Jun 30

Today’s News 30th June 2022

  • EU Walks Back Hard Line On Kaliningrad Standoff As Russia Places New Missiles On Baltic Coast
    EU Walks Back Hard Line On Kaliningrad Standoff As Russia Places New Missiles On Baltic Coast

    Following Moscow threatening to retaliate and escalate, it seems the European Union is seeking to rapidly defuse tensions after earlier in June giving Lithuania the go-ahead to block all rail and road transit of Russian goods going to Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad. Some one million Russian citizens of Kaliningrad Oblast have been cut off from normal and vital reception of goods through neighboring EU-NATO member Lithuania since June 17 due to enforcement of EU sanctions against Moscow.

    But Reuters is reporting Wednesday that Brussels is ready to climb down quickly from its hard line sanctions enforcement stance, after last week the Kremlin warned Lithuania that “Russia will certainly respond to such hostile actions.” A statement from Nikolai Patrushev, the Secretary-General of Russia’s Security Council, at the time threatened: “The consequences will have a serious negative impact on the population of Lithuania.” But now EU leaders are said to be seeking compromise.

    Via Shutterstock

    The EU is now talking sanctions exemptions rather than enforcing them over an area that will only ensure escalation with Moscow.

    European officials are in talks to exempt the area from sanctions that have so far hit industrial goods like steel and pave the way for a deal in early July if EU member Lithuania drops its reservations, the people who refused said Not to be credited because the discussions are private.

    This despite all the talk of a unified front and “resolve” to not only enforce existing anti-Russia sanctions but ramp up further punitive measures over the Ukraine invasion at both the G7 and NATO summits held this week.

    Russia has said it would for the time being ferry goods across the Baltic Sea to its territory of Kaliningrad. At the same time, Russia’s military nearer to the start of the Kaliningrad ‘blockade’ initiated missile exercises in the Baltic Sea, which featured anti-ship missile ‘live fire’ against targets. The Defense Ministry even publicized and promoted footage of the threatening drills.

    And more crucially, there are emerging reports of further fresh Russian missile deployments to Kaliningrad’s Baltic Sea coast. “Analysis of satellite imagery shows that Russia has now positioned advanced anti-ship missiles on the Kaliningrad coast,” a fresh report in the global maritime monitoring site Naval News finds. “The systems are deployed to the Mys Taran headland, a prominent landmark mid-way along the exclave’s short coastline.” According to details in the report:

    The missile systems are two types which are often deployed together. The first, 3K60 Bal system (NATO: SSC-6 Sennight), is loosely equivalent to the Harpoon. It shoots the Kh-35 missile, known by the NATO reporting name SS-N-25 Switchblade. This is the same missile that Ukraine’s Neptune system is based on. Each Bal TEL (transporter erector launcher, read ‘launch truck’) can carry 8 missiles. This is more than most other comparable coastal defense systems.

    Bal has an effective range of around 70 nautical miles, with an improved version increasing this to 160 nautical miles.

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    The recent drills have given way to fears that Russia could exercises a ‘military option’ if overland goods to Kaliningrad, which is sandwiched on two sides by NATO states, continue to be blocked, per the Reuters report:

    If the traditional route for Russian goods to Kaliningrad, first via allied Belarus and then Lithuania, is not restored, the Baltic state fears Moscow could use military force to plow a land corridor through its territory, the person said.

    Germany, meanwhile, has troops stationed in Lithuania and could be drawn into a confrontation with its NATO allies if that were to happen.

    Moscow has also in the recent past not hesitated to position short-range Iskander missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave.

    Meanwhile, there are some surprisingly blunt admissions coming out of Western officials over the Kaliningrad crisis, such as the following in Reuters:

    “We have to face reality,” said one person with direct knowledge of the EU discussions, calling Kaliningrad “sacred” for Moscow.

    “(Putin) has a lot more influence than we do. It’s in our interest to find a compromise,” he said, acknowledging that the eventual result might seem unfair.

    Some of the particular forms of compromise could involve freight traffic being exempted on the basis that it wouldn’t count as “international” trade according to the ‘letter’ of EU sanctions policy (given the exclave is already Russia’s), or issuing waivers on a “humanitarian” basis; however, Lithuania appears in a mood to “stand up” to Russia and not make significant concessions.

    Given the Russian escalation and possible missile build-up in the Baltic region, it is looking like goods could flow normatively to Kaliningrad within a few days, according to officials cited in Reuters.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/30/2022 – 02:45

  • Empire To Expand NATO In Response To War Caused By NATO Expansion
    Empire To Expand NATO In Response To War Caused By NATO Expansion

    Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

    Turkey’s President Erdoğan has officially withdrawn Ankara’s objection to the addition of Finland and Sweden to NATO membership, with the three countries signing a trilateral memorandum at a NATO summit in Madrid.

    The removal of Erdoğan’s objection was reportedly obtained via significant natsec concessions from the other two nations largely geared toward facilitating Turkey’s ongoing conflict with regional Kurdish factions, and it removes the final obstacle to Finland and Sweden beginning the process of becoming NATO members. Finland’s addition will more than double the size of NATO’s direct border with Russia, a major national security concern for Moscow.

    “Sweden and Finland moved rapidly to apply to NATO in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reversing decades of security policy and opening the door to the alliance’s ninth expansion since 1949,” Axios reports.

    So the western empire will be expanding NATO again in response to a war that was predominantly caused by NATO expansion. Brilliant.

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    At the same NATO summit, President Biden announced plans to ramp up US military presence in Europe in response to the Ukraine war.

    “Speaking with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Biden said the US will increase the number of US Navy Destroyers stationed at a naval base in Rota, Spain, from four to six,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp reports.

    “The president said that this was the first of multiple announcements the US and NATO will make at the summit on increasing their forces in Europe, steps being taken in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

    This news comes out as a new CNN report tells us that the Biden administration does not believe Ukraine has any chance of winning this war, yet still won’t encourage any kind of negotiated settlement to end the bloodshed.

    From CNN:

    White House officials are losing confidence that Ukraine will ever be able to take back all of the land it has lost to Russia over the past four months of war, US officials told CNN, even with the heavier and more sophisticated weaponry the US and its allies plan to send.

    Advisers to President Joe Biden have begun debating internally how and whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should shift his definition of a Ukrainian “victory” — adjusting for the possibility that his country has shrunk irreversibly. US officials emphasized to CNN that this more pessimistic assessment does not mean the US plans to pressure Ukraine into making any formal territorial concessions to Russia in order to end the war.

    This would confirm what I and many others have been saying since Russia invaded: that this proxy war is being waged not with the intention of saving Ukrainian lives by delivering a swift defeat to Moscow but with the intention of creating a costly, gruelling military quagmire to weaken Russia on the world stage.

    This is further confirmed by a new Politico report that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has discouraged France’s President Macron from facilitating a negotiated peace settlement between Moscow and Kyiv, which would support an earlier Ukrainian media report that Johnson had discouraged President Zelensky from such a settlement during his visit to Kyiv in April.

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    These revelations emerge in the wake of western officials admitting that Ukraine is crawling with CIA personnel and special forces operatives from the US and other NATO countries.

    “As usual it appears that the administration wants to have it both ways: assure the American people that it is being ‘restrained’ and that we are not ‘at war’ with the Russians, but doing everything but planting a U.S. soldier and a flag inside Ukraine,” writes Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Beaucar Vlahos of this admission.

    “The Russians may not see the distinction and consider this news as further evidence that their war is more with Washington and NATO than with Ukraine.”

    The empire is guided by so little wisdom in its escalations against Russia that the US congress is now pushing expensive ship-launched nuclear cruise missiles on its naval forces even as the US Navy tells them it doesn’t want those weapons and has no use for them.

    Like hey, just take the nukes anyway. What’s the worst that could happen?

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    We need to really start taking seriously the possibility that a nuclear weapon could detonate as a result of misunderstanding or malfunction amid the chaos and confusion of all these frenzied, foolish escalations and lead to an exchange which ends our entire world. This nearly happened on multiple occasions in the last cold war, and there’s no rational reason to believe we’ll get lucky again.

    The only sane course of action here is de-escalation and detente, and all the major players in these escalations are pointed in the exact opposite direction.

    This is so much more dangerous than most people are letting themselves consider. It’s being sustained by psychological compartmentalization, emotional avoidance, and a profound lack of wisdom.

    As David S. D’Amato recently remarked, “If our species does find a way to survive into the distant future, our descendants will look at right now as the near miss; they’ll think, ‘Wow, that was close.’ How do we convince people in power to preserve that future?”

    *  *  *

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/30/2022 – 02:00

  • China's War Machine Is Betting The Future On Drones
    China’s War Machine Is Betting The Future On Drones

    By Andrew Thornebrooke of the Epoch Times

    A swarm of drones flies through the night sky over the Pacific.

    Shrouded in darkness and less than 100 miles from the California coastline, they go in groups of fours and sixes, stalking U.S. Navy vessels. They whir about over the ships’ bows, gathering intelligence to deliver to faceless masters.

    They match the speed of the naval vessels, flying unimpeded in low visibility for as long as four hours at a time. The alarmed crews of the ships have no idea where they came from or what their purpose is.

    This is not the plot of an up-and-coming spy thriller, but a series of actual events that took place in July 2019.

    A People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force WZ-7 high-altitude reconnaissance drone is seen a day before the 13th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai, southern China’s Guangdong Province on Sept. 27, 2021

    The chilling encounters raised alarms throughout the Navy and brought forth an investigative apparatus composed of elements of the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and FBI. Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of the Pacific Fleet were kept primed with updates on the situation.

    “If the drones were not operated by the American military, these incidents represent a highly significant security breach,” said one investigative report based on the ships’ logs.

    Yet, the nature of the drones, where they came from, and who deployed them remained a mystery for more than two years.

    However, a new investigative report published by The Drive in June shed light on the incidents, which totaled at least eight encounters involving several unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that were previously referred to simply as UFOs in the press.

    The report, based on Navy materials newly obtained through multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, pinpoints the launching point of the drones as a civilian bulk carrier operating in the area at the time. That ship, the MV Bass Strait, is owned and operated by Pacific Basin, flagged out of Hong Kong.

    “The Navy assessed that the commercial cargo ship was likely conducting surveillance on Navy vessels using drones,” the report said. During its first-ever operational voyage, the ship may have been linked to previously unknown incidents in March and April 2019, including “intelligence collection operations” targeting the USS Zumwalt, America’s most advanced surface combatant.

    “Active surveillance of key naval assets is being conducted in areas where they train and employ their most sensitive systems, often within close proximity to American shores,” the report said.

    A model of an FL-71 drone is seen on display at the Chinese Defense Information Equipment and Technology exhibition in Beijing on June 18, 2019.

    China’s Growing Drone Force

    It is too early to say what connection, precisely, the crew of the Bass Strait, Pacific Basin, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) share. Nevertheless, the incident underscores the central role that drones are to play in the next stage of modern warfare and how they are already shaping the battlefield and intelligence gathering processes.

    As it so happens, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is betting big on drone warfare. The regime has invested heavily for over a decade into everything from cheap and expendable commercial quadcopters to resource-heavy high-altitude long-endurance drones.

    Indeed, the CCP and its military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), have undertaken numerous UAV projects since the early 2000s. However, the first appearance of a large-scale Chinese-built stealth drone came shortly into CCP leader Xi Jinping’s tenure.

    Likely built from data obtained from the Iranian capture of an advanced American drone in 2011, China’s “Sharp Sword” was just the first of many advanced UAVs, built through the assistance of foreign technologies gathered as part of the regime’s comprehensive program of technology theft.

    Since then, the CCP has funded dozens of varieties of UAVs using a plethora of state-owned corporations that also build the regime’s space and missile technologies. From larger combat drones like the Sharp Sword to small quadcopter drones like those spotted near California to rocket-powered supersonic vehicles intended to zip through the sky gathering targeting information, the CCP buys everything drone-related.

    Moreover, the CCP is already building out its drone capabilities across the spectrum of its military assets, deploying those capabilities in some of the world’s most contested regions.

    China’s third and newest aircraft carrier, the Fujian, is expected to host a variety of drones. Its electromagnetic catapult system will prove invaluable for quickly launching differently weighted drones with adjustable torque.

    That effort will likely build on operational lessons learned from the last several years, as China’s second aircraft carrier, the Shandong, was spotted in early June this year with a small fleet of “commercial or commercial-derivative drones” on its flight deck, according to one report’s analysis of images that appeared on Chinese social media platform Weibo.

    “[The images] do underscore the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s ever-increasing efforts to develop and field various types of unmanned aircraft, including those that can operate together in networked swarms, and often with an eye toward performing various roles in the maritime domain,” one report said.

    If that were not enough to underscore the regime’s ambition to dominate the strategic space with a new, drone-first approach to military engagement, there is now the case of the Zhu Hai Yun.

    The Zhu Hai Yun is a 290-foot ocean research vessel designed to deploy various underwater and airborne drones for various purposes. The ship is also a drone and can either be remotely controlled by a pilot or left to navigate the open seas autonomously.

    In the words of its manufacturer, it is the “world’s first intelligent unmanned system mother ship.”

    And though Beijing has officially described that mothership as a maritime research tool, a South China Morning Post report acknowledged that the vessel indeed hosts military capabilities that can “intercept, besiege, and expel invasive targets.”

    That news is likely to displease U.S. military leadership, which is not likely to deploy its own such vessel for six more years.

    Watching, Learning, Preparing

    As the pace of China’s military drone development has accelerated, the rate of international incidents related to drones has also increased.

    In August 2021, Japan Self Defense Forces led multiple sorties of fighter jets over several days to intercept PLA drones caught flying south of Okinawa. The drones, comparable in size to the United States’ Predator and Reaper drones, were believed to be collecting strategic intelligence on the Miyako Strait, which provides the PLA with a critical point of entry to the Pacific, and has been the site of increasing Chinese military excursions for the past decade.

