negative-yielding debt has collapsed in 2022 (from a peak over $18 trillion in Dec 2020, there remains a modest $113 billion left, mainly in short-dated JGBs)…

          Source: Bloomberg

          As The Fed unleashed its most aggressive tightening cycle in decades…

          Source: LPL

          Some investors welcome this new discipline.

          “This has been a train crash waiting to come,” says Alexandra Morris, chief investment officer at Norway’s Skagen Funds.

          “Now, money has a cost. You can’t just throw money at unprofitable businesses, very risky businesses. We need to have a much more sensible allocation of capital.”

          As the year ends, 113 counterparties parked a record $2.554 trillion at the Fed’s overnight reverse repurchase agreement facility, in which counterparties like money-market funds can place cash with the central bank. That was $245 billion more than the day before, the biggest one-day increase ever.

          Source: Bloomberg

          Demand for the facility has tended to surge at the end of each quarter as dealers curtail their activity in the market for repurchase agreements in order to shore up their balance sheets for regulatory purposes.

          US Treasury yields exploded higher this year, led by the short-end, as the market realized The Fed wasn’t kidding about its anti-inflation stance. 2Y Yields rose a stunning 370bps in 2022 while 30Y yields rose over 200bps…

          Source: Bloomberg

          Which meant a massive flattening in the yield curve…

          Source: Bloomberg

          …driving the entire curve deep into inversion…

          Source: Bloomberg

          For some context, 2Y Yields started the year at 0.72% and ended at 4.43% (with Fed Funds now trading above it)…

          Source: Bloomberg

          The last six months have seen dramatic swings in the market’s expectations for The Fed’s monetary policy trajectory with the terminal rate surging up to around 5.00% as the expectations for a H2 2023 rate-cutting cycle (which implies a recession) surging dovishly in Q4…

          Source: Bloomberg

          The dollar has gained more than 8 percent over the year, but it lost more than 8 percent this quarter on expectations the Fed may not raise rates as high as previously feared…

          Source: Bloomberg

          Cryptos took annus horribilis to ’11’ this year with the big ones – BTC and ETH – down 64% and 67% respectively as chaos reigned across the ecosystem…

          Source: Bloomberg

          On the commodity side of the board, it was a very volatile year with copper down notably (growth/demand scares) and energy up (supply scares), though the latter is dramatically below its mid-year panic highs…

          Source: Bloomberg

          WTI had a volatile year as Putin invasion reactions battled China COVID restrictions

          Source: Bloomberg

          Despite the dollar’s gains, gold ended unchanged on the year, rallying back above $1800 after triple-testing $1600 support…

          Source: Bloomberg

          Silver outperformed gold on the year, with Q4 seeing the gold/silver ratio top out (at 2019/2020 resistance) and fall back into the red for the year…

          Source: Bloomberg

          Finally, if you’re hoping for a rebound in 2023, there’s really only one factor you can pray for…

          Source: Bloomberg

          When (or if) The Fed ends its QT program? Or this?

          See you in 2023!

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 16:01

        • US Mulls Testing Airline Wastewater As China Covid Surge Expands
          US Mulls Testing Airline Wastewater As China Covid Surge Expands

          The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is considering a plan to sample wastewater taken from international aircraft to track emerging Covid-19 variants, Reuters reports.

          According to an infectious disease expert, such a policy would provide the best chance of tracking the virus and slowing its entry into the United States, vs. blanket travel restrictions announced this week by the US and other countries, which once again are requiring mandatory negative Covid tests for travelers from China.

          “They seem to be essential from a political standpoint. I think each government feels like they will be accused of not doing enough to protect their citizens if they don’t do these,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, referring to the travel restrictions.

          Nearly half of a plane-load of 212 passengers who arrived in Italy’s Milan Airport from China on Monday tested positive for Covid, according to a Wednesday statement by a regional health chief.

          This week the United States added its voluntary genomic sequencing program to the Seattle and Los Angeles airports, bringing to the total number of airports that can analyze positive tests to seven.

          That may not be enough, according to experts.

          A better solution would be testing wastewater from airlines, which would offer a clearer picture of how the virus is mutating, given China’s lack of data transparency, said Dr Eric Topol, a genomics expert and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California.

          Getting wastewater off planes from China “would be a very good tactic,” Topol said, adding that it’s important that the United States upgrade its surveillance tactics “because of China being so unwilling to share its genomic data.” –CNBC

          China has hit back at critics, calling criticism of its Covid statistics ‘groundless’ – and saying that the risk of new variants is low, as they would likely be more infectious but less severe.

          According to CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund, sampling airline wastewater is one of several options the agency is considering.

          “Previous Covid-19 wastewater surveillance has shown to be a valuable tool and airplane wastewater surveillance could potentially be an option,” she wrote.

          In July, French researchers reported that airplane wastewater tests revealed that negative Covid tests don’t protect against new variants – finding the Omicron strain in wastewater from two commercial airplanes which flew from Ethopia to France in Dec. 2021 despite all passengers having tested negative. 

          California researchers reported in July that sampling of community wastewater in San Diego detected the presence of the alpha, delta, epsilon and omicron variants up to 14 days before they started showing up on nasal swabs.

          Osterholm and others said mandatory testing before travel to the United States is unlikely to keep new variants out of the country. -CNBC

          “Border closures or border testing really makes very little difference. Maybe it slows it down by a few days,” said Osterholm, adding that the virus is likely to spread worldwide anyway, so closing borders would simply delay the inevitable.

          Tyler Durden
          Fri, 12/30/2022 – 15:40

        Digest powered by RSS Digest

        Dec 30

        Today’s News 30th December 2022

        • UFO Topic Continues To Stir Debate With More Sightings, Studies
          UFO Topic Continues To Stir Debate With More Sightings, Studies

          Authored by Allan Stein via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          The truth about unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is still out there.

          Yet every so often, the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, gets a phone call about an unusual sighting in the night sky.

          Is it a UFO—or something else?

          Lowell Observatory historian Kevin Schindler says mostly it is a natural occurrence, like the planet Venus shining bright after sunset.

          The Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., as it appeared on Dec. 20, 2022. The late astronomer Percival Lowell founded the observatory with its 24-inch refractor telescope in 1894, hoping to discover intelligently made canals on Mars. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

          And then those are tongue-in-cheek moments such as the letters that suggested there were extraterrestrials from Cassiopeia.

          “We do have a variety of people asking things like that,” Schindler says.

          But, UFO researchers say some cases defy explanation and include eyewitness reports from credible sources—from military people to commercial pilots.

          These sightings have taken the debate over UFOs to a new and sober level—to such an extent that the government formed an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) in August 2020 to study the topic in detail.

          In its unclassified report, “Preliminary Assessment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” dated June 25, 2021, the task force concluded that the subject of UAPs is worth further study and research funding.

          However, the report would not acknowledge an extraterrestrial origin.

          Unidentified Aerial Phenomena “pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security,” the report to congressional intelligence officials warned.

          While available reporting on UAPs is “largely inconclusive,” the report said sightings fall into five categories: airborne clutter, natural atmospheric phenomena, U.S. Government or industry development programs, foreign adversary systems, and “other.”

          The report added that a few UAPs demonstrate advanced technology, though most reports “probably lack a single explanation.”

          In October 2022, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced the formation of an Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Study with 16 members versed in the subject.

          “Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are [and] the language of scientists is data,” according to a NASA fact sheet.

          Lowell Observatory historian Kevin Schindler stands beside the 24-inch refractor telescope in Flagstaff, Ariz., on Dec. 20, 2022. The late astronomer Percival Lowell had the observatory built in order to confirm the existence of canals on Mars. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

          The independent study group will examine UAP data over the next nine months and report on its findings around mid-2023.

          NASA asserted it is “going in with an open mind, and we expect to find that explanations will apply to some events and different explanations will apply to others.”

          “We will not underestimate what the natural world contains [and] there is a lot to learn.”

          NASA press secretary Katherine Rohloff said the study aims to identify data from the civilian government, commercial, and other sources that can shed light on UAPs.

          Using that data, the space agency will recommend a “roadmap” for future UAP analysis.

          In July 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) announced the establishment of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office to examine and assess potential aerial threats near military installations.

          The DoD said UAPs include anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged, and “trans-medium objects.”

          “Put simply, UAPs are objects that, when encountered, cannot be immediately identified and may exhibit anomalous behavior,” said DoD press operations spokeswoman Sue Gough.

          Gough cautioned that the lack of attribution “does not necessarily indicate the significance of each sighting or a threat to national security.”

          “Anomalous behavior means that DoD operators or sensors cannot make immediate sense of collected data, actions, or activities,” Gough told The Epoch Times in an email.

          Gough said that by combining data collection with rigorous science, “any object we encounter can likely be isolated, characterized, identified, and, if necessary, mitigated.”

          The DoD’s position is to collect as much data and see where it leads.

          A UFO was captured over Victoria, Australia, on Google Earth, according to bloggers. (Google Street View)

          Gough added, “We will not rush to conclusions in our analysis. In many cases, observed phenomena are classified as ‘unidentified’ simply because sensors [could not] collect enough information to make a positive attribution.”

          Since the purported crash of a UFO took place in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1948, the idea of visitors from other planets has captured the public’s imagination like no other.

          There have been thousands of reports of UFOs over the years since, ranging from direct sightings of strange lights and actual craft to alien abductions.

          Incidents such as these sparked a series of investigations by the U.S. Air Force, beginning with Project Sign in 1947, Project Grudge in 1948, and Project Blue Book from 1952 to 1969.

          The studies looked at more than 12,000 reported sightings in total, concluding UFOs were not a national security threat or of extraterrestrial origin.

          People who study UFOs are known as “ufologists.” And many ufologists, like documentary filmmaker Ron James of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), believe ample proof exists that UFOs are here and not of this world.

          More importantly, the government knows this.

          “When we say government, we’re not talking about guys at the Pentagon,” said James, MUFON’s director of public relations.

          “We’re talking about programs buried for years away from the institutional memory of the armed forces in pseudo-government, private ventures that are accountable to nobody and impossible to penetrate with the FOIA [Freedom Of Information Act].”

          James’s latest project, “Accidental Truths,” seeks to address the government’s “new narrative” of UFOs and the key people involved in concealing their existence.

          The 90-minute film’s release is due in early 2023.

          James said MUFON amassed a growing database of 120,000 UFO sightings and encounters since the group’s founding in 1969, receiving hundreds more cases each month.

          Lowell Observatory historian Kevin Schindler peers through the eyepiece of the 24-inch refractor telescope in Flagstaff, Ariz., on Dec. 20, 2022. The telescope has the fifth-largest refractor in the world and is still used in planetary research. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

          He said at least 97 percent of cases MUFON receives and investigates have a natural explanation, like the weather, satellites, or aircraft.

          The other 3 percent can’t easily be explained and requires further study.

          “When you talk about the field [of UFO research], you don’t cover it in one umbrella,” James told The Epoch Times. “Many of these avenues are conjecture, testimony, little documented evidence—which is fine.

          “Things that are science fiction today are science fact tomorrow.”

          More than 70 years after the Roswell incident, James said we know “something is going on.”

          “We don’t know exactly [but] we have a pretty good idea.”

          While Roswell catalyzed interest in UFOs, references to strange flying objects appear in texts going back to biblical times, James said.

          “This topic has been at the forefront of our culture and the general population since the 40s. Since the Roswell thing took off.”

          In December 2017, the New York Times published an article exposing what it said was a secret Pentagon program to investigate UFOs beginning in 2007.

          Former U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reportedly obtained funding for the program.

          However, James said government investigations into UFOs amount to little more than a “dog and pony show.”

          “That’s how it’s been from the beginning. The acronyms [for the studies] are adding up,” James said.

          Through “compartmentalization” of various government entities, “it gives them the ability to say we don’t know anything about [UFOs], even though it’s a real thing,” James said.

          “By compartmentalization—and by what we call ‘stovepiping’—they’re able to sequester information. And then they have plausible deniability.”

          James believes there is a power struggle within certain levels of government between those who wish to cover up the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs and those who want to expose it.

          He said the government acknowledging the reality of alien technology and energy sources would be Earth-shaking.

          “It would destroy every paradigm, every power structure, every means of control that keeps the planet in check. It’s all about energy. Whoever controls the energy controls the entire planet,” James said.

          Despite official denials of non-terrestrial UFOs, sightings of strange objects continue to this day.

          The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), a national clearinghouse of information on unidentified aerial sightings, has logged more than 150,000 reports over 47 years of operation. The center in December posted 1,255 new UFO sightings on its website.

          On Nov. 7, NUFORC received a report from multiple airline pilots describing a “dramatic display” of lights over the midwestern United States the night before.

          “Moreover, several other flight crews allegedly reported the same event over their backchannel, so-called ‘guard,’ radio frequency, and discussed the event extensively over an estimated 20-25 minutes,” according to NUFORC’s website.

          James said the UFO debate is far from over yet he doesn’t believe the new investigations will reveal anything significant.

          Screenshot from Go Fast: Official USG Footage of UAP for Public Release, published on March 9, 2018. (To The Stars Academy of Arts)

          “It’s not going to reveal anything we don’t already know. If [the government] can drag it out for another 50 years, they’ll do it,” James said.

          “At some point, they will have to acknowledge the existence of non-human intelligence. Where it goes after that depends on what that relationship is about.”

          One organization focused on the search for advanced extraterrestrial civilizations through radio signals is SETI (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence).

          SETI began as a government program in 1960. However, questions over its scientific value led Congress to terminate it in the 1970s, though SETI researchers reorganized privately in the 1990s.

          SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak said there has been no shortage of UFO reports since he joined the organization.

          “I get a phone call almost every day from someone having difficulty with aliens in their personal lives,” Shostak said. “It’s not a new phenomenon for me.”

          Shostak agreed that public fascination with UFOs remains high while conspiracies of government cover-ups abound.

          “The fundamental fact is that ever since the 1960s, poll after poll has shown that one-third of the American populace believes that the aliens are buzzing the skies. Many call me up,” Shostak told The Epoch Times.

          Shostak said every time a new UFO study group enters the media cycle, it only stirs hope “that something new will happen,” and Americans “love a conspiracy.” But the evidence regarding alien visitation is doubtful. Otherwise, we’d see them in our everyday lives.

          “Maybe the aliens have lost interest or have been repelled by the fast food,” he joked. “If the aliens were visiting—if there were good evidence of that—you’d have thousands of scientists looking into this.”

          “They’d be beavering away at this every day,” Shostak told The Epoch Times. “What could be more important than the idea extraterrestrials have decided to come to Earth for—whatever reason? And they’re not doing that. That means [scientists] are not convinced.”

          The late American astronomer Percival Lowell, founder of the Lowell Observatory in 1894, stands out among 20th-century scientists who believed in life on other planets.

          Schindler said Lowell, from a wealthy Boston family, built the observatory housing its 24-inch refractor telescope to prove the existence of aqueducts, or “canals,” made by intelligent beings on Mars.

          Lowell was not “one of these wacky guys with all these crazy ideas,” Schindler said. “He was well-educated and went to Harvard because he was a Lowell.”

          “He started [the observatory] because he wanted to prove there was life on Mars.”

          Lowell would also study the field of planetary formation and how the solar system might have evolved, theorizing the existence of a ninth planet—Planet X.

          Lowell died in 1915, though his research would inspire other astronomers to carry on, leading to the discovery of Pluto on Feb. 8, 1930.

          “It’s interesting he wanted to prove there was intelligent life on Mars and didn’t—wanted to discover a planet and didn’t. He probably went to his grave unfulfilled in some ways because he didn’t do that one big thing,” Schindler said.

          Read more here…

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 23:40

        • Rolex Watch Theft Wave Hits Major Western Cities
          Rolex Watch Theft Wave Hits Major Western Cities

          Timepiece aficionados are leaving their Rolex, Patek, Audemars Piguet, and other expensive watches at home as they attempt to stay under criminals’ radar while in public. From Los Angeles to Manhattan to London to Paris, violent high-end watch robberies are rising. 

          “I outright stopped wearing it [stainless steel Rolex Submariner] on the subway.

          “I don’t want to draw attention to myself in that way” amid the spate of subway crimes, New York City resident Troy Barmore told NYTimes in August. 

          While watch theft statistics are limited in major metro areas, authorities across the US and Europe have warned about a wave of criminals targeting affluent people for their timepieces. 

          Bloomberg reported London’s Metropolitan Police Service recorded a staggering 60% jump in knife-point robberies. In Paris, an entire police task force has been assigned to investigate luxury watch theft. 

          “This is a top priority for us, and we have already made a number of arrests.

          “No one should have to go about their day in fear of thieves,” said London Detective Chief Superintendent Owain Richards.

          Police data in London shows 667 Rolex watches were stolen from people between January and September, up from 60 over the same period last year. The average value of watches stolen in the English capital exceeded 10,000 pounds this summer. 

          Watch owners insure their timepieces, but that’s the least of their worries because they could become victims of a violent robbery. Some who sport these watches have taken them off and placed them in winder boxes. 

          And back to the US, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said 206 thefts involving at least one watch valued at $5,000 or more occurred between Jan. 1 through mid-November. That’s a 30% increase over the same period last year. 

          Organized crime gangs have been mainly on the prowl, scoping out wealthy folks, either at their homes or in public, waiting to pounce and steal expensive jewelry. These thefts are also happening at home. 

          “We are definitely seeing examples of robberies and thefts of luxury watches taking place across North America,” Tannie Ng, a senior underwriter for luxury collections at Chubb Ltd., said in an interview.

          With that in mind, it’s safer to wear less expensive and or no jewelry at all. And for those who want to wear fancy jewelry despite the risks, well, wearing body armor and or legally concealing a weapon could be your best shot at survival as the western world plummets into a crime-infested liberal utopia. 

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 23:20

        • World Economic Forum Cancels Twitter, Directs Followers To Chinese Social Media Apps
          World Economic Forum Cancels Twitter, Directs Followers To Chinese Social Media Apps

          Authored by Jordan Schachtel via The Dossier (emphasis ours),

          Prior to its upcoming conference in Davos next month, the World Economic Forum (WEF) appears to have joined the cancel campaign against Twitter, taking to recommending Chinese state-controlled social media apps to “follow along” with Davos Man into the future.

          Twitter is noticeably absent from the entities listed on the organization’s “How to follow Davos 2023” social media pamphlet, and that appears to be no accident. 

          To stay up to speed with all that is happening within the invite-only doors of the ruling class confab, the WEF recommends following along through a handful of social media sites. They include the U.S.-based narrative-compliant Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, along with the Chinese social media apps TikTok WeChat, and Weibo. Twitter, which has freed itself from the grasp of the WEF-endorsed censorship-compliant social apps, is no longer included.

          Through its founder Klaus Schwab and partner organizations, the WEF has a very cozy relationship with the Chinese government. Davos recently revealed that their China office now has 40 full time staffers. Moreover, every year in Beijing, the WEF hosts its “Annual Meeting of the New Champions,” which facilitates partnerships between international businesses and the Chinese Community Party. In 2018, the CCP awarded Klaus Schwab with its China Reform Friendship Medal, a medal for non-Chinese people who do the CCP’s bidding overseas.

          Davos 2023 will feature Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, on stage. First reported by The Dossier, he will appear at an event titled “Tackling Harm in The Digital Era.” 

          In case you missed it, The Dossier has obtained an early, partial list of both events and confirmed speakers for Davos 2023. On the agenda for the 2023 conference includes event titles such as Why We Need Battery Passports, Leading The Charge Through Earth’s New Normal, A Living Wage For All, Enabling An Equitable Transition, and Beyond The Rainbow: Advancing LGBTQ+ Rights, among others.

          The Bird App has faced a ferocious cancel campaign following its change of management. Elon Musk’s pledge to turn Twitter into a free speech platform has met major resistance from the institutional corporate and governmental ruling class. Several WEF partners, such as BlackRock, have joined the attacks against Twitter, boycotting the platform in protest of its “content moderation” policies. It should come as no surprise that the ruling class’s favorite narrative and ideas shop for technocratic tyranny has come after Twitter, given that the latter app is now serving as the one major global social media platform for open debate and dialogue.

          Subscribe to The Dossier

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 23:00

        • Despite Massive COVID Wave, High-Frequency Indicators Show China's Traffic Congestion Rebounds
          Despite Massive COVID Wave, High-Frequency Indicators Show China’s Traffic Congestion Rebounds

          China abruptly reversed the zero-Covid regime that isolated the world’s second-largest economy for nearly three years. High-frequency data shows highway congestion is rising, which could indicate a surge in crude demand in 2023. 

          BloombergNEF published a note that found China’s road congestion index rebounded from the previous week. The index includes highway congestion from 15 major cities, which jumped by 58.2% versus a week earlier. And what this means is that mobility is increasing across China despite the resurgence of Covid-19 infections. 

          China’s exit from zero-Covid (more on what the reopening means for the economy and markets) could indicate crude consumption for the country might begin to tick up in the first quarter of 2023 and accelerate in the back half of the year if the reopening process is smooth. 

          Since 2020, strict lockdowns and quarantines have impeded mobility by road inside China. For the first ten months of this year, passengers traveling by road were down 82% versus the same period in 2019. As restrictions ease, travel demand will increase and eventually rebound as urban and long-distance highway travel resumes. This would boost oil consumption. 

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          “China’s total consumption is set to rise by 1.0 million b/d or more by the end of 2023 as travel restrictions unwind and manufacturing recovers,” Reuters noted. As we explained last month, China has already increased oil imports for reopening. 

          The problem with China reopening is there might not be enough spare crude production capacity to satisfy demand by the second half of 2023. Crude supply remains constrained by OPEC+ output limits, sanctions on Russia, and a lack of US crude production, so if there’s no global recession next year, the likelihood of renewed upward pressure on crude could take hold.

          … and maybe former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s bullish outlook for $150 Brent is something to note. 

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          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 22:40

        • Lying Liar George Santos Under Investigation For All Those Lies
          Lying Liar George Santos Under Investigation For All Those Lies

          Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          Republican Congressman-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) is being investigated by prosecutors after he said he had embellished his professional biography during his campaign to represent the state’s 3rd Congressional District.

          U.S. Rep.-elect George Santos (R-N.Y.) speaks at the Republican Jewish Coalition annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas, Nev., on Nov. 19, 2022. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

          Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly, a Republican who took office at the start of 2022, said in a statement on Dec. 29: “The numerous fabrications and inconsistencies associated with Congressman-Elect Santos are nothing short of stunning.

          “The residents of Nassau County and other parts of the third district must have an honest and accountable representative in Congress. No one is above the law and if a crime was committed in this county, we will prosecute it.”

          Representatives for Santos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

          On Dec. 26, in an interview with the New York Post and New York-based radio station WABC, Santos said he had fabricated parts of his education and work experience, in what he called “resume embellishments.”

          Santos had falsely claimed on his biography posted on the National Republican Congressional Committee that he had obtained “degrees in finance and economics” at Baruch College and New York University, and had worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

          The revelations came about after a report from The New York Times on Dec. 19 called into question what Santos had claimed about his heritage, education, and work history.

          The rep.-elect said he still plans to assume office in January. He is scheduled to be sworn in on Jan. 3, when the U.S. House of Representatives reconvenes.

          “I want to make sure that if I disappointed anyone by resume embellishments, I’m sorry,” he told WABC on Dec. 26. “And I will deliver to you on everything I campaigned on because it’s still the same guy, still the same message, still the same priorities.”

          Santos faced other allegations such as that he had falsely said he was Jewish. Santos on Dec. 26 told the New York Post he had “never claimed to be Jewish.”

          Previously, he referred to himself as “a proud American Jew,” reported The Associated Press, and described himself as a “non-observant Jew,” reported the Jewish Insider. He separately had said on Twitter that he is a “conservative Roman Catholic.”

          In remarks to the Jewish Insider in early November, Santos said: “Whether my mother’s Jewish background beliefs, which are mine, or my father’s Roman Catholic beliefs, which are also mine, are represented or not, I want to represent everyone else that practices every other religion to make sure everybody feels like they have a partner in me.”

          Read more here…

           

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 22:20

        • The New Yorker Promotes "People's CDC" And Mask Mandates Forever
          The New Yorker Promotes “People’s CDC” And Mask Mandates Forever

          When the science no longer supports the establishment narrative, the science no longer matters.  This is the lesson we have learned time and time again over the course of the past few years when it comes to covid mandates and vaccine cultism.  Americans in particular have been whipped with incessant claims since 2020 that the “science is settled” when it comes to mask restrictions, lockdowns, mRNA technology, etc.  Yet, as time passes, every “conspiracy theory” asserted by the anti-mandate crowd turns out to be true.

          This, however, is not stopping the covid cult (made up mostly of political leftists) from blindly marching forward as they cling to the sweet taste of ultimate power they experienced from 2020 – 2021.  They just can’t let it go.  The pandemic world is their ideal world, and they continue to reveal their addiction in a steady outcry for ongoing restrictions.  

          The New Yorker has recently joined the trend for perpetual medical tyranny with an article titled ‘The Case For Wearing Masks Forever’ in which they promote the concept of a new politicized version of the CDC, called the People’s CDC, which ignores the actual science and enables the irrational fears of covid obsessives. 

          The People’s CDC is made up of academics, doctors, activists, and artists who believe that the government has left them to fend for themselves against Covid-19.  They believe the CDC’s data and guidelines have been distorted by powerful forces with vested interests in keeping people at work and keeping anxieties about the pandemic down.

          This is a fascinating juxtaposition of previous narratives.  Two years ago, anti-mandate movements argued the exact opposite – That data and guidelines had been distorted by powerful forces vested in keeping the public afraid and under control.  As it turns out, the anti-mandate crowd was right about everything.  The public was being lied to about the effectiveness of the masks, the effectiveness of the lockdowns and the effectiveness of the vaccines.  Establishment institutions have been forced by the wider dissemination of scientific data to admit this reality. 

          And now, leftists are livid. They feel betrayed by the very government agencies that once fed their craving for fear. 

          The People’s CDC admits they don’t really know what their larger goal is, only that they are seeking to provide an “alternative source of information”, one that essentially reinforces their ideological assumptions.  It should be noted that when conservatives and liberty activists tried to share scientific information that was contrary to the establishment narrative, it was these same leftists that cried for censorship and called anti-mandate groups “dangerous”.  