    The incident serves as a poignant reminder of what so much of China’s drone fleet serves to do: secure vital strategic intelligence for the coordination of military actions.

    And it is this point that brings one back to the issue of just what several groups of drones launched from a Hong Kong freight ship were doing spying on U.S. Navy vessels near the coast of California.

    If such actions were directly or indirectly tied to the sprawling military-security apparatus of China’s communist government, what would be the end goal for the intelligence gathered? What is the action in “actionable intelligence”?

    To that question, one analysis found that 2019’s “adversary drones” were “meant to stimulate America’s most capable air defense systems and collect extremely high-quality electronic intelligence data on them.”

    “By gathering comprehensive electronic intelligence information on these systems, countermeasures and electronic warfare tactics can be developed to disrupt or defeat them,” the report said. “Capabilities can also be accurately estimated and even cloned, and tactics can be recorded and exploited.”

    “That swarm could have been, and likely was, sucking up, or helping another nearby platform suck up, all that sensitive … data on the most capable warships on earth and at very close range.”

    In essence, the drones were achieving two things. The first was the blanket intelligence gathered from spying on U.S. naval vessels up close. The second was learning what would draw an American response and what that response would be.

    In this way, the drones were baiting U.S. naval vessels, soaking up intelligence about their response (or lack thereof) for future actions that could not only inform the Chinese military about the technical specifications of U.S. ships, but also how to manipulate their crews and protocols to learn how American forces would behave in conflict.

    Winning the Next War

    Such tools have very real consequences for the United States, its allies and partners, and the greater liberal international order. Perhaps nowhere more so than in the acute threat of a CCP invasion of the democratic Taiwan, which has maintained its de facto independence since 1949.

    Despite that independence, and despite the fact that the CCP has never ruled the island, the regime has made a central point of its current focus the forced unification of Taiwan with the mainland. Drones, it appears, are to play a central role in that endeavor.

    In late 2021, the PLA launched a miniature aircraft carrier designed to deploy and recover swarms of drones. Such staging vehicles are designed to work alongside surface combatants to disrupt military operations in the maritime domain by swarming enemy targets or rendering them less effective through distraction.

    continue reading over at The Epoch Times

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 23:40

  • Visualizing The Elemental Composition Of The Human Body
    Visualizing The Elemental Composition Of The Human Body

    The human body is a miraculous, well-oiled, and exceptionally complex machine. It requires a multitude of functioning parts to come together for a person to live a healthy life—and every biological detail in our bodies, from the mundane to the most magical, is driven by just 21 chemical elements.

    Of the 118 elements on Earth, just 21 of them are found in the human body. As Visual Capitalist’s Mark Belan and Anshool Deshmukh detail below, together, they make up the medley of divergent molecules that combine to form our DNA, cells, tissues, and organs.

    Based on data presented by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), in the above infographic, we have broken down a human body to its elemental composition and the percentages in which they exist.

    These 21 elements can be categorized into three major blocks depending on the amount found in a human body, the main building block (4 elements), essential minerals (8 elements), and trace elements (9 elements).

    The Elemental Four: Ingredients for Life

    Four elements, namely, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, are considered the most essential elements found in our body.

    Oxygen is the most abundant element in the human body, accounting for approximately 61% of a person’s mass. Given that around 60-70% of the body is water, it is no surprise that oxygen and hydrogen are two of the body’s most abundantly found chemical elements. Along with carbon and nitrogen, these elements combine for 96% of the body’s mass.

    Here is a look at the composition of the four elements of life:

    Values are for an average human body weighing 70 kg.

    Let’s take a look at how each of these four chemical elements contributes to the thriving functionality of our body:

    Oxygen

    Oxygen plays a critical role in the body’s metabolism, respiration, and cellular oxygenation. Oxygen is also found in every significant organic molecule in the body, including proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and nucleic acids. It is a substantial component of everything from our cells and blood to our cerebral and spinal fluid.

    Carbon

    Carbon is the most crucial structural element and the reason we are known as carbon-based life forms. It is the basic building block required to form proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Breaking carbon bonds in carbohydrates and proteins is our primary energy source.

    Hydrogen

    Hydrogen, the most abundantly found chemical element in the universe, is present in all bodily fluids, allowing the toxins and waste to be transported and eliminated. With the help of hydrogen, joints in our body remain lubricated and able to perform their functions. Hydrogen is also said to have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, helping improve muscle function.

    Nitrogen

    An essential component of amino acids used to build peptides and proteins is nitrogen. It is also an integral component of the nucleic acids DNA and RNA, the chemical backbone of our genetic information and genealogy.

    Essential and Supplemental Minerals

    Essential minerals are important for your body to stay healthy. Your body uses minerals for several processes, including keeping your bones, muscles, heart, and brain working properly. Minerals also control beneficial enzyme and hormone production.

    Minerals like calcium are a significant component of our bones and are required for bone growth and development, along with muscle contractions. Phosphorus contributes to bone and tooth strength and is vital to metabolizing energy.

    Here is a look at the elemental composition of essential minerals:

    Values are for an average human body weighing 70 kg.

    Other macro-minerals like magnesium, potassium, iron, and sodium are essential for cell-to-cell communications, like electric transmissions that generate nerve impulses or heart rhythms, and are necessary for maintaining thyroid and bone health.

    Excessive deficiency of any of these minerals can cause various disorders in your body. Most humans receive these minerals as a part of their daily diet, including vegetables, meat, legumes, and fruits. In case of deficiencies, though, these minerals are also prescribed as supplements.

    Biological Composition of Trace Elements

    Trace elements or trace metals are small amounts of minerals found in living tissues. Some of them are known to be nutritionally essential, while others may be considered to be nonessential. They are usually in minimal quantities in our body and make up only 1% of our mass.

    Paramount among these are trace elements such as zinc, copper, manganese, and fluorine. Zinc works as a first responder against infections and thereby improves infection resistance, while balancing the immune response.

    Here is the distribution of trace elements in our body:

     

    Values are for an average human body weighing 70 kg.

     

    Even though only it’s found in trace quantities, copper is instrumental in forming red blood cells and keeping nerve cells healthy. It also helps form collagen, a crucial part of bones and connective tissue.

    Even with constant research and studies performed to thoroughly understand these trace elements’ uses and benefits, scientists and researchers are constantly making new discoveries.

    For example, recent research shows that some of these trace elements could be used to cure and fight chronic and debilitating diseases ranging from ischemia to cancer, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 23:20

  • Concerned Graduates Of West Point Challenge Leadership Of Military Academy: Letter
    Concerned Graduates Of West Point Challenge Leadership Of Military Academy: Letter

    Authored by Enrico Trigoso via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Three retired U.S. military officers—LTG Thomas McInerney, USAF; MG Paul Vallely, U.S. Army; and Colonel Andrew O’Meara Jr., U.S. Army—signed a letter authored by “Concerned Graduates of West Point and The Long Gray Line,” protesting against mandatory vaccinations, CRT classes, sanitary conditions, progressive political activism, and other “woke actions,” in the military academy.

    U.S. Military Academy cadets attend the 2020 graduation ceremony at West Point, New York, on June 13, 2020. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images)

    “The Long Gray Line” refers to the continuum of graduates United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

    “We wanted to challenge the leadership of the Academy and the Defense Dept on their WOKE actions, CRT, Diversity training and the other discrepancies in the Academy. We found it pervasive at the Naval and Air Force Academies so we knew it was directed from the highest levels of our Military Leadership,” Vallely told The Epoch Times.

    Paul E Vallely MG US Army (Ret) (Courtesy of Paul E Vallely)

    “We all want the Military to get back on track to training and leading our Armed Forces to secure America and its Citizens,” Vallely, who has been sounding the alarm against a socialist takeover of the United States, added.

    The letter, titled “Declaration of Betrayal of West Point And the Long Gray Line,” asks for the following information:

    1. An explanation for the irregularities in the enforcement of the Honor Code.

    2. A justification for the mandatory vaccinations of cadets with the COVID Virus despite widespread adverse reactions to the inoculation, as well as provisions for exceptions for cadets with religious objections.

    3. An explanation for teaching Critical Race Theory at the Academy that constitutes an attack upon the Constitution and our constitutional Republic. This is behavior that constitutes unconstitutional conduct, if not sedition.

    4. An explanation of reported mismanagement of the cadet dining facility resulting in unsanitary conditions, inadequate food prepared for the meal, and food served that was reportedly unfit for consumption.

    5. Political activism on the part of civilian faculty members constituting political activity violating the long-standing policy of the Academy and Army Regulations.

    6. The practice of exclusive reliance upon radical progressive guest speakers to address the Corps of Cadets. This practice results in prejudiced political activism on the part of the Staff and Faculty in violation of Army Regulations.

    7. An explanation for the failure of the Superintendent to respond to correspondence inquiring about problems identified at the Academy.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 23:00

  • Churches Across US Build Tiny Home Villages Amid Worsening Affordability Crisis
    Churches Across US Build Tiny Home Villages Amid Worsening Affordability Crisis

    Churches across the US are working with homeless charities to construct tiny home communities amid one of the worst housing affordability crises ever. 

    AP News says churches are using spare land to build tiny home communities to accommodate the homeless. 

    On vacant plots near their parking lots and steepled sanctuaries, congregations are building everything from fixed and fully contained micro homes to petite, moveable cabins, and several other styles of small-footprint dwellings in between.

    Church leaders are not just trying to be more neighborly. The drive to provide shelter is rooted in their beliefs — they must care for the vulnerable, especially those without homes. -AP

    More than half a million Americans were homeless in 2020, and the number has likely climbed as shelter costs if renting or owning have exploded, triggering the worst ever housing affordability crisis on record. As we’ve previously noted, soaring shelter costs force people into homelessness. 

    Days ago, we outlined how a tidal wave of evictions could be ahead with 8.4 million Americans, or about 15% of all renters were behind rent payments. Of that, 3.5 million said they could be evicted within the next two months. Unlike the pandemic, the federal eviction moratorium prevented people from ending up on the streets, though the moratorium has since expired during the worst inflation storm in four decades. 

    Jeff O’Rourke, lead pastor of Mosaic Christian Community in St. Paul, Minnesota, embraced tiny homes as a housing solution. He said his church uses “every square inch of property that we have to be hospitable.” 

    Meridian Baptist Church in El Cajon, California, partnered with local nonprofit Amikas to construct a tiny home community to address the homelessness crisis. 

    In the San Francisco Bay Area, Firm Foundation Community Housing, launched by Rev. Jake Medcalf, has erected a tiny home housing community in the parking lot of First Presbyterian Church of Hayward. 

    The First Christian Church of Tacoma in Washington erected an entire village of tiny homes in their parking lot.

    “We don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have a whole lot of people … but we care a lot about it, and we’ve got this piece of property,” said the Rev. Doug Collins, the church’s senior minister.

    Donald Whitehead, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, told AP the move by churches across the country to build tiny home communities is a “great emergency option” amid today’s economy that hasn’t worked for everyone. 

    Maybe all of these tiny home communities springing up at US churches should be dubbed “Bidenvilles,” similar to the shacktowns built during the Great Depression in the 1930s called “Hoovervilles.” 

    More of these communities will be constructed as the eviction tidal wave nears. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 22:40

  • Known And Suspected Terrorists Entering US In Unprecedented Numbers: Rep. Higgins
    Known And Suspected Terrorists Entering US In Unprecedented Numbers: Rep. Higgins

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

    Known and suspected terrorists are entering the United States in unprecedented numbers amid a surge in illegal immigration, according to Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.).

    Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing on gun violence on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 8, 2022. (Andrew Harnik/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

    In an interview with NTD, the Louisiana representative stated that the Biden administration is providing “absurd” figures on the actual number of known and suspected terrorists entering America through its borders.

    Higgins, a decorated law enforcement officer, said he believes this number to be much higher in part owing to the number of suspected terrorists who have aggressively avoided interaction with law enforcement at the border, which are referred to as “got-aways.”

    Higgins’s comments come after Border Patrol agents captured 50 people who were on the FBI’s terror watchlist from October 2021 to May 2022.

    That figure was just 15 in the fiscal year 2021, which included several months under former President Donald Trump’s administration.

    “Towards the end of last year, I had estimated that we had lost about 250 KSTs, known and suspected terrorists, so the total numbers now that we’re told could serve about 700,000 ‘got-aways’ are suspected to have crossed into America. I think that’s a low number,” Higgins said.

    “From my perspective, with data delivered to me by boots on the ground, from the border and from Central America and Mexico, and from the official numbers that are delivered to Congress from official data collection processes with Customs and Border Patrol, I think it’s reasonable for Americans to sort of step back and say, ‘My God, we have somewhere between 500 and 1,000 known and suspected terrorists [that] have entered into our country across our southern border since President [Joe] Biden has been inaugurated into office.’ This should startle every American citizen regardless of political affiliation,” Higgins said.

    ‘Conservative Numbers’

    Explaining why he believes the actual number of suspected terrorists in the United States could be higher, Higgins, pointed to Biden’s administration, which he said is using “conservative numbers” when it comes to estimating how many there are.

    The lawmaker added that this is in part because “got-aways” are very difficult to catch because they aggressively run and hide from law enforcement.

    Things have been made even harder, according to Higgins, because much of law enforcement at the border has been pulled away from their primary mission of securing the border to instead processing illegal aliens, giving the “got-aways” more opportunity to escape.

    “So the men that are aggressively evading law enforcement, we’re looking at true numbers of probably a million but we’ve been told 700,000,” Higgins said. “So just using a number of 700,000, and estimating that a very small percentage of that number would be a known or suspected terrorist, which fits the historical data, you could look at 700 known and suspected terrorists who have crossed into our country.”

    “It’s a startling number, it should frighten us all, it should drive us to greater action to confront the Biden administration’s failed border policies to insist upon the resignation of [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas and to promise the American people that if Mayorkas does not resign, he’s going to be impeached,” the lawmaker continued.

    Higgins added that huge numbers of those individuals who are evading law enforcement at the border are working for Mexican drugs cartels, and pointed to the rising number of fentanyl deaths in America.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 22:20

  • "Bullsh*t": Claim Trump "Lunged" For Steering Wheel On Jan 6 Discredited By Secret Service
    “Bullsh*t”: Claim Trump “Lunged” For Steering Wheel On Jan 6 Discredited By Secret Service

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    The January 6 Committee’s credibility has plummeted after claims by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson that President Trump “lunged” for the steering wheel of his vehicle and demanded to be taken to the site of the riots were contradicted by the lead Secret Service agent.

    Hutchinson testified that Tony Ornato, the then-White House deputy chief of staff, told her that Trump said something like, “I’m the f-ing president, take me up to the Capitol now,” and had “reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel” before then using “his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel,” the the presidential driver.

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    Despite the legacy media breathlessly reporting Hutchinson’s claims without much skepticism, the term ‘Amber Heard 2.0’ subsequently trended on Twitter as Hutchinson’s assertions were demolished.

    Within hours, Peter Alexander of NBC News revealed that Engel was prepared to testify “under oath that neither man was assaulted and that Mr. Trump never lunged for the steering wheel.”

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    Trump himself also asserted that the incident never happened.

    Secret Service sources also reporter Julio Rosas that the story is “bullshit.”

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    Hutchinson appears to be pursuing a personal vendetta against Trump because he “personally turned her request her down” when she tried to get a job at Mar-a-Lago.

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    Hutchinson also apparently told another outright lie during her testimony when she claimed she had written a note of a statement for Trump to release on January 6.

    The note was actually penned by Former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann.

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    “The handwritten note that Cassidy Hutchinson testified was written by her was in fact written by Eric Herschmann on January 6, 2021,” a spokesperson for Herschmann told ABC News Tuesday evening.

    It remains to be seen whether Hutchinson will face any consequences for apparently lying under oath, although the already dubious credibility of the January 6 Committee has taken a further massive blow.

    “The January 6 committee clowned itself,” summarized Tim Young.

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    * * *

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

    In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Get early access, exclusive content and behinds the scenes stuff by following me on Locals.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 22:11

  • Canadian Cities Like Vancouver And Hamilton Top L.A. And Chicago As More Expensive Places To Live
    Canadian Cities Like Vancouver And Hamilton Top L.A. And Chicago As More Expensive Places To Live

    Canada’s most expensive cities to live are starting to officially overtake the U.S.’s most expensive cities to live.

    In fact, Mississauga, Vancouver, and Hamilton are more expensive than well known expensive U.S. cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, according to a new study from Canadian insurance provider PolicyAdvisor.

    The study looked at the “10 biggest cities by population in each of Canada and the US based on the average cost of eight items in each – a cinema ticket, a meal out, a bottle of water, a cappuccino, one month of gym membership, a one way ticket and a monthly ticket on public transport as well as a month’s rent”.

    Topping the list remains New York, which is the most expensive city when “considering cost of living in relation with salary”. The combined cost of the basket of 8 items that the study looked at accounted for 57% of the average salary in New York, the study found. 

    New York was followed by Mississauga, Canada, at 56.4% of salary, and Vancouver, Canada, at 50% of salary. Both Hamilton and Toronto, Canada beat out well known expensive U.S. cities like Los Angeles and San Diego. 

    New York had the “highest price of rent, at an average of $3,381.88 per month, as well as the highest gym membership cost ($103.35), monthly transportation pass ($129.5) and cost of a meal at an inexpensive restaurant ($25),” the study found. 

    Toronto had the “second highest cost of monthly transport pass after New York” and Hamilton also a high monthly travel pass, at $85. Vancouver was toward the top of the list because of its far lower salary than other cities – people earned just $3,804.53 per month there. 

    “The impact of the pandemic has made a lot of people reconsider their priorities for both their careers and where they want to live. This data contains some surprising results, as even though some major cities in North America might be perceived as having lower living costs – when factoring in the average salary in the area, it’s not as clear cut,” a PolicyAdvisor spokesperson said. 

    PolicyAdvisor is a digital-first life insurance broker, using technology to make insurance simple, quick, and online.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 22:00

  • Port Of Houston Marks All-Time Container Volume Record
    Port Of Houston Marks All-Time Container Volume Record

    By Noi Mahoney of American Shipper

    Gulf Coast ports got a boost in May from strong container volumes, as well as imports of steel and plywood and exports of crude oil and petroleum products.

    Port of Houston reaches all-time TEU record in May

    Port of Houston hit an all-time record for monthly container volumes in May, handling 335,000 twenty-foot equivalent units, a 16% increase over the same period last year.

    “Container activity continues to be at record levels. It seems like we’re talking about new records at the port every day,” Roger Guenther, Port Houston’s executive director, said during the port’s monthly meeting Tuesday. “There’s really no signs of [volume] backing off of the imports or exports and actually the exports are beginning to rebound a little bit.”

    Total import tonnage was 2.8 million tons in May, a 32% year-over-year increase. Total export tonnage was 2.1 million tons, a 2% year-over-year decrease. 

    Imports of steel increased 72% year over year in May to 401,587 tons. Imports of general cargo increased 83% to 840,351 tons.

    Port Houston has been handling about 13,000 daily interchanges combined at its Barbours Cut and Bayport container terminals but a single-day record of 14,000 on June 23, said Jeff Davis, Port Houston’s chief operations officer.

    Davis said the port was working 26 ships Tuesday. “We have seen pretty much the same on a daily basis, but it has not been without challenges,” Davis said. 

    Port Houston expanded its hours at the Bayport and Barbours Cut container terminals at the beginning of June to include Saturdays. The new gate hours were put in place to help optimize the flow of cargo through the terminals.

    Davis said Saturday volumes have been a little “disappointing” so far but hopes more trucking operators will begin to utilize the extra workday.

    “We’ve seen a couple of 1,000 transactions on Saturdays. We’re seeking about half of a normal day of the week. We’d love to see 6,000 transactions at a minimum on Saturday,” Davis said.

    Imports of steel increased 171% year over year in May to 646,548 tons. Imports of general cargo increased 4% to 601,543 tons.

    Port Houston recorded 713 total ship calls in May, a 5% increase from the same period last year.

    Nashville, Tennessee-based Ceres Terminals Inc. also recently announced the opening of a 75-acre container yard directly adjacent to the Barbours Cut Terminal.

    The new yard will provide container services, servicing steamship line partners, beneficial cargo owners and the trucking community. The yard will also provide services for final-leg deliveries to meet cutoffs, according to a press release.

    “This yard will provide our customers with much-needed near-dock capacity as well as supply chain efficiencies which we hope will relieve some of the stress on the container terminal,” Adam Brooks, COO of Ceres Terminals, said in a statement.

    Port NOLA sees 88% increase in breakbulk but container volume declines

    For the third consecutive month, the Port of New Orleans (Port NOLA) saw a large increase in breakbulk cargo but a decline in container volumes.

    The port recorded an 88% year-over-year increase in breakbulk tons in May to 262,728 tons.

    In recent months, Port NOLA’s monthly volumes have been boosted by shipments of coffee and plywood. 

    Port NOLA’s container volume declined 30% year over year in May to 35,535 TEUs. Like many ports across the country, Port NOLA said it has been hampered in recent months by a shortage of cargo containers. 

    The port handled 12,621 Class I railcar switches in May, a 9% year-over-year increase. The port handles switching operations for the six Class I railroads that operate in New Orleans: BNSF Railway, CN, CSX, Kansas City Southern, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific.

    Port of Corpus Christi sees growth in petroleum, crude oil

    The Port of Corpus Christi in South Texas moved 15.2 million tons of cargo in May, a 9% year-over-year increase from the same month in 2021.

    Total shipments of crude oil totaled 8.7 million tons, of which 8 million tons were exports, during May. Exports of crude oil saw an 8% increase from the same month last year.

    The port also handled 5.3 million tons of petroleum during May, a 18% increase compared to the same year-ago period. Exports of petroleum for the month topped 4.2 million tons, a 20% increase from the same period last year.

    The Port of Corpus Christi had 635 ship calls in May, including 374 liquid cargo barges and 180 liquid cargo ships. It was a 10% year-over-year increase in total ship calls compared to May 2021.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 21:40

  • China "Completes Scientific Exploration" Of Mars, Releases Mind-Blowing Images 
    China “Completes Scientific Exploration” Of Mars, Releases Mind-Blowing Images 

    China’s first Mars mission appears to have been a success. On Wednesday, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced the Tianwen-1 probe completed all planned scientific exploration tasks, including snapping imagery data of the entire planet. 

    The mission’s scientific objectives were completed by a robotic spacecraft consisting of six devices: an orbiter, two deployable cameras, a lander, a remote camera, and the Zhurong rover. The aims of the mission included:

    • Searching for evidence of current and past life,

    • Producing surface maps,

    • Characterizing soil composition and water ice distribution, and 

    • Examining the Martian atmosphere, particularly its ionosphere.

    CNSA said the Tianwen-1 had spent two years orbiting Mars while the rover portion of the mission surveyed the surface for about a year. One thousand forty gigabytes of “medium-resolution” and “high-resolution” image data covering the entire world of Mars were acquired. 

    “As of June 29, the Tianwen-1 mission orbiter has been flying normally for 706 days, orbiting Mars 1,344 times, and has acquired medium-sized data covering the entire planet of Mars. With high-resolution image data, all scientific payloads have achieved global exploration of Mars. The “Zhurong” rover has traveled 1921.5 meters on the surface of Mars. Both the Tianwen-1 mission orbiter and the Mars rover have completed the established scientific exploration​​​,” CNSA said. 

    Some of the photographs released show where the planet’s water resources reside. In a 2018 European Space Agency mission to the planet, an orbiting probe found liquid water under the ice of the planet’s surface. 

    Here are the most important developments since the Chinese probe started orbiting Mars in early 2021 and began operations in May 2021: 

    CNSA said the scientific data collected would be researched and used to promote humankind’s exploration of the universe. 

    The final frontier is space — the world’s superpowers are on a hunt for trillion-dollar deposits of rare metals that will power Earth’s green energy revolution in decades to come. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 21:20

  • G-7 & The Desperation Stage Of Russian Sanctions
    G-7 & The Desperation Stage Of Russian Sanctions

    Authored by Jack Rasmus via Counterpunch.org,

    Biden and the other G7 leaders are meeting in the Bavarian Alps this week. Apart from proclaiming they’ll never give up supporting Zelensky and Ukraine, G7 leaders announced they were planning two new sanctions on Russia.

    Like most of the previous six phases of sanctions the purpose of the latest is to deprive Russia of revenues from exports. So far sanctions haven’t been all that successful in that regard, at least in the shorter term. While the USA has banned Russian oil and gas imports to the USA, those amounts and their respective revenue impact on total Russian export revenue is insignificant. Moreover, the ban on Russian oil exports to Europe do not begin until December 2022, while there’s no ban on Russian natural gas imports whatsoever. So little net impact on Russian energy export revenues from Europe either.

    The sanctions on oil & gas Russian exports to Europe have been quite minimal to date. Meanwhile, Russia’s exports to China, India and rest of the world have been rising. As have global energy prices in general.  With accelerating global prices for oil and gas, and an increase in Russian energy exports to India, China and elsewhere, Russia’s revenues have been actually rising.

    This rising revenue despite sanctions has presented something of a conundrum for Biden and the G7. The whole idea of sanctions is to dramatically reduce Russian revenues, not simply volume of exports! Sanctions thus far have had the opposite effect of what was intended—Russian energy revenues have risen not fallen.

    So the G7 in Bavaria have come up with two more schemes to try to reduce Russian export revenues. But the thin mountain air must be affecting their thinking. The two new schemes are among the most desperate and economically absurd sanction ideas spawned thus far.

    1. Ban Russian Gold Exports to Europe

    The first absurd proposal being bandied about in Bavaria is to get Europe to agree to ban Russian gold exports to Europe.

    The thinking is Russian revenues from gold constitute Russia’s second largest export revenue source, but at $20 billion a year gold sales revenue is still well below Russia’s oil export revenue of around $90 billion (before sanctions). Most of the Russian gold exports goes to the gold exchange in London where it’s ‘sold’ by Russia in exchange for other currencies. The G7 thinks denying Russia access to the London gold exchange will result in a big dent in its total export revenues and ability to obtain other currencies with which to purchase other needed imports for its economy. But there are problems with the G7’s proposed ban on Russia gold exports.

    First, Russia could just as well sell its gold elsewhere in the world. It doesn’t have to sell it to the Europeans at the London exchange. Other major global buyers of Russian gold are Turkey, Qatar, India and other middle eastern markets. Gold prices have been rising globally, as inflation has driven up oil, gas, and other industrial and agricultural commodities. Gold is an asset that tends to rise in price with rising general price levels, which are now accelerating worldwide. With inflation, other countries will more than gladly buy up the Europeans’ share of Russian gold. Some may even then sell the gold back to the Europeans—at a marked up higher price of course.

    The Demand for Russian gold will simply shift, from Europe to elsewhere. Russian gold export revenues will thus not fall on net; in fact, may possibly even rise as gold prices continue to rise with inflation–ironically in large part due to other sanctions in general.

    Second, gold is an asset that provides a hedge against inflation. It may be that Biden can get the G7 leaders and their governments (and central banks) to boycott buying Russian gold. But what’s to stop individual investors in Europe from buying Russian gold in offshore markets, when it’s presently such an attractive asset? Will Biden extend sanctions on all the individual Europeans who simply shift their purchases of Russian gold from the London Gold Exchange to the gold exchanges in Turkey, Qatar and elsewhere?