          The difference between the two groups is stark, though.  On the conservative side, the goal was clear and concise – Stop the draconian mandates because they are politically motivated and are not based on legitimate science. The goal was to separate politics from science.   On the leftist side the broad motivation is to inject activism into science; to make science as political as possible.  This is a truly dangerous and destructive endeavor.

          The group suggests that ongoing mask mandates are essential to dealing with the spread of covid.  Members even claim that opposition to masks is predominantly among white people, and that anti-masking is rooted in “white supremacy” and eugenics.  Many minorities are also anti-mask, and the fact that The New Yorker would even entertain such drivel highlights the downfall of mainstream journalism.

          The People’s CDC notes that they take issue with the way that the real CDC emphasizes individual choices over collective action.  This was not the case a year ago and it really still isn’t the case today.  What they are likely more upset about is that the CDC gave up on collective enforcement because such measures failed to pass scientific scrutiny and the scrutiny of the public.

          The official median Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of covid continues to sit at a mere 0.23%.  Meaning, on average over 99.7% of the population is not at risk of dying from the virus.  This is a number which every establishment institution seeks to avoid mentioning because it lays bare the insanity behind covid fear mongering.  

          The CDC has openly admitted that masking is not very effective, noting that the cloth masks which were widely required in public establishments across the country do little or nothing to prevent the transmission of covid.  At best they acted as a placebo, at worst they represented as symbol of submission to collectivist authority.  While N95 masks are purported to be more effective, recent studies show that the N95 offers no more protection than cloth masks.

          States in which masking was widely enforced did not see any significant reduction in infection rates or death rates over states that had no mask mandates.  In fact, the rates are almost identical.  

          This is the kind of information The New Yorker and the People’s CDC never mention.  That’s what happens when science is tainted by activism – The quest for truth becomes an annoyance rather than the primary mission. 

          What the covid debate really amounts to is a conflict between those that support individual liberty vs those that do not.  Those that think society should be group focused and think that individual choice is a threat vs those that see the group as an abstraction exploited to take away people’s freedoms.  Collectivists see the covid mandates as a vehicle to further their cause.  They don’t care if the science contradicts their aims because the point is ultimately not public health and safety, the point is to elevate the ideology of the group over the individual.  This is why anti-mandate champions often refer to people like those in the “People’s CDC” as cultists; they desire ideological alignment to the detriment of all other concerns, including reality.   

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 22:00

        • GOP-Controlled State Legislatures Weigh 'Constitutionality' Of Presidential Executive Orders
          GOP-Controlled State Legislatures Weigh ‘Constitutionality’ Of Presidential Executive Orders

          Authored by John Haughey via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          Rep. Brian Seitz (R-Branson) will enter his third session when the Missouri General Assembly convenes in Springfield on Jan. 4 and, for the third time, he is sponsoring a bill that would require state lawmakers to scrutinize and, potentially disregard, some presidential executive orders.

          President Joe Biden signs executive orders as Vice President Kamala Harris and Director of NIAID Anthony Fauci look on in the White House in Washington on Jan. 21, 2021. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

          Under his proposed House Bill 174, the Missouri House must review all presidential executive orders not affirmed by a Congressional vote to determine if “they are, in fact, Constitutional,” Seitz told The Epoch Times.

          If the Missouri House has questions about the constitutionality of a presidential executive order, the bill requires it be referred to the state’s attorney general to determine if it “restricts a person’s constitutional rights.”

          “I’m a firm believer in states’ rights, and am very concerned about losing our authority [as a legislature] to federal overreach,” Seitz said.

          That purview would apply to any presidential executive order that relates to “regulation of business activities or personal behaviors during a pandemic or other public health emergency,” natural resources, the agricultural industry, land use, “the financial sector through the imposition of environmental, social, or governance [ESG] standards, and “the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.”

          “There are three branches of the government—not one,” Seitz said, stressing if adopted, the measure “would cover executive orders from presidents of either party.”

          But make no mistake: The bill—along with Senate companions filed by Sen. Rick Brattin (R-Harrisonville)—is hardly bipartisan in genesis.

          Since Democrat Joe Biden was sworn in as president in January 2021, similar bills have been introduced in at least nine other Republican-controlled state legislatures: Alabama, Utah, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Iowa, and South Carolina.

          The Oklahoma and Tennessee bills advanced through committees to chamber votes in 2021 but ultimately were not adopted.

          American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) senior director for Homeland Security, International Relations, and Federalism Karla Jones said the bills are in response to “federal overreach that infringes on state sovereignty.”

          Washington-based ALEC is usually the generator of conservative policy guides and model bills that state lawmakers carry into sessions.

          But in reference to presidential executive orders, the council adopted its model policy regarding presidential executive orders in December 2021 in response to bills submitted by state lawmakers in six states during that year’s sessions.

          “We just saw [the bills] proliferating because executive orders were becoming such a problem,” Jones told The Epoch Times. “There was a lot of alarm among state lawmakers who care about federalism and worry about federal overreach.”

          During his first six months in office, “Biden was on track to issue more executive orders than FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt],” she said. “He has since leveled off considerably and is now pretty equal with President Donald Trump, who also issued more executive orders than we thought was prudent.”

          According to Ballotpedia, as of Dec. 22, Biden had signed 105 executive orders. During his four years in office, Trump issued 220. FDR signed more than 3,500 in his 12 years in office.

          Jones said it is easy to disparage a president’s use of executive authority, but it’s often exerted by default.

          “Congress doesn’t have the political will to do the hard work, so many presidents rely on executive orders,” she said. “George Washington had, like, one. Single-digit executive orders,” during a presidency “was typical for the first 50 years of our history.”

          ALEC’s policy fine-tunes the 2021 versions of the bills. Rather than tie them to specific issues, such as gun owners’ rights, the policy is a guide for bills “that could be used in any state” across a range of issues, Jones said, including by Democrat-controlled legislatures.

          “Blue state may care about federal overreach in other areas.”

          Seitz’s proposed HB 174 is similar to Iowa’s HF 815, filed in 2021 by Rep. John Wills, (R-Spirit Lake), which would have required Iowa to disregard, or not enforce, any presidential executive order related to a public health emergency, firearms, land-use, or regulation of natural resources, the agricultural industry, and the financial sector, that “restricts a person’s rights.”

          HF 815 would also have accorded the Iowa Legislative Council authority to review the constitutionality of presidential executive orders and refer its conclusions to the state’s attorney general or governor’s office.

          Oklahoma Rep. Jay Steagall (R-Yukon), sponsored a 2021 resolution that claimed the U.S. Constitution’s 10th Amendment allows states to claim sovereignty when it comes to discarding presidential executive orders.

          Neither was adopted.

          Read more here…

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 21:40

        • Laid Off Tech Workers Are Having No Trouble Finding New Jobs
          Laid Off Tech Workers Are Having No Trouble Finding New Jobs

          It was just hours ago that we wrote about how restaurant staffing was returning to pre-pandemic levels and, in what we’re sure is totally not a coincidence, it also appears that laid off tech workers are having no trouble finding new jobs. 

          According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, the job market apparently hasn’t softened enough just yet: tech workers are finding jobs “shortly after beginning their search” despite the tightening job market.

          The 10.3 million job openings across the economy still “far exceeds” the number of unemployed Americans, the report noted.

          Ergo, 79% of workers who were laid off or terminated found new work within three months, the report says. About 40% of workers found new jobs less than a month after being terminated or laid off from the tech jobs, according to data from ZipRecruiter.

          Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told the Journal: “Despite the widespread layoffs, hiring freezes, and cost-cutting taking place in tech, many tech workers are finding reemployment remarkably quickly. They’re still the most sought-after workers with the most in-demand skills.” 

          The report noted that a smaller share of workers in tech are spending long periods of time searching for new opportunities:

          About 5% of laid off tech workers who found jobs from April to October had spent more than six months hunting for work, down from 26% of those hired between August 2021 and February 2022, ZipRecruiter said.

          One 23 year old former videographer, who was fired and then able to land a new job within two months, told WSJ: ““When I was applying, to be honest, I didn’t feel very confident because there was such an influx of competition with a lot of people also being laid off.”

          But he was able to land a social media manager job at a software startup under 3 months from being laid off. “I was surprised at how quickly I was able to secure an offer for a job,” he said of the new opportunity. 

          Ryan Sutton, district president at Robert Half, a global recruitment firm added: “We’ve definitely seen a slowdown in hiring, but the reason why is that the job creation level was beyond record highs because of the slingshot effect of the pandemic. From August 2020 to May 2022, it wasn’t red-hot. It was lava-hot.”

          He said the “usual” occurrence of laid off tech workers contacting his company for placement hasn’t happened. “We have not seen it yet—we haven’t seen more candidates coming to market. Our recruiters are having to hunt and hustle just as much as they had to in the last couple of years,” he concluded.  

          And it appears the bounce back for laid off workers isn’t just limited to tech. Workers in other industries, such as transportation and delivery, were also able to find new jobs easily, the Journal concluded. You can read their full report here. 

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 21:20

        • China's COVID Chaos A "Horrible Indictment" Of US Leadership For Emulating CCP Lockdowns: Former White House Adviser
          China’s COVID Chaos A “Horrible Indictment” Of US Leadership For Emulating CCP Lockdowns: Former White House Adviser

          Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times,

          If the world can learn one thing from the COVID chaos in China, it is that “locking down does not work,” said healthcare policy adviser Dr. Scott Atlas.

          “We don’t even know really the extent of the harms to their population that they inflicted by locking down but we know anecdotally that there were massive harms to people—they couldn’t get food, they couldn’t get their own medications, people were imposing a completely uncivilized, almost animalistic way,” Atlas, a previous White House special coronavirus adviser and contributor to The Epoch Times, said in an interview.

          For almost three years, China’s ruling regime has imposed a severe zero-COVID strategy, using strict lockdowns, centralized quarantines, mass testing, and omnipresent surveillance to contain the virus’s spread, leading to many residents being deprived of basic living needs, and some even dying from a lack of care.

          “This is a massive human rights violation,” Atlas said.

          “All of their policies imposed on their public,” he said, referring to China’s communist party (CCP), “is an example of one of the most extraordinary violations of human rights that we have seen in modern history.”

          ‘Flies in the Face of Common Sense’

          The policy reversal that came without a transition plan accompanied an exponential surge of cases that was quickly overwhelming the country’s health system.

          World Health Organization emergencies director Mike Ryan noted during a global health briefing on Dec. 14 that this wave of COVID-19 now seen in China is not due to the lifting of COVID restrictions, as it started long before any easing of the zero-COVID policy.

          “I think that it’s very important to recognize that,” he said, adding,

          “The disease was spreading intensively because I believe the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease, and I believe that the Chinese authorities have decided strategically that that for them is not the best option anymore.”

          Contrasting the few death cases the authorities have reported—11 since the easing of COVID curbs earlier this month—was mounting anecdotal evidence suggesting that the virus is fast spreading in Chinese cities and fatalities are rising. Hospitals and funeral homes have been filling up, with backlogs of bodies awaiting cremation.

          The Chinese numbers, Atlas said, are “absurd” to think of.

          “This just completely flies in the face of common sense,” he said.

          “No one should believe the counting method that is reported by China,” he added, noting that to “save face and justify their reckless harmful lockdowns,” the regime would “necessarily have to say they had fewer deaths.”

          COVID-19 patients on gurneys at Tianjin First Center Hospital in Tianjin, China, on Dec. 28, 2022. (Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images)

          “I don’t know how anyone would think that they have transparency on how they’re counting.”

          The lack of data from China has been so concerning that it has driven the United States to impose a new travel curb mandating COVID tests for travelers from China.

          Lockdown Success ‘Fantasy’

          That the regime has been “lying about the numbers” from the beginning, Atlas said, poses a troubling question.

          In January 2020, after suppressing whistleblower doctors and journalists trying to sound warning about the emerging virus, China became the world’s first country to shut down cities in response to COVID-19 spiraling out of control. As the virus spread, the lockdown method that Beijing insisted was effective was then quickly copied by other countries around the world, such as the United States.

          Atlas, an early lockdown critic, has previously enumerated the toll that such policies inflict on the public, from learning loss and mental health damage to a rise in substance abuse.

          “There was this false belief that somehow China had ‘beaten the virus.’ This was a completely absurd lie—a fantasy.”

          Health workers wait for people to scan a health code to test for the COVID-19 coronavirus in the Jing’an district in Shanghai, China, on Dec. 22, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

          It was a lie that Atlas believes policymakers “blind to science” bought without question.

          “It’s one thing that it’s a society like China [that] imposes the draconian policies on its on its public, because that’s what totalitarian societies do,” he said. “But it’s another thing—it’s extraordinary that governments of supposedly ‘free societies’ would attempt to impose these sorts of policies on the public—and even more sad is the acquiescence of people to such policies.”

          “It’s a horrible indictment of American leadership to emulate a totalitarian society like China.”

          Separate from the fact that locking down can’t get rid of a virus, Atlas sees two things that the world hasn’t grasped about the CCP’s “inhumane policies”: “the true failure of their policies and the massive harms on their own people.”

          “The worst thing for China, or any totalitarian society, is to have people start realizing that the government policies are failures,” he said. “Because the only reason that the totalitarian societies exist is they have power.”

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 21:00

        • National Guard Going Door-To-Door In Buffalo, Official Says
          National Guard Going Door-To-Door In Buffalo, Official Says

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

          Police and National Guard members are going door-to-door Wednesday to check on some Buffalo residents following a major winter storm that left dozens of people dead in recent days, officials said Wednesday.

          A National Guard truck drives past a police cruiser on a snowy street in Buffalo, N.Y., on Dec. 27, 2022. (Joseph Cooke/The Buffalo News via AP)

          Erie County Executive Mark C. Poloncarz confirmed the development on Wednesday morning in a news conference. National Guard members and police will be deployed to neighborhoods that lost power during the storm.

          Poloncarz also warned more dead could be found during the door-to-door checks. “We are fearful that there are people who are not doing well, or who may have perished,” he said.

          “If your neighborhood lost power, you’re going to see a member of the National Guard starting now for the next 48 hours, who is going to knock on your door, ‘Is everybody OK? Was there any issues? Is anyone sick,’” Poloncarz added.

          Officials said more than 30 people so far have been reported to have died because of the blizzard that raged Friday and Saturday in western New York, an area prone to powerful winter storms. The historic Blizzard of 1977 killed as many as 29.

          A driving ban remained in effect for Buffalo, Poloncarz said Wednesday. The National Guard and state police are enforcing the measure, he said.

          “The National Guard is NOT ticketing, they are assisting with traffic issues and people violating the driving ban in the City of Buffalo while crews are still working to clear roads,” he wrote on Twitter Wednesday, adding that the ban on driving will likely remain for the rest of Wednesday.

          Cars and buildings during a blizzard in Buffalo, N.Y., on Dec. 26, 2022. (Mostofa Ahsan/via Reuters)

          The county executive added that “no EMS call will go unanswered” and that “911 has been up and running and EMS crews are focused on life-saving missions. There may be delays, but they are out responding to calls.”

          At least one death in Erie County was connected to an EMS delay, he told CNN on Tuesday. “Our emergency responders could not get to the person because of the snow,” Poloncarz added. “They were blocked, and by the time they got there it was too late.”

          Only a trace of snow might fall on Buffalo and Western New York off the Great Lakes on Wednesday as temperatures will hit 40 degrees Fahrenheit, said Josh Weiss, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

          “Most of the snow has ended, fortunately. They need a break,” Weiss said. “In Buffalo, there’s no forecast below zero into next week,” he said. “By the weekend it’ll be in the 50s.”

          Weiss said that a warming trend has also begun for the eastern third of the United States and will extend past the new Year with temperatures remaining largely above freezing. Melting snow presents a risk of flooding and about 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch of rain is expected in Western New York on Friday and Saturday.

          “We’re expecting a rapid melt, and regional flooding on creeks. Creeks will top out,” Poloncarz said Wednesday.

          Other Details

          Giant snow-blowing machines were deployed to help clear several major highways clogged with towering drifts.

          Vehicles make their way along a snow-covered street in Buffalo, N.Y., on Dec. 26, 2022. (Joed Viera/AFP via Getty Images)

          Hundreds of electric company linemen were out restoring power, and Poloncarz posted on Twitter that some 4,500 customers remained without electricity on Tuesday, as crews cleared downed trees with chain saws.

          For residents essentially trapped in their homes for two days, the easing of the storm brought a realization of how much snow fell during white-out conditions that had limited their view.

          New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called it an “epic, once-in-a-lifetime” weather disaster, the worst blizzard to hit the Buffalo area in 45 years.

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 20:40

        • Judge Keeps Oregon’s Strict Gun Control Measure On Ice
          Judge Keeps Oregon’s Strict Gun Control Measure On Ice

          Authored by Scottie Barnes via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          An Oregon gun-control measure that many predict will wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court remains in limbo.

          Guns are on display at a shop in Roseburg, Ore., on Oct. 2, 2015. (Cengiz Yar Jr./AFP via Getty Images)

          In a Dec 23 hearing, Circuit Court Judge Robert Raschio said he would rule by Jan. 3 whether to lift a temporary restraining order (TRO) on the Oregon Ballot Measure 114 requirement that a background check be completed before a firearm can be sold or transferred.

          Earlier this month, Raschio issued a TRO on the measure’s permit-to-purchase provision and its ban on magazines that carry 10 or more rounds. Those TROs are still in place.

          Passed in November with just 50.7 percent of the vote, Ballot Measure 114 was initially scheduled to take effect Dec. 8 but, starting on Dec. 6, faced a flurry of lawsuits.

          A driver pulled a handgun after Antifa members smashed his truck lights in Salem, Ore., on March 28, 2021. Second Amendment activists say that if fully implemented, Oregon Ballot Measure 114 would adversely impact a citizen’s right of self defense. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

          In a Harney County suit filed on Dec. 6 by Gun Owners of America (GOA), the Gun Owners Federation, Cliff Asmussen, and Joseph Arnold, Raschio issued a TRO just three hours after Federal Court Judge Karin J. Immergut had denied such relief to plaintiffs in one of four related cases.

          In his ruling, Raschio said the law violated the Oregon state constitution’s right to bear arms and that Oregonians would be “unable to lawfully purchase a firearm or bear a magazine capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition in the State of Oregon.”

          The Oregon Department of Justice immediately filed a petition asking the Oregon Supreme Court to vacate the lower court’s decision.

          “We strongly disagree with the decision of the Harney County Circuit Court,” Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum wrote to the court. “Our mandamus petition to the Oregon Supreme Court gives our highest state court the opportunity to weigh in now and reverse the Harney County judge’s ruling.”

          The state Supreme Court refused to intervene.

          State Unprepared to Issue Permits

          On Dec. 13, Raschio heard arguments on the permit-to-purchase provision, which the state acknowledged was not ready to go. The state had declared that it needed until approximately Feb. 8 to implement that system.

          Lifting the order before the permitting system is ready would cause “irreparable harm to the constitutional right to bear arms,” he said. The judge continued the TRO for this provision. When the state notifies him in writing that it is prepared to roll out the new permitting program, he will schedule a hearing.

          The court then considered the ban on magazines that hold 10 rounds or more. The state argued that such firearms were not in “common use” when the Second Amendment was ratified. So, they are not protected.

          The state’s expert, Brian DeLay, associate professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, testified that high-capacity firearms were an “experimental technology” and not commercially available when the Oregon Constitution was ratified.

          Experts for the plaintiffs testified that high-capacity firearms have existed since the 16th century.

          Lewis and Clark Carried High Capacity Firearm

          Isaac Botkin, the technical and education director at manufacturing company T-Rex Arms for more than a decade, described a long history of firearms capable of holding more than 10 rounds, the most famous being one carried by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It was in 1804-06 that Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Lt. William Clark led the expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest.

          “Meriwether Lewis carried a firearm that had the capability of 20 or 22 rounds that was quite effective,” he said.

          The state’s attorney argued that Botkin shouldn’t be allowed to make any “historical conclusions” on the history of guns, claiming that he is not an expert. The judge disagreed and allowed Botkin to continue.

          Plaintiff’s Attorney Tony Aiello Jr. argued that magazines that hold more than 10 rounds are standard for guns manufactured today. He said those guns are “essentially the same firearm, just modified by design and function,” as some of the nation’s earliest guns.

          Raschio asked whether magazine restrictions would “reasonably promote public safety by restraining a constitutional right to bear arms” as claimed in the ballot measure. Aiello argued that it would not, claiming that the ban would deny law-abiding Oregonians the ability to defend themselves while criminals continue to ignore the law.

          Background Check Provision Scrutinized

          Convinced that the ban would violate Oregonians’ rights under the state constitution, Raschio also extended the TRO on the magazine restriction.

          “Based upon the preliminary evidence, the result of BM 114 would be a near absolute prohibition on handguns and many other firearms with their magazines,” Raschio wrote.

          The Dec. 23 hearing focused primarily on the measure’s requirement that a background check is completed before a firearm can be sold or transferred.

          Oregon special Attorney General Harry B. Wilson argued that the completed background-check requirement would save lives, is constitutional, and wasn’t explicitly challenged by the plaintiffs.

          A licensed firearms dealer can legally deliver a purchased gun after three business days if the required federal background check is not complete—what gun control advocates call the “Charleston Loophole.” Measure 114 would end that by giving the state more time to complete background checks.

          Measure Offers No Guarantee of Expediency

          “Although a significant percentage of background checks are completed automatically within minutes, many require additional time,” Wilson wrote to the court. “As a result, in some instances, individuals with felony criminal histories can obtain a firearm because the transferer can deliver the firearm after three days and before the background check is complete.”

          Read more here…

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 20:20

        • Watch: New Batch Of Stealth Fighters Delivered To Russian Aerospace Forces
          Watch: New Batch Of Stealth Fighters Delivered To Russian Aerospace Forces

          Russia’s state-controlled United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) announced a new batch of Sukhoi Su-57 fifth-generation fighters had been delivered to the Russian Aerospace Forces, according to EurAsian Times. 

          “A new batch of fifth-generation Su-57 fighter jets has been delivered under a major contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense. This aircraft is the future of Russian military aviation, embodies advanced technologies and design solutions. It has super maneuverability, is barely noticeable, can destroy air and ground targets, detect the enemy from long distances and operate in network-centric warfare,” Sergey Chemezov, CEO of Rostec, the Russian state-owned technology company, said in a statement. 

          UAC didn’t elaborate on how many Su-57 were delivered in the latest batch. Still, some on Twitter who posted images of the jets speculated at least four. 

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          In May, two Su-57s were delivered to Russian Aerospace Forces. It’s believed 6 to 15 Su-57s are already operational. Over the next five years, Russia plans for 76 Su-57 fighters. 

          Russia’s first stealth-capable fighter plane will eventually replace fourth-generation MiG-29 and Su-27 aircraft though production is very slow. Perhaps the tweet explains why… 

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          For all the times Moscow touts its new weapon systems, these fifth-generation fighters have been widely absent from Ukrainian airspace since the invasion. 

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 20:00

        • California Lawmaker Introduces Bill To Legalize Magic Mushrooms, Other Psychedelics
          California Lawmaker Introduces Bill To Legalize Magic Mushrooms, Other Psychedelics

          Authored by Jamie Joseph via The Epoch Times,

          A Democratic lawmaker in California introduced a bill Dec. 19 to decriminalize the personal use of plant-based psychedelic drugs—such as magic mushrooms, mescaline, and psilocybin—outside of school grounds for people 21 and up.

          “Criminalizing drug use and possession accomplish absolutely nothing other than to fill up our prisons with people who are addicted,” said Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) outside of the state Capitol Dec. 19.

          “We need to treat drug use as a health issue instead of a criminal one.”

          Wiener, the author of Senate Bill (SB) 58, said that psychedelics—a type of hallucinogenic drug—“have huge promise” when it comes to helping those suffering from mental health issues such as opioid addiction, depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

          Sen. Scott Wiener speaks in front of the California State Senate on Aug. 31, 2022. (Screenshot via California State Senate)

          SB 58 will also allow the cultivation, transfer, or transportation of fungi or other plant-based materials that can serve as ingredients for these drugs, according to its text.

          The bill may be heard on or after Jan. 16, 2023.

          These drugs affect how people see, hear, taste, smell, or feel, and can radically affect the user’s mood and thought, sometimes resulting in psychosis, according to existing academic studies.

          One veteran, Michael Young, said at the press conference he came home to the United States with severe PTSD after 10 years of counter-terrorism missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

          “Psychedelics help heal the unseen scars from my years of service in the war on terror,” he said.

          “This sacred medicine showed me how to put myself back together again.”

          According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, hallucinogens “can cause users to see images, hear sounds, and feel sensations that seem real but do not exist.” The effects of ingesting psychedelics generally begin within 20 to 90 minutes and can last up to 12 hours in some cases or as short as 15 minutes in others, according to the institute.

          Magic Mushrooms sit in a fridge in London, England, on July 18, 2005. (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

          SB 58 is a comparably moderate version of a previous bill Wiener proposed but failed to pass in 2021, which would have legalized not only plant-based but synthetic psychedelics, such as MDMAs, LSD, and ketamine.

          Although it is rare for someone to die from an LSD overdose, “severe injury and death has occurred as an indirect result of using LSD, in that accidents, self-mutilation, and suicide have occurred … when people are largely unaware of what they are doing,” according to the American Addiction Centers.

          The Heroic Hearts Project—a co-sponsor of SB 519 of 2021 and psychedelic advocacy group for veterans struggling with PTSD—said “psychedelic treatment options provided these veterans with a level of relief and healing that many had come to believe was no longer possible.”

          Several law enforcement groups opposed the 2021 bill, including the California College and University Police Chiefs Association, California District Attorneys Association, California Narcotic Officers’ Association, California Police Chiefs Association, California State Sheriffs’ Association, California Statewide Law Enforcement Association, and Peace Officers’ Research Association of California, among other organizations.

          The Peace Officers’ Research Association of California “believes many of the penalties related to controlled substances work as a deterrent or a reason for individuals to get the treatment they need to turn their lives around,” according to a statement of opposition submitted to the state Assembly Health Committee in July 2021.

          “Furthermore, [the association] believes this bill will cause an increase in the selling and personal use of drugs, which will lead to greater crime and arrests in our communities,” the statement read.

          Under the CURES Act, signed into law in 2016 to expand medical innovations, many hallucinogenic substances—including LSD, DMT, mescaline, and psilocybin—are classified as Schedule 1 substances, meaning they pose a high risk of abuse and are not accepted for medical use.

          In September, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a motion calling for law enforcement to deprioritize investigations and arrests of adults found in possession of psychedelics. This was a month after an Oakland church using magic mushrooms as its form of communion was raided by police.

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 19:40

        • Buttigieg Knew: State AGs Warned Transportation Agency Of Airline Debacle Months Ago
          Buttigieg Knew: State AGs Warned Transportation Agency Of Airline Debacle Months Ago

          Shortly before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in September that airline issues would ‘get better‘ before the holidays, a bipartisan group of attorneys general warned him that regulators’ lax oversight over the industry was about to lead to chaos.

          According to The Lever, federal officials stood by as Southwest Airlines executives, “flush with cash from a government bailout,” showered themselves in cash and dividends, instead of shoring up fundamental issues that have contributed to this week’s travel mayhem.

          Four months before Southwest’s mass cancellation of flights, 38 state attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders declaring that Buttigieg’s agency “failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse” to thousands of consumer complaints about airlines customer service. -The Lever

          “Americans are justifiably frustrated that federal government agencies charged with overseeing airline consumer protection are unable or unwilling to hold the airline industry accountable,” the AGs wrote in August, urging Congress to pass legislation which would arm state officials to enforce consumer protection laws against airlines.

          On August 2, New York AG Letitia James sent Buttigieg a letter raising the alarm over “the deeply troubling and escalating pattern of airlines delaying and canceling flights,” especially during the holidays. The letter made several recommendations, including;

          • Require airlines to advertise and sell only flights that they have adequate personnel to fly and support. Perform regular audits of airlines to ensure compliance, thoroughly investigate airlines with excess cancellations, and impose fines on airlines that do not comply.
          • Require airlines to provide partial refunds to passengers for any cancellation that results in a rescheduled flight which the passenger accepts but that is later or longer than the originally purchased flight.
          • Require airlines to provide full refunds and additional payments for cancellations that require passengers to cancel their flights and assume additional costs, such as flights on other airlines, rental car reservations, gas, or hotel stays, in order to make it to their destination.
          • Require airlines to provide full and prompt refunds to passengers, at passengers’ request, if flights are delayed for longer than a time period established by the FAA.
          • Impose steep fines for domestic flight delays of more than two hours and international flight delays of more than three hours that are not weather-related

          Congressional lawmakers put pressure on Buttigieg nearly six months ago.

          One week after the letter from the Attorneys General, Buttigieg told The Late Late Show With James Corden that the airline experience “is going to get better by the holidays,” Lever reports.

          Read more here…

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 19:20

        • Gun Owners Of America Labels 18 Republican Senators "Turncoats"
          Gun Owners Of America Labels 18 Republican Senators “Turncoats”

          Authored by Michael Clements via The Epoch Times,

          Gun Owners of America (GOA), the Virginia-based Second Amendment rights advocacy group, issued a scathing rebuke of the 18 Republican senators who voted for the 2023 Omnibus Appropriations Act.

          In a Dec. 22 press release, GOA accused the group of advancing the Biden administration’s anti-gun agenda.

          “Unfortunately, 12 gun-control items just passed the Senate with the help of these 18 Republican turncoats,” the press release states.

          The Republicans who voted for the bill are Sen. Roy Blount, Missouri; Sen. John Boozman, Arkansas; Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginia; Sen. Susan Collins, Maine; Sen. John Cornyn, Texas; Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas; Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina; Sen. Jim Inhofe, Oklahoma; Sen. Mitch McConnell, Kentucky; Sen. Jerry Moran, Kansas; Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska; Sen. Rob Portman, Ohio; Sen. Mitt Romney, Utah; Sen. Mike Rounds, South Dakota; Sen, Richard Shelby, Alabama; Sen. John Thune, South Dakota; Sen. Roger Wicker, Mississippi; and Sen. Todd Young, Indiana.

          The GOA was already unhappy with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) for his support of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

          Attempts by The Epoch Times to contact the senators were unsuccessful due mainly to their offices being closed for the Christmas holidays.

          All 18 listed expressed support for the Second Amendment on their websites. All but Senators John Thune and Mike Rounds mentioned their Omnibus votes. The vast majority said military spending, national security issues, and funding were part of their decision.

          One example is Sen. Jim Inhofe who represents Oklahoma, considered the reddest of red states.

          His Omnibus press release lists defense as one of his top priorities. Inhofe touts spending on computer technology, weapons systems, and construction projects at military installations around the world.

          He also includes a list of infrastructure projects in at least 17 counties and municipalities in Oklahoma. Not to mention grants for research at various Oklahoma institutions.

          One Oklahoma project that might draw GOA’s attention is a $10 million Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) to train law enforcement officers to respond to mentally ill or disabled persons.

          GOA flagged such spending as a way for federal officials to promote Extreme Risk Protection orders—so-called Red Flag laws—in the states.

          Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) touted defense spending, homeland security, and infrastructure projects as reasons he supported the Omnibus bill. (Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images)

          Red Flag Laws allow local officials to confiscate firearms owned by a person who has been ruled to be a danger to himself or the community. This can be done regardless of whether the person has broken the law.

          Inhofe wrote that, overall, he is happy with the Omnibus deal. “While this is not the package Republicans would have written on our own, the $45 billion increase for our troops will make our country more secure,” his statement reads.

          But, a review of the 18 senators’ reveals a mixed bag regarding Second Amendment fervor. All the senators criticized by GOA portray themselves as Second Amendment advocates. Some, however, do call for limits or increased regulation.

          Senator John Cornyn, from the generally gun-friendly state of Texas, draws GOA’s ire in particular.

          Like Inhofe, Cornyn touts defense, homeland security, and infrastructure spending as big wins. However, his press release highlights school safety grants and laws supporting crime victims.

          Much of this is covered by the “Bipartisan Safer Communities Act,” which Cornyn helped pass. The GOA opposed the law and school safety grants as the foot-in-the-door for Red Flag Laws.

          During his fight to pass the Act, Cornyn denied that it called for such laws.

          Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) wrote on her website that she believes Extreme Risk Protection orders can be balanced with due process rights. She also listed defense spending and infrastructure as reasons she supported the Omnibus spending bill. (Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images)

          However, Senator Susan Collins, who worked on the Act with Cornyn, pointed to Maine’s “Yellow Flag” law as an example of what could be done to reduce gun violence and protect individual rights.

          Collins’ website doesn’t have one press release specific to the Omnibus bill, but she does list several projects funded by the plan. These include new ships for the U.S. Navy and funding for colleges and medical facilities.

          She is also a strong supporter of Red Flag laws.

          On her website, Collins says these laws can be implemented while respecting the due process rights of individual citizens.

          Utah’s Sen. Mitt Romney also supported the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

          His press release on the Omnibus bill doesn’t mention the Second Amendment, but he does agree with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. They complain that the current process makes it difficult to take firm stands on specific issues.

          “The process for government funding must change in the next Congress and allow for individual appropriations bills to be voted on in regular order instead of being combined into large catchall bills which force us to vote for the bad to get the good,” Romney wrote.

          Graham agrees.

          “This legislation is far from perfect, and the process that led us to this point needs to change,” Graham wrote on his website.

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 19:00

        • Biden Awkwardly Congratulates Most Extreme Right Government In Israel's History
          Biden Awkwardly Congratulates Most Extreme Right Government In Israel’s History

          As we previewed earlier Benjamin Netanyahu has formed what’s being widely perceived as the most hardline and right-wing governing coalition in the country’s history, and on Thursday he was sworn in as the next prime minister along with this top officials.

          President Biden promptly issued a formal congratulations, but also stressed that his administration will “oppose policies that endanger” the two-state solution or “contradict our mutual interests and values.”

          The somewhat strained congratulatory statement among “friends” suggests that relations could get rocky from the start, given on Wednesday Netanyahu’s Likud party released the new governing coalition’s policy guidelines which vowed to place settlement expansion in the Palestinian West Bank as highest on the list of priorities.

          The policy statement opens by vowing to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria.” 

          Netanyahu’s return to power, after already being the longest-ever serving PM for the country, comes after he was ousted 18-months ago under a cloud of scandal. He served as prime minister from 2009 to 2021 – and his ultra-right coalition finally emerged victorious after multiple failed national election attempts.

          Here’s how Axios, consistent even with a number of Israeli publications, describes the new government sworn in on Thursday: 

          The new government reflects the rise of the Israeli extreme right. Two once-fringe figures known for expressing racist and Jewish supremacist views — Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir — have become senior ministers.

          Biden still stressed that the two leaders can “jointly address the many challenges and opportunities facing Israel and the Middle East region, including threats from Iran.”

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          The Biden statement continued: “The United States is working to promote a region that’s increasingly integrated, prosperous, and secure, with benefits for all of its people.”

          The White House has only within the past month acknowledged that the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal is dead. Israeli officials have long warned that any “bad deal” would result in them seriously contemplating a preemptive attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Netanyahu’s own newly appointed national security chief actively supports military strikes on the Islamic Republic.

          It’s worth recalling that after the Biden administration entered the White House at the start of 2021, then PM Netanyahu had to wait weeks for an initial phone call from Biden after Israel reached out. This was widely taken inside Israel as sign of a ‘cold shoulder’ from Biden.

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 18:40

        • Of Economic Crises & Pandemics: Facebook As Fact, Government As Truth, Big Pharma As God
          Of Economic Crises & Pandemics: Facebook As Fact, Government As Truth, Big Pharma As God

          Authored by Colin Todhunter via Off-Guardian.org,

          If events since March 2020 have shown us anything, it is that fear is a powerful weapon for securing hegemony. Any government can manipulate fear about certain things while conveniently ignoring real dangers that a population faces.

          Author and researcher Robert J Burrowes says:

          …if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course.”

          No panic because the controlling interests of the global food system have long profited from a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy that ensures people unnecessarily go hungry when corporate profit rather than need dictates policies.

          US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and must be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.

          During COVID, Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated:

          Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.”

          In the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.

          Like other political leaders, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’. Those who questioned the COVID narrative – including world-renowned scientists – were smeared, shut down and censored.

          It was an internationally orchestrated campaign involving governments, the big tech companies, media and the WHO, among others.

          The EU Times reported on 17 December 2022 that the US Centers for Disease Control worked with social media to censor facts and information about COVID that ran afoul of official narratives.

          The organisation America First Legal noted in a press release that the fourth set of documents it released – obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – revealed:

          …further concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and silence the public square under the government’s label of ‘misinformation’.”

          Twitter ran a ‘Partner Support Portal’ for government employees and other ‘stakeholders’ to submit posts that it would remove or flag as ‘misinformation’ on its platform.

          The US government was actively working to ‘socially inoculate’ the public against anything that threatened its narrative. Big tech corporations monitored and manipulated users for the purposes of censoring unapproved information and pushing government propaganda. Facebook sent written materials to the CDC in which it talked of censoring more than sixteen million ‘pieces of content’ containing opinions or information the government wanted suppressed.

          AFL noted that the CDC was “collaborating with UNICEF, the WHO and IFCN member and leading civil society organisation Mafindo” to mitigate ‘disinformation’. Mafindo is a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner based in Indonesia and funded by Google.

          AFL states:

          What is clear is that the United States government, big tech platforms, and international organizations were fully entangled in an intricate campaign to violate the First Amendment, to silence the American people, and to censor dissenting views.”

          The CDC’s mask guidance policies for school children were also shown to be driven by politics rather than science.

          Across all the major Western nations, there was a clamp down on dissent and a massive censorship campaign to justify a policy framework of social and economic lockdowns, masking, distancing and state intrusion into almost every aspect of private life.

          The findings of AFL indicate how centres of power can and do act in unison when they need to. The fact that it involved a worldwide campaign shows something huge was at stake.

          The official narrative was about protecting populations from a deadly virus. And any dissent that did seep into the edges of mainstream discourse (like Tucker Carlson on Fox News or a few presenters on Talk Radio in the UK, for instance) tended to focus on politicians going too far on lockdowns and restrictions and being caught up in their egotistical lust for power and control.

          Such a superficial explanation avoided a deep, critical analysis of the situation. Indeed, any focus on big finance’s – Wall Street and the City of London – role in this was conspicuous by its absence.

          In March 2022, BlackRock’s Rob Kapito warned that a ‘very entitled’ generation of people would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives as some goods grow scarce because of rising inflation. BlackRock is the world’s most powerful investment fund.

          Kapito talked about the situation in Ukraine and COVID being responsible for the current economic crisis, conveniently ignoring the inflationary impact of the trillions pumped into imploding financial markets in 2019 and 2020 (dwarfing the crisis of 2008).

          The war in Ukraine as well as COVID are being used to explain the roots of the current economic crisis. But COVID policies were a symptom not a cause of the crisis – they were used to manage what by late 2019 was regarded as an impending economic meltdown. Draconian COVID policies had little to do with a public health emergency.

          That much is made clear in the article A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation by Professor Fabio Vighi.

          On 15 August 2019, BlackRock issued a white paper instructing the US Federal Reserve to inject liquidity directly into the financial system to prevent “a dramatic downturn”. The message was unequivocal:

          An unprecedented response is needed when monetary policy is exhausted and fiscal policy alone is not enough. That response will likely involve ‘going direct’.”

          It also stated the need to find ways to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders while avoiding hyperinflation.

          Six days earlier, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) had in a working paper called for “unconventional monetary policy measures” to “insulate the real economy from further deterioration in financial conditions”.

          Vighi’s shows why the hegemonic class reacted so severely to a public health issue that impacted a minority of the population. This response only makes sense when viewed within the context of economics.

          Come late 2019 and especially 2020, pumping trillions into the financial system followed by lockdowns (to prevent hyperinflation) were used as the “unconventional monetary policies” that the BIS had called for on 9 August 2019.

          Did you really think the authorities cared so much about something that mainly affected the over-80s and those with severe comorbidities that they would lock down the entire global economy?

          Did they really care so much about ordinary people, especially unproductive labour – the working class old and working class infirm – when through the years of imposed austerity, we saw the working classes being treated with utter contempt?

          And did those who imposed restrictions and lockdowns really believe there was a ‘deadly’ virus on the loose?

          Think of booze parties at Downing Street, Neil Ferguson’s breaking of lockdown rules to carry on an extra-marital affair, Matt Hancock breaking his own COVID rules with his lover, maskless world leaders gathering in London while their servants wore masks, various US political leaders ignoring their own rules and the public theatre of Fauci et al masking up for TV cameras then maskless as soon as they were off camera.

          While such people tyrannised populations with fear and lockdowns, it is clear they themselves were unworried about ‘the virus’.

          After embarking on a massive anti-Russia media propaganda campaign earlier this year to garner public support for Ukraine, the centres of power in the West are now sending billions of dollars of the public’s money into the coffers of the likes of weapons manufacturers Raytheon and Boeing.

          Such corporations are more than happy to profit from sacrificing the lives of ordinary Ukrainians in the geopolitical quest to weaken and balkanise Russia so that US interests can gain a dominant, strategic foothold on the Eurasian landmass.

          And while billions of dollars are being spent to achieve this, a wholly unnecessary ‘cost of living’ crisis (resulting from reckless economic neoliberalism which has finally imploded) is being imposed on working people in the Western countries – regarded as mere collateral damage when it comes to economic policies, war and corporate profit. The result is misery and poverty and the demonisation of some of the (now striking) workers who were lauded as ‘heroes’ during COVID.

          But – of course – the powers that have so much demonstrable contempt for the lives of ordinary people at home and abroad will close down the entire global economy to protect their health!

          Those who believe this are testament to the power of propaganda.

          COVID-related policies were wholly disproportionate to any risk posed to public health, especially when considering the way ‘COVID death’ definitions and data were often massaged and how PCR tests were misused to scare populations into submission.

          And the big winner has been Big Pharma, an industry with a track record of dirty tricks, false advertising and death and injury resulting from its products. If, say, Pfizer were an individual, given its corporate crimes, it would be serving a lengthy prison sentence with the proverbial key being thrown away.

          But corporations with lengthy corporate rap sheets across many sectors are promoted to the public as being trustworthy and dependable. When governments partner (conspire) with such enterprises, they are conspiring with criminal recidivist companies. And when people purchase stock in them, the same applies.

          Given the reference to the global food system at the beginning of this article, of particular interest are the crimes of Dupont and Bayer (see the Powerbase website), and Monsanto and Cargill (see the Corporate Research Project (CRP) website).

          And, of course, Pfizer and its disturbing corporate rap sheet also appears on the CRP site.

          These immensely wealthy corporations spend millions each year funding various groups and lobbying governments and international bodies. Little wonder that they wield tremendous influence and, in one way or another, become ‘trusted partners’ of governments, the WHO, the WTO and the like.

          In Pfizer’s case, trusted so much as being granted ‘emergency use authorisation’ to have its ‘vaccines’ brought to market and then forced on the public via the coercive policies of governments.

          Returning to Lippmann, since early 2020 so many people have feared for their lives and have admired with awe leaders who supposedly saved them from destruction. Even now as reports on vaccine injuries, vaccine inefficacy and increased mortality rates since the jab rollouts are largely taboo within the mainstream media, the public are being kept on message as the WHO and Big Pharma work towards a global treaty that will strip all their rights come the next economic meltdown or ‘pandemic’.

          This article was written over the Yuletide period, an increasingly secular celebration stripped of religious connotation. These days, ‘in Big Pharma we trust’ might be more apt along with blind faith in a Zuckerberg-esque fantasy metaverse where Facebook is fact, government is truth and Big Pharma is God.

          Because (heaven help us) that we should be left to think for ourselves!

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 18:20

        • Andurand Sees Oil Demand Soaring As Much As 4MM b/d In 2023
          Andurand Sees Oil Demand Soaring As Much As 4MM b/d In 2023

          When sitting down to make forecasts about 2023, perhaps the biggest wildcard is what happens to the price of commodities in general, and oil in particular, after China fully reopens following its current “post covid-zero” hiccup which may lead to even more chaos but which will promptly reverse in a few weeks time.

          Here, estimates vary, but few are as optimistic as iconic oil hedge fund trader Pierre Andurand, who said that global oil demand could soar as much as 4% at some point next year if the world fully emerges from Covid restrictions.

          In a series of overnight tweets, Andurand said that consumption has been lagging long-term trends and, boosted by a switch to oil from gas, may increase by 3 million to 4 million barrels a day in 2023. As a reminder, Andurand’s main commodities fund has crushed the competition this year, rising about 50% in 2022.  Andurand is among several fund managers who made huge profits betting that supply-chain disruptions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would lead to jumps in oil and other commodities.

          Andurand (who in March incorrectly predicted that oil would hit $200 by year-end as Biden’s drain sends the SPR to record lows) caveated that the oil demand surge will be limited by the increasing popularity of electric vehicles, which are displacing about 600,000 barrels a day of fuel use, but net demand will still be more than enough to offset this drop.

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          Having been bearish on oil for much of 2021 and 2022 despite its relentless march higher, Wall Street banks now widely expect that crude prices, trading near $82 a barrel in London, will advance next year as sanctions squeeze Russian supplies.

          That said, the bullish mood isn’t unanimous and as Bloomberg notes, veteran analyst and PIRA founder Gary Ross at Black Gold Investors tweeted on Wednesday that oil market balances are “weak” and will deteriorate further in early 2023 as US storms curb refinery operations.

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          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 18:00

        • West Point Begins Removal, Alteration Of Confederate Memorials On Campus
          West Point Begins Removal, Alteration Of Confederate Memorials On Campus

          Authored by Samantha Flom via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          The U.S. Military Academy at West Point has commenced the removal and modification of 13 Confederate memorials and symbols on its campus at the direction of the Department of Defense.

          Cadets walk across ‘The Plain’ before the Oath of Allegiance ceremony during Reception Day at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York on June 27, 2016. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

          The modifications—recommended by the congressionally mandated Naming Commission and subsequently approved by the Defense Department in October—were to begin over the school’s holiday break, which started on Dec. 18.

          “Academy leaders and key stakeholders developed a comprehensive plan to ensure that historical artifacts will be professionally and respectfully handled during the execution phase,” the school said in a Dec. 19 statement. “Memorabilia removed during this process will be relocated to appropriate sites, including museums or other suitable venues.”

          According to a letter (pdf) signed by Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, items to be placed in storage includes a portrait of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that hung in the academy’s library, Jefferson Hall; a stone bust of Lee from Reconciliation Plaza; and a bronze triptych from the main entrance of Bartlett Hall.

          Meanwhile, the portrait and the stone bust of Union Gen. Ulysses Grant that have traditionally accompanied those of Lee will be moved to Grant Hall.

          By Spring 2023, the school also intends to replace a quote from Lee displayed at Honor Plaza and begin refacing select stone markers at Reconciliation Plaza with modified language and images.

          Several streets, buildings, and areas around the West Point campus are also slated to be renamed, including Lee Road, Beauregard Place, Hardee Place, Lee Barracks, Lee Housing Area, and Lee Child Development Center.

          “We will conduct these actions with dignity and respect,” Gilland wrote in the letter. “In the case of those items that were class gifts (specifically, Honor Plaza and Reconciliation Plaza), we will continue to work closely with those classes throughout this process. Any costs associated with the Commission’s recommendations will be resourced within the Department of Defense.”

          The History

          The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, was founded in 1802 under President Thomas Jefferson.

          The school churned out hundreds of graduates who fought for both the Union and Confederate armies, including Grant, in the class of 1843 and Lee in 1829.

          Lee, who became commander of the Confederate Army toward the end of the Civil War, graduated second in his class at West Point and later served as the school’s superintendent from 1852 to 1855.

          Calls for Revisions

          Established under the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2021, the Naming Commission was created to assign, modify, or remove names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia within the Department of Defense that commemorate the Confederacy or those who voluntarily fought for the Confederate Army.

          On Aug. 29, the eight-member commission submitted Part II of its final report to Congress (pdf), which addressed assets of the U.S. Military Academy and U.S. Naval Academy.

          “Throughout the [West Point] grounds, plaques adorn almost every building and entrance, honoring the names and lives of West Point graduates who demonstrated exceptional devotion to the defense of the United States and the advancement of its ideals,” the commissioners wrote in their report. “Commemorating the Confederacy alongside those graduates honors men who fought against the United States of America, and whose cause sought to destroy the nation as we know it.”

          In defending their recommendations relating to assets named after Lee, the commissioners noted that the general turned down the opportunity to serve as the top field commander for the Union Army, opting instead to join the Confederates.

          “The consequences of his decisions were wide-ranging and destructive,” they added. “Lee’s armies were responsible for the deaths of more United States Soldiers than practically any other enemy in our nation’s history.”

          As for the triptych, the commissioners called for the removal of the names of several Confederate soldiers. Additionally, acknowledging that the triptych’s depiction of a hooded Ku Klux Klansman did not fall under their purview, the commissioners also encouraged the secretary of defense to “address DoD assets that highlight the KKK in Defense Memorialization processes and create a standard disposition requirement for such assets.”

          “The Commissioners do not make these recommendations with any intention of erasing history,” the commissioners noted. “The facts of the past remain and the Commissioners are confident the history of the Civil War will continue to be taught at all service academies with all the quality and complex detail our national past deserves. Rather, they make these recommendations to affirm West Point’s long tradition of educating future generations of America’s military leaders to represent the best of our national ideals.”

          Reactions

          West Point’s announcement has been met with mixed reactions from those who have served in the nation’s armed forces, with some supporting the changes and others decrying them.

          Read more here…

          Tyler Durden
          Thu, 12/29/2022 – 17:40

        Digest powered by RSS Digest

        Dec 29

        Today’s News 29th December 2022

        • Geoengineering Startup Begins Releasing Sulfur Particles Into Atmosphere In Attempt To 'Stop Climate Change'
          Geoengineering Startup Begins Releasing Sulfur Particles Into Atmosphere In Attempt To ‘Stop Climate Change’

          Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,

          A startup is launching weather balloons capable of releasing reflective sulfur particles into the earth’s atmosphere, with the stated aim of combating climate change through solar geoengineering, while disregarding the negative consequences of such actions.

          In solar geoengineering, attempts are made to manipulate the climate by reflecting more sunlight away from earth. Theoretically, releasing sulfur and other such compounds is believed to potentially cool down the planet. Back in 1991, for example, when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted, it released large amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere that spread around the world and triggered a 1-degree Fahrenheit cooling for the next 15 months. The California-based startup, Make Sunsets, is believed to have launched the weather balloons from Mexico.

          In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Make Sunsets CEO Luke Iseman said that he expects to be characterized as a “Bond villain” for what the company is doing. But he insists that climate change is a threat, and that since the world is moving slowly to address the problem, a more radical solution is needed.

          “It’s morally wrong, in my opinion, for us not to be doing this,” Iseman said.

          What’s important is “to do this as quickly and safely as we can.”

          Make Sunsets is attempting to make revenue out of its efforts, seeking to sell $10 “cooling credits” for releasing a gram of particles into the atmosphere. The startup has raised $750,000 in funding. It plans on raising the sulfur payload in the future as well as using telemetry devices and other sensors.

          Climatic Downsides

          A 2018 blog by David Keith, a leading expert on solar geoengineering, explains that he is opposed to commercial work on such technologies due to the fact that commercial development cannot achieve the transparency and trust that is necessary for the world to make decisions on the matter.

          Solar geoengineering must only be done by “transparent democratic institutions,” he insisted.

          “Solar geoengineering is large-scale climate modification which inherently has global consequences that are difficult to quantify even after deployment. DAC [direct air capture] results in emissions reductions (carbon-neutral synthetic fuels) or net CO2 removal (sequestration), with local impacts that can be measured with reasonable accuracy,” he wrote.

          In an interview with MIT, Shuchi Talati, a scholar-in-residence at American University, says that Make Sunset’s actions could end up negatively affecting scientific study on the matter, even leading to reduced funding, boosting calls for restricting such studies, and decreasing government support for it.

          “The current state of science is not good enough … to either reject, or to accept, let alone implement [solar geoengineering] … To go ahead with implementation at this stage is a very bad idea,” Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative, said in an email to the media outlet.