    2. Price Cap Russian Oil Exports to Europe

    This is an even sillier proposal. Here’s the logic of how the price cap is supposed to work. Theoretically, Europe would all agree to buy Russian oil exports over the next six months but only at a deeply discounted price that all of Europe would agree on. In other words, set a ‘price cap’ at a level well below world market prices that are currently determined by supply in global oil spot markets. The lower price is supposed to cut Russian revenues from the oil exports to Europe—i.e. reduce revenues, the prime goal of all sanctions. The idea was first suggested by Janet Yellen, the US Secretary of the Treasury. That’s the Janet Yellen who told the world in February 2022 that inflation was temporary, remember!

    Getting all of the G7 to agree to a price cap still requires getting the rest of Europe as well as Japan, So. Korea and others to agree to that price capt as well.   But isn’t Europe supposed to stop buying all Russian oil imports by end of 2022 per previous sanctions they’ve agreed to? Who believes the Europeans can agree to a price cap on Russian oil and implement that cap in three months (July-September)–and then for just three months more (October-December)? Europe can’t do anything in three months, or even six. Maybe the US and EU aren’t all that confident they can implement a full ban on Russian oil exports by December?

    But even this isn’t the most absurd aspect of the ‘price cap’ proposal.

    Assuming Biden could get all the G7 to convince all of Europe’s 27 nations on a super discounted price, there’s still the ‘small problem’ of what Russia’s response might be to all that. The G7’s faulty logic is the deep discounted price Europe is only willing to pay for the oil would be at a price much lower than even the 30% discount that Russia is now selling oil to India, China and elsewhere. The G7 presumably would offer to buy Russian oil only at a 50% discount off current world prices maybe? That would put pressure, as the G7 argument goes, on Russian oil sales to India etc. The Indians would then demand Russia oil prices at the G7 lower 50% discount price. Russia would realize further reduced revenues from oil lower prices to India, China, the rest of the world as well as to G7 and Europe.

    This is a proposal so ridiculous it’s almost embarrassing. The problem with the G7 ‘price cap’ idea is there’s no reason why Russia would want to sell any oil whatsoever to Europe at the G7’s deeply discounted price cap level.

    First, why should it when Europe says it plans to phase out all Russian oil by December anyway? Second, Russia has shown it is not concerned with reducing natural gas export revenues to Europe. It’s already cut cubic gas exports to Europe by one-third as part of its own economic response to Europe’s agreement with US sanctions on Russia and it’s warned Europe of another third soon.  Economic warfare cuts both ways. So what’s to stop Russia from just cutting off all oil exports to Europe—and well before December? Third, Russia would have to be pretty dumb to agree to sell oil to Europe at the latter’s ‘price cap’ level which would be well below Russia’s already 30% discount oil price sales to India? It knows the likely knock on effect that would follow. India as a long term oil customer is far more important to Russia than Europe which says it’s ending as a customer in just six months.  Finally, Russia knows if it cuts off all oil exports to Europe, it would just change the market flow of global oil, not reduce it. Russia would sell more to other countries, which might then just re-export it back to Europe in turn.

    In short, the error with the G7 price cap idea is it assumes that buyers (Europe) can set the price for oil in what is a global sellers market! G7 may think they can stand market fundamentals on their head and make it work, but they are wrong.  No amount of G7 wishful thinking can make Demand determine Supply in today’s global energy markets, where broken and restructuring supply chains, sanctions, and war are the main determinants of price.

    Both the proposal to ban Russian gold exports to Europe and the proposal to manipulate oil demand to reduce its global market price—and thereby deprive Russia of revenues—are ideas that reflect more the desperation of the US and G7 to find some way to make sanctions on Russia work in the short run when thus far they aren’t working very well, if at all.

    The short run objective of sanctions–i.e. to reduce Russian export revenues–has not been working but the two latest desperate ideas won’t work any better.

    Historians will wonder years from now why the US and its most dependent allies in tow—the G7 countries—embarked upon a scope of sanctions on Russia so soon after Covid’s deep negative impacts on global supply chains and domestic product and labor markets. Global markets, trade and financial flows were seriously disrupted by the Covid experience of 2020-21. And they had not recovered by January 2022 when US sanctions on Russia were escalated. Before global supply chains could heal, the US and its G7 allies embarked on sanctions that further disrupted and restructured those same supply chains while simultaneously setting off chronic global inflation that ravaged their domestic economies as well. History will show, it was all not well thought out.

    Even less thought out, however, are the more recent G7 proposals to ban Russian gold and engineer a price cap on global oil—the latter in effect a fantasy that by somehow manipulating a region’s (Europe) oil Demand it could set global oil prices in general and thus over-ride Supply as the driver of oil price and revenues.

    It makes one wonder about the qualifications of the current generation of world leaders (led by Biden and the US) playing with the geopolitical world order. And wonder even more about their even less understanding of the consequences of their economic actions on the world economy.

    *  *  *

    Jack Rasmus is author of  ’The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump, Clarity Press, January 2020. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network on Fridays at 2pm est. His twitter handle is @drjackrasmus.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 21:00

  • Biden's Crypto-Tax Crackdown Reportedly Delayed
    Biden’s Crypto-Tax Crackdown Reportedly Delayed

    The Biden administration’s cunning plan to garnish billions in taxes from crypto has reportedly hit a wall.

    The provision in the US infrastructure bill signed into law in November, which will require financial institutions and crypto brokers to report additional information, could reportedly be delayed.

    Bloomberg reports, according to people familiar with the matter, that the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service are likely to push off a January 2023 date for the firms to begin tracking data such as customers’ capital gains and losses.

    Once rules are in place, exchanges and brokerages will have to send the detailed transaction data to the IRS and their clients who made the trades, who could then use the information to file their taxes. The data would include customer names and addresses, gross proceeds from sales, and any capital gains or losses.

    As CoinTelegraph reports, the potential delay could reportedly affect billions of dollars related to capital gains taxes – the Biden administration’s budget for the government for the 2023 fiscal year previously estimated modifying the crypto tax rules could reduce the deficit by roughly $11 billion.

    Remember, it’s all for your own good:

    “It could be very helpful just to standardize the reporting and put it in a way that makes it easier to digest and put on a tax return,” said Michael Desmond, former chief counsel for the IRS

    In other words, helping the IRS find tax cheats… and simplifying reporting for all the honest crypto players.

    For now, according to Jake Chervinsky, head of policy at the Blockchain Association,“delaying is smart.”

    “We’re getting closer & closer to the effective date of the infrastructure bill’s tax provisions & we’re still waiting for guidance or rulemaking on implementation,” he added.

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    Bloomberg notes that in addition to the rules, Treasury and the IRS are working on a new form for crypto firms to use called the 1099-DA, which will be different than the 1099-B used by stock and bond brokers. 

    There is no escaping the inevitable though as the Biden administration is adamant that crypto tax evasion remains a major issue for Washington policy makers.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 20:40

  • The Influencer's Dilemma (Why Elon Musk Is Probably Right About Twitter)
    The Influencer’s Dilemma (Why Elon Musk Is Probably Right About Twitter)

    Authored by Omid Malekan via Medium.com,

    The following in an excerpt from my new book: Re-Architecting Trust, The Curse of History and the Crypto Cure for Money, Markets and Platforms. It provides context on the ongoing breakdown of traditional social medial.

    The prevalence of digital fakery is an underrated contributor to the breakdown of respect in every online setting. It leads to a toxic environment where the worst behaviors are rewarded. To see why, we must first recognize that online influence is valuable. Having a lot of likes, retweets, positive reviews, and followers is an asset, one that increasingly impacts the offline economy. A restaurant that has a lot of five-star reviews is more likely to get new customers and a pundit who has a lot of Twitter subscribers is more likely to get a book deal.

    The digital attestations of likes and followers and so on are a form of social capital, and everyone is motivated to acquire as much as they can. The question is how.

    Some people try to acquire their social capital by doing something useful, like running a quality restaurant or putting out valuable content.

    They hustle, put in long hours, and work to earn every like, retweet, positive review, and follower. This is the social capital equivalent of proof of work: do the work, earn the reward.

    Other people cheat.

    They don’t put in the hours or hustle, they instead buy enough fake followers and reviews on the black market to make it look like they did. This is the social capital version of a Sybil attack. On any centralized platform such as Seamless or Twitter, the second group is guaranteed to win.

    As the comedian Groucho Marx once said, “the secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

    To understand why, recall that the target audience — the consumers who order food from an app, watch TikTok videos, and subscribe to Instagram feeds — have no idea what’s real and what’s fake. Facebook doesn’t tell them what percentage of an Instagram influencer’s likes were generated by a click farm (if it did, advertising revenues would plummet). This lack of information puts every would-be influencer in a bind. If viewers can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s fake, then what’s the best strategy for becoming popular? Should they work hard to earn real users or pay up to acquire fake ones? The answer is both. After all, those who decide to both build and buy will always be more popular than those who only do one. In game theory, this is known as the Nash equilibrium. In real life, it’s a race to the bottom.

    But now we have a new problem because Instagram users aren’t that gullible. They understand that some chicanery is going on. There are too many content creators who are suspiciously popular, and the numbers only ever go up, sometimes too quickly. There are also academic studies and media reports that confirm their suspicions. But there is no obvious tell, so the most reasonable response from the users perspective is to assume that everything is a little fake, and to discount every number — every like, retweet, five-star review, and follower count — accordingly. Since tomorrow will bring more fakery, then discount a little more with each passing day. It helps that the human brain is uniquely adept at performing this invisible calculus. People have been doing it for millennia. Not with social capital of course, but with money.

    Online social capital in any centralized setting is an inflationary currency. It does not enjoy scarcity of any kind and is easy to counterfeit so its purchasing power falls on a daily basis. That’s why it takes much higher numbers to impress users today than it used to. Here the world’s centralized platform operators are even more irresponsible than central banks. The Federal Reserve might be profligate with its printing, but it at least tries to preserve the integrity of its currency after it’s been issued. That’s why $100 bills are difficult to counterfeit. One hundred (or one hundred thousand) likes on any social media platform, on the other hand, are easy to counterfeit.

    In economics, Gresham’s Law is the phenomenon by which “bad money eventually drives out good.” It’s more of a principle than a law but explains why lower quality representations of the same currency, like diluted coins with less gold that still have the same face value, tend to force higher quality money out of circulation. It’s best understood from the perspective of ordinary people making sensible decisions. In any economy where legal tender laws force citizens to treat coins of different metal content as having the same value, people are going to try to spend the diluted coins (to get rid of them) and save the denser ones. Maybe the laws will be changed, or the currency will fail, and all coins will have to be melted down to capture their pure metallic value. A similar phenomenon also explains why Bitcoin is increasingly viewed as a store of value, not the medium of exchange it was invented to be. The more fiat money that is printed by the world’s central banks, the greater the perception that fiat is a form of bad money, leading people to want to spend their dollars and hoard their bitcoins.

    Kabessa’s Law is the social capital equivalent of this dynamic, named after a popular crypto pundit who first postulated the dilemma that every would-be influencer faces in a centralized setting — to build or to buy. This law states that counterfeit online social capital eventually drives out the quality kind, taking over.

    The higher the percentage of fake activity on any platform, the lower the incentive to bother trying to create the real deal. Put differently, the easier it is to buy one thousand Twitter followers, the lower the incentive to try to earn one.

    *  *  *

    About the book: Re-Architecting Trust is a thought-provoking exploration of how decentralized blockchain networks and the digital assets that they enable can reinvent our most important trust frameworks by creating new types of money, reinvigorating how we transact the old kind, disintermediating the least trustworthy financial institutions, and enabling meaningful business models for artists and influencers. You can order a copy here

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 20:20

  • When Does The Recession Begin? Here Is What Wall Street Thinks
    When Does The Recession Begin? Here Is What Wall Street Thinks

    Last week we showed that with the Bloomberg Economics team now modeling in virtual certainty of a recession in the next 24 months…

    … and with consensus now expecting Fed rate hikes to peak in Q4 and rate cuts to begin in Q1 2023…

    … the only question is of timing: just when does the recession begin?

    To answer that question, we go to the latest survey of Wall Street professionals conducted by DB’s Jim Reid whose preliminary results were released today, and which finds that “the risk of a US recession by the end of 2023 has only been building in recent months with 88% of you now thinking it happens by the end of 2023 up from 78% last month.” Interestingly still only 17% believe the recession starts this year, but this is up from 13% last month and virtually 0 in February, so as Reid notes, “the market narrative of a more imminent recession has moved quicker than the responses.” Also worth noting: just 8% now expect no recession until 2024, down from a near majority (45%) in February.

    That said, of these respondents, over a third (~6% of the total responses) believe the recession has already started. And while Reid still thinks 2023 is more likely than 2022 (“but it’s clear the risks are building”), we have claimed since last December that the recession is a 2022 calendar event and a few more catastrophic data points such as the latest guidance cut by RH, just three weeks after its last guidance cut, will make a 2022 recession consensus, which in turn will only accelerate the timeline on the Fed’s rate cuts and QE.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 20:00

  • South Carolina Rep. In Leaked Audio Strategizes "Sleepers" And "Dope Money" To Finance Senate Campaign
    South Carolina Rep. In Leaked Audio Strategizes “Sleepers” And “Dope Money” To Finance Senate Campaign

    Authored by Matt McGregor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A South Carolina state representative on the ballot for the Democratic primary runoff on June 28 for the U.S. Senate has been heard in leaked audio strategizing on how to utilize Democrat “sleepers” to run as Republicans in local elections, as well as requesting drug money from a state prison inmate.

    South Carolina Rep. Krystle Matthews has been recorded in leaked audio strategizing about illegal fundraising methods. (Courtesy of Project Veritas)

    Project Veritas, the watchdog organization that obtained the recording, confirmed to The Epoch Times that it verified state Rep. Krystle Matthews as the person speaking with Perry Correctional Institution inmate David Solomon Ballard.

    “When we get enough of us in there, we can wreak havoc for real from the inside out,” Matthews is heard saying in the recording dated Feb. 15.

    Inmate phone calls are recorded and those making the call are notified by an operator that calls are recorded.

    It is unclear what the relationship is between Matthews and Ballard, who was incarcerated in 2018 with a four-year sentence for threatening the life and family of a public official, and a ten-year sentence for resisting arrest and assaulting an officer, with multiple disciplinary actions taken against him while incarcerated. He also has an extensive arrest record.

    Ballard had been jailed for threatening the life of Aiken County Sheriff Mike Hunt and his family, according to The State.

    While in custody at the Aiken County Department of Public Safety, Ballard then assaulted a State Law Enforcement Division agent.

    ‘Secret Sleepers’

    Matthews assumed state office in 2018 as a representative of District 117.

    “We need some secret sleepers,” she is heard saying. “Like, you need, we need them to run as the other side, even though they for our side, and we need them to win,” the Senate primary candidate said. “We need people to run as Republicans in these local elections.”

    Ballard agrees, stating, “Right, right.”

    Watch:

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    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 19:40

  • India's Largest Cement Maker "Circumventing The Dollar" In Russian-Coal-For-Yuan Deal
    India’s Largest Cement Maker “Circumventing The Dollar” In Russian-Coal-For-Yuan Deal

    The Russian economy is currently experiencing unprecedented pressure from a group of countries led by the United States, with more than 10,000 sanctions imposed on the country, its citizens, and companies. 

    Despite all the amplification of sanctions threats by the media, and vilification of anything Russian by western leaders, many of the world’s largest nations (by population and economy), are continuing to adjust to current conditions, ignoring the virtue-signaling, and sending Russia’s currency and current account balance soaring.

    But, in yet another example of the far-less-unified-than-Biden-claims new world order, it appears Indian industrialists have no problem dealing with Putin for their key materials.

    The latest example comes from India as Reuters reports that UltraTech Cement – India’s biggest cement producer – is importing a cargo of Russian coal and paying for it using Chinese Yuan.

    UltraTech is bringing in 157,000 tonnes of coal from Russian producer SUEK that loaded on the bulk carrier MV Mangas from the Russian Far East port of Vanino, the document showed. It cites an invoice dated June 5 that values the cargo at 172,652,900 yuan ($25.81 million).

    The increasing use of the yuan to settle payments could help insulate Moscow from the effects of western sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and bolster Beijing’s push to further internationalise the currency and chip away at the dominance of the U.S. dollar in global trade.

    “This move is significant. I have never heard any Indian entity paying in yuan for international trade in the last 25 years of my career. This is basically circumventing the USD (U.S. dollar),“ a Singapore-based currency trader said.

    India has explored setting up a rupee payment mechanism for trade with Russia, but that has not materialized. Chinese businesses have used the yuan in trade settlements with Russia for years.

    “If the rupee-yuan-rouble route turns out to be favourable, the businesses have every reason and incentive to switch over. This is likely to happen more,” said Subash Chandra Garg, a former economic affairs secretary at India’s finance ministry.

    An Indian government official familiar with the matter said the government was aware of payments in yuan.

    “The use of the yuan to settle payments for imports from countries other than China was rare until now, and could increase due to sanctions on Russia,” the official said.

    Finally, we are reminded of what First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) told The Financial Times earlier in the year: that the recent financial sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine are threatening to weaken the dominance of the U.S. Dollar as the world currency,

    Russia had been planning for years to reduce its dependence on the petrodollar since the United States imposed sanctions in retaliation for its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

    The current crisis in Ukraine has only accelerated those plans… and it now seems the entire BRICS group may be ready to cross the chasm as Bretton Woods III begins to form.

    The implications, needless to say, are staggering (and, worse, while Zoltan Poszar does not explicitly state it, he clearly believes that world war is coming):

    Empires fall and rise. Currencies fall and rise. Wars have winners and losers.

    When Wellington beat Napoleon, the trade was to buy gilts. I am no expert on geopolitics, but I am an interest rate strategist and I think the level of inflation and interest rates and the size of the Fed’s balance sheet will depend on the steady state that emerges after this conflict is over. Three is a magic number:

    The four prices of money are managed via Basel III and central banks as DoLR.

    The four pillars of commodity trading are shaped by war, hopefully not WWIII.

    The new world order will bring a new monetary system – Bretton Woods III.

    A BRICS-based payment system would be the ultimate challenge to the dollar-hegemon-based system in place today.

    At a BRICS summit earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the bloc, consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, is currently working on setting up a new global reserve currency that would be based on the currency basket of the five nations. Earlier, the bloc said it was working on establishing a joint payment network to abate the reliance on the Western financial system.

    Even if this is nothing but talk, it underscores the fact that the dollar is on shaky ground. US policymakers would be wise to consider future dollar weaponization carefully.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 19:20

  • Biden Admin To Deploy 1.6 Million Doses Of Monkeypox Vaccines In "Enhanced" Strategy
    Biden Admin To Deploy 1.6 Million Doses Of Monkeypox Vaccines In “Enhanced” Strategy

    Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

    The Biden administration announced it will expand access to monkeypox vaccines in a new “enhanced” national strategy to combat the outbreak, which includes the deployment of 296,000 vaccine doses over the coming weeks, and potentially 1.6 million vaccine doses over the coming months.

    Xavier Becerra, secretary of Health and Human Services, speaks at the HHS headquarters in Washington, on June 28, 2022. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images)

    The plan seeks to “expand vaccination for individuals at risk and make testing more convenient for healthcare providers and patients across the country,” the White House said in a statement on June 28.

    Source: BNO

    Under the strategy, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will immediately allocate 56,000 doses of the two-dose Jynneos vaccine, which are currently in the national stockpile, to states and territories across the United States.

    “States will be offered an equitable allotment based on cases and proportion of the population at risk for severe disease from monkeypox, and the federal government will partner with state, local, and territorial governments in deploying the vaccines,” the White House announced.

    The move is a major step up from the 9,000 doses of the Jynneos vaccine that HHS has so far deployed from the national stockpile to the 32 states and jurisdictions that requested the vaccine.

    HHS will also allocate another 240,000 doses in the coming weeks “to a broader population of individuals at risk,” as more doses are received from the manufacturer. This would bring the total number of vaccines to be distributed over the coming weeks to 296,000.

    The White House said HHS will hold another 60,000 vaccines in reserve.

    HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement that the new strategy allows the government to “maximize the supply of currently available vaccines and reach those who are most vulnerable to the current outbreak.”

    …

    Up until now, monkeypox vaccines have been provided only to people who have had confirmed exposure to a monkeypox case. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) from the CDC now recommends that vaccines will be made available to people with “confirmed monkeypox exposures and presumed exposures.”

    “This includes those who had close physical contact with someone diagnosed with monkeypox, those who know their sexual partner was diagnosed with monkeypox, and men who have sex with men who have recently had multiple sex partners in a venue where there was known to be monkeypox or in an area where monkeypox is spreading,” HHS said in a statement.

    …

    The White House noted that the ACAM2000 vaccine “cannot be provided to individuals who are immunocompromised or who have heart disease.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 19:00

  • De Blasio To AIPAC: Drop Dead
    De Blasio To AIPAC: Drop Dead

    It wasn’t long ago that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had an overwhelming grip on both major parties in the United States. However, in the most striking indication yet that Democrats are slipping from AIPAC’s grasp, former New York mayor and current congressional candidate Bill de Blasio has publicly disowned the group. 

    In a virtual candidate forum, NY Jewish Week asked de Blasio if he supported AIPAC. “No, I don’t,” he responded, adding that the group has changed in a manner he called “unacceptable.” Hammering home his stance, he said, “I am not seeking their endorsement and would not accept it even if it were offered.”

    Such an utterance from a prominent member of either party was unthinkable just a year ago—to say nothing of the fact that de Blasio is running in New York City…which, in 2019, de Blasio called “the largest urban Jewish community on Earth.” 

    De Blasio has both hands in the air, one waving a flag of Israel as he marches in a parade
    Then-Mayor de Blasio marches in the 2017 “Celebrate Israel Parade” in Manhattan (photo: NYC mayor’s office)

    In May, House speaker Nancy Pelosi accepted the endorsement of AIPAC’s pro-Israel rival lobby group J Street. Israeli newspaper Haaretz called it “a political development that signals the shifting attitudes on Israel inside the Democratic Party.” Walking a political tightrope, Pelosi—a longtime AIPAC ally and recurring attendee at its conferences—hasn’t touted the endorsement. 

    AIPAC and J Street have gone head to head in many Democratic primary races. Earlier this month, Pelosi recorded a video message to counter AIPAC-sponsored attack ads against a Maryland congressional candidate that has the backing of both Pelosi and J Street.  

    Where AIPAC is a relentless defender of seemingly every action of the Israeli government and encourages a hard-line U.S. foreign policy against Israel’s rivals, J Street bills itself as “the political home of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” and has decried “the injustice of Israel’s occupation” and “the ongoing denial of fundamental rights and freedoms to millions of Palestinians in occupied territory.”

    The difference between AIPAC and J Street came into sharp relief last week:

    De Blasio spoke to AIPAC’s national conference in March 2019—two months for before declaring his candidacy for president. He laid out what he called a “progressive case for the state of Israel,” but condemned the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement that many progressives embrace as a means of opposing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

    Also that month, de Blasio scolded progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar for tweeting “It’s all about the Benjamins baby” in response to a Glenn Greenwald tweet marveling at “how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation [Israel] even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans.” De Blasio said “there’s a long antisemitic tradition associated with that kind of comment.” 

    In distancing himself from AIPAC, de Blasio cited an AIPAC-affiliated PAC’s sponsorship of a successful primary challenger to progressive House candidate Nina Turner in Ohio. “I thought the attack on her was not only horribly unjustified, it deprived our nation of someone who could have been a huge difference maker in terms of our progressive movement,” said de Blasio. 

    That race pitted two black women against each other in a district with a substantial Jewish vote. In her victory speech, challenger AIPAC-backed Shontel Brown reminisced about her visit to Israel, which helped her “appreciate the vulnerability of a state, and that has given me the understanding of the U.S.-Israel relationship and I thank my Jewish brethren.” 

    Turner’s sin that provoked AIPAC: A tweeted message of solidarity with “If Not Now,” a group that describes itself as “American Jews organizing our community to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice, and a thriving future for all.”  

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    At last week’s candidate forum, De Blasio said “the only path forward to peace in the region for both Israeli and Palestinian people to have their own states. I would fight for that, and I would certainly fight against any organization that attacks my fellow progressives.”

    De Blasio, who served as New York’s mayor from 2014 to 2021, is running to represent the newly-redrawn New York 10th congressional district, which covers all of southern Manhattan and a big swath of Brooklyn.  

    The redrawn New York 10th Congressional District (via Ballotpedia)

     

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 18:40

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Jun 29

Today’s News 29th June 2022

  • Scotland Set to Hold 2nd Independence Referendum As Sturgeon Prepares To Fight Johnson Veto
    Scotland Set to Hold 2nd Independence Referendum As Sturgeon Prepares To Fight Johnson Veto

    Scotland is set to hold its second independence referendum, Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon announced Tuesday, while at the same time proposing a future date of October 19, 2023 for her country to hold a new vote on a potential break from the United Kingdom.

    Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party campaigns on a platform for Scotland to declare independence from the UK, and she’s been pushing for another referendum on the question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” In 2014, the 32 council areas of Scotland voted “no” – with the “No” side winning at 2,001,926 votes over 1,617,989 for “Yes”.

    Via The Herald

    Sturgeon said this week, “​​What I am not willing to do, what I will never do, is allow Scottish democracy to be a prisoner of Boris Johnson or any prime minister” – in reference to British constitutional rules that stipulate consent must be gained from the UK prime minister to proceed with the vote. Johnson has been on record as saying he would decline such a request.

    She further penned a letter to PM Johnson, saying, “In a voluntary union of nations where the people of one nation have voted in elections to give a mandate for a referendum, it is, in my view, unacceptable democratically that the route to a referendum has to be via the courts rather than by co-operation between the UK and Scottish Governments,” Sturgeon said the letter. 

    And according to more details via EuroNews:

    In a statement to the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh on Tuesday, Sturgeon said she had written to Boris Johnson indicating she was “ready and willing” to negotiate a so-called Section 30 order with him, which gives the Scottish government temporary powers to hold a referendum. This was how the 2014 independence referendum was held. 

    Johnson is likely only to continue to stand firm against granting a section 30 order while watching Scottish politics fragment over the “partisan” push for independence. 

    The main opposition party, the Scottish Conservatives, and its leader Douglass Ross has slammed the “pretend poll” in which his party will refuse to take part. “This is becoming a parliament that doesn’t get anything done on people’s real priorities,” Ross said, who represents a region of the Scottish Highlands. 

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    “A parliament that only exists to further the Scottish National Party’s interests… a do-nothing parliament with a first minister obsessed with another referendum at all costs,” he added.

    Thus the political road and fight to a second vote appears set to be a long haul, after the first was defeated by almost half a million votes in a country with only some 5.5 million people.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 02:45

  • Ukrainian Elite Unit Claims Sabotage Ops Inside Russia
    Ukrainian Elite Unit Claims Sabotage Ops Inside Russia

    Authored by Kyle Anzalone via The Libertarian Institute, 

    The Times spoke with an intelligence officer and two sergeants in the Ukrainian special forces elite Shaman battalion who claimed Kiev had conducted covert operations inside Russia. The officers said they successfully carried out raids involving explosions to sow confusion and dissent among Russians. 