          Widespread Dangers

          Solar geoengineering can have devastating consequences for human beings. Such attempts can end up altering the global hydrological cycle, affecting monsoon activity. This can affect agriculture and food security.

          Reflecting sunlight to cool down the earth might also make people carelessly pump out more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Excessive CO2 can cause acidification of the oceans.

          Moreover, if solar geoengineering were to be stopped suddenly after using it for some time, it could lead to global warming at 10 times more speed.

          Solar geoengineering can reduce rainfall on some parts of the earth, thereby affecting the local ecosystem. This would be particularly harmful to evergreen forests and tropical ecosystems.

          A change in rainfall, for example, can negatively affect vegetation, which would be bad news for the wildlife that survives on them.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 23:25

        • Stanford Backpedals On Anti-American Woke Language Guide
          Stanford Backpedals On Anti-American Woke Language Guide

          Stanford University has backpedaled on its woke “harmful language” guide after admitting it was wrong to have included the word “American.”

          The updated guide from Stanford’s “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” (EHLI), placed mean words and phrases in various categories, including; “ableist,” “culturally appropriative,” “gender-based,” “imprecise language,” and “institutionalized racism.”

          “The purpose of this [EHLI] website is to educate people about the possible impact of the words we use,” reads the language guide – which also suggested that people should avoid using the word “American,” and instead replace it with “U.S. Citizen,” under the “imprecise language section.”

          “[American] often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the US is the most important country in the Americas,” reads the guide.

          Some other recommendations in the guide included replacing the word “Hispanic” with “Latinx, “grandfather” with “legacy,” and “immigrant” with “person who has immigrated.”

          “White paper,” which falls under the “institutionalized racism” section, should be replaced by “position paper,” according to the guide. It argued that assigning value connotations based on color, in this case where white means good, is an act that is “subconsciously racialized.” –Epoch Times

          Shortly after the story went viral, Elon Musk tweeted “Stanford disapproves of saying you’re proud to be an American? Whoa.”

          Musk also said Stanford had “gone too far” and asked for an explanation “for this madness.”

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

          In response to the outrage, Stanford’s chief information officer, Steve Gallagher, said in a Dec. 20 statement that the EHLI website “does not represent university policy.”

          “It also does not represent mandates or requirements. The website was created by, and intended for discussion within, the IT community at Stanford,” he continued. “It provides ‘suggested alternatives’ for various terms, and reasons why those terms could be problematic in certain uses.”

          Gallagher added that targeting the term “American” was a mistake.

          “To be very clear, not only is the use of the term ‘American’ not banned at Stanford, it is absolutely welcomed,” he said. “The intent of this particular entry on the EHLI website was to provide perspective on how the term may be imprecise in some specific uses, and to show that in some cases the alternate term ‘US citizen’ may be more precise and appropriate.”

          More via The Epoch Times,

          ‘Proud to Be an American’

          Some Republican lawmakers have taken to Twitter the university’s effort to change the English language.

          “The radical left is attempting to destroy our country and erase our history,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) wrote on Dec. 20. “Now, Stanford University is seeking to ban the word ‘American.’”

          “Stanford University published an index of forbidden words. One of the words they are trying to eliminate is ‘American.’ ARE YOU SERIOUS?” Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) wrote on Dec. 20.

          “I am proud to be an American,” Weber added. “I’ve had enough of the woke liberals trying to destroy America as we know it.”

          “If Stanford thinks the word American is harmful, what are they doing with American taxpayer dollars?” Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa) wrote on Dec. 21.

          Opposition

          There is also opposition against the language guide inside the university.

          Dr. Jay Bjattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford’s School of Medicine, said he opposed the elimination of the word “American” and added that universities shouldn’t carry out “word policing.”

          “I remember how proud I was when I became a naturalized American citizen. I’m still proud to be an American, and I don’t care that @Stanford disapproves of my using the term,” Bhattacharya wrote in a tweet on Dec. 19.

          “The problem is the @stanford provenance of the list,” he added in a separate tweet.

          “Universities are the wrong place for word policing. There are better ways, more effective & more consistent with liberal norms, to teach students respect and compassion for others than a clumsy list of proscribed words.”

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

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 23:05

        • Jan. 6 Committee Withdraws Trump Subpoena
          Jan. 6 Committee Withdraws Trump Subpoena

          The January 6th special committee has formally withdrawn its subpoena of former President Donald Trump.

          “In light of the imminent end of our investigation, the Select Committee can no longer pursue the specific information covered by the subpoena,” wrote Rep. Bernie Thompson (D-MI) in a Wednesday night letter sent to Trump’s attorneys, which was obtained by CNN.

          “Therefore, through this letter, I hereby formally withdraw the subpoena issued to former President Trump, and notify you that he is no longer obligated to comply or produce records in response to said subpoena,” the letter continues.

          Trump took a victory lap on Truth Social, writing: “Was just advised that the Unselect Committee of political Thugs has withdrawn the Subpoena of me concerning the January 6th Protest of the CROOKED 2020 Presidential Election. They probably did so because they knew I did nothing wrong, or they were about to lose in Court. Perhaps the FBI’s involvement in RIGGING the Election played into their decision. In any event, the Subpoena is DEAD!”

          As CNN notes, the committee has already dropped several subpoenas against other witnesses, and has wrapped up its investigation by referring Trump to the DOJ for potential criminal prosecution on four separate charges. The referrals, however, hold no legal weight.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 22:45

        • China's Employment Outlook & Income Confidence Hit Record Lows
          China’s Employment Outlook & Income Confidence Hit Record Lows

          As the economic slump grew deeper this year, Chinese people’s trust in the labor market, their wages, and their interest in purchasing homes all plummeted to record low levels, a recent survey shows. 

          As Hannah Ng reports at The Epoch Times, The People’s Bank of China’s Employment Sentiment Index, representing residents’ prospects for jobs, fell to 33.1 in the fourth quarter of 2022, down from 35.4 in the prior quarter, according to Bloomberg.

          It is the lowest figure since the data began to be collected back in 2010. Figures under 50 signify a contraction in the industry.

          Meanwhile, the Income Confidence Index—signifying the outlook for income in the next three months, saw a decline to 44.4 compared to 47 in the third quarter. 

          The number indicates the lowest number since 2001, according to the quarterly survey of 20,000 depositors nationwide, released on Dec 27.

          The survey results were among the first indicators of business sentiment in the world’s second-largest economy after China’s sudden relaxation of strict pandemic containment measures on Dec. 7 triggered a still-growing wave of COVID-19 cases.

          Record-Low Business Confidence

          The bleak sentiments of China’s residents came as the country’s private sector—its biggest source of employment—has been plagued by business interruptions due to COVID-19 policies and financing difficulties.

          China’s stringent zero-COVID measures disrupted business and confined millions of people to their homes for weeks and sometimes months at a time.

          China’s Business Confidence index fell to 48.1 in December from 51.8 in November, according to the World Economics’ survey of sales managers at over 2,300 companies, conducted Dec. 1–16. 

          The figure was the lowest since the data began to be documented in 2013.

          The study found that the manufacturing and service sectors’ sales managers’ indices both fell below 50 in December, indicating a substantial decline in company activity.

          “The percentage of companies that claim to be currently negatively impacted by COVID has risen to a survey high, with more than half of all respondents now suggesting their operations are being harmed in one way or another,” the study reads.

          “Many small businesses have run out of liquidity, especially restaurants, gyms, hotels, and other city services,” said Dan Wang, chief economist at Hang Seng Bank China.

          Housing Market Confidence Declines

          Housing market confidence also continued its downward trend in the last quarter of 2022, survey data showed, despite Beijing’s economic stimulus measures.

          Only 14 percent of respondents to the central bank survey anticipated an increase in property prices in the following quarter. That represents a new low in the data, which goes back to 2010. 

          Only 16 percent of respondents stated they intended to buy a property in the following three months, compared to 17.1 percent in the previous quarter. According to the study, nearly 62 percent, up from 58 percent, claimed they were saving more money.

          Ongoing Real Estate Crisis

          The low expectations for the property market persisted despite recent stimulus measures launched by Beijing to boost the sector.

          On the real estate front, the CCP introduced a slew of policy-loosening measures to support developers.

          In November, China’s six largest state-owned banks came out to offer more than 925 billion yuan ($130 billion) in credit support to property developers. The move was an attempt to stop the spread of financial troubles, amidst a continued liquidity crunch in the country’s property sector. China Vanke Co., Midea Real Estate Holding, Country Garden Holding, and China Overseas Land and Investment were some of the developer beneficiaries.

          China’s central bank and its banking regulator released a joint policy document on Nov. 24, outlining ways the country’s financial institutions should set expectations on real estate transactions, including down payment ratios and interest rate boundaries to support the real estate sector.

          However, these support measures are unlikely to alter the negative trajectory of China’s real estate market.

          In 2021, China witnessed the defaults of some giant property names including China Evergrande Group, Sunac China Holdings, and China Resources Land.

          Chinese developers left millions of presold housing units unfinished due to liquidity problems. As a result, many Chinese banks are facing a mortgage payment halt or “mortgage strike”—where homebuyers refuse to pay mortgages unless the developers resume construction.

          S&P Global estimated that 2.4 trillion yuan (about $355 billion) of mortgages could be at risk of being unpaid. That amounts to around 6.5 percent of all outstanding mortgages.

          The rating agency also projects that home sales in China could drop as much as 33 percent this year amid the mortgage strike, further squeezing the liquidity of distressed developers and leading to more defaults, Bloomberg reported.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 22:25

        • Netanyahu's Newly Appointed National Security Chief Wants Preemptive Strikes On Iran
          Netanyahu’s Newly Appointed National Security Chief Wants Preemptive Strikes On Iran

          Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

          Incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week appointed a major Iran hawk to lead Israel’s National Security Council under the new government.

          Tzachi Hanegbi is a veteran Likud lawmaker and a longtime ally of Netanyahu who has repeatedly threatened in recent years that Israel would attack Iran if the US returns to the Iran nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA.

          Benjamin Netanyahu with Tzachi Hanegbi, via Jewish News Syndicate

          In his most recent threat, Hanegbi said that Netanyahu would order an attack on Iran if the US doesn’t secure a new nuclear deal or doesn’t take military action itself. He told Israel’s Channel 12 in November that in that situation, Netanyahu “will act, in my assessment, to destroy the nuclear facilities in Iran.”

          Back in 2020, Hanegbi, who was settlement minister at the time, warned that if President Biden won the election and returned to the JCPOA, it could lead to a war between Israel and Iran. He made a similar threat following Biden’s election.

          Netanyahu’s new government will be taking over soon as tensions between the US and Iran are soaring. Since JCPOA negotiations fell apart in September, the US has escalated its sanctions campaign against Iran.

          The Pentagon’s recently admitted in its new Nuclear Posture Review that Iran is not trying to build a nuclear weapon, but US and Israeli officials continue to hype up the threat anyway.

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

          The US and Iran recently held joint military exercises over the Mediterranean Sea in November that simulated attacks on Iran.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 22:05

        • South Korean Sex-Doll Trade Set To Inflate After Ban Lifted
          South Korean Sex-Doll Trade Set To Inflate After Ban Lifted

          South Korea’s ban on full-body sex dolls has reached a climax after years of hot-n-heavy debate over whether government can interfere in a private citizen’s ability to copulate with a synthetic partner.

          A lawmaker, Lee Yong-ju, who brought a sex doll, speaks during a parliamentary inspection at the National Assembly in Seoul in 2019

          While no official laws or regulations exist which ban the import of sex dolls, hundreds – possibly thousands of them have been seized by customs under a clause which prevents the import of goods that “harm the country’s beautiful traditions and public moral,” the Daily Mail reports.

          The issue was brought to a head after angry importers took their cases to court – most of which agreed, and ordered customs to allow the sex-dolls into the country to be used in private spaces, on the basis that they do not undermine human dignity.

          On Monday the Korean Customs Service issued a statement that it will now allow life-size adult sex dolls into the country under a revised guideline based on the recent court rulings and opinions from relevant government agencies, including the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.

          South Korea has formally ended a ban on the import of full-body sex dolls, ending years of debate over how much the government can interfere in private life (file photo)

          Child-like sex dolls or those which embody certain people will remain banned.

          “‘It’s a reasonable decision though it came a bit late,” said Lee Sang-jin, a former head of a local company that imports sex dolls. “We thought our people’s rights to seek happiness and use (sex dolls) in their private lives have been restricted by the state.”

          “There are various types of people who use (sex dolls), including those who are sexually alienated or those who need them for artistic purposes.”

          According to Lee, his former company has already taken back over 20 sec dolls from customs officials via lawsuits, and that the company has filed separate lawsuits seeking government compensation.

          The decision risks backlash from angry feminists (a redundant expression) who claim sex dolls objectify women.

          While the decision reflects South Korea’s slow yet gradual moves to restrict state interference into personal lives, some women’s rights and conservative organisations are likely to again voice their opposition to the use of sex dolls.

          They say they deepen sexual objectification of women and undermine public moral. -Daily Mail

          Maybe just let dudes do what they want, 캐이른?

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 21:45

        • Funny What Even A Flimsy Border Fence Can Do…
          Funny What Even A Flimsy Border Fence Can Do…

          Authored by Monica Showalter via AmericanThinker.com,

          Well, here we have it.

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

          At a time when Joe Biden and his trusty sidekick, Homeland Security secretary  Alejandro Mayorkas, claim there’s nothing they can do about the border surge as they wave illegal aliens through, illegal border crossings in the El Paso area have … gone to almost zero.

          According to Border Report:

          EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Migrant crossings have plummeted in a mile-long stretch of Downtown El Paso where the Texas Army National Guard has set up concertina wire and portable fencing along the Rio Grande.

          The guard began setting up the barrier last week at a gap in the border wall west of the Paso del Norte port of entry. In the space of eight days, the barbed wire has nearly reached a second port of entry and chain-link fence anchored by sandbags extends even farther. The result is that asylum seekers can no longer walk across ankle-deep water in the Rio Grande and turn themselves in to waiting Border Patrol agents in that area.

          “The difference is vast,” said 1st Sgt. Suzanne Ringle. “The 19th, the 20th and the 21st we had large groups of families and individuals who were wanting to come across. Now, it’s almost a ghost town out there.”

          She attributed that to the “visual deterrent” of the barbwire, parked Humvees and soldiers patrolling the area with their semi-automatic rifles. As of Tuesday, 600 guard members were in El Paso on border security duty associated with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star.

          So that’s all it takes?

          It makes sense that it does.

          Put a fence up, even an ugly, flimsy one, redolent of a communist regime, complete with a few guys with guns and patrol cars out there and they won’t come. 

          So much for all the arguments that “walls don’t work” because migrants will find ways to scale,catapult, or tunnel under the walls. Yes, there are a few cases of this, but the big mass surges suddenly end.

          There have been arguments that big, high-tech, and impressive walls are what it takes, but these ideas have been thwarted by open-borders leftists, screaming about wildlife and illegal alien “rights.” President Trump’s border wall was largely thwarted that way, and Arizona’s effort to set up stacked boxcars as an impenetrable wall met their fates this way, too.

          But barbed wire and chain link fences work, too, a hell of a lot better than a naked, open, inviting border space, sometimes with only a puddly river to cross. It’s makeshift and it’s ugly, sure, but the obstructions of open-border leftists and their leftwing lawyers and roundheel judges are why we can’t have nice things. So now we get crappy, unsightly things, like razor-wire rolls and chain link fences, along with a few guards with guns and it works just as well.

          The left has had a grand old time running circles around the larger, and more permanent fencing projects, but it’s a lot harder for them to challenge tiny, temporary, barriers and make an issue of them.

          The success of this old and tried border solution raises questions as to why this wasn’t done earlier, back when President Trump was trying to get his wall built. Hindsight, of course, is easy for us now, but it’s sad that this idea didn’t come up earlier, even as a temporary solution while the bigger battles over the wall construction were going on. While Trump was valiantly battling leftists in the courts over his wall’s construction and funding, the barbed wire fence solution sat right there, seemingly unused. The barbed wire fence apparently could have been dragged through national parks, national wildlife refuges, and perhaps even private lands, with minimal disruption and no big symbolic images such as the border wall for the left to rally round in outrage. Those were some of the obstacles he endured in his battle to get the border wall built.

          A lousy barbed wire fence worked just as well, and could be thrown up quickly, cheaply, and with immediate effects, all of which was in the thinking of that master-problem-solver, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who deserves kudos for this simple and effective idea. Abbott has a lot of those.

          It works because I know it works.

          I’ll share a personal story: My mother has an ambitious kitten whose great goal is to romp around in the canyon behind her house, which is filled with packs of hungry, pet-eating, coyotes. City officials do nothing about the problem and the den is proliferating. Once in awhile, I hear a gun go off at night and with no cops called, it’s almost certainly someone taking out a coyote and everyone else in the neighborhood just keeping quiet. Since kittens don’t belong in canyons, I found that the solution for her issue is to block the hell out of the flimsy fence she has, with flower pots, old boards, dirt, nearby jumping points, anything that will keep the kitten inside his yard and out of the canyon. Rather than wait for a coyote to come, the blocked fence is the one thing that keeps the kitten inside. Focus on the fence openings, I’ve told her, not on taking the kitten back to the shelter, as she frets every time the kitten gets out. We are still working on the fence openings, but when a known one is blocked off, the kitten stays in. When he discovers another, it’s back to the drawing board, but one day, we will have the entire fence turned into a kitten-coyote barrier. We will get there.

          So will the people of Texas, with guys like Gov. Abbott around.

          The lesson here is that even a bad fence works wonders to deter the tens of thousands of unvetted illegal aliens from crossing in, so let’s see more of them.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 21:25

        • NYC Electric Garbage Truck Plans Hit Wall After Trucks "Conked Out" Plowing Snow After Just Four Hours
          NYC Electric Garbage Truck Plans Hit Wall After Trucks “Conked Out” Plowing Snow After Just Four Hours

          In a move that absolutely nobody could have seen coming, New York City is scrapping its brilliant idea for electric garbage trucks after finding out the truck simply “aren’t powerful enough to plow snow”.

          The pipe dream of converting the city’s 6,000 garbage trucks from gas to electric in order to try and limit carbon emissions (because there’s no other problems that need to be dealt with in New York City right now) is “clashing with the limits of electric-powered vehicles,” Gothamist wrote this week.

          The city’s current trucks run on diesel and can be fitted with plows in the winter. 

          Despite the shortcomings, the city Department of Sanitation’ has already ordered seven electric rear loader garbage trucks, custom-made by Mack, the report says. Those trucks cost an astonishing $523,000 each and are to be delivered this spring. 

          Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch told the NYC city council earlier this month: “We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours. Given the current state of the technology, I don’t see today a path forward to fully electrifying the rear loader portion of the fleet by 2040.”

          “We can’t really make significant progress in converting our rear loader fleet until the snow challenges are addressed,” she continued.

          Many other cities don’t use their garbage trucks to plow snow, the report notes. Places that get a lot of snow, like Denver, have their own committed light duty trucks outfitted with plows, which operate more efficiently. 

          New York City, however, has committed to plowing each street and doing so by putting the city’s 2,100 trucks to work to clear the “equivalent of 19,000 miles of street lanes”. 

          In addition to…well, not being able to get the job done, charging has also been a holdup with electric trucks, Tisch said: “..this charging infrastructure requires additional space and often new electrical utility connections that can require substantial capital investments.”

          Harry Nespoli, the president of Teamsters Local 831 union representing sanitation workers also isn’t sold on the idea: “How much power do they have? Can they run 12-hour shifts without a charge? I don’t know.”

          Sanitation spokesperson Vincent Gragnani concluded: “​​With current technology, full electrification isn’t possible now for some parts of our fleet, but we are monitoring closely and really hope it will be.”

          Let us know how that turns out, Vinny.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 21:05

        • What Did Nancy Know & When Did She Know It?
          What Did Nancy Know & When Did She Know It?

          Authored by Julie Kelly via AmGreatness.com,

          The January 6 select committee never intended to act as a truth-seeking mission but rather perform a cover-up for what actually happened…

          The January 6 select committee finally released its long-delayed report late on December 23 after most Americans had happily turned away from politics to enjoy the Christmas weekend with family and friends. The Friday night news dump, a common tactic when government officials want to bury something controversial, was not exactly a vote of confidence in the panel’s ultimate work product.

          As expected, the bulk of the 845-page document spun a well-worn tale that portrayed Donald Trump as the sole villain in a so-called “insurrection” the committee wants us to believe was engineered to keep him in the White House. Page after page included dramatic interpretations of snippets from witness testimony intended to bolster the committee’s preconceived conclusions.

          Analysis of how law enforcement and intelligence services failed to prepare for the “attack,” a promise made by the committee in its original sell job to the public, is buried in a relatively brief appendix at the end. And despite confirmation the government was aware violence might occur—the FBI used a threat tag, “CERTUNREST2021,” purportedly to categorize in advance information related to January 6—federal and local agencies did not prevent what the Biden regime branded a terror attack comparable to 9/11. (FBI Director Christopher Wray’s name is not mentioned once in the report and it appears unlikely he sat for a transcribed interview.)

          Even so, in the face of extensive evidence that those agencies were on high alert, committee members still faulted Trump: “Few in law enforcement predicted that the President of the United States would incite a mob attack on the Capitol, that he would send them to stop the joint session knowing they were armed and dangerous, that he would further incite them against his own vice President while the attack was underway, or that he would do nothing to stop the assault for hours,” the report dishonestly stated.

          Another official who escaped accountability in the report is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the lawmaker mainly responsible for protecting Capitol grounds. Committee members avoided any criticism of Pelosi, instead allowing her to write the foreword. (It’s also unclear whether committee investigators interviewed the speaker.)

          For two years, Pelosi has played the role of victimized bystander in the events of January 6 rather than being recognized as the incompetent steward of public safety she is—or worse, someone who was complicit in manufacturing the entire spectacle. After all, her filmmaker daughter just happened to be on site as the historic event, one usually considered a pro forma ceremony, went down.

          But a competing report also released last week by a handful of Republican House members did not let Pelosi off the hook; to the contrary, “Security Failures at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021” presented new disclosures about how Pelosi’s staff spent weeks ostensibly preparing for the electoral certification vote that afternoon.

          “[Then] House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving—who served on the Capitol Police Board by virtue of his position—succumbed to political pressures from the Office of Speaker Pelosi and House Democrat leadership leading up to January 6, 2021,” the report authored by Representatives Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), James Banks (R-Ind.) and others revealed.

          “He coordinated closely with the Speaker and her staff and left Republicans out of important discussions related to security. Irving only provided information to Republicans after receiving instruction from the Speaker’s office. In one case, Irving even asked a senior Democratic staffer to ‘act surprised’ when he sent key information about plans for the Joint Session on January 6, 2021 to him and his Republican counterpart. The senior Democratic staffer replied: ‘I’m startled.’”

          (Jordan and Banks were appointed to the January 6 select committee before being bounced by Pelosi.)

          According to records obtained by House Republicans, Irving maintained constant communication with two of Pelosi’s top aides—Terry McCullough, her chief of staff, and Jamie Flood, a shared staffer for Pelosi and the House Administration committee—about January 6 in early December 2020. 

          On December 11, 2020, McCullough emailed Irving’s team to request a meeting to discuss “choreography and safety for the opening day and electoral college events.” That meeting took place four days later; no Republicans were present.

          Irving and his office met three more times with Democratic staffers before January 6 and once on the morning of January 6 without Republican lawmakers in attendance. Now, perhaps there’s an innocent explanation as to why Irving intentionally prevented Republicans from being involved in those discussions—except for more alarming disclosures in the report.

          On Monday, January 4, 2021, Irving met with Pelosi in her office. While the specific nature of the meeting isn’t addressed in the report, Pelosi and her aides were furiously working on new COVID protocols to strictly limit the number of lawmakers and staff on the House floor on January 6; a letter to Congress explaining the new rules was sent out the afternoon of January 5.

          But that’s not all that happened on January 5. The day began with a “walkthrough” for the joint session attended by Irving, Stenger, Capitol Police, McCullough, and Democratic staffers at 8:30 a.m.. Irving scheduled another walkthrough for his staff at 1:15 p.m.. Shortly thereafter, Stenger, who reported to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) conducted a separate walkthrough, apparently without inviting Republican lawmakers or staffers.

          And in one of the oddest events of the day, despite repeated assurances the threat for violence was “remote,” Irving led a walkthrough of Congress’ evacuation plan with unnamed participants at 2:30 p.m.; almost 24 hours later to the minute, the joint session recessed and lawmakers were evacuated from the Capitol creating one of the most dramatic images of January 6.

          This also happened at the same time Irving and Stenger repeatedly brushed off requests by Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund for extra protection in the form of National Guardsmen, a process both sergeants-at-arms continued to hamstring throughout January 6. (Sund later testified that Irving expressed concerns about the “optics” of guardsmen surrounding the Capitol.) The guard did not arrive until after 5 p.m., shortly after the disturbance ended.

          The exchanges detailed in the House GOP report contradict the narrative that congressional security officials were unprepared for the events of January 6. So, too, does the appendix buried in the January 6 select committee document. Not only was the FBI allegedly collecting scary posts before the Capitol protest, Pelosi’s underlings engaged in deep discussions and planning efforts weeks beforehand without the involvement of Republicans. What exactly those conversations entailed, the public still does not know.

          Regardless, as of January 7, 2021, Irving, Stenger, and Sund were out of a job, forced to resign at the demands of irate lawmakers. Were they the fall guys in a carefully “choreographed” operation to permanently oust Trump from office and subsequently criminalize his movement? Did they willfully participate or were they duped? Why didn’t the January 6 committee cover this as extensively as House Republicans?

          The answer is obvious. The January 6 select committee never intended to act as a truth-seeking mission but rather perform a cover-up for what actually happened, which is becoming more obvious every day. House Republicans produced a more serious report that requires rigorous follow-up next year.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 20:45

        • Indonesia's All-Women Flog-Squad Under International Scrutiny
          Indonesia’s All-Women Flog-Squad Under International Scrutiny

          One of the biggest international relations stories of the 1990s which captured much of the American public’s attention at the time was the 1994 arrest of 19-year old Michael P. Fay in Singapore. He had been accused of vandalism, and confessed to spray-painting cars and was reportedly found with road signs in his possession, for which he received the harsh sentence of caning by a Singapore court. The caning with four strokes only took one minute, but left blood running down his back, and subsequently strained US-Singaporean relations.