    One of the special operations officers explained the missions involved sabotage and explosives. “The most interesting missions are working behind enemy lines; planting explosives behind the front lines, beyond the border,” he said. The second sergeant indicated the Shaman battalion’s raid behind enemy lines was successful.

    He claimed, “The Russians don’t know what happened, they often can’t believe we were there.”

    The officers gave few details about their operations to The Times. There have been several explosions inside Russia since President Valdimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Kiev has not officially claimed responsibility for any attacks inside of Russia but has hinted it might be behind some of the explosions. 

    During the war in Afghanistan, the “Shaman battalion” fought with US and UK special forces. A senior Ukrainian intelligence official said, “We send them [Shaman battalion] to take on the most difficult tasks because they’re the best and the bravest. They are hugely important to the war effort.”

    The sergeants explain how their units have been deployed in several battles inside Russia and Ukraine. However, they say their forces and supplies are diminishing as the fight in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region drags on. One of the officers told The Times that half of their friends have been killed in recent weeks. 

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    An intelligence official confirmed that Ukrainian soldier casualties are on the rise. “Ukraine’s casualty rate, far lower than Russia’s in the first weeks of the war, is now approaching parity with the invading force,” he said. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 02:00

  • Escobar: Behind The Tin Curtain – BRICS+ Vs NATO/G7
    Escobar: Behind The Tin Curtain – BRICS+ Vs NATO/G7

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

    The west is nostalgically caught up with outdated ‘containment’ policies, this time against Global South integration. Unfortunately for them, the rest of the world is moving on, together.

    Once upon a time, there existed an Iron Curtain which divided the continent of Europe. Coined by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the term was in reference to the then-Soviet Union’s efforts to create a physical and ideological boundary with the west. The latter, for its part, pursued a policy of containment against the spread and influence of communism.

    Fast forward to the contemporary era of techno-feudalism, and there now exists what should be called a Tin Curtain, fabricated by the fearful, clueless, collective west, via G7 and NATO: this time, to essentially contain the integration of the Global South.

    BRICS against G7

    The most recent and significant example of this integration has been the coming out of BRICS+ at last week’s online summit hosted by Beijing. This went far beyond establishing the lineaments of a ‘new G8,’ let alone an alternative to the G7.

    Just look at the interlocutors of the five historical BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa): we find a microcosm of the Global South, encompassing Southeast Asia, Central Asia, West Asia, Africa and South America – truly putting the “Global” in the Global South.

    Revealingly, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s clear messages during the Beijing summit, in sharp contrast to G7 propaganda, were actually addressed to the whole Global South:

    • Russia will fulfill its obligations to supply energy and fertilizers.

    • Russia expects a good grain harvest – and to supply up to 50 million tons to world markets.

    • Russia will ensure passage of grain ships into international waters even as Kiev mined Ukrainian ports.

    • The negative situation on Ukrainian grain is artificially inflated.

    • The sharp increase in inflation around the world is the result of the irresponsibility of G7 countries, not Operation Z in Ukraine.

    • The imbalance of world relations has been brewing for a long time and has become an inevitable result of the erosion of international law.

    An alternative system

    Putin also directly addressed one of the key themes that the BRICS have been discussing in depth since the 2000s — the design and implementation of an international reserve currency.

    “The Russian Financial Messaging System is open for connection with banks of the BRICS countries.”

    “The Russian MIR payment system is expanding its presence. We are exploring the possibility of creating an international reserve currency based on the basket of BRICS currencies,” the Russian leader said.

    This is inevitable after the hysterical western sanctions post-Operation Z; the total de-dollarization imposed upon Moscow; and increasing trade between BRICS nations. For instance, by 2030, a quarter of the planet’s oil demand will come from China and India, with Russia as the major supplier.

    The “RIC” in BRICS simply cannot risk being locked out of a G7-dominated financial system. Even tightrope-walking India is starting to catch the drift.

    Who speaks for the ‘international community?’

    At its current stage, BRICS represent 40 percent of world population, 25 percent of the global economy, 18 percent of world trade, and contribute over 50 percent for world economic growth. All indicators are on the way up.

    Sergey Storchak, CEO of Russian bank VEG, framed it quite diplomatically: “If the voices of emerging markets are not being heard in the coming years, we need to think very seriously about setting up a parallel regional system, or maybe a global system.”

    A “parallel regional system” is already being actively discussed between the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China, coordinated by Minister of Integration and Macroeconomics Sergey Glazyev, who has recently authored a stunning manifesto amplifying his ideas about world economic sovereignty.

    Developing the ‘developing world’

    What happens in the trans-Eurasian financial front will proceed in parallel with a so far little known Chinese development strategy: the Global Development Initiative (GDI), announced by President Xi Jinping at the UN General Assembly last year.

    GDI can be seen as a support mechanism of the overarching strategy – which remains the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), consisting of economic corridors interlinking Eurasia all the way to its western peninsula, Europe.

    At the High-level Dialogue on Global Development, part of the BRICS summit, the Global South learned a little more about the GDI, an organization set up in 2015.

    In a nutshell, the GDI aims to turbo-charge international development cooperation by supplementing financing to a plethora of bodies, for instance the South-South Cooperation Fund, the International Development Association (IDA), the Asian Development Fund (ADF), and the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

    Priorities include “poverty reduction, food security, COVID-19 response and vaccines,” industrialization, and digital infrastructure. Subsequently, a Friends of the GDI group was established in early 2022 and has already attracted over 50 nations.

    BRI and GDI should be advancing in tandem, even as Xi himself made it clear during the BRICS summit that “some countries are politicizing and marginalizing the developmental agenda by building up walls and slapping crippling sanctions on others.”

    Then again, sustainable development is not exactly the G7’s cup of tea, much less NATO’s.

    Seven against the world

    The avowed top aim of the G7 summit in Schloss Elmau at the Bavarian Alps is to “project unity” – as in the stalwarts of the collective west (Japan included) united in sustainable and indefinite “support” for the irretrievably failed Ukrainian state.

    That’s part of the “struggle against Putin’s imperialism,” but then there’s also “the fight against hunger and poverty, health crisis and climate change,” as German chancellor Scholz told the Bundestag.

    In Bavaria, Scholz pushed for a Marshall Plan for Ukraine – a ludicrous concept considering Kiev and its environs might as well be reduced to a puny rump state by the end of 2022. The notion that the G7 may work to “prevent a catastrophic famine,” according to Scholz, reaches a paroxysm of ludicrousness, as the looming famine is a direct consequence of the G7-imposed sanctions hysteria.

    The fact that Berlin invited India, Indonesia, South Africa and Senegal as add-ons to the G7, served as additional comic relief.

    The Tin Curtain is up

    It would be futile to expect from the astonishing collection of mediocrities “united” in Bavaria, under de facto leader of the European Commission (EC), Fuehrer Ursula von der Leyen, any substantial analysis about the breakdown of global supply chains and the reasons that forced Moscow to reduce gas flows to Europe. Instead, they blamed Putin and Xi.

    Welcome to the Tin Curtain – a 21st century reinvention of the Intermarium from the Baltic to the Black Sea, masterminded by the Empire of Lies, complete with western Ukraine absorbed by Poland, the Three Baltic Midgets: Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Czechia and even NATO-aspiring Sweden and Finland, all of whom will be protected from “the Russian threat.”

    An EU out of control

    The role of the EU, lording over Germany, France and Italy inside the G7 is particularly instructive, especially now that Britain is back to the status of an inconsequential island-state.

    As many as 60 European ‘directives’ are issued every year. They must be imperatively transposed into internal law of each EU member-state. In most cases, there’s no debate whatsoever.

    Then there are more than 10,000 European ‘rulings,’ where ‘experts’ at the European Commission (EC) in Brussels issue ‘recommendations’ to every government, straight out of the neoliberal canon, regarding their expenses, their income and ‘reforms’ (on health care, education, pensions) that must be obeyed.

    Thus elections in every single EU member-nation are absolutely meaningless. Heads of national governments – Macron, Scholz, Draghi – are mere executants. No democratic debate is allowed: ‘democracy,’ as with ‘EU values,’ are nothing than smokescreens.

    The real government is exercised by a bunch of apparatchiks chosen by compromise between executive powers, acting in a supremely opaque manner.

    The EC is totally outside of any sort of control. That’s how a stunning mediocrity like Ursula von der Leyen – previously the worst Minister of Defense of modern Germany – was catapulted upwards to become the current EC Fuhrer, dictating their foreign, energy and even economic policy.

    What do they stand for?

    From the perspective of the west, the Tin Curtain, for all its ominous Cold War 2.0 overtones, is merely a starter before the main course: hardcore confrontation across Asia-Pacific – renamed “Indo-Pacific” – a carbon copy of the Ukraine racket designed to contain China’s BRI and GDI.

    As a countercoup, it’s enlightening to observe how the Chinese foreign ministry now highlights in detail the contrast between BRICS – and BRICS+ – and the imperial AUKUS/Quad/IPEF combo.

    BRICS stand for de facto multilateralism; focus on global development; cooperation for economic recovery; and improving global governance.

    The US-concocted racket on the other hand, stands for Cold War mentality; exploiting developing countries; ganging up to contain China; and an America-first policy that enshrines the monopolistic “rules-based international order.”

    It would be misguided to expect those G7 luminaries gathered in Bavaria to understand the absurdity of imposing a price cap on Russian oil and gas exports, for instance. Were that to really happen, Moscow will have no problems fully cutting energy supply to the G7. And if other nations are excluded, the price of the oil and gas they import would drastically increase.

    BRICS paving the way forward

    So no wonder the future is ominous. In a stunning interview to Belarus state TV, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov summarized how “the west fears honest competition.”

    Hence, the apex of cancel culture, and “suppression of everything that contradicts in some way the neoliberal vision and arrangement of the world.” Lavrov also summarized the roadmap ahead, for the benefit of the whole Global South:

    “We don’t need a new G8. We already have structures…primarily in Eurasia. The EAEU is actively promoting integration processes with the PRC, aligning China’s Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian integration plans. Members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are taking a close look at these plans. A number of them are signing free trade zone agreements with the EAEU. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is also part of these processes… There is one more structure beyond the geographic borders of Eurasia.”

    “It is BRICS. This association is relying less and less on the Western style of doing business, and on Western rules for international currency, financial and trade institutions. They prefer more equitable methods that do not make any processes depend on the dominant role of the dollar or some other currency. The G20 fully represents BRICS and five more countries that share the positions of BRICS, while the G7 and its supporters are on the other side of the barricades.”

    …

    “This is a serious balance. The G20 may deteriorate if the West uses it for fanning up confrontation. The structures I mentioned (SCO, BRICS, ASEAN, EAEU and CIS) rely on consensus, mutual respect and a balance of interests, rather than a demand to accept unipolar world realities.”

    Tin Curtain? More like Torn Curtain.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/29/2022 – 00:05

  • EY Valued Israeli Spyware Company NSO At $2.3bn Months Before Emergency Bailout
    EY Valued Israeli Spyware Company NSO At $2.3bn Months Before Emergency Bailout

    Just months before secretive Israeli spyware company NSO Group required an emergency bailout and its equity was declared worthless, Big Four accounting firm EY valued the privacy-invading enterprise at $2.3 billion, the Financial Times has reported: 

    “The EY valuation, more than twice what NSO had been valued at two years earlier, was made by analysts in the firm’s Luxembourg office in July last year, according to documents seen by the Financial Times. The estimate of NSO’s enterprise value was made without visiting the company or verifying the information its analysts had been provided.”

    The valuation by EY—known as Ernst & Young until 2013—came at a time when NSO was facing shrinking revenue, lawsuits, public condemnation and harsh media scrutiny over its Pegasus spyware, which had been used by various governments against activists and journalists. Two female associates of Saudi-slaughtered journalist Jamal Khashoggi were reportedly among those targeted.

    By October, NSO required an emergency $10 million loan. In December—just four months after the $2.3 billion valuation had been finalized by EY in August—creditors informed NSO’s majority stockholders that the firm was insolvent.

    “Pegasus allows operators to clandestinely surveil a suspect’s mobile phone—access contacts and messages, as well as the built-in camera, microphone, and location history,” reported the Epoch Times. Strikingly, the spyware reportedly can be transmitted by sending a link to a phone in a way that creates no notification, and activated without the phone’s owner doing anything at all.

    Earlier this year, Berkeley Research Group, working for NSO’s private equity owners, declared the company’s equity “valueless”  

    On May 31, the Financial Times reported that, with the company in a “financial spiral” and struggling to meet payroll, “foul-mouthed CEO” Shalev Hulio alarmed a group of investors when he said he was contemplating selling the spyware to governments previously flagged as posing “elevated risk” of misusing it. 

    NSO has sold the spyware to dozens of countries, including many authoritarian governments. In addition to the United States and Israel, NSO’s long list of clients reportedly includes Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Mexico, South Africa and India. Last week, NSO said “at least” five European Union governments have purchased its spyware, and that the firm canceled one of the contracts after an EU country misused it.

    NSO founders Shalev Hulio, Niv Karmi and Omri Lavie

    NSO—a name derived from the first names of its founders—Niv Karmi, Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie—says all its sales are subject to the approval of Israel’s defense ministry. The New York Times found several instances in which the sale of Pegasus coincided with the recipient government’s increased support for Israel.

    NSO’s value is under renewed scrutiny, as the firm entertains a spin-off of its core assets to U.S. defense contractor L3Harris. The White House objects to the proposal; the Department of Commerce had earlier barred NSO from doing business with U.S. companies. This month, Moody’s withdrew its rating of NSO’s half-billion dollars of junk bonds, citing “inadequate information.”