          Now another southeast Asian country is being spotlighted in Western media for its longstanding practice of flogging – or caning – as an accepted judicial sentence of corporal punishment, given it even has an all female flogging squad, which was formed almost three years ago. The all-women caning squad is tasked with meting out the punishment for female convicts as part of Indonesia’s strict Islamic Sharia law system.

          AFP via Getty Images

          A photo spread and on the ground report featured in Vice News includes women dressed in head to toe Islamic coverings, administering punishments in a setting that ironically enough looks straight out of the US television series The Handmaid’s Tale.

          Typically a rattan cane no more than a half-inch thick is used for all judicial and prison floggings, which can be done for offensives ranging from drinking alcohol, adultery, having any sexual relations outside of marriage, homosexuality, or even being caught in “close proximity” with an ‘unauthorized’ member of the opposite sex. 

          Increasingly Indonesia’s only Shariah-regulated province of Aceh is coming under national as well as international attention and scrutiny for the practice, given that in some instances caning can be so brutal as to result in victims passing out, and skin being ripped off.

          Two women designated to conduct flogging on female convicts. Image source: Vice News

          Vice in its report painted a portrait of the following eerie scene: 

          Officials—mostly men—from the Sharia police are gathered at Taman Sari, a popular public park at the heart of the city. Among the scant crowd is a group of college girls and photojournalists jostling to get the perfect shot. In the middle of the park’s arena, a woman cloaked in a white jilbab with her face covered with a mask, is seated on her knees on a carpet. She’s accused of a crime that wouldn’t even be considered a crime anywhere else in Indonesia: meeting a man who is not her husband.

          Sharia law dominates daily life in this strictest part of Indonesia, making even immodest clothing among women a potential punishable offense. 

          Local authorities claim that female floggers were needed given that crimes committed by women were on the rise. “In official data shared by Sharia police with VICE World News, crimes against morality, such as unmarried men and women caught together, have seen a steep drop in 2021 as compared to 2018,” the Vice report reads.

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          “For instance, khalwat or when an unmarried man and woman are in a secluded place together, was reported 90 times in 2018. In 2021, that number was down to 8. The Sharia police attribute this to flogging. Activists disagree,” Vice continues. 

          The hardline province and its police have long been subject of investigations by external human rights groups, given the ‘morality police’ have been documented actively seeking out ‘criminal behavior’ or public displays of vice – however, activities which the vast majority of countries and societies in the world would consider normal everyday things, such as simply a man and woman sitting together in a public park.

          Apparently, some among the eight women floggers employed by the province were quite eager to quit their professional careers and conduct physical punishments:

          Mariam, Aceh’s first woman flogger, wanted to become a lawyer but joined the Sharia police instead in 2006 and then was appointed by the prosecutor to become a woman flogger in 2018. “I never thought of becoming a flogger but when this regulation was made, I was ready for it,” the mother of four children told VICE World News. 

          Despite that regional authorities claim equal justice and objectivity in how flogging is carried out, the report recounts the following shocking episode from years prior to the women floggers being established: “In 2014, the Sharia police flogged a 25-year-old woman for adultery even though she was handed over to them by vigilantes who gangraped her and doused her with sewage water.” And much more recently: “Early this year, a woman was flogged 100 times for adultery while the man involved, who denied the accusations, received just 15 lashes.”

          European media outlets have over many years documented the abuses of Aceh’s morality police:

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          Concerning this year’s incident involving 100 lashes, Amnesty International Indonesia described, “The fact that the woman had already collapsed once and was still forced to undergo more flogging shows a complete lack of compassion and care for her well-being and health.” The statement continued: “Both the use of flogging as a punishment and the criminalization of sexual relations outside marriage are clear violations of international human rights law.”

          Vice’s full, lengthy photographic report and interviews can be accessed here.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 20:25

        • Report Warns Risk Of Nuclear War At Its Highest Since US Nuked Japan
          Report Warns Risk Of Nuclear War At Its Highest Since US Nuked Japan

          Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

          A Swedish group that assesses catastrophic risks warned in its annual report this year that the risk of nuclear weapons use is higher today than at any point since the US dropped nuclear weapons on Japan in 1945, AFP reported on Tuesday.

          Kennette Benedict, an advisor to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who led the report for the Global Challenges Foundation, said the risk of nuclear war was greater than during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

          DOD file image

          The report warned that an all-out nuclear exchange would send enough dust in the air to block sunlight resulting in “a period of chaos and violence, during which most of the surviving world population would die from hunger.”

          President Biden acknowledged the risk back in October when he said the chances of nuclear “armageddon” are higher today than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Despite his recognition of the danger of his policy of supporting Ukraine against Russia, Biden continues to escalate US involvement in the war, and there is no end in sight to the fighting.

          Ukraine’s war effort is entirely reliant on Western support, and the US is not just sending weapons but also providing training, intelligence, and other kinds of targeting support.

          According to recent media reports, the Pentagon now tacitly backs Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory, and the CIA is directing sabotage operations inside Russia.

          Russian officials have made clear that they believe they are not just fighting Ukrainian forces in the war but also the US and NATO. This means Russia has the pretext to launch strikes on the US and NATO, although there’s no sign that such a decision has been made.

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          If Russia eventually chooses to retaliate by using conventional weapons against NATO, the conflict could quickly spiral into nuclear war. If Moscow decides to use a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, most experts believe it would lead to a nuclear exchange between the US and Russia.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 20:05

        • Restaurant Staffing Is Finally Returning To Pre-Pandemic Levels
          Restaurant Staffing Is Finally Returning To Pre-Pandemic Levels

          After the pandemic…err…the government’s response to the pandemic…decimated the restaurant industry, it looks as though it is slowly starting to wobble back to its feet and stand up heading into 2023. 

          Staffing in restaurants is finally starting to bulk back up, the Wall Street Journal reported in a new piece out this week. Restaurants and bars have “nearly doubled” their employee counts from the pandemic lows in April 2020, the note said. The industry added 62,000 jobs over the past month alone.

          The piece also notes that all but 2.1% of the jobs that existed in November 2019, prior to the pandemic, are back, according to Labor Department data.

          However, one must also keep in mind that, as we have been saying for months, these are usually the first stops for people working 9 to 5 salaried jobs who have been laid off due to the Fed’s cohesive and calculated plans to strategically napalm the U.S. economy in order to get inflation lower.

          Nevertheless, many recent hires are “returning to the restaurant industry after forsaking it earlier in the pandemic’ the report says. It’s amazing what happens when your newfangled crypto trading empire, established some time between 2020 and 2022, goes bust when its top two positions – dogecoin and Tesla call options – turn out to be worthless. 

          The report notes that it wasn’t the re-opening that led employees back to restaurants. In fact, demand soared and restaurants were still short staffed when Covid restrictions eased, it says. But now that steadier work is dying at the hands of the Fed, and associated layoffs, former employees are crawling back.  

          Beau Duncan (Photo: WSJ)

          Bob Szuter, co-owner of Wolf’s Ridge Brewing told WSJ: “There’s a lot more focus in the hospitality industry on the importance of workers. You’d be hard-pressed to find a lot of businesses now who say that the customer is always right.”

          Beau Duncan, who lost his job as a bartender at Outback Steakhouse, did work in construction during the pandemic, but it wasn’t enough to cover his bills. He has now found new work at a Mexican restaurant, telling WSJ: “It’s been the most difficult industry job I’ve had, but the most rewarding.” 

          Vanessa Chadwick, who switched from restaurants to retail during the pandemic, said she eventually started to “miss” working in a restaurant. When she started applying for a new job this year, she found that hiring opportunities were better than pre-pandemic. 

          “The hospitality industry has caught up and the pay and benefits are much better than they were. I haven’t felt this happy in a very long time,” she said. 

          Adam Noyes, chief operating officer of sandwich chain Potbelly Corp said that the outlook is getting better: “We’re in a much better place. Over the last 90 days we’ve made a lot of progress.” 

          You can read the WSJ’s full report here. 

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 19:45

        • Elon Musk Announces New Twitter Policy To Allow Scientific Debate
          Elon Musk Announces New Twitter Policy To Allow Scientific Debate

          Authored by Chase Smith via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          Twitter CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet Wednesday he is enacting a new Twitter Policy related to post on the platform about science.

          Elon Musk’s Twitter profile on a smartphone placed on printed Twitter logos on April 28, 2022. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)

          “New Twitter policy is to follow the science, which necessarily includes reasoned questioning of the science,” Musk wrote.

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          No further details of the plan had been released, but The Epoch Times reached out to Twitter for comment.

          In a follow-up tweet below his original policy announcement, Musk said “Anyone who says that questioning them is questioning science itself cannot be regarded as a scientist.”

          Musk has released a trove of information since taking over the company regarding Twitter’s suppression of certain information related to COVID-19.

          Musk said Twitter employees had a private group on Slack that was a “fan club” of White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, The Epoch Times reported. The employees “had an internal Slack channel unironically called ‘Fauci Fan Club,’” Musk wrote.

          Musk’s post noted that the Fauci Fan Club was set up despite outstanding “glaring issues” regarding Fauci, including the question of whether the White House adviser was untruthful when he denied that U.S. federal money was used to fund risky “gain-of-function” research at a Chinese lab at the center of speculation about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

          Alleged Twitter Suppression of Scientific Debate

          Musk revealed in the Twitter Files—a collection of internal emails and communications made public by Musk—the company suppressed early treatment options for COVID-19, and vaccine safety concerns, Dr. Peter McCullough said in an interview on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Dec. 14.

          “Twitter had become an incredibly biased and censored platform, where the public knew they weren’t getting a fair, balanced set of information on a whole variety of developments—including the early treatment of SARS-COV2 infection and a balanced view of safety and efficacy of the vaccines,” McCullough said.

          McCullough said he believed he was censored and finally suspended for sharing scientific “abstracts and manuscripts,” which he believed didn’t fit the accepted political view. McCullough said he wasn’t the only doctor targeted by the company’s censorship.

          Musk lifted the suspensions of McCullough and mRNA vaccine technology contributor Dr. Robert Malone—suspended from Twitter in 2021 after criticizing the effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines—after completing his Twitter purchase.

          McCullough said when sites like Twitter posted COVID-19 warnings or labels a post “misinformation,” it amounted to government censorship and control.

          “Facebook, Instagram, and the other platforms. … Anytime a message is posted, and it says, ‘See the COVID information center,’ or it labels it ‘COVID misinformation,’ that actually indicates that there’s government interference. There’s government censorship going on,” McCullough asserted.

          Musk’s latest policy announcement about questioning science while also following it mirrors what McCullough said about advertisements on Twitter regarding vaccine efficacy and safety.

          “So, when Americans were seeing advertisements that said ‘safe and effective,’ of course, immediately, we were jumping and making the case based on the peer-reviewed literature that that’s not correct.”

          Read more here…

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          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 19:25

        • Brazil Ramps Up Security For Lula Inauguration After Foiled Bomb Plot
          Brazil Ramps Up Security For Lula Inauguration After Foiled Bomb Plot

          Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is set to be inaugurated on Sunday, weeks after a close upset victory over ultra-conservative incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in what was the most consequential election in Brazil in decades.

          Bolsonaro’s supporters alleged widespread election fraud, leading to sporadic protests and clashes with police since October, which two weeks ago escalated into an attack on the headquarters of the federal police in Brasilia. Fierce protests urging an investigation into alleged election irregularities are still ongoing.

          And over the weekend police foiled a bomb plot, reportedly intended to disrupt the Lula inauguration, and which is now driving fears that there could be an attack on the Sunday events in the capital which is expected to have a massive turnout. 

          Via CNN

          The suspect now in custody has been identified as 54-year-old gas station manager George Washington de Oliveira Sousa. He has reportedly confessed to planting explosive devices not far from where Lula is staying.

          According to CNN: 

          The man arrested for being involved in a bombing attempt at Brasilia International Airport over the weekend said in a written statement to police that he intended to “create chaos” so a “siege state in the country” would be installed to prevent former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from taking office again in January.

          The media is blaming a group of “pro-Bolsonaro election deniers” and is making connections to Jan.6 in America.

          “On December 24, Brasilia police said they had foiled a bomb plot, arresting a man with ties to a group of pro-Bolsonaro election deniers camped outside the army headquarters, who have been urging the military to overturn Lula’s victory,” Reuters reported Tuesday.

          Following the bomb incident and arrest, which has dominated headlines since the weekend, federal police are reportedly taking extra security precautions to protect against some kind of potential ‘terror’ event.

          Brazil’s incoming justice minister Flávio Dino has vowed on Twitter to implement measures that ensure everyone’s safety on inauguration day. “All procedures will be reassessed, with a view to strengthening security,” Dino aid. “And the fight against terrorists and rioters will be intensified. Democracy has won and will win.”

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          While Bolsonaro has not openly or explicitly contested that Lula will be next president, Bolsonaro himself has yet to publicly concede defeat to Lula. A late November attempt by Bolsonaro’s team to appeal to the courts while alleging a fraudulent election was immediately tossed out.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 19:05

        • Red States Texas, Florida Crush Blue New York, California, & Illinois When It Comes To 2022 Population Growth
          Red States Texas, Florida Crush Blue New York, California, & Illinois When It Comes To 2022 Population Growth

          Authored by Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner via Wirepoints.org,

          The difference couldn’t be more stark between the biggest states in the nation.

          The red states of Texas and Florida grew their populations by more than 400,000 in 2022. Their pro-growth, pro-business, pro-taxpayer policies remain a magnet for both Americans and foreigners alike. In contrast, blue states New York, California and Illinois each had their populations fall by 100,000 or more in 2022. Americans continue to flee those same three states, year after year.

          These findings are based on a Wirepoints’ analysis of the latest 2022 population estimates provided by the U.S. Census Bureau on December 22. The bureau performs a population estimate each year in addition to its full decennial census count at the end of each decade.

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          This redistribution of people among the nation’s biggest states matters for a host of reasons. Florida and Texas are winning the battle for people and their wealth, and that’s key to future growth and prosperity. It’s also key to expanding political influence. Florida and Texas both gained representation in Congress as a result of the 2020 Census, while California, Illinois and New York all lost. And the outflow of people from the blue states may be, in part, a rejection of the draconian pandemic policies those states enforced on their populations.

          Changes in population also help reveal Americans’ policy preferences. The fact that the nation’s largest blue states are shrinking and red states are growing matters because three of those state’s governors, Illinois’ Pritzker, California’s Newsom and Florida’s DeSantis, may vie for the presidency.

          Growing, shrinking states

          Texas and Florida shared the title for the fastest-growing state in 2022. Texas won in terms of sheer numbers, growing its population by 470,708. With a 2022 population of 30,029,572, Texas is now the second state in the nation to have a population above 30 million.

          Florida was the nation’s runner-up, with an increase of 416,754. Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia rounded out the top five with population gains of 133,088, 124,847, and 94,320 respectively. 

          New York, like last year, was the nation’s big loser with a population decline of 180,341 in 2022. California was next with a loss of 113,649 people. Illinois, Pennsylvania and Louisiana rounded out the top five losers with population declines of 104,437, 40,051 and 36,857 respectively.

          Florida was the nation’s biggest winner on a percentage basis.

          The Sunshine State’s population grew by 1.9% in 2022. Idaho was the runner-up, with a population increase of 1.8%. Next was South Carolina with a 1.7% increase, Texas up 1.6% and South Dakota with a 1.5% increase.

          In contrast, New York was again the big loser with a population decline of 0.9% and Illinois came in second with a population loss of more than 0.8%. Rounding out the bottom five losers were Louisiana with a loss of 0.8%, West Virginia with 0.6% and Hawaii with a 0.5% decline.

          Domestic migration causes growth, declines

          The single biggest source for population changes among the 50 states continues to be domestic migration – the natural movement of Americans between states. Net domestic migration is the number of people who move into a state minus those who move out.

          Neither natural increase (births minus deaths) nor international migration come close to the same impact as net domestic migration. 

          Florida remained the most popular destination in 2022, with a net 319,000 people deciding to make the Sunshine state their home. Texas was next, with a net migration of nearly 231,000 Americans.

          On the flip side, a net 343,000 people decided they couldn’t stomach California anymore – the worst level of out-migration in the country. New York and Illinois were the runners-up, with losses of nearly 300,000 and 142,000 people, respectively.

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          Demographic differences

          There is an interesting amount of variety in why certain states grew or shrank in 2022.

          Texas, for example, grew the most in the nation due to positive numbers in every demographic component. Births outpaced deaths, creating a significant net natural increase (+118,159). That, coupled with international (+118,614) and domestic (+230,961) in-migration, is what allowed Texas to grow so much.

          Florida, on the other hand, had deaths outnumber births in 2020, resulting in a negative natural increase (-40,216). But the state more than made up for that decline with the nation’s largest net domestic migration (+318,855) and the 2nd-largest international migration (+125,629).

          On the flip side, neither California’s positive net natural increase (+106,155) nor its best-in-nation international migration (+125,715) made up for its worst-in-nation domestic out-migration (-343,230).

          In Illinois, a positive net natural increase and net international migration were able to mask the state’s constant, growing domestic out-migration for years. No longer. The state’s tiny natural increase (+4,866), low levels of international migration (+31,529) and record domestic out-migration (-141,656) led to a record population decline of 104,000 in 2022.

          Another round of winners and losers

          Voting at the ballot box is certainly a way to bring about change. But as the numbers above show, so, too, is voting with your feet. 

          Texas and Florida didn’t just win the war for people and their wealth in 2022, their victories have been going on for a decade and more. Texas and Florida were ranked 1 and 2 in population growth over the 2010-2020 period, with increases of 4 million and 2.8 million, respectively. That’s a growth of about 15% each. Structurally, that gives these states a huge advantage in the battle over both investment and political influence.

          In contrast, states like Illinois are seeing their populations shrink. Every person that leaves is another blow to those states’ future prosperity.

          You can’t help but wonder what impact these population numbers will have on the next presidential election – and what they mean for the prospects of the governors who end up running.

          Read more from Wirepoints:

          Appendix.

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          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 18:45

        • Janet Yellen's Not-So-Good Name
          Janet Yellen’s Not-So-Good Name

          Authored by Thomas McArdle via The Epoch Times,

          Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who last year assured the nation that inflation was only a fleeting bogeyman, recently took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to sell the Biden snake oil of a U.S. economy that we are supposed to believe is “resilient,” “strong,” “healthy,” and “robust” thanks to this administration’s endless inflationary spending, because of which she claims “the U.S. will be in a uniquely strong position to capitalize on the future.”

          Funny, but just a few days before her overflowingly optimistic op-ed, Yellen was telling CBS’s 60 Minutes “there’s a risk of a recession,” then craftily adding that “it certainly isn’t, in my view, something that is necessary to bring inflation down”—a suggestion that the aggressive but less-than-Volckeresque higher interest rate policy of the Federal Reserve she once chaired will be to blame for the downturn that likely has already begun.

          Before that, early this month, Yellen appeared on the Stephen Colbert show and blamed the American people for the record-high inflation, because they “suddenly started splurging on goods, buying technology,” leading to “bottlenecks” in supply chains.

          Only last June before the Senate Finance Committee, Biden’s Treasury chief was saying, “I do expect inflation to remain high,” conceding that the administration’s 4.7 percent forecast would have to be revised in the midst of a 40-year high 8 percent inflation rate and a World Bank projection of several years of high inflation and seriously diminished economic growth around the globe. Now, by contrast, she claims “there are signs that the supply-demand imbalances that have been boosting inflation are now easing in many sectors of the economy.”

          So when Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin try to alert the administration to the Chinese Communist Party seeking control of an important Silicon Valley company like GEO Semiconductor, they have to wonder whether it will be Janet in Wonderland they’ll be dealing with or the woman who appears not to have swallowed the totality of the Biden propaganda whole.

          “As you know,” the two members of Congress wrote Yellen last week (pdf), “the CCP pursues a strategy to acquire cutting-edge dual-use technology overseas in part to help the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) develop and field advanced military capabilities that are then aimed at American forces in the Indo-Pacific. We are deeply concerned that GEO Semiconductor may fall prey to this scheme, as Chinese-controlled companies are often forced to hand over their technology to the Chinese military or intelligence services.”

          In a taunt regarding the Democrats’ spending excess, Cotton and Gallagher added that “Given that Congress recently enacted legislation to spend billions to promote the American semiconductor industry, it would be malfeasant to allow the Chinese Communist Party to become a beneficiary of American taxpayer dollars and to seize part of that industry.”

          But considering that last month Yellen said, “it’s appropriate for American businesses to be thinking about” China conquering Taiwan, how much action can be expected from her Treasury against Beijing’s infiltration of American high tech?

          President Joe Biden’s main response to the China threat is—is it any surprise?—to establish a new layer of bureaucracy at the State Department that Democrat elder statesman Leon Panetta fears could become “another bureaucratic hellhole in which people establish positions for the sake of establishing positions and don’t develop the kind of sharpness that you need in order to get the job done.”

          Yellen claimed in the Wall Street Journal that “the policies of the Biden administration have propelled the American economy to one of the fastest recoveries in modern history.” Sorry, but the economic growth that returned when Americans came back to work after the COVID-19 lockdown is not the result of Biden policies, any more than COVID was the result of Donald Trump’s pro-growth economic policies.

          The fact that Yellen would make this assertion demonstrates just how dumb she and the president think Americans are.

          …

          Like other Federal Reserve chairmen before and since, Yellen spent years watching her words and maintaining an image of detachment from politics and ideology. Her contradictory assertions and discredited predictions during her time as Treasury chief have ruined her reputation of supposed sagacity.

          *  *  *

          Read more here…

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 18:05

        • Incoming PM Netanyahu Vows West Bank Settlement Expansion A 'High Priority'
          Incoming PM Netanyahu Vows West Bank Settlement Expansion A ‘High Priority’

          Incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is busy forming what’s being widely perceived as the most hardline and right-wing government in the country’s history. Netanyahu is set to be formally sworn into office on Thursday, along with his top ministers.

          He has already promised to put settlement expansion in the Palestinian West Bank highest on the list of priorities. His Likud party released the new governing coalition’s policy guidelines Wednesday, which opens by vowing to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria.” 

          Source: The Jerusalem Post

          All of these are the biblical and Israeli-recognized names for broad swathes of the occupied West Bank. The new government is essentially warning it will go ‘gloves-off’ in taking more territory.

          Given that the United States and the vast majority of United Nations members oppose an official policy of Israeli West Bank expansion, also given the potential for reigniting explosive conflict in the region, it could see a strained relationship between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government. 

          Already some 500,000 Israelis are part of dozens of Jewish settlements scattered throughout the West Bank, which European leaders especially have long condemned as “illegal”. 

          These settler groups frequently clash with local Palestinians – the latter who number about 2.5 million, but who have growing restrictions placed on their freedom of movement as the settlements expand. Israeli troops control checkpoints and Palestinians’ ability to travel depending on the proximity of Jewish settlements.

          This leads to frequent clashes and street battles, often with Palestinians hurling rocks and other debris at Israeli security forces. Large-scale settlement under incoming prime minister Netanyahu could unleash another Intifada, observers and human rights activists fear.

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

          Some of the incoming government officials under Netanyahu themselves live in ‘illegal’ settlements, as Al Jazeera explains:

          Netanyahu’s new government – the most religious and hardline in Israel’s history – is made up of ultra-Orthodox parties, a far-right ultranationalist religious faction and his Likud party. It is expected to be sworn in on Thursday.

          Several of Netanyahu’s key allies, including most of the Religious Zionism party, are ultranationalist West Bank settlers.

          Netanyahu was removed from office last year over major accusations of corruption and bribery, the investigation of which is still ongoing. He served as prime minister from 2009 to 2021 – and his now rising to lead an unlikely coalition that finally emerged victorious after multiple failed national election attempts. This of course makes him the longest-serving leader in Israel’s history.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 17:45

        • Paul Pelosi Attack Suspect David DePape Pleads Not Guilty To State Charges
          Paul Pelosi Attack Suspect David DePape Pleads Not Guilty To State Charges

          Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

          David DePape, the man charged in the hammer attack targeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband pled not guilty Wednesday to attempted murder and other state charges.

          DePape, 42, previously pleaded not guilty to federal charges of assault and attempted kidnapping. Wednesday’s arraignment was for state charges.

          The suspect also waived his right to a speedy trial. He will be back in court on Feb. 23 to set his trial date, a judge ruled, according to local media reports.

          In November, during his initial arraignment, DePape pleaded not guilty via his public defender and denied all allegations against him. The Canadian national currently remains held without bail.

          “Mr. DePape will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and held accountable for his heinous crimes,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in a statement on Wednesday.

          DePape’s public defender, Adam Lipson, told reporters that he had no comments after Wednesday’s hearing. He said the suspect is “going to be fighting this case in court, not the hallway.”

          Prosecutors alleged DePape broke into the Pelosis’ residence in San Francisco at around 2 a.m. on Oct. 28 before he went upstairs and asked a sleeping Paul Pelosi where his wife, Nancy, was. The House speaker was out of town.

          Family members said that Pelosi, 82, suffered a skull fracture and was hospitalized for several days before he was released. He was seen with his wife at a public event at the Kennedy Center Honors earlier this month.

          Court papers also said that Paul Pelosi then told DePape that he had to use the bathroom and called 911 from his cellphone. Two officers arrived before encountering DePape and Pelosi struggling over a hammer, prosecutors said. When the officers told the two to drop the hammer, DePape got control of the tool and used it to hit Pelosi in the head.

          The home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in San Francisco on Oct. 28, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

          In a hearing earlier this month, prosecutors showed new evidence that included Pelosi’s 911 call, body camera footage, and the hammer that was allegedly used in the attack. A 15-second-long bodycamera clip was also played, according to reports, showing the front door opening, the alleged attack, and DePape telling officers that he won’t drop the hammer.

          San Francisco Police Department Lt. Carla Hurley told the court that when she interrogated DePape, he told her that he had other targets, including Hunter Biden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, actor Tom Hanks, and others. Jenkins and other prosecutors said that the attack was politically motivated—based on statements that he made to investigators.