    NSO is the target of lawsuits filed by WhatsApp and Apple. WhatsApp, a subsidiary of Meta, says 1,400 users of its encrypted instant messaging and voice-over-IP application were targeted by NSO software.

    In April, NSO asked the Supreme Court to consider an argument that the firm deserved protection from Meta under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which protects foreign governments from civil cases filed by American citizens. Last year, the 9th Circuit rejected that notion by a 3-0 vote. Judge Danielle Forrest wrote:

    “The question presented is whether foreign sovereign immunity protects private companies. The law governing this question has roots extending back to our earliest history as a nation, and it leads to a simple answer—no. Indeed, the title of the legal doctrine itself—foreign sovereign immunity—suggests the outcome.”

    In an interview with a Hebrew-language podcast, NSO founder Lavie blamed anti-semitism for the worldwide backlash against his firm over governments’ use of its spyware against political adversaries, activists and journalists. “We have no way to know what they do with the system,” he said. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to be an intelligence partner.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 23:45

  • Social Media Study Shows Growing DeSantis Boom Among Swing Voters
    Social Media Study Shows Growing DeSantis Boom Among Swing Voters

    Authored by John Ransom via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    An analysis of social media posts shared with The Epoch Times shows growing momentum for Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis as the GOP presidential nominee in 2024 among voters who aren’t solidly in the Trump camp.

    “A sizable portion of the positive discussion (32 percent) speak of him as preferable to Trump,” said the summary analysis of the research paid for by the Ready for Ron Committee—a draft committee that is encouraging DeSantis to run for president.

    “To them, he is the rightful heir and suggest the former president step aside and allow the younger man to run the gauntlet,” the analysis said of the majority of surveyed voters.

    The research, which was conducted by Impact Social, looked at 40,000 “swing” voters on social media and categorized them into ten segments, from “Disillusioned Trump” voters, Obama-turned-Trump voters, to “Bernie Sanders” voters.

    U.S. President Donald Trump and Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis hold a COVID-19 and storm preparedness roundtable in Belleair, Fla., on July 31, 2020. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

    Trump Gets More Traction, But More Attacks Too

    While the name Trump is more prominent on social media than DeSantis, Impact Social reported that Trump-related posts attract more negative sentiment, including among right-leaners who would otherwise favor the GOP in 2024.

    Impact Social analyzed approximately 93,000 posts mentioning Trump and around 8,000 posts mentioning DeSantis made by the swing voters from June 1 to June 14.

    “It is interesting to note that, despite many of these floating voters emanating from the right of the political spectrum, only a relatively small number come to Trump’s defense,” Impact Social said.

    The recent hearings regarding the Jan. 6 breach also haven’t helped Trump among undecided voters. While the hearings have fallen far short of proving that an insurrection occurred in a legal sense, they certainly didn’t burnish the image of the former president.

    “Well, I think in retrospect, I think it would have been very smart to put [Republicans on the committee] and again, I wasn’t involved in it from a standpoint so I never looked at it too closely but I think it would have been good if we had representation,” Trump told conservative radio host Wayne Allen Root earlier this month, blaming Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) for a “bad decision” on declining to put someone on the Jan. 6 House Committee.

    Former President Remains Popular

    U.S. President Donald Trump, daughter Ivanka Trump, and son Donald Trump Jr., make their way to board Air Force One before departing from Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, Ga., on Jan. 4, 2021. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

    Still, Trump remains the odds-on favorite for the GOP nomination, with a recent poll by Quinnipiac showing that 69 percent of Republicans think Trump bears little blame for the Jan. 6 riots.

    Polling continues to show that Trump has a commanding lead against DeSantis, who is not well-known outside of Florida or outside the GOP activists base, even as DeSantis is reported by some to be eating into Trump’s lead as of late.

    A recent Granite State Poll by the University of New Hampshire showed Trump and DeSantis in a statistical dead heat in New Hampshire, more than doubling the DeSantis support since October.

    But as the head of the Ready for Ron Committee, former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins previously told The Epoch Times that it’s doubtful that DeSantis would run against Trump if Trump actually seeks the nomination.

    The committee’s goal isn’t to supplant Trump, but to make sure there is a candidate that can carry on Trump’s legacy if Trump declines to run, is unable to run, or runs into trouble, Rollins said.

    “Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, the United States enjoyed record unemployment, economic stability, safety, and global respect. Many are yearning for a return to these policies and the prosperity good leadership can bring,” Ready for Ron legal counsel and spokeswoman Lilian Rodríguez-Baz told The Epoch Times via video.

    “The era of President Trump was wonderful, but now, since he isn’t currently running, we must get ready for a new leader, we must be Ready for Ron,” Rodríguez-Baz added.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 23:25

  • Debate Ensues After Mysterious Lights Appear Over San Diego
    Debate Ensues After Mysterious Lights Appear Over San Diego

    Residents across San Diego on Monday night reported mysterious lights in the night sky. The unidentifiable lights were spotted south of downtown San Diego. 

    A flood of Twitter users posted pictures and videos of “weird lights” above San Diego. The bizarre footage showed three to six glowing balls of fire hovering in the night sky. 

    Residents across San Diego, parts of Mexico, and even San Clemente reported seeing fireballs over the ocean. 

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    It was reported by local news ABC7 that “there weren’t any commercial or military aircraft on the radar in the area” during the time the fireballs left many San Diegans scratching their heads. 

    The sight was so bizarre that Google searches across the region for “UFO” spiked last night as some thought Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman’s alien invasion was underway. 

    The sight of an alien invasion would’ve made Krugman very happy, though some on Reddit revealed that the fireballs appeared to be flares from military planes flying around the area. 

    “Here is your answer to all those lights in the sky,” said one Redditor. They tweeted a picture of flight tracking website Flightradar24 showing at least two military airplanes, one a Lockheed Martin KC-130, off San Diego’s coast, flying in circles. 

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    Another Redditor snapped one of the clearest pictures of the fireballs from La Jolla, showing what could be military flares. Smoke trails are visible in the top two fireballs, though nothing is confirmed. 

    Similar lights in the night sky spooked San Diegans in August 2018 but were later confirmed as military flare during a training mission 30 miles off the San Diego Coast, according to CBS 8.

    With no confirmation from the military, the internet remains abuzz about last night’s mysterious light show. 

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 23:05

  • The Best Early Recession Indicator
    The Best Early Recession Indicator

    As we approach the end of the first half, it’s safe to say that how the second progresses will likely be determined by whether the US moves into recession or not (and how soon). In regards to this key question, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid writes that those readers looking for lead indicators, the bank’s economists have long believed that continuing claims are the best signal for an imminent slide into recession. In a recent piece, they show how an +11.5% rise above the minimum level over the previous year provides the most accurate and timely signal of recession risks since the data becomes available in the 1960s. It works for each recession and normally leads by around 2 months.

    In this cycle, the current low was 1306k hit on May 20th 2022. So far it’s up less than 1% to 1315k and would need to hit 1456k for the 2-month recessionary countdown clock to start ticking.

    However, as one can can see from the chart below, this isn’t a big pick-up in historical terms so although we’re not trending there at the moment, it wouldn’t take too much to change the picture.

    Indeed one concern is that initial jobless claims are up from a trough of 166k in March to 229k last week. Over time, Reid writes, these two series are very well correlated so this is a big enough move to confirm an imminent recession if continuing claims catch up. However this series is seasonally adjusted and non-seasonally adjusted claims are still bumping along the bottom and DB economist Matt Luzzetti thinks there may be some issues with seasonally adjusting so he wouldn’t yet read anything too significant into the pick-up in SA claims.

    In any case, Thursday 8:30am EST when the weekly claims data is released, is “showtime” each week for the foreseeable future according to Reid.

    Separately, DB’s asset allocation team put out an excellent piece last week (available to professional subscribers) looking at what all the short, medium and long-range US recession indicators are currently telling us. In brief, most that turn down early (6-14 months before a recession) are flashing red, most that warn 1-5 months out are mixed, whereas those that turn late are still mostly showing no signs of recession, however these can often turn only in real time.

    More in the full note available to pro subs.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 22:45

  • BofA Accuses Bed Bath & Beyond Of Cutting AC To Save Money
    BofA Accuses Bed Bath & Beyond Of Cutting AC To Save Money

    Bank of American has accused struggling retailer Bed Bath & Beyond of cutting off air conditioning in stores in order to quickly lower expenses amid a slump in sales.

    Bed Bath & Beyond in Port Chester on Jan. 6 before closing (Mark Vergari / The Journal News)

    The company hit back, however, telling CNN that any changes in store temperature didn’t come from corporate.

    “We’ve been contacted about this report, and to be clear, no Bed Bath & Beyond stores were directed to adjust their air conditioning and there have been no corporate policy changes in regard to utilities usage,” a spokesperson said.

    After conducting in-person store visits, however, BofA analysts reported “mounting concerns” over significant cuts in employee hours, scaled back utilities, reduced operating hours, and remodeling projects which have been canceled.

    What’s more, the company’s rewards program has been scaled back and replaced.

    All of this has led the Bank of America analysts to predict that Bed Bath & Beyon will soon announce more closures, as well as a halt to its Buy Buy Baby stores.

    Meanwhile, analysts at Riley Securities noted that sales promotions have also fallen flat, along with a decrease in store traffic – causing them to reduce their price target from $17 to $7.

    The changes come ahead of the homegoods retailer’s first quarter report, set to be released this week, and follow a devastating report last quarter when sales plunged 22%. Bed Bath & Beyond’s CEO Mark Tritton said the unavailability of certain products caused by supply chain kinks resulted in about $175 million of lost sales during the period.

    Bank of America analysts believe sales will drop another 20% this quarter.
     
    “The company has been underperforming the industry and we think consensus estimates [of an 18% drop in sales] may be optimistic,” they wrote. -CNN
    According to Zacks Equity Research Concensus Estimate for the retailer, Bed Bath & Beyond is expected to report a loss of $1.28 per share, a decline of 2,660% vs. last year.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 22:25

  • Supreme Court Reinstates Louisiana Election Map Disputed By Democrats
    Supreme Court Reinstates Louisiana Election Map Disputed By Democrats

    Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

    The Supreme Court granted an emergency Republican application to reinstate a disputed election map in Louisiana late in the day on June 28, a move that allows the map to remain in place for the next elections.

    In the process, the high court also stayed two lower court rulings that found that the redrawn congressional district boundaries in the map probably violated the federal Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of black voters.

    The court said in the brief unsigned order (pdf) that it would hold off on considering the merits of the case until after it hears and decides a similar dispute from Alabama that is expected to be argued in the court’s new term that begins in October.

    The map was approved by Louisiana state lawmakers in March after they overrode Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’s veto.

    According to a CNN summary, the map kept Republicans’ advantage in five of the Pelican State’s six congressional districts.

    This left only the 2nd district, which runs all the way from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, as the state’s only majority black district and the sole district to favor Democrats. Reportedly, 33 percent of all Louisianans are black.

    The ruling came in Ardoin v. Robinson, court file 21A814. Kyle Ardoin is Louisiana’s Republican secretary of state.

    The emergency application to revive the electoral map was filed with Justice Samuel Alito, who referred the case to the full court.

    The court’s liberal members – Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan – dissented from the new decision but did not provide reasons explaining why.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 22:05

  • "Stage 6" Power Blackouts Hit South Africa Amid Labor Unrest
    “Stage 6” Power Blackouts Hit South Africa Amid Labor Unrest

    South African state power utility Eskom has been hit with labor unrest contributing to widespread blackouts after ten generation units went offline.

    Reuters says Eskom is facing “Stage 6” power cuts that mean most South Africans will experience six hours without power, beginning Tuesday night, one of the worst power crises since 2019. 

    “Three of the 10 generation units that had tripped during the night have been returned to service. This, however, is still insufficient to stave off the implementation of Stage 6 load-shedding,” Eskom said in a statement. 

    Blackouts were caused primarily by “unlawful and unprotected labor action, which has caused widespread disruption to Eskom’s power plants,” the utility said. 

    Since last week, Eskom has enforced “Stage 4” power cuts, shedding 4,000 megawatts (MW) from the national grid. Stage 6 outages mean 6,000 MW will be removed. 

    “The group’s coal-fired power plants are prone to faults, and labor protests are constraining its ability to return units to service,” Reuters said, adding, “the protests started last week after wage talks between Eskom and trade unions, including the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and the National Union of Mineworkers, reached deadlock.” 

    Eskom Chief Executive Andre de Ruyter said the strikes are unlawful because electricity is considered an essential service. A court blocked the strike, though protests still happened anyway, crippling the economy. 

    Bloomberg points out that energy-intensive companies, such as Anglo American Plc and Glencore Plc, which account for 40% of the nation’s electricity consumption, face severe outages and pose a safety risk to workers operating in deep-level mines. 

    Widespread blackouts come as growing concern about South Africa’s faltering economy of lackluster growth, soaring inflation, and high unemployment could unleash a dangerous economic environment known as “stagflation.”  

    People are getting angry. 

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 21:45

  • Gas Prices Squeezing Americans As More Rate Biden's Economy "Poor"
    Gas Prices Squeezing Americans As More Rate Biden’s Economy “Poor”

    By Lydia Saad of Gallup

    Two-thirds of Americans say recent increases in the price of gas are causing them hardship, which is up from 52% feeling this financial pinch in April. Although more Americans say they are experiencing “moderate” rather than “severe” hardship, the percentage describing the hardship as severe has risen from 14% to 22%.

    The latest results are based on a June 1-20 Gallup survey. The 67% experiencing hardship is among the highest levels Gallup has found when asking this question at other times of rising gas prices since 2000. The last time it was at this level was in May 2011.

    Americans’ reaction to gas prices reflects the relatively sharp increase in pump prices this year, rising by nearly a dollar a gallon in recent months and now averaging close to $5.00 per gallon nationally. Americans were paying just over $2.00 a gallon, on average, at the start of 2021.