          “There is evil in Washington, what they did went so far beyond the campaign,” DePape told Hurley, according to a recording that was played in court.

          DePape also allegedly told Hurley that when police approached Pelosi’s home after he entered, he recalled saying, “I’m not going to surrender, I am here to fight. If you stop me from going after people, you will take the punishment instead.”

          Other Details

          Family members, however, said that DePape shared their left-wing views and questioned those claims.

          “‘I’m surprised about the whole thing. There is still a lot of info that hasn’t been given to the public. I have no clue what happened or how it happened. There are more questions than answers right now. Do we even know what really happened?” Sky Gonzalez, DePape’s son who lives with his family in Berkeley, told the Daily Mail in December.

          Front entrance of David DePape’s former house and camper van currently belonging to his ex-wife Oxane Taub at 1526 Woolsey Street in Berkeley, Calif., on Oct. 30, 2022 (Lear Zhou/The Epoch Times).

          While Gonzalez admitted that he hasn’t seen his father in years, he asserted DePape is not “a danger to society” and added he doesn’t “even know if he even attacked Mr. Pelosi.”

          “My father had a lot of political views and told me about a lot of different things, but he didn’t subscribe to either political party, Democrat or Republican,” he said, adding that he believed his father was a member of the left-wing Green Party.

          Days after the attack was reported, DePape’s former partner, nudist activist Oxane “Gypsy” Taub, said that he suffered from mental illness. Several years ago, he disappeared for months and came back believing he was Jesus Christ, Taub told local media.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 17:25

        • Biden Says Ending Title 42 "Long Overdue" After Supreme Court Decision
          Biden Says Ending Title 42 “Long Overdue” After Supreme Court Decision

          In response to a recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision to keep the Title 42 illegal immigration law in place, Joe Biden begrudgingly stated that while the federal government is required to continue enforcing them, the removal of covid-based restrictions is ‘long overdue’. 

          The comment represents even more proof that Biden and Democrats are intent on creating an open migration environment and will do nothing to secure the border. 

          It should be noted that the Biden Administration continues to promote pandemic fear-mongering despite the fact that the vast majority of the country has moved on. 

          Yet, when it comes to the disastrous flood of illegal migrants invading the southern border the White House is not at all concerned about the spread of covid and continues to ignore the crisis. 

          It is this kind of hypocrisy that leaves border states with little option other than to bus the migrants they can’t send back across the border over to Democrat run sanctuary cities.  

          Dissenting opinions from the Supreme Court’s decision argue that the crisis on the border is not a “covid crisis”, therefore Title 42 serves no purpose. 

          They acknowledge the crisis exists, but since it is not covid related they (and Biden) want to remove the only legal tool available to deter migrants from skipping across the border with the expectation of a free ride and welfare benefits.

          Numerous officials including the Democrat Mayor of El Paso (an epicenter of the border calamity) have admitted that the end of Title 42 would result in a massive spike in migrant caravans well beyond what the US is already dealing with. 

          Keeping the law in place is essential if the threat is to be averted.

          Tyler Durden
          Wed, 12/28/2022 – 17:05

        Digest powered by RSS Digest

        Dec 28

        Today’s News 28th December 2022

        • Chris Hedges: The Democrats Are Now The War Party
          Chris Hedges: The Democrats Are Now The War Party

          Authored by Chris Hedges,

          The Democrats position themselves as the party of virtue, cloaking their support for the war industry in moral language stretching back to Korea and Vietnam, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was as lionized as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

          All the wars they support and fund are “good” wars. All the enemies they fight, the latest being Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, are incarnations of evil. The photo of a beaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Kamala Harris holding up a signed Ukrainian battle flag behind Zelensky as he addressed Congress was another example of the Democratic Party’s abject subservience to the war machine.

          The Democrats, especially with the presidency of Bill Clinton, became shills not only for corporate America but for the weapons manufacturers and the Pentagon. No weapons system is too costly. No war, no matter how disastrous, goes unfunded. No military budget is too big, including the $858 billion in military spending allocated for the current fiscal year, an increase of $45 billion above what the Biden administration requested.

          The historian Arnold Toynbee cited unchecked militarism as the fatal disease of empires, arguing that they ultimately commit suicide.

          There once was a wing of the Democratic Party that questioned and stood up to the war industry: Senators J. William Fulbright, George McGovern, Gene McCarthy, Mike Gravel, William Proxmire and House member Dennis Kucinich. But that opposition evaporated along with the antiwar movement. When 30 members of the party’s progressive caucus recently issued a call for Biden to negotiate with Putin, they were forced by the party leadership and a warmongering media to back down and rescind their letter. Not that any of them, with the exception of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have voted against the billions of dollars in weaponry sent to Ukraine or the bloated military budget. Rashida Tlaib voted present.

          The opposition to the perpetual funding of the war in Ukraine has come primarily from Republicans, 11 in the Senate and 57 in the House, several, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, unhinged conspiracy theorists. Only nine Republicans in the House joined the Democrats in supporting the $1.7 trillion spending bill needed to prevent the government from shutting down, which included approval of $847 billion for the military — the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction. In the Senate, 29 Republicans opposed the spending bill. The Democrats, including nearly all 100 members of the House Congressional Progressive Caucus, lined up dutifully for endless war.

          This lust for war is dangerous, pushing us into a potential war with Russia and, perhaps later, with China — each a nuclear power. It is also economically ruinous. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven U.S. debt to over $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the U.S. GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spend more on the military than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined. Congress is also on track to provide an extra $21.7 billion to the Pentagon — above the already expanded annual budget — to resupply Ukraine.

          “But those contracts are just the leading edge of what is shaping up to be a big new defense buildup,” The New York Times reported.

          “Military spending next year is on track to reach its highest level in inflation-adjusted terms since the peaks in the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars between 2008 and 2011, and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II — a level that is more than the budgets for the next 10 largest cabinet agencies combined.”

          The Democratic Party, which, under the Clinton administration aggressively courted corporate donors, has surrendered its willingness to challenge, however tepidly, the war industry.

          “As soon as the Democratic Party made a determination, it could have been 35 or 40 years ago, that they were going to take corporate contributions, that wiped out any distinction between the two parties,” Dennis Kucinich said when I interviewed him on my show for The Real News Network.

          “Because in Washington, he or she who pays the piper plays the tune. That’s what’s happened. There isn’t that much of a difference in terms of the two parties when it comes to war.”

          In his 1970 book “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine,” Fulbright describes how the Pentagon and the arms industry pour millions into shaping public opinion through public relations campaigns, Defense Department films, control over Hollywood and domination of the commercial media. Military analysts on cable news are universally former military and intelligence officials who sit on boards or work as consultants to defense industries, a fact they rarely disclose to the public. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star army general and military analyst for NBC News, was also an employee of Defense Solutions, a military sales and project management firm. He, like most of these shills for war, personally profited from the sales of the weapons systems and expansion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

          On the eve of every congressional vote on the Pentagon budget, lobbyists from businesses tied to the war industry meet with Congress members and their staff to push them to vote for the budget to protect jobs in their district or state. This pressure, coupled with the mantra amplified by the media that opposition to profligate war funding is unpatriotic, keeps elected officials in bondage. These politicians also depend on the lavish donations from the weapons manufacturers to fund their campaigns.

          Seymour Melman, in his book “Pentagon Capitalism,” documented the way militarized societies destroy their domestic economies. Billions are spent on the research and development of weapons systems while renewable energy technologies languish. Universities are flooded with military-related grants while they struggle to find money for environmental studies and the humanities. Bridges, roads, levees, rail, ports, electric grids, sewage treatment plants and drinking water infrastructures are structurally deficient and antiquated. Schools are in disrepair and lack sufficient teachers and staff. Unable to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, the for-profit health care industry forces families, including those with insurance, into bankruptcy. Domestic manufacturing, especially with the offshoring of jobs to China, Vietnam, Mexico and other nations, collapses. Families are drowning in personal debt, with 63 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. The poor, the mentally ill, the sick and the unemployed are abandoned.

          Melman, who coined the term “permanent war economy,” noted that since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its discretionary budget on past, current and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. The military-industrial establishment is nothing more than gilded corporate welfare. Military systems are sold before they are produced. Military industries are permitted to charge the federal government for huge cost overruns. Massive profits are guaranteed. For example, this November, the Army awarded Raytheon Technologies alone more than $2 billion in contracts, on top of over $190 million awarded in August, to deliver missile systems to expand or replenish weapons sent to Ukraine. Despite a depressed market for most other businesses, stock prices of Lockheed and Northrop Grumman have risen by more than 36 and 50 percent this year.

          Tech giants, including Amazon, which supplies surveillance and facial recognition software to the police and FBI, have been absorbed into the permanent war economy. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle were awarded multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and are eligible to receive $9 billion in Pentagon contracts to provide the military with “globally available cloud services across all security domains and classification levels, from the strategic level to the tactical edge,” through mid-2028.

          Foreign aid is given to countries such as Israel, with more than $150 billion in bilateral assistance since its founding in 1948, or Egypt, which has received over $80 billion since 1978 — aid that requires foreign governments to buy weapons systems from the U.S. The U.S. public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and purchases them for foreign governments. Such a  circular system mocks the idea of a free-market economy. These weapons soon become obsolete and are replaced by updated and usually more costly weapons systems. It is, in economic terms, a dead end. It sustains nothing but the permanent war economy.

          “The truth of the matter is that we’re in a heavily militarized society driven by greed, lust for profit, and wars are being created just to keep fueling that,” Kucinich told me.

          In 2014, the U.S. backed a coup in Ukraine that installed a government that included neo-Nazis and was antagonistic to Russia. The coup triggered a civil war when the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, the Donbass, sought to secede from the country, resulting in over 14,000 people dead and nearly 150,000 displaced, before Russia invaded in February. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to Jacques Baud, a former NATO security advisor who also worked for Swiss intelligence, was instigated by the escalation of Ukraine’s war on the Donbass. It also followed the Biden administration’s rejection of proposals sent by the Kremlin in late 2021, which might have averted Russia’s invasion the following year.

          This invasion has led to widespread U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia, which have boomeranged onto Europe. Inflation ravages Europe with the sharp curtailment of shipments of Russian oil and gas. Industry, especially in Germany, is crippled.  In most of Europe, it is a winter of shortages, spiraling prices and misery.

          “This whole thing is blowing up in the face of the West,” Kucinich warned. “We forced Russia to pivot to Asia, as well as Brazil, India, China, South Africa and Saudi Arabia. There’s a whole new world being formed. The catalyst of it is the misjudgment that occurred about Ukraine and the effort to try to control Ukraine in 2014 that most people aren’t aware of.”

          By not opposing a Democratic Party whose primary business is war, liberals become the sterile, defeated dreamers in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground.”

          A former convict, Dostoevsky did not fear evil. He feared a society that no longer had the moral fortitude to confront evil. And war, to steal a line from my latest book, is the greatest evil.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 23:20

        • What China's Accelerated Reopening Means For The Economy And Markets
          What China’s Accelerated Reopening Means For The Economy And Markets

          On the evening of 26 December, China released new guidelines to significantly relax its Covid control policy for domestic infections and inbound travelers, effective 8 January 2023. As reported previously, key measures include i) removing quarantine requirements for Covid cases, ii) abandoning the risk district classification system, and iii) shifting to a de facto “0+0” regime for inbound travelers. In a note from Goldman’s China strategy chief, Hui Shan, he writes that while the new guidelines as a major step towards the full reopening, he cautions on the increased challenges to China’s medical system in the near term. He adds that the frontloaded China reopening timetable adds conviction to the bank’s below-consensus forecast for Q4 GDP growth (+1.7% yoy) and above-consensus 2023 GDP forecast (+5.2% yoy)

          1. Key takeaways from the new guidelines

          On the evening of 26 December, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) released new guidelines to significantly relax its Covid control policy for domestic infections and inbound travelers (Exhibit 1).

          The new guidelines are as follows:

          • On the management of Covid: China will immediately rename the term “Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia” (新冠肺炎) to “Novel Coronavirus Infection” (新型冠状 病毒感染). It will downgrade the management of the disease from the current top-level Category A to less strict Category B, effective 8 January 2023, after which China will no longer impose quarantine measures for Covid cases, will no longer trace their close contacts, and will no longer identify high/low-risk districts of Covid.
          • On policies for inbound travelers: China will abandon the requirements of frequent testing and centralized quarantine for inbound travelers (although a negative 48hr PCR test result before departure to China is still required). Inbound travelers will be allowed to enter the community immediately upon health declaration, and various restrictions on the international routes of airlines will be removed. China also pledged to make it easier for foreigners to obtain inbound travel visas, and gradually normalize domestic residents’ outbound travel.
          • On medical preparations: China pledged to further strengthen its medical preparations to cope with the reopening, including pushing up the vaccination rate for the elderly population, improving the supply of Covid-related medicines and test kits, expanding intensive care units (ICUs), and enhancing the supply of medical resources in the rural areas.

          2. Another significant step towards full reopening

          China has rapidly relaxed its Covid policies since November, featured by the Covid “20 measures” on 11 November, “10 measures” on 7 December, and the new guidelines on 26 December. China’s new guidelines, which will de facto reopen borders and abandon quarantines, are a significant step towards the full reopening (or, the “living with Covid” mode).

          According to Goldman, the most important change in the guidelines lies with cross-border policies, which implies a de facto “0+0” regime for eligible inbound travelers starting from 8 January 2023 (vs. the current “5+3”). That said, on the domestic front, the downgrade of Covid management and removal of quarantine requirements appear to be an “after the fact” adjustment, as in practice many people who have tested positive have been allowed to go to work and enter public places in recent weeks.

          However, amid the rapid reopening, the challenge to China’s medical system may have been significantly escalated, especially for less developed inland and rural areas amid the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday. This highlights the urgency of more and faster policy efforts to boost elderly vaccination and other medical resource supply (e.g., ICU beds, oral pills, and medical staff).

          3. Implications for growth and markets

          High-frequency mobility data (Exhibit 2) and December Emerging Industries PMI (EPMI) pointed to weaker growth momentum during the frontloaded “exit wave”, on the back of surging infections, a temporary labor shortage and increased supply chain disruptions. Although the NHC stopped the release of Covid case data, experience from Hong Kong and Taiwan suggests daily new cases may peak in late December or January in mainland China (Exhibit 3). According to Goldman, this adds conviction to the bank’s below-consensus forecast for Q4 GDP growth (+1.7% yoy) countered by above-consensus 2023 GDP forecast (+5.2% yoy).

          Furthermore, Goldman also maintain the view that China reopening is positive for CNY, and that improved growth expectations in 2023 might outweigh unfavorable factors such as deterioration in goods and services trade balances. On FX, the bank expects small appreciation of the USDCNY over the 12-month horizon to 6.90.

          On the spillover effects of China reopening, Hong Kong and Thailand may benefit the most from the international tourism channel if China removes visa restrictions and outbound travel gradually normalizes.

          More in a full note from Goldman available to professional subs.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 23:00

        • Younger Parents Say Their Kids Are Indifferent To The American Flag
          Younger Parents Say Their Kids Are Indifferent To The American Flag

          Authored by Nathan Harden via RealClear Wire,

          A new survey suggests that younger parents don’t share the same values or priorities for civics education as their older peers. According to the survey, conducted by RealClear Opinion Research and funded by the conservative Jack Miller Center, nearly nine out of ten Americans agree that teaching children about our nation’s founding principles is “very important.” But seven out of ten don’t think schools are doing a good job of it.

          The survey was conducted in November and included responses from more than one thousand likely voters on topics related to education, civics instruction, and the American founding. As first reported by my colleague, RealClearPolitics reporter Phil Wegmann, their answers revealed that both Republicans and Democrats value civics education. Contrary to how it’s often portrayed in the news cycle, civics education is not merely a concern on the right.

          Still, there were some partisan differences. Democrats demonstrated more confidence in the public school system to deliver what kids need to know about the American founding, while Republicans were more likely to see private schooling or homeschooling as the best way to do the job. Republicans were also more likely to say that they believe schools are promoting a biased political agenda, and that their children were not free to express their ideas at school.

          But the most striking differences weren’t partisan. Instead, they emerged when comparing the responses of young parents to those of older parents.

          To the question, “What emotion do you believe your children feel when they see the American flag?” most parents responded positively. “Pride” and “gratitude” together made up more than 63% of the responses, compared to 5.8% who said their children felt “shame” or “disgust” when they see the flag.

          About 30% overall said their children felt “indifference” when they saw the flag. But when you consider younger parents as a group that number was much higher. 52.6% of parents aged 18-24 said their children felt indifference to the flag. For parents aged 25-34, that number is 41.6%.

          Let’s call it the civics education age gap. And while the survey asks parents specifically what their kids think about the flag, data from additional questions on the survey suggest that younger parents may share some of that indifference about America in general.

          On the question of how to portray the flawed figures of America’s founding, overall, 92.5% of respondents said public schools should “portray historical figures honestly with the understanding that we can teach a person’s achievements even if their views do not alight with values of today.” Only 7.5% of all respondents believe that “if the views of historical figures do not align with the values of today, we should minimize or avoid teaching about their historical achievements.” On this question, the responses of young parents aged 18-24 differed only slightly from the average parent—9.8% of them believe we should minimize the achievements of problematic historical figures, or even avoid teaching about them altogether. For parents aged 35-34, that number was 8%.

          The context for this survey is, of course, our culture’s ongoing debate over how to teach kids about the impact of racism and slavery on our country, and what those things mean about our national identity. The disagreement could be boiled down to the question, “Is America Good?” Thomas Jefferson is a prime example. He was a racist slave owner who nevertheless expressed ideas that gave birth to a new kind of political freedom, and whose words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal” would one day be uttered by Martin Luther King in defense of civil rights for those slaves’ descendants.

          At a recent event in Washington, D.C. where the results of the survey were discussed, education and civil rights activist Bob Woodsen spoke of the importance of allowing for “redemption” when we consider our flawed founding fathers and our national identity. Hans Zeiger, president of the Jack Miller Center, put it this way, “We can be honest about our history without being romantic about it.”

           When asked which aspects of civics education should have priority, over 70% of parents said the focus should be “teaching students the principles underlying American politics, such as the history and ideas behind the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.” On the other hand, nearly 23% said the priority should be “teaching students how to actively promote change in government.” Among parents aged 18-24, that number was nearly 55%.

          The vast majority of Americans today agree that civics education is important, and that civics education should include an honest assessment of our nation’s flaws and our flawed founding fathers. But younger parents seem to embrace a more pessimistic view of our nation and a more activist vision of the civics classroom. If these differences were to endure as younger parents age, one wonders what the civics age gap portends. One wonders what it will mean for our nation if younger parents, and their children, allow no place for redemption.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 22:40

        • Visualizing EV Production In The US By Brand
          Visualizing EV Production In The US By Brand

          How long will Tesla hold onto its dominant electric vehicle (EV) market share?

          This is one of the biggest questions facing the U.S. automotive industry. On one hand, Tesla has a very strong brand and loyal customer base (similar to Apple). The company also has a headstart in EV production and spends more on R&D per car than its competitors.

          On the other hand, legacy automakers such as Volkswagen are eager to overtake Tesla. As the incumbents, they have decades more experience in building cars and are investing billions of dollars to catch up.

          To keep you up to date on this evolving story, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu uses data from the EPA’s 2022 Automotive Trends Report. in the following infographic:

          Data for the 2021 Model Year

          Although it comes from a 2022 report, the comprehensive production data used in this infographic is for the 2021 model year.

          The table below breaks out total production by EV and PHEV (plug-in hybrid electric vehicle).

           

          *Rounded to nearest 1,000. Numbers may not add up due to rounding. Includes top 14 manufacturers with U.S. footprint

          Toyota and Stellantis are the two biggest legacy automakers in this dataset, though it’s worth pointing out that they only produced PHEVs. Toyota’s first EV, the bZ4X, isn’t slated for release until 2023.

          Stellantis appears to be even further behind, though the company has plenty of untapped potential with brands like Jeep and Ram. In a recent interview, Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares revealed that the company has set aside $36 billion for electrification and software.

          Legacy Brands with the Most Momentum

          When it comes to building EVs, some legacy brands have moved quicker than others.

          Among these legacy brands is Volkswagen, which has made a major commitment to EVs in the fallout of its Dieselgate scandal. The group aims to produce 22 million EVs by 2028, and is rolling out various models including the ID.3 hatchback, the ID.4 SUV, and the ID. Buzz (an electric revival of the classic Microbus).

          Ford is also showing good pace, announcing $22 billion in EV investment between 2021 and 2025. The brand produced its 150,000th Mustang Mach-E in Nov. 2022, and is aiming to build 270,000 of them in 2023 alone.

          Ford’s highly anticipated F-150 Lightning has also received over 200,000 reservations. Production of the Lightning is expected to be 15,000 in 2022, 55,000 in 2023, and 80,000 in 2024. Rivian, Ford’s primary rival in the electric pickup truck segment, is on track to reach 25,000 vehicles in 2022.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 22:20

        • Fighting The 'Psyopcracy'
          Fighting The ‘Psyopcracy’

          Authored by Joe Lauria via ConsortiumNews.com,

          It is a hard thing to combat because it’s not a physical enemy but rather messages that lodge themselves in millions of people’s minds. And it has come to rule over us. 

          Cathy Vogan, the executive producer of Consortium News‘ webcast CN Live!, recently coined a new term to describe rule by psyops, or psychological operations: psyopcracy.   According to Wikipedia: 

          “Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.

          The purpose of United States psychological operations is to induce or reinforce behavior perceived to be favorable to U.S. objectives.”  

          William Casey, C.I.A. director under Ronald Reagan, said: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

          Thus the American people are continuously subject to a number of psychological operations otherwise known as “the news.”  

          U.S. intelligence officials feed journalists disinformation to create a false narrative that is intended to mislead the public and cover-up what is actually taking place. The constant reinforcement of these lies becomes entrenched in the public mind and after time comes to be accepted as unquestionable truth.  

          Here’s an explanation of how the C.I.A. did it in Vietnam:

          Through such operations, the American people were led to believe for years that the United States was winning in Vietnam, when it was actually losing, as the Pentagon Papers proved. 

          Since then, many examples have followed of completely false stories being planted into people’s minds to start and keep a war going, the fake WMD narrative in Iraq perhaps the most infamous.

          Blind Faith (Eden Gallanter/Creative Commons)

          Today the war people are being fooled about is in Ukraine. Sometimes a psyop doesn’t involve inserting false information, so much as leaving out what’s true. 

          The American people, and by extension people around the world, have been led to believe that an unprovoked Russian madman started the war last February.

          That’s because they are purposely not told that the war actually began in 2014 after a U.S.-backed coup in Kiev led Russian speakers in Donbass to declare independence, after which the coup government militarily attacked them. 

          Other facts are removed from the story, such as Russia’s proposed treaties with the U.S. and NATO last December that would have prevented Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian civil war. 

          Robert Parry, the founder of this website, in March 2017 wrote the article, “How US Flooded the World with Psyops,” in which he reported for the first time:

          “Newly declassified documents from the Reagan presidential library help explain how the U.S. government developed its sophisticated psychological operations capabilities that – over the past three decades – have created an alternative reality both for people in targeted countries and for American citizens, a structure that expanded U.S. influence abroad and quieted dissent at home.

          The documents reveal the formation of a psyops bureaucracy under the direction of Walter Raymond Jr., a senior CIA covert operations specialist who was assigned to President Reagan’s National Security Council staff to enhance the importance of propaganda and psyops in undermining U.S. adversaries around the world and ensuring sufficient public support for foreign policies inside the United States.”

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          So many people are subject to psyops that telling the truth becomes a formidable task. You become the one that is out of step. You are the one that seems to be mad.

          *  *  *

          Consortium News‘s mission since 1995 has been to fight against psychological operations that have come to rule over Americans, convincing them of all manner of falsehoods, such as that their nation is motivated by humanitarian and democratic principles in the world. And that the Ukraine war was unprovoked.

          Help us fight the psyopcracy…

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 22:00

        • Aussie Cops Ask Neighbors To Rat Out 'Anti-Government, Anti-Police, Or COVID-Vaccine Conspiracy Theorists'
          Aussie Cops Ask Neighbors To Rat Out ‘Anti-Government, Anti-Police, Or COVID-Vaccine Conspiracy Theorists’

          Australian police are using a brutal ambush on two cops to encourage residents to rat out neighbors who are skeptical of the Covid-10 vaccine, or harbor anti-government views.

          On December 12, two Brisbane police officers were gunned down by a family of rural Australians, who opened fire as the two officers approached their home. Constables Rachel McCrow, 29, and Matthew Arnold, 26 died in the attack, while a third officer, Constable Randall Kirk, was shot in the leg but managed to escape. A fourth officer, Keely Brough, fled to safety in the bushes.

          Later that evening, members of the rural family were killed in a shootout with tactical police.

          In response to the incident, Deputy Commissioner Tracy Linford suggested that neighbors need to assume anyone who harbors non-mainstream views is clearly a threat.

          “As I said before, if there’s anybody out there that knows of someone that might be showing concerning behavior around conspiracy theories, anti-government, anti-police, conspiracy theories around COVID-19 vaccination as what we’re seeing with [shooting perpetrators] the Train family, we’d want to know about it. We want to know about that. And you can either contact the police directly or go through Crime Stoppers,” she said.

          In response, Rebel News‘ Avi Yemini replied: “Queensland Police appealing to the public to dob in their neighbours who “are anti-government or believe Covid-19 vaccine conspiracy theories.””

          This has not sat well with many:

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          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 21:40

        • Texans As Young As 18 Can Carry Guns After State Drops Appeal
          Texans As Young As 18 Can Carry Guns After State Drops Appeal

          Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          People as young as 18 can carry handguns in Texas after the state dropped an appeal of a recent order.

          Handguns in a store in Houston, Texas, on Sept. 9, 2022. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

          Texas officials were prepared to make their case against the order, which found a Texas law barring people aged 18–20 from carrying handguns unconstitutional, but abruptly asked to withdraw the appeal on Dec. 20, court records show.

          Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for the withdrawal and the appeals court granted the unopposed request. McCraw did not say why the state, which filed a notice of appeal in September but never filed a brief outlining its position, was backing down. The department did not return a request for comment.

          The Firearms Policy Coalition, which sued the state over the law, celebrated the move.

          “We applaud Texas for doing the right thing and accepting the district court’s ruling against its law prohibiting 18-to-20-year-old adults from carrying firearms in public,” Cody Wisniewski, the coalition’s senior attorney for constitutional litigation, said in a statement. “Not only do young adults have the same constitutionally protected right to bear arms as all other adults, they are also among the reasons we have a Second Amendment, Constitution, and Country in the first place.”

          The law was still in effect because U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee who used to serve as a justice on a Texas appeals court, stayed his order blocking it to give the state time to seek an appeal and, if an appeal was sought, for the appeals court to rule on it.

          The Law

          Texas law says that people younger than 21 cannot carry handguns in any place not “on the person’s own premises or premises under the person’s control; or inside of or directly en route to a motor vehicle or watercraft that is owned by the person or under the person’s control.”

          The law has led to criminal penalties for young people who carry guns, whether openly or in a concealed manner.

          The law does not apply to young adults who obtain a license to carry a handgun, but another part of the Texas code states that a person must be at least 21 to get such a license.

          “Accordingly, while Texas allows law-abiding adults 21 years of age or older—and 18-to-20-year-old adults in or honorably discharged from the military—to exercise their rights to keep and bear arms in public, the State bans ordinary, law-abiding adults who are 18-to-20 years of age from exercising their right to carry a handgun for self-defense in public,” the coalition said in its lawsuit, which was joined by several young adults seeking to carry.

          At the same time, 18- to 20-year-olds can carry rifles, the plaintiffs noted.

          The law violates Supreme Court rulings including District of Columbia v. Heller, the suit asserted.

          Defendants argued that the law was constitutional under Supreme Court precedent, including Heller, in part because prohibitions on young adults carrying handguns have been around for years.

          Pittman’s Order

          The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

          Pittman sided with the plaintiffs, concluding that “the people” include 18- to 20-year-olds.

          The amendment does not mention age restrictions, and in Heller, the Supreme Court found that “the people” refers to “all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset,” the judge noted. Also, in another decision on gun rights, the court said that “ordinary, law-abiding, adult citizens … are part of ‘the people’ whom the Second Amendment protects.”

          Read more here…

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 21:20

        • Rachel Levine Calls For Tech Companies To Control "Misinformation" On Gender Affirming Care
          Rachel Levine Calls For Tech Companies To Control “Misinformation” On Gender Affirming Care

          Biden’s trans Assistant Secretary for Health and honorary four-star admiral, Rachel Levine (formerly known as Richard Levine) has called for Big Tech companies to control “misinformation” on gender affirmation care (hormone treatments and sex change surgeries).  This is yet another example of open attempts by government officials to demand tech conglomerates and social media websites enforce the establishment narrative while censoring anyone who disagrees.  

          Recent Twitter File data dumps indicate extensive collusion between government agencies like the FBI and social media in an attempt to silence dissent on hotly debated topics from the existence of the Hunter Biden laptop to the draconian covid pandemic response.  In most cases, the government has sought to silence facts and evidence and label accurate arguments as “misinformation.”  Another issue which leftist officials seem to obsess over is the trans identity movement.

          Representatives claim to engage in activism in the name of civil rights, but trans people have the same exact rights and legal protections as anyone else in the US and equality is already a fact of life for them.  Instead, their goals are more akin to special treatment and extraordinary privileges well beyond the rights enshrined in the US Constitution or the law.  It is hard to think of any other group in the western world that gets more attention and protection from government and corporations than trans people.  In essence, they demand the power to control people’s speech, language and thoughts in the name of insulating trans people’s feelings and mental health. 

          Rachel Levine’s comments on “misinformation” are clearly in response to the massive push-back coming from the public when it comes to the numerous oversteps by the trans community and the government. 

          The establishment has recently lost control of the narrative and they are seeking to get it back.

          Specifically, a large number of Americans are fighting against the imposition of trans ideology on children and the use of hormone therapies and gender based surgeries on kids.

          In the past five years there has been an accelerated expansion of trans related policies applied within public institutions, especially when it comes to public schools.

          Keep in mind that trans people (or people claiming to be trans) only represented 0.39% of the population in 2016.  Only six years later around 1.9% of the general population and a suspicious 5% of teens identifying as trans. 

          One could argue that such a jump defies scientific and statistical logic and can only be explained by the growing pervasiveness of trans ideology in schools and media.  In other words, it is likely that many people identify as trans today because they want to join an artificially created trend, or, they want to get a piece of the pie when it comes to special treatment.

          Studies involving gender reassignment or hormone therapy often conclude that patients experience a notable decline in depression or need for mental health services afterwards.  But, after peer review these conclusions change, indicating that there is no significant advantages to gender affirmation care.  The media runs with the initial story, and then never reports on the retractions.

          People like Levine assert that the science is all but settled and any contrary information is “dangerous” to the public. 

          What Levine calls an “onslaught” is merely the natural correction of false information being pumped out by the government and the corporate media. 

          Science should never become political, and when it does it is no longer science – It is cultism.  This goes for climate change, covid vaccines and gender affirmation treatments. 

          Science is ever evolving with theories and counter-theories.  To suppress all counter-theories and contrary evidence in support of a single narrative is anti-science. 

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 21:00

        • 12 States Allow Home Equity 'Theft' Over Homeowners' Tax Payment Shortfalls, Study Says
          12 States Allow Home Equity ‘Theft’ Over Homeowners’ Tax Payment Shortfalls, Study Says

          Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          Twelve states and the District of Columbia allow local governments and private investors to seize dramatically more than what is owed from homeowners who fall behind on property tax payments, according to a new report.

          Christina M. Martin, senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, in a file photo. (Courtesy of Pacific Legal Foundation)

          The practice, which Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) calls “home equity theft,” is documented in what the organization bills as the first national study aimed at exposing “the injustice of home equity theft through tax foreclosure.”

          “Our findings are alarming,” PLF’s strategic research director, Angela Erickson, said in a statement.

          “Home equity theft is robbing thousands of people of their homes and all the equity they’ve built. A system that allows governments and private investors to take more than what is owed creates a perverse incentive to work against the homeowner—not with the homeowner—to get the tax debt paid.”

          Homeowners lost more than $777 million in life savings on more than 5,600 homes, based on their market value, in transactions that took place from 2014 to 2021. The true total is probably higher because statistics from New York state and some statistics from the other states studied were not available. On average, homeowners lost 86 percent of their equity, the study found.

          Government entities, which often unload properties for a fraction of their market value, collected an estimated $26 million more than they were owed on about 1,300 homes. At the same time, private investors, who purchase tax liens, took in about $250 million more than what they were owed on about 2,600 homes.

          Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, South Dakota, and the District of Columbia have laws on the books that let local governments and private investors “steal” substantial amounts of home equity from homeowners who are late on their property taxes, according to PLF.

          Nine other states—Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, and Wisconsin—safeguard home equity in the foreclosure process but provide loopholes that permit governments or private entities to capture excess equity value that PLF says should belong to the homeowner.

          These laws allow government officials and investors to take homes that have been in families for generations and leave some people homeless over tax debts that, in some cases, work out to less than 1 percent of their property’s value, according to PLF.

          In one case, a county in Michigan seized a man’s house over an $8.41 underpayment, leaving him with nothing. The report notes that in the end, the homeowner prevailed when the Michigan Supreme Court determined that the county had acted unconstitutionally.

          PLF takes the position that these so-called tax-and-take transactions violate the Fifth Amendment, which prevents the government from taking property without just compensation, and the Eighth Amendment, which bans excessive penalties.

          Some government treasurers’ organizations, counties, and tax lien investors who “personally profit off the system in some of these states” are in favor of laws that lead to home equity theft, Christina Martin, a senior attorney at PLF, told The Epoch Times.

          “Everybody else seems to be against it—groups on the left, right, [and] center,” she said.

          “The vast majority of people seem to be against this. And most people actually have no idea this is even happening.”

          The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an alliance of conservative lawmakers, is opposed to home equity theft. Laws should be changed to require surplus profits to be returned to a home’s prior owner after a “tax lien investor or county collects what it is due and any other debts or levies on the property are paid,” ALEC says.

          The Epoch Times reached out to the Government Finance Officers Association, the National Governors Association, and the National Conference of State Legislatures for comment but had not received a reply from any of the three organizations as of press time.

          PLF currently has three home equity theft-related petitions from homeowners pending before the Supreme Court, all of which are scheduled to be considered by the justices on Jan. 6, 2023.

          Two are from Nebraska. One petition (pdf) is Fair v. Continental Resources, court file 22-160, and the other (pdf) is Nieveen v. Tax 106, court file 22-237. A petition (pdf), Tyler v. Hennepin County, court file 22-166, is from Minnesota.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 20:40

        • These Were The Deadliest Countries For Journalists In 2022
          These Were The Deadliest Countries For Journalists In 2022

          Reporters Without Borders (RWB) counts a total of 57 journalists and media workers that have been killed this year because of their job, including eight killed in Ukraine. Additionally, RWB has recorded 532 that are imprisoned as of December 14.

          In the infographic below, Statista’s Martin Armstrong shows the places where the most journalists were killed in 2022 (16 countries not shown had one death each).

          Infographic: The Deadliest Countries for Journalists in 2022 | Statista

          You will find more infographics at Statista

          In Mexico, journalists’ deaths with a direct link to their journalistic work represented almost 20 percent of the worldwide total.

          As detailed by RWB:

          “At least 80 journalists have been killed in connection with their work in Mexico in the past ten years (including 46 in the past five) despite repeated calls from civil society and international organizations for the government to combat the violence more effectively.”

          The report goes on to reference the killing of journalist Lourdes Maldonado López, who was “in principle enjoying (state) protection in Baja California ” when she was gunned down outside her home in January.

          Turning attention to Ukraine, now the second most dangerous country for media workers since the Russian invasion on February 24, RWB count 8 deaths in the country as 2022 comes to a close:

          “They include Maks Levin, a Ukrainian photojournalist who was deliberately shot by Russian soldiers on March 13, according to the conclusions of an RWB investigation”.

          Russia itself currently has 18 journalists imprisoned.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 20:20

        • China Had Biological Weapons Ambitions Long Before Pandemic: House Intelligence Committee Member
          China Had Biological Weapons Ambitions Long Before Pandemic: House Intelligence Committee Member

          Authored by Hannah Ng and Steve Lance via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          China had made clear its biological weapons ambitions long before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

          Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on Feb. 3, 2021. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

          Wenstrup together with Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) released a report (pdf) on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic on Dec. 14.

          “Our State Department has put things out over the past, even going back to 2005, that China is interested in offensive bioweapons,” Wenstrup told the “Capitol Report” program on NTD, the sister media outlet of the Epoch Times, on Dec. 16.

          The lawmaker singled out the work of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s Fifth Institute of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), the military’s top medical research body. 

          “In 2005, the U.S. State Department publicly stated the U.S. assessment that China also operates an offensive biological weapons program, specifically identifying two Chinese entities as likely involved, one of which is the Fifth Institute. In a 2006 declaration of compliance with the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention, China acknowledged that the Fifth Institute specifically conducts research on SARS coronaviruses,” the report reads. 

          Doctor and Congressman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) interview with NTD Capitol Report April 2, 2022.

          Wenstrup also took note of the book titled “The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Artificial Humanized Viruses as Genetic Weapons,” released by AMMS in 2015.

          “The book described how to create weaponized chimeric SARS coronaviruses, the potentially broader scope for their use compared to traditional bioweapons, and the benefits of being able to plausibly deny that such chimeric coronaviruses were artificially created rather than naturally occurring,” the report states.

          The congressman, who is also a medical doctor, said that the military research institute had also collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the body at the center of the lab leak theory of the pandemic origins. 

          Wenstrup said there were “published articles with scientists from the Fifth Institute, as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) … combining their military with their other areas of research.”

          He further pointed to a scientist with the PLA’s Fifth Institute, General Zhou Yusen, who had reportedly worked with the WIV for years prior to the pandemic.

          According to Wenstrup, Zhou was “heavy into the gain of function type research or chimeric research.”

          “Notably, in the spring of 2020, as global COVID-19 cases surpassed 7 million and COVID-19 deaths surpassed 400,000, General Zhou reportedly died under mysterious circumstances,” according to the GOP report.

          Challenging the Intelligence Community

          The lawmaker noted that an update to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)’s declassified assessment (pdf) of the origins of COVID-19 released in October 2021 did not address important information that indicates the Chinese regime’s interest in offensive bioweapons. 

          “The declassified updated assessment also failed to address the AMMS’ publicly stated interest in the development of engineered coronaviruses for biological weapons purposes,” the GOP report states.

          “The IC [intelligence community] should be transparent regarding what it does or does not know regarding the relationship between the PLA’s Fifth Institute of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS), which China has publicly admitted conducts bioweapons research and coronavirus experiments, and the WI,” the report continues. 

          Wenstrup specifically pointed to Zhou’s death under questionable circumstances, saying “We want to know what the intelligence community knows about his work, and also about his untimely death and the circumstances around that.”

          Lack of Cooperation

          The lawmaker highlighted that China has consistently failed to cooperate with investigations into the origins of COVID-19.

          “When they finally did let people come to China, they really didn’t let them into the lab and to see everything. As a matter of fact, they [investigation group] had to be held in quarantine for one or two weeks before they even got to have a conversation,” he said, referring to a team of World Health Organization-recruited scientists who visited China in early 2021 to probe the pandemic origins.

          “And interestingly, the only person they would allow from America was a gentleman named Peter Daszak, who was with EcoHealth Alliance, who was getting NIH [National Institutes of Health] funding, and then working with the Chinese on coronavirus type of research,” he added.

          Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that has drawn considerable scrutiny over funneling federal funding to the WIV for research on coronaviruses, which some experts say amounted to gain-of-function research.

          Given the history of collaboration between Daszak and WIV, Wenstrup said there was potential for bias.

          Further Investigation

          Wenstrup said that the committee would continue to probe the pandemic origins, especially after the Republicans take the gavel in the new year.

          Read more here…

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 20:00

        • Russia Dismisses "Smokescreen" Kyiv Offer Of February Peace Talks
          Russia Dismisses “Smokescreen” Kyiv Offer Of February Peace Talks

          In the last few weeks there’s been increasing public talk of achieving peace through direct negotiations coming out of both Ukrainian and Russian officials. But for now, each side is sticking to their respective strict demands, making the possibility of serious talks coming to fruition anytime soon highly unlikely. Yet it’s at least a positive that the word “negotiations” is even in the air at this point.

          The latest back-and-forth began with a Monday statement by Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, who called for a peace summit to be held by the end of February with the mediation of UN Secretary-General António Guterres. However, his key sticking point, which proved to be a non-starter for Moscow, was that Russian officials first face a “war crimes court” for the invasion of Ukraine.

          “Every war ends in a diplomatic way,” Kuleba said. “Every war ends as a result of the actions taken on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.” He added while talking about a UN venue, “This is really about bringing everyone on board.”

          Short-lived talks during the opening weeks of the invasion. BelTA/TASS

          And as Politico reported of the top Ukrainian diplomat’s Monday remarks, “Asked about whether they would invite Russia to the summit, he said that Moscow would first need to face prosecution for war crimes at an international court.” Kuleba then stipulated, “They can only be invited to this step in this way.”

          Kuleba then went on the attack, speaking of the Russians: “They regularly say that they are ready for negotiations, which is not true, because everything they do on the battlefield proves the opposite.”

          In part, this was all a reaction to weekend comments by President Vladimir Putin saying he’s ready to negotiate “with everyone involved” in the Ukraine conflict.

          The Kremlin’s official response to Kuleba’s latest comments came via head of the Russian State Duma Committee on international affairs Leonid Slutsky – who it should be noted would likely head any future Russian delegation in talks with Ukraine. Slutsky dismissed the Ukrainian calls for a war crimes tribunal as a “smoke screen.” 

          “Ukraine is still not ready to hold peace negotiations; all the statements made by [Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry] Kuleba are a smoke screen,” Slutsky said, and further according to state media:

          Slutsky underscored that it was the Ukrainian side that withdrew from the Istanbul peace process, instead choosing a path of escalation. “It wasn’t us who were evading peace talks, it wasn’t us who staged the provocation in Bucha,” he added.

          Slutsky noted that “the ball is still in Kiev’s court,” adding that the goals of the special military operation remain the same, those being the denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine.

          He emphasized Moscow’s key stipulation that talks are possible if the West halts its ongoing weapons pipeline to Ukraine’s armed forces.

          “Russia has repeatedly called on the international community, including at the parliamentary level, asking to stop arming the Kiev regime; however, Western states continue sponsoring and supplying heavy weapons. This is what the UN should pay greater attention to,” the lawmaker said, after UN leadership appeared to back Kuleba’s call for peace talks.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 19:40

        • Emergency Preps From A To Z
          Emergency Preps From A To Z

          Authored by Ashley Allen via The Organic Prepper blog,

          Emergency preparedness is serious business but not all of our endeavors need to take on the gravity of life and death. This is a fun list, and while the suggestions are solid, it is by no means a list that covers everything you need to be prepared.

          Without further ado, here’s an alphabetical list of preps that could serve you well.

          Emergency Preps from A-Z

          I’ve chosen one prep for each letter of the alphabet to help you get ready for disasters large or small.

          A – Alcohol-based hand sanitizer: It’s important to have hand sanitizer on hand in case you don’t have access to soap and water. Alcohol-based hand sanitizer can help reduce the spread of germs and bacteria. Not a fan of hand sanitizer and prefer a natural approach? Here’s an article that explains when to use what kind of product.

          B – Battery-powered radio: In the event of a power outage, a battery-powered or hand-crank radio can be a vital source of information. It can help you stay updated on weather forecasts, evacuation orders, and other important alerts. We recommend this one.

          C – Cash: In an emergency, ATMs and credit card machines may not be available, so it’s important to have a supply of cash on hand. This can be used to purchase necessary supplies or pay for evacuation expenses. Put back small bills. You may not be able to get change during a crisis.

          D – Drinking water: It’s important to have a supply of clean drinking water in case the water supply is disrupted or contaminated. Consider storing bottled water, or filling up jugs or other containers with tap water in case of an emergency. Here’s an article on water storage.

          E – Emergency contact list: Having a list of emergency contacts can be invaluable in an emergency situation. This should include phone numbers for family members, friends, neighbors, and any relevant agencies or organizations. This is an important part of an emergency binder. Get a printable template here.

          F – Fire extinguisher: A fire extinguisher can be a crucial tool for putting out small fires or containing them until the fire department arrives. It’s important to have one on hand in case of a fire emergency. Here’s an article on choosing and maintaining your fire extinguishers.

          G – Generator: A generator can provide a reliable source of power in the event of a power outage. This can be especially important for those who rely on electricity for medical equipment or other essential needs. Daisy has this one for her apartment, and here’s some advice on choosing a larger one.

          H – Hazardous materials kit: In the event of a chemical spill or other hazardous materials incident, it’s important to have a hazardous materials kit on hand. This should include protective gear, such as gloves and respirators, as well as supplies for cleaning up and neutralizing the hazard.

          I – Insurance documents: In the event of a natural disaster or other emergencies, it’s important to have copies of your insurance documents on hand. This can help you quickly file a claim and get the financial assistance you need to recover. This printable helps you create a home inventory for insurance purposes.

          J – Jacket: A warm jacket can be essential in an emergency situation, especially if you are evacuated to a location with a different climate than you are used to. It’s important to have a jacket that is appropriate for the weather in your area, as well as any locations you may need to evacuate to.

          K – Knife: A knife can be a useful tool in a variety of emergency situations, including cutting through debris, opening cans, and preparing food. It’s important to have a reliable and durable knife on hand in case you need it. Here’s some advice on choosing a knife.

          L – Light source: In the event of a power outage, a light source can be essential for navigating your home and performing tasks. This can include flashlights, candles, or a headlamp. This article discusses different types of emergency lighting.

          M – Medical supplies: A basic first aid kit should be part of your emergency preparedness kit. This should include supplies like bandages, gauze, and pain medication, as well as any prescription medications you or your family members may need. Check out this article about OTC medications and medical supplies.

          N – Non-perishable food: It’s important to have a supply of non-perishable food, such as canned goods, dried fruits and nuts, and protein bars, in case you don’t have access to fresh food. These items will keep for a long time without refrigeration and can help sustain you in an emergency situation. Here’s some advice on building your prepper food supply.

          O – Oxygen tanks: If you or a family member relies on oxygen tanks for medical purposes, it’s important to have a supply of tanks on hand in case of an emergency.

          P – Pet supplies: If you have pets, it’s important to include them in your emergency. Here’s a printable checklist.

          Q – Quick clotting products: Quick clotting powder is a highly effective bleeding control agent that helps to stop bleeding within minutes of application. It is made from a clay-like substance that is applied directly to the wound, where it absorbs excess blood and helps to form a clot. This can be a lifesaving tool in situations where traditional methods of bleeding control, such as applying pressure to the wound, are not enough. Here’s a source of Quik Clot gauze and Celox powder.

          R – Respirator mask: In the event of a natural disaster or other emergency situation, it’s possible that the air quality may be compromised. A respirator mask can help protect you from inhaling harmful particles and contaminants in the air. Here’s our guide to respirators and masks.

          S – Smoke detector: A smoke detector is a vital component of any emergency preparedness plan. It can alert you to the presence of fire in your home, giving you the opportunity to evacuate or take other safety measures. Be sure to test your smoke detectors regularly and replace the batteries as needed.

          T – Tent: A tent is an important item to have in an emergency because it can provide shelter in case you need to evacuate your home or if you are caught in an unexpected outdoor situation. A tent can protect you from the elements and provide a sense of security. Here are the pros and cons of bugging out with a tent.

          U – USB charger: In an emergency, it’s important to have a way to charge your phone or other electronic devices. A USB charger can be a lifesaver, especially if you need to use your phone to call for help or stay in touch with loved ones. This portable charger has fantastic reviews on Amazon and is very reliable.

          V – Vaseline: Vaseline is a versatile product that can be used in a variety of emergency situations. It can be used to protect and moisturize skin, as well as to seal small cuts and scratches. In a survival situation, Vaseline can also be used as a fire starter or to lubricate gear.

          W – Water filter: A water filter is essential in an emergency because it can allow you to access clean drinking water if your regular source is compromised. There are many different types of water filters available, including straw filters, gravity filters, and pump filters. Choose one that is appropriate for the situation you may face. We recommend a gravity-fed water filter for home use and a Sawyer Mini or Lifestraw when you’re on the go.

          X – X-Acto knife: An X-Acto knife is a precise cutting tool that can be used to cut through a variety of materials, including paper, fabric, and plastic. It can be especially useful in an emergency if you need to cut through small items or make precise cuts.

          Y – Y: Yellow rubber cleaning gloves – You know the kind – your mother and grandmother swore by them to protect their hands when doing dishes. Yellow rubber gloves can be worn when handling hazardous materials, cleaning up after an emergency, or handling human waste.

          Z – Ziptop bags: Ziptop bags are a useful item to have in an emergency because they can be used to store and protect a variety of items. They are great for organizing supplies and keeping them dry, and they can also be used to store food or other perishable items.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 19:20

        • Impoverished Canadians Seek Euthanasia As A Solution While Trudeau Vacations In Jamaica
          Impoverished Canadians Seek Euthanasia As A Solution While Trudeau Vacations In Jamaica

          Poverty stricken Canadians are going to food banks not just for help in feeding themselves and their families, but also to ask about government assisted suicide as a potential solution to their struggles.  Canada’s cost of living crisis is growing (as is America’s crisis), with inflation ongoing and spiking interest rates crushing lower and middle class workers with increased debt burdens.  The average monthly food costs for a family of four in Ottawa is around $1000 and the average monthly rent is $2000.   

          Canada’s euthanasia laws are becoming alluring to those people that cannot afford rising expenses and see no other way out.

          The nation’s revised medical assistance in dying (MAID) came into force on March 17, 2021. The new law includes changes to eligibility, procedural safeguards, and the framework for the federal government’s data collection and reporting regime. 

          On March 17, 2021, Parliament passed legislation that makes important changes to who may be eligible to obtain medical assistance in dying and the process of assessment. These changes took effect immediately.  Under the current laws a patient must have a grievous and irremediable medical condition in order to receive assisted suicide, but apparently many Canadians believe they should have access even when they are healthy.  

          Justin Trudeau was confronted by Global News with a video interview of a food bank CEO relating her story of multiple recipients asking about government supported suicide.  His response is politically typical, with a show of general concern and assertions that his resolve is deepened to “step up” and help impoverished families (discussion begins at 13:30).  

          Immediately after this interview, Trudeau is set to enjoy a scheduled family vacation to Jamaica.  In 2019, Trudeau’s vacation to Costa Rica leeched Canadian taxpayers for nearly $200,000 in flight costs, and this does not include the added costs of extended protection in a foreign province by Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  That’s a lot of money that could go to helping hundreds of families in need.

          It should be noted that it was Trudeau’s oppressive (and long running) pandemic restrictions that directly aided in triggering declining economic conditions in Canada, including supply chain disruptions and higher inflation.  While Trudeau tries to blame the war in Ukraine for the terrible conditions (the inflation crisis started long before the Ukraine conflict), it cannot be denied that his authoritarian policies are at least partly responsible for the financial troubles of millions of Canadian citizens.  

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 19:00

        • Special Forces Insider: The CIA Is Directing Sabotage Attacks In Russian Territory
          Special Forces Insider: The CIA Is Directing Sabotage Attacks In Russian Territory

          Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

          The CIA has been using a European NATO country’s intelligence services to conduct sabotage attacks inside Russia since the February invasion of Ukraine, investigative journalist Jack Murphy reported on Saturday, citing unnamed former US intelligence and military officials.

          The report said that no US personnel are on the ground in Russia but that the operations are being directed by the CIA. The US is using an ally’s intelligence services to add an extra layer of plausible deniability, and a former US special operations official told Murphy that layer was a major factor in President Biden signing off on the attacks.

          A fire at the Russian Aerospace Forces’ Central Scientific Research Institute in Tver in April, via TASS.

          Murphy said he didn’t name the NATO country whose intelligence services were being used in the report because “doing so might endanger the operational security of cells that are still operational inside of Russia.”

          The report appeared on Murphy’s personal website, and in a note at the end of the piece, he explained why it wasn’t published by a media outlet. “While working with editors at mainstream publications I was asked to do things that were illegal and unethical in one instance, and in another instance I felt that a senior CIA official was able to edit my article by making off the record statements, before he leaked a story to The New York Times to undermine this piece,” he wrote.

          According to the report, the covert campaign inside Russia has been years in the making. Two former military officials said that the NATO country’s spy services had hidden a cache of explosives and equipment in Russia more than a decade ago, and some of the gear has been used recently.

          A former US special operations official and US person briefed on the campaign said that the CIA didn’t get involved with the NATO country’s operations inside Russia until 2014. The first time sleeper cells entered Russia that were directed by both the CIA and the NATO ally’s spy service was in 2016, and more entered the country in the following years.

          The NATO ally provided the undercover operatives with stories to explain their presence in Russia and documents to back them up. The report said that around the time Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the NATO ally’s spy service activated its sleeper cells inside Russia using covert communication, and they were ready for orders on what targets to strike.

          It’s not clear how many attacks the sleeper cells have been responsible for, but there has been a series of mysterious explosions at Russian military facilities, powerplants, and railways since the invasion. The report suggested that the saboteurs could have been behind an April fire at the research institute of Russia’s Aerospace Defense Forces, which killed over 20 people.

          The sabotage operations that the CIA is overseeing require a presidential finding. President Obama signed a finding before he left office that allowed covert action against Russia over allegations that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election, a claim that has never been proven.

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

          According to The Washington Post, Obama’s finding allows “planting cyberweapons in Russia’s infrastructure, the digital equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow.” Murphy cited a former CIA official who said the finding also allowed sabotage operations against Russia, although other former officials he spoke with said the current operations would have required an amendment or an entirely new finding.

          A CIA spokesperson denied the allegations made in the report, but Murphy pointed out that the spy agency can legally deny the existence of its covert operations.

          The CIA directing sabotage inside Russia risks a major escalation between NATO and Russia and could lead to a nuclear escalation. Ukraine has recently stepped up its own attacks inside Russian territory, and according to The Times, the Pentagon tacitly endorsed recent drone strikes that hit air bases deep inside Russian territory, adding to the risk of escalation.

          In his note at the end of the report, Murphy said that he published the story to inform the public:

          “Indeed, the Russian government knows perfectly well who is sponsoring these sabotage strikes. Moreover, the intelligence community wants them to know. The only party left in the dark is the public at large, left unaware of the shadow war taking place behind the scenes,” he wrote.

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

          Murphy said that the article “went through a vigorous fact-checking process, and was deemed newsworthy as the strategic bombings of Laos and Cambodia or the CIA’s secret drone campaign in Pakistan.”

          * * *

          Note: Jack Murphy is a US special forces combat veteran turned journalist who specializes in reporting on clandestine operations, including investigative reports for Yahoo News and other major publications.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 18:40

        • Arizona Considers $5.5 Billion Water Desalination Plant, 200-Mile Pipeline From Mexico To Combat Drought
          Arizona Considers $5.5 Billion Water Desalination Plant, 200-Mile Pipeline From Mexico To Combat Drought

          Arizona’s Water Infrastructure Finance Authority has been tasked with reviewing a proposal for a multibillion-dollar project to construct a water desalination plant in Mexico that would pump water through a 200-mile pipeline to the border state as part of an effort to counter its drought-driven water uncertainty. 

          The Arizona Republic said the state water finance board recently passed a non-binding resolution supporting a potentially massive seawater desalination plant in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez that Israel-based desalination plant operator IDE Technologies would construct.

          Through reverse osmosis membranes, the plant would separate salt from seawater and pump the fresh water through a pipeline across the Mexico-US border to a reservoir west of Phoenix. IDE said the new plant could replace declining Colorado River water that flows through the Central Arizona Project’s aqueduct. 

          IDE claims the new plant could supply 300,000 acre-feet of water or enough for a million households. IDE aims to begin operations at the new plant by the second half of 2027.

          The proposal still requires further review and support from the US and Mexico. 

          Andy Tobin, a member of the water finance board and a former speaker in the Arizona House of Representatives, said, “folks are running out of water,” suggesting “the risk here clearly, in the case, outweighs the rush” to get this project underway to prevent a worsening water crisis. 

          If Arizona commits to the project, residents in Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima counties would pay higher water costs but at least won’t have a fear of running out of water. 

          The proposal also includes securing water for Mexico. The project could cost upwards of $5 billion to construct. Plans for a water desalination plant show the drought-stricken state quickly needs a solution to new water sources. 

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 18:20

        • Students Speak Out On Anti-White, Anti-Christian, Anti-American Culture At Florida University
          Students Speak Out On Anti-White, Anti-Christian, Anti-American Culture At Florida University

          Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

          Florida may be “where woke goes to die,” according to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has repeated the line in many speeches.

          A journalism student at a Florida university, who asked to be identified only as Mia, said professors on her campus openly disparage Christians, America’s founders, and whites. (Courtesy of Mia)

          But talk of its demise is greatly exaggerated, according to some university students in the state and an organization that tracks progressive policies on college campuses.

          Six conservative students attending a major Florida university told The Epoch Times, on condition of anonymity, about their frustration with the anti-white, anti-Christian, and anti-American environment on campus and in classrooms that make them feel uncomfortable at best and threatened at worst.

          Across the country, parents have pushed back against their community school boards for allowing radical race and gender theories in grades K-12. But experts told The Epoch Times that the same pushback hasn’t happened at the college level—the birthplace of Critical Race Theory (CRT).

          CRT, the experts said, is rampant across the nation, not just in Florida. And that means conservative students nationwide are struggling to navigate college systems, where they face disdain for their beliefs and encouragement to reject their core values.

          On a campaign stop in rural North Florida on Nov. 3, 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, scorns left-wing ideology, saying “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.” (Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times)

          Carol Swain, a retired political science and law professor at Vanderbilt University and a frequent television analyst on race relations, sympathizes with the struggle conservatives face at colleges.

          But she urges students to think strategically before outing themselves as holding conservative views, which are often unpopular among or even demonized by fellow students and professors.

          Conservative students should pick their battles carefully, Swain told The Epoch Times, to successfully finish college—because the country needs young conservative voices in the professional world.

          “There are key players that you want in position—you want [conservatives] to become university professors, or whatever profession they’re trying to go into,” Swain said.

          ‘Extremist’ views

          A Christian law student, who supports the National Rifle Association (NRA), told The Epoch Times he didn’t know he’d been reported as “an extremist” for expressing conservative views until FBI agents knocked on his apartment door. They questioned him about his political views for more than an hour.

          A journalism student said she felt bullied by a professor who forced students to parrot her scorn for America’s “systemic racism” and affirm “progressive talking points” on immigration, gender-identity issues, “queer theory,” intersectionality, transgenderism, religious faith, and the ideas of Karl Marx, author of “The Communist Manifesto.”

          “I can’t write what I truly believe” about these issues, Mia said. “When I did that, I got an F. In order to pass a class, I have to affirm leftist ideas I don’t believe in. When I repeat all the talking points and present them as ideas I believe wholeheartedly, I get As.”

          “It feels like being brainwashed when they reward you for repeating their ideas and punish you for saying things that go against their beliefs.”

          A Florida university student, who asked to be identified only as Mia, sits with her Bible at home on Christmas break on Dec. 22, 2022. Expressing Christian views on campus draws scorn from professors, who openly talk about their “hate” for Christians, she told The Epoch Times. (Courtesy of Mia)

          At the core of the students’ struggle is the university’s apparent glorification of CRT, a Marxist-derived ideology that substitutes race or gender for class struggle. The theory divides people into two groups—oppressors and the oppressed—based on factors such as skin color or sexual orientation.

          One of the leading architects of modern CRT is Ibram X. Kendi, who attended Florida A&M University, and later taught at the University of Florida. Kendi’s book, “How to be an Antiracist,” promotes fighting racism by discriminating against groups that, according to Kendi, are “oppressors,” such as white males. Antiracism practices often are taught in classes and employer trainings that promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

          Students said CRT, gender theory, and other topics considered “woke” are flourishing at their Florida university.

          That’s despite attempts by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to stop racial activism in education and workplaces in his state by formally banning CRT training and discrimination.

          CRT controversy

          In April, DeSantis signed the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, also known as the Stop WOKE Act. The law prohibits discriminatory classroom instruction, such as CRT. And it prohibits employers from forcing workers to attend antiracism and CRT training.

          The law bans instruction that implies someone is responsible for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin. The measure also allows Floridians to sue if they believe their school or workplace has violated the law.

          The Stop WOKE Act originated as a response to the spread of CRT and other social justice concepts widely promoted by works such as The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which paints America as a country founded on slavery and characterizes the nation’s Founding Fathers as racists.

          While the 1619 Project has been rejected by many academics, historians, and politicians, its teachings have been embraced just as vigorously by many liberals and progressives. Many have held it up as a model of how history should be taught to children and college students.

          New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The 1619 Project, speaks as colleagues hold a rally outside The New York Times headquarters in New York City, on Dec. 8, 2022. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

          Under the Stop WOKE Act, Florida university faculty members who teach CRT could be fired as part of post-tenure reviews. A violation of the Stop WOKE Act would make schools ineligible for what is known as performance funding. That’s extra money awarded by the state for measurable successes, such as high graduation rates and impressive median earnings of alumni.The threat of facing those repercussions for teaching CRT has sparked legal challenges.

          Several Florida college professors and students filed a lawsuit challenging the Stop WOKE Act. They claim the law chills free speech in the classroom, confuses professors, and violates their First Amendment rights.

          Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, issued a preliminary injunction against the law in November. The DeSantis administration is appealing the decision.

          Hostile Environment

          Florida college students who spoke with The Epoch Times described a campus culture focused on race and social justice and hostile to conservative or Christian views. They asked to use pseudonyms to protect their identity, fearing retaliation for speaking publicly.

          Jeff, a pre-law freshman, told The Epoch Times he felt pressure in an economics course to write about globalization as a “good thing,” even though he disagrees with it.

          Globalization is a movement to reduce trade barriers and build closer political, social, and economic ties between countries. It has been criticized by conservatives, who warn it’s moving countries toward a one-world government that would strip away the sovereignty of nations.

          Ellen, a Florida college freshman, said her classes have elements of gender theory, climate change, and race woven into teachings on business. One class defined professional attire by showing what would be appropriate for men, women, and people who identified as both genders, or neither.

          Sam Brinton, shown at an event in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Nov. 17, 2019, was the first “gender fluid” person in federal government leadership. Brinton served under President Joe Biden as a deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Nuclear Energy until being charged with luggage theft twice. (Tasia Wells/Getty Images for The Trevor Project)

          In a required philosophy course, Ellen’s classmates seemed convinced they were doomed to die from what they were taught were human-caused climate changes, she said. The view that fluctuations in weather patterns might be a normal, natural occurrence that’s happened throughout history was not presented by the professor, she said.

          And when the professor announced that President Joe Biden had recommitted the United States to the Paris Climate Accords, the room erupted in applause, she recalled. Unwilling to cheer, the moment made her feel alienated, she said.

          In an introductory business course that focused on DEI, another student, Luis, said he was told to list all his “identities,” including being a white, heterosexual, Catholic male. The point of the assignment seemed to be to make white students feel ashamed, he said.

          He ignored the risk of stigma and wrote that he would like to perpetuate his Irish-American bloodline.

          Demonstrators denouncing “systemic racism” in law enforcement and calling for the defunding of police departments kneel in Maria Hernandez Park in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City on June 5, 2020. (Scott Heins/Getty Images)

          Journalism major Mia spoke of a required class in which the professor emphatically spoke about “white privilege” and “systemic racism” as fact. If students wrote about views contrary to the professor’s anti-white, anti-establishment positions, their grades suffered, she said.

          Speaking among themselves, classmates indicated they were afraid to ask questions or assert their true beliefs, she said.

          One professor, who lauded the teachings of Marx, warned students on the first day of class that “hate speech,” which the professor didn’t define, would be reported to the dean, Mia said. It had a chilling effect.

          The professor also warned students not to get “too comfortable” in writing about their beliefs in a journaling assignment, Mia said. That could lead to students being reported and punished, the professor promised, indicating she’d lodged formal complaints against students for such violations.

          The professor praised students who acknowledged, with apparent regret, that their parents had not raised them to hold views similar to the professor’s but were thankful to finally be learning about progressive beliefs, Mia said.

          Writing Satire for an ‘A’

          The traditional belief that journalists should question authority and think for themselves was not taught in the required journalism class, Mia said. All assignments in the class would be “viewed through a lens of social justice,” students were told on the first day.

          White people were described as “privileged” in readings assigned by the black professor, Mia said.

          Students were told by the professor that it’s a “myth” that journalists must report both sides of a story. For example, if a journalist covers a story involving members of the Ku Klux Klan, the public doesn’t have to hear from them, the professor told the class, Mia said.

          “Our government and social institutions have created advantages that disproportionately channel wealth, power, and resources to white people,” a slide from the professor proclaimed. “This affects everyone, whether we are aware of it or not.”

          In a required journalism class at a major Florida university, the professor spends most of the time teaching about race, class, gender-identity, and sexual orientation, rather than principles of journalism, according to a student who asked to be identified only as Mia. (Courtesy of Mia)

          Students faced the ethical dilemma of choosing between turning in writings that affirmed the professor’s views, with which they disagreed, or failing the class, Mia said.

          When she turned in a paper with views that opposed her professor’s, but were attributed to others, Mia received a failing grade. In that assignment, she defended Christianity as an institution that helped end slavery. That position was attacked by a teaching assistant, who penned scathing comments.

          Desperate to pull up her grade, Mia came up with a plan. She’d pretend to agree, pursuing assignments as if writing for the satirical, social-media powerhouse, The Babylon Bee.

          “It’s horrible. I feel so fake,” Mia told The Epoch Times. “I’m not learning anything, except to write things I don’t believe.”

          Conservative on Campus

          A Christian now studying law, Robert was only an undergraduate when he discovered the risk of being known as a conservative on campus. That revelation quickly became clear when two FBI agents knocked on his apartment door at 9 a.m. They told him they’d received an anonymous tip that he was “an extremist.”

          “They did ask me if I was an extremist or was a member of extremist groups,” he told The Epoch Times. “I asked them to define it. When they hesitated, I asked if being a Christian or a member of the NRA qualified. They said, ‘No.’”

          To their credit, Robert said, the two agents seemed to be “reasonable people.” They told him that, after speaking with him, they had no idea why someone would report him. He was told the case against him would be closed, he said.

          Environmental activists rally on Capitol Hill in Washington, on March 25, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

          Robert, now a second-year law student, says Florida’s new Stop Woke Act is “toothless.” Teachings that applaud principles of CRT, such as the need for “social justice,” are ubiquitous on campus, he said. In law courses, students are taught to consider skin color with regard to crime and punishment.

          Robert said that because blacks have suffered racism at the hands of whites, students debated if “systemic racism” should be considered when sentencing people of color.

          Discussions centered on whether black people should be punished less severely than white people for similar crimes to compensate for historical oppression of blacks by whites, and because whites, on average, live longer, Robert said.

          “The new trend is to see the difference and discriminate,” he said.

          ‘Tear up the Constitution’

          Robert, who focuses on constitutional law, recalled students arguing that the U.S. Constitution was illegitimate from the start, and was written by racist, old, white men. The professor didn’t express that he condoned that point of view, but he didn’t offer a rebuttal, either, Robert said.

          Law students, he added, “talk about how we should tear up the Constitution.”

          A slide showing part of a quiz on bankruptcy law describes a scenario involving divorced lesbians, though gender and sexual orientation have nothing to do with the concept. (Courtesy of Chris)

          Chris, a third-year law student, objects to the pervasive LGBT ideology woven into classes.

          “What does homosexuality have to do with bankruptcy, right?” he asked. “They were literally just pushing this same-sex, homosexual agenda.”

          When answering questions on timed exams, students often lose precious moments trying to determine if gender is pertinent to the legal concept, or if it’s just an attempt to “virtue-signal,” Chris said.

          Legal textbooks routinely use “she” when describing situations in which gender is not specified, Chris said. That causes confusion.

          “I had to get used to reading these textbooks constantly referring to a lawyer as she.”

          Traditionally, it’s been considered correct to use “he” and “him” as gender-neutral pronouns. Progressives have insisted on using other pronouns such as “she” and “they” when gender is not specifically designated. And failing to use a person’s “preferred pronouns” has meant harsh punishments, such as expulsion for students and termination for instructors around the country.

          Conchy Vasquez (R) and Jony Rozon, both engineers at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Division Newport, discuss the importance of using correct pronouns in a training video for the U.S. Navy. (Courtesy of the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service)

          “The left preaches tolerance…until they become strong,” and then tolerance for opposing views ends, Chris said. “That’s what we saw with the communist revolutions.”

          ‘Our Policy is Not to Comment’

          Ray Rodrigues, Chancellor of the State University System of Florida, assumed the post to oversee the state’s universities in November. He was asked by The Epoch Times about students’ claims that professors teach CRT and radical gender theory as irrefutable truth, and how students say they fear speaking out against such class material.

          “As you know, the legislature passed legislation regarding this issue, and we have prepared a regulation to implement that legislation,” spokeswoman Renee Fargason, an assistant vice chancellor for public affairs, wrote in an emailed response. “It has been enjoined by the Court, and our policy is to not comment on pending litigation.”

          She directed The Epoch Times to the Board’s Statement of Free Expression.

          The iconic Century Tower on the University of Florida campus in Gainesville, Fla. on July 30, 2022. (Nanette Holt/The Epoch Times)

          Florida universities actively promote CRT, according to the Critical Race Training in Education database maintained by the Legal Insurrection Foundation.

          Florida colleges follow CRT principles by renaming campus spaces after progressive icons, and they present race-based workshops and resources for students and staff, the organization says. The Sunshine State’s universities also have encouraged students to report each other for “biased” speech or beliefs, according to the database.

          For example, the University of Florida in Gainesville made headlines for naming a study room on campus in honor of Karl Marx. The school removed the name after media attention in March.

          At Florida State University in Tallahassee, the College of Education offers antiracism training resources, including a list of children’s books to “combat racism” in children as young as 3.

          The college’s website cites Harvard research asserting that by age 5, “white children are strongly biased towards whiteness. To counter this bias, experts recommend acknowledging and naming race and racism with children as early and as often as possible.”

          The University of Central Florida in Orlando was sued by Speech First in 2021 for creating rules and regulations that “suppress and punish speech about the political and social issues of the day.”

          The lawsuit described a campus atmosphere where students reported each other for “biased” views, triggering investigations by the university. Students were forced to sit through lectures on university-approved speech that Speech First compared to a “reeducation camp.”  The result was students became afraid to voice their views, the lawsuit stated.

          Toeing the Line

          Cornell law professor William Jacobson, founder of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, said the experiences of the Florida students are typical throughout the states.

          Conservative students at Cornell and at institutions around the country have complained to him about the same issues, he told The Epoch Times.

          The increasing popularity of CRT prompted him to launch CritialRace.org in 2020.

          Students are being conditioned to go along with a professor’s political views and say whatever is necessary in order to survive their courses, even going against their own deeply held beliefs, he said.

          “It’s a massive problem because one bad grade in a course can keep you out of graduate school. Students are mostly terrified of going against the professor. That’s something I hear all the time.”

          As the reach of CRT has expanded, so has the scope of CriticalRace.org, Jacobson said. The database now includes private medical, military, and K-12 schools. It has examined hundreds of U.S. higher education institutions and documented critical race training courses.

          The problem is that universities have developed what Jacobson calls “systemic repression.” By hiring politically progressive professors and mandating progressive policies, administrators create a culture that allows little room for dissent.

          “That’s the complete opposite of what higher education is supposed to be about,” Jacobson said.

          Students parrot materials and professors’ views to survive their courses, he said. Meanwhile, administrators pretend the students aren’t being pressured. And when students complain, administrators may demand proof that students were penalized for speaking against a professor’s beliefs.

          “How are you going to prove it without putting yourself at risk?” Jacobson asked.

          Pervasive Problem

          Swain, who wrote “Black Eye For America: How Critical Race Theory is Burning Down the House,” agrees that student fear is a pervasive problem.

          “I have often told conservative students that they have rights. They should be protected against discrimination,” Swain said.

          Going along with racial and gender ideology to get through college is more common than people realize, Swain said.

          The political left has persuaded many students to jettison whatever values and principles they’d held for most of their early lives, she added.

          It starts with freshman orientation, the first day on campus, she said. That’s when established students and administrators let new students know that their past beliefs—based on their religion or family values—are unsophisticated.

          To understand the opposition, conservative students should become familiar with Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” a guide of progressive beliefs, Swain said. The book advocates for deception, infiltration, and manipulation to win political power.

          Read more here…

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 18:00

        • Elon Musk Says 100 Starlink Terminals "Active" In Iran Amid 100 Days Of Unrest
          Elon Musk Says 100 Starlink Terminals “Active” In Iran Amid 100 Days Of Unrest

          More than a hundred days since the Iranian anti-government protests began, the longest since the 1979 Islamic revolution, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk announced Starlinks are operational in the region. 

          On Monday, Musk tweeted, “Approaching 100 Starlinks active in Iran.” He tweeted at Wall Street Silver, who posted a video showing Iranian women walking around without hijabs. 

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          In September, Musk said he would activate Starlink terminals in Iran. At the time, he responded to the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s tweet that the US would “advance internet freedom and the free flow of information” to Iranians.

          Starlink satellite broadband service — already in use across Ukraine — would allow Iranians to circumnavigate the government’s authoritarian control over the internet and social media platforms amid widespread social unrest. 

          The government has blocked YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Telegram, Snapchat, and Medium for fear these Western social media platforms could support continued uprisings and spread information that acts like a megaphone. But with Starlink terminals, access to the outside world is now possible. 

          Over the years, especially during the Arab uprisings a decade ago, social media played a critical role in mobilizing young protesters — some referred to the unrest as Facebook or Twitter revolutions. 

          Reuters nor any other Western media outlet questioned who or what organizations were operating the terminals and for what purpose. If we had to guess, one logical assumption might be the terminals are used by anti-government groups with support from Western nations to disseminate information from the outside world and help organize protests to overthrow the government. 

          And this could be true. 

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          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 17:40

        • Time For Everyone To Go Galt
          Time For Everyone To Go Galt

          Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

          An Inconvenient Revolution

          It’s inconvenient when those whose sacrifices are essential to the system get fed up and find some other way to live.

          Convenience isn’t just about small appliances. It’s also about ruling nations. Let’s start with the semantics of ruling nations. Some labels might be viewed as somewhat inflammatory (Kleptocracy, anyone?), so let’s stick with the neutral Ruling Order.

          Some things have been extraordinarily convenient for the Ruling Order. Take the life and death of one Jeffrey Epstein, an intel “asset” who assembled a veritable goldmine of dirt on an astounding collection of bigwigs, and then became, well, inconvenient.

          Very conveniently, the security camera in his cell failed, the guards dozed off and he hung himself in this fortuitous interlude. This was the acme of convenience.

          Extending the Surveillance State into Big Tech’s planetary-wide social media networks was also convenient, and a bargain to boot. Instead of all that expensive stuff the Communist State in China had to pay for, America’s Ruling Order just put the squeeze on Big Tech and saved a bundle.

          The Surveillance State assumes that any revolt / revolution can either be nipped in the bud by identifying foreign influences / domestic extremists, or crushed by foreknowledge of the storming of the barricades.

          In conventional times, these are pretty safe assumptions. But the times are no longer conventional, and so the Ruling Order is in effect investing its treasure and confidence in fighting the last war.

          It’s convenient if rebelling citizens organize themselves in visible networks and concentrate into groups that can be crushed by force. It’s inconvenient if the revolution is not neatly organized and crushable but an invisible revolution of not showing up.

          In other words, a revolution of getting fed up and opting out, of finding some other way to live rather than spending 10 years paying down the student loans and another 30 years paying down the mortgage and the last few years of one’s life watching the tides of financial excess erode the sand castles of pensions and retirement.

          There’s a consequential asymmetry to the inconvenience caused by people getting fed up and opting out. The average worker not showing up is consequential but not catastrophic. But when the managerial class thins out, and those doing the dirty work thin out, there are no replacements, and the system breaks down.

          Few are willing to make the beds, empty the bedpans and work in slaughterhouses. When those willing to do the work nobody else wants to do quit, the system collapses. Those with higher expectations will not volunteer to do the dirty work, and many are unable to do the work even if they are willing. It’s too hard and too physically punishing. (Says a guy who’s carried stupid amounts of lumber up hillsides where no forklift could go.)

          Despite what many of us may think, the majority of workers lack the experience and tools to manage complex operations. (Those of us who try soon reach our limits.) Many lack a deep enough knowledge to fix major breakdowns. When the critical operational and managerial people retire, quit, or find some other way to live, the system breaks down.

          All the surveillance and all the force that the Ruling Order depends on to maintain its dominance is useless when people get fed up and quit supporting the system with their labor and their borrowing / spending. All the surveillance and facial recognition software is worthless, all the monitoring of kitten and puppy photos on social media, all the tracking of foreign influence–none of it matters any more.

          It’s inconvenient when those whose sacrifices are essential to the system get fed up and find some other way to live. Yet this is the inevitable consequence of a system hopelessly corrupted by fraud, inequality and unfairness, a system rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many. People eventually get fed up and opt out.

          They don’t throw themselves on the gears of an odious system, they simply stop greasing the gears with their time, effort, experience, debt and money. It doesn’t take many opting out to trigger decay and collapse. The Pareto Distribution applies. The system can adjust to the first 4% opting out, but those consequential few trigger the decay of the commitment of the next 20%, and the system cannot survive when the 20% find some other way to live. The 80% can still be willing to grease the gears but that’s no longer enough to maintain the coherence of the system.

          The asymmetry of decay and collapse is inconvenient.

          *  *  *

          My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century. Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

          Become a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

          Tyler Durden
          Tue, 12/27/2022 – 17:20

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