    Experiencing hardship due to gas prices is, naturally, strongly related to household income.

    • Eight in 10 adults in lower-income households — those earning less than $40,000 per year — say the rise in gas prices has caused them financial hardship, with 40% saying it has been severe.

    • Nearly as many households making between $40,000 and $99,999 — 73% — report a hardship, although just 20% say it has been severe.

    • Half of households earning $100,000 or more report a hardship due to gas prices, with 12% calling it severe.

    Majorities Say Summer Driving and Vacations Being Affected

    More than six in 10 Americans say the price of gas has caused them to drive less this summer than they might have otherwise. This exceeds the percentages reporting they were curtailing their driving at other times of high gas prices, including in 2000, 2001, 2004, 2005 and 2018. Gallup did not ask this question during the period of high gas prices in 2008.

    Fifty-five percent of Americans also say the price of gas is causing them to alter their summer vacation plans. The one time Gallup asked this previously, in May 2005, 46% reported altering their plans. At the same time, slightly fewer than now, 59%, said rising gas prices were causing financial hardship.

    Gallup Economic Confidence Index Now Lowest Since 2009

    As gas prices have become more burdensome for Americans, their view of the U.S. economy has continued to dim, as indicated by Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index (ECI). The index, which is a summary of Americans’ ratings of current economic conditions and outlook for the economy, has sunk 13 points over the past month to -58. The index has a theoretical range from +100 if all respondents describe the economy in positive terms and think it’s improving to -100 if all describe it in negative terms and think it’s worsening.

    Today’s -58 ECI score represents a substantially negative skew in public opinion about the economy and is the lowest measured since a -64 reading in February 2009. At the time, the country was still embroiled in the 2007-2009 recession and confidence was starting to recover after hitting the all-time low of -72 in October 2008.

    The latest drop in Gallup’s ECI score reflects harsher assessments of the economy on both aspects of the index:

    • The percentage of Americans calling current conditions “poor” has risen eight percentage points in June to 54% — the first time a majority has called conditions poor since 2009. Just 11% say conditions are “good” and 34% “only fair.” Less than 1% describe them as “excellent.”

    • A striking 85% in June say the economy is getting worse, up from 77% in May and only two points shy of the record high on this, from June 2008.

    Perceptions of Nation’s Most Important Problem Are Steady

    Currently, 40% of U.S. adults mention some aspect of the economy when asked to name the country’s chief problem, including 18% mentioning the high cost of living or inflation and 5% citing gas prices explicitly. Another 13% say the economy in general is the top problem, and 1% say it’s the “recession” among a handful of other aspects of the economy mentioned by no more than 1% for each.

    A unique aspect of Americans’ current attitudes about the nation is that their top-of-mind mentions of the economy are not nearly as high as would be expected from their explicit ratings that compose the ECI.

    While up sharply from 23% a year ago and 19% in June 2020, current net economic mentions are far below the 70% and higher level seen in 2008 and 2009, when economic confidence was similar to or just slightly worse than today. Fewer name economic problems today than did so between 2010 and 2014, when economic confidence was significantly better than it is now.

    The top-named noneconomic problem is the government, cited by 18% of Americans, which ties with inflation as the top-named specific problem overall. The government has consistently ranked among the top two mentions since 2016.

    Eight percent this month, up from 1% in May, mention guns or gun control as the most important problem facing the country, reflecting Americans’ focus on the issue in the aftermath of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. This is the highest percentage mentioning guns since August 2019, after back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

    Another 2% this month mention school shootings, bringing overall concern about gun violence to 10%. That is close to the record-high 13% recorded in March 2018, following the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting.

    Other noneconomic issues mentioned by at least 3% of Americans include crime (6%), immigration (5%), lack of unity in the country (5%), ethical/moral decline (4%), race relations (3%) and poverty/homelessness (3%).

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 21:25

  • Get Woke, Go Broke: Hollywood Is Dying And They Deserve It
    Get Woke, Go Broke: Hollywood Is Dying And They Deserve It

    Hollywood is dying, their various partners are dying, and they brought it on themselves.  The entertainment and corporate news industry has long had a cringe inducing leftist bias, but for many years their propaganda and their motivations remained comparatively subtle.  Then, something happened.  Maybe it was the election of Donald Trump, maybe it was a unified decision within corporate culture to take the mask completely off and reveal the true ugliness underneath, or, maybe it was just pure arrogance.  Whatever the cause, Hollywood and all the related appendages of the tinsel town religion suddenly turned openly militant and the zealotry was palpable.  

    This is a dynamic that had been developing for some time, but truly became an international phenomena around 2016 onward.  It’s important to note that also around this same time there was a burgeoning revelation among conservatives and many moderates that our popular culture had been overrun by people with an agenda, and they did not have our best intentions at heart.  We had been lax in our vigilance.  Many thought that pop culture was “stuff for children” and that the real fight was in politics.  They were wrong.   

    The first group that really took notice and spoke up was video game consumers.  This led to open opposition to leftists hijacking the industry and spreading like a cancer into video games journalism.  And, of course, as soon as people expressed distrust the leftists attacked them as “racists, homophobes, bigots, sexists and misogynists.”  A typical gaslighting response that is all too familiar today.  Known as “Gamergate,” leftists to this day still rabidly froth at the mouth over the mere mention of “integrity in video games journalism.”  Leftists really hate it when you expose them.   

    There have been many other moments of exposure since 2016, from the negative reactions to Comicsgate, feminist Ghostbusters, feminist Star Wars, woke Star Trek, woke Dr. Who, woke Batwoman, woke He-Man, woke Lord of the Rings, critical race theory in television, trans, LGBT and CRT propaganda in children’s programming, etc.  It’s becoming endless.  Around 95% of all popular entertainment contains multiple layers of leftist messaging.  The market is utterly saturated with it.

    This kind of overwhelming propaganda is familiar.  It is a methodology used in communist regimes and authoritarian governments throughout the 20th century including the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, and it almost slipped right under the noses of the majority of Americans and western nations.  The goal is simple:  Make EVERYTHING political.  

    Want to escape the real world for a couple of hours into a fantasy land?  Want to see daring tales of classical heroes and villains?  Want to experience history as it actually happened, or at least very close to the historical record?  Are you looking for an archetypal experience, a mythological exploration of the human mind or the human heart – something that almost anyone could relate to?  Sorry, you’re not allowed to escape.  You’re not allowed to examine universal ideas and ideals.  Every single story must be told within the narcissistic framework (or prison) of modern political ideology.  Even in stories set a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.

    The extreme political left wants you to think about their beliefs and viewpoints all day everyday.  They want you to assume that their ideology is the ONLY ideology.  They want you to assume that the “majority” of the population thinks as they think.  It’s called manufacturing consensus.

    The problem is, the public is aware of the agenda and they are looking for the subliminal and not-so-subliminal messages.  They see the narratives and they are getting sick and tired of it.  Thus, the mantra of “Get Woke, Go Broke” was born.  

    The more the leftists in media double down on inserting their politics into every single product, the more broke they get.  Case in point, the continuing decline of the largest media entities in the world.  

    The streaming giant Netflix is now imploding, with a multitude of failed woke projects, the company is dealing with a recent subscriber loss of 200,000 and a projected subscriber loss of over 2 million by next month.  The company actually began to falter last year, despite covid lockdowns in many states that should have encouraged people to buy into streaming services as a means to deal with boredom.  Beyond that, the Netflix stock price collapsed from almost $700 a share to $190 a share in less than six months.   

    The company will never openly admit it, but woke programming is mostly to blame.  Netflix released an internal memo to employees last month indicating that they would be producing more content for consumers of differing political views and even suggested that any employee that has a problem with that should quit.  A major problem within woke companies is the attitude of low level, low value and low intelligence employees thinking that they should be in charge.  Now it appears that Netflix is trying to clean house, with hundreds of people fired in the past couple of weeks.  But, it’s too little too late.       

    Disney is another huge example that Get Woke, Go Broke is becoming a social rule.  The company is rife with leftist cultism to the point that it avidly defended the sexualization of children in public schools.  Disney’s attacks on Florida and its stated goal of disrupting the legally ratified and widely supported Anti-Grooming Bill has revealed the disgusting underbelly of the conglomerate for all to see.  Disney wants your kids to be exposed to sexual discussions and mentally ill teachers looking for psychological validation.  

    When you target people’s kids, even the normies start to take notice.  

    Disney has now suffered multiple box office flops and streaming network failures, from Ms. Marvel, to Obi-Wan Kenobi to Lightyear, the media giant is crumbling.  You can only put so many CRT and LGBT messages into your movies before it starts to add up to box office poison.  And, you can’t declare fealty to the leftist agenda as a company and then expect the majority of Americans, who are not extreme leftists, to give you their hard earned money.

    Disney’s stock price has collapsed this past year from $200 down to $90.  The company is currently relying on continued traffic through its theme parks to sustain it, but with gas prices inflating to record highs it is unlikely that park revenues and tourist dollars will continue to levitate.  

    One movie that did do extremely well this year from every angle including from a budget standpoint was Top Gun: Maverick.  Tom Cruise’s love letter to fans of the original film had a budget of $170 million and has grossed over $1 billion globally so far, crushing every other competing film including Disney’s woke film ‘Lightyear.’  With zero leftist propaganda injected into the Maverick story and a perfect balance of fan appreciation and nostalgia, proponents of the war against the woke cult have been proven correct.  Audiences want nothing to do with progressive politics in their entertainment.  It is a fact.

    What leftists seem to have forgotten is they don’t own the consumer.   They can pump out an endless array of woke media, but they can’t force the public to buy their products.  We own them.  They are the consumer’s bitch.  Activism in entertainment might be viable at times, but the market has spoken when it comes to “woke,” and the market says no. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 21:05

  • Over 100 Georgia Sheriffs Condemn Democratic Gubernatorial Challenger Over 'Defund The Police'
    Over 100 Georgia Sheriffs Condemn Democratic Gubernatorial Challenger Over ‘Defund The Police’

    Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A total of 102 sheriffs in Georgia have joined Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican who is seeking a second term, in a statement condemning Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams over her support of “soft-on-crime policies.”

    Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams speaks to the media during a press conference at the Israel Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 24, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

    The statement, released on June 27, also criticized Abrams for “advancing the Defund the Police movement” with her position as a board member at the Marguerite Casey Foundation, a Seattle-based grant-making group, which the sheriffs called an “anti-police organization.”

    “Stacey Abrams has repeatedly shown complete disdain for law enforcement and the risk we take every day putting our lives on the line to serve our communities,” the sheriffs wrote.

    “Ms. Abrams actively serves on the governing board of—and has profited from—an anti-police organization which openly advocates for abolishing prisons and stripping local police departments of their funding,” they added.

    Georgia’s governor race is a rematch between Kemp and Abrams. In 2018, Kemp edged Abrams by 54,723 votes with over 3.9 million voters casting a vote. This year, Kemp defeated former Sen. David Perdue to win the GOP nomination.

    So far it has been a tight race between the two candidates. According to a recent poll from Easter Carolina University’s Center for Survey Research, Kemp led Abrams 50 percent to 45 percent. The poll surveyed 868 registered voters in Georgia from June 6 to June 9.

    Abrams became a board member of the foundation in May 2021. Less than a month later, she was one of the board members supporting the foundation’s roll-out of an anti-police initiative.

    The foundation’s 2020 financial filing (pdf), available on its website, shows that it has given grants to groups including the Movement for Black Lives and Louisville Community Bail Fund.

    The foundation is vocal in its support for the #AbolishthePolice and #DefundthePolice movements, as evidenced by the frequent mention of the two Twitter hashtags on its social media account. One recent example involved a post promoting the foundation’s book event.

    “Stacey Abrams also supports proposals that put criminals back on our streets and clears their criminal record, and she opposed legislation to crack down on human trafficking when she served in the state legislature,” the sheriffs added.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 20:45

  • Houseboats Trapped On Lake Mead As Water Levels Fall Closer To "Dead Pool" Status 
    Houseboats Trapped On Lake Mead As Water Levels Fall Closer To “Dead Pool” Status 

    Lake Mead’s water levels are plunging so fast that houseboats on the nation’s largest reservoir are getting stuck because there’s not enough water in some parts. 

    One houseboat was stranded for three weeks after the water quickly dropped earlier this month. Thankfully, YouTubers — Sin City Outdoors of Las Vegas and HeavyDSparks of Salt Lake City — came out with a military jet boat and documented when they pulled the beached houseboat back into the water. 

    Dave Sparks and his team arrived Thursday and secured permission from the National Park Service to conduct the recovery operation of the houseboat. 

    Persistent drought conditions have pushed Lake Mead to the lowest point since the artificial reservoir was filled nearly a century ago. Water levels have been falling this year, down to 1,043 feet above sea level — and 148 feet from “dead pool,” which is the point water would no longer pass through Hoover Dam to supply California, Arizona, and Mexico. 

    A graph might not do justice to visualizing just how fast the water level has fallen. So here are three pictures of a sunken speedboat in the lake and the corresponding date. Just in May, the boat was partially submerged. Now there’s no water. 

    Other YouTubers have headed to Lake Mead as well because they know the apocalyptic scenes of a dried-out lake would generate views. 

    Here’s more footage of Lake Mead — maybe the body of water (or whatever is left) should be called Desert Mead. 

    “As the lake continues to fall the Lake Mead Marina finds itself in a very serious situation. Can it be moved farther out? Other Marinas have already been closed and some of the harbors look like the apocalypse,” YouTuber The Other Me said. 

    Some say it could only be a matter of weeks before boat ramps become inaccessible.  

    North America’s largest artificial reservoir appears to be in deep trouble. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 20:25

  • FBI Raids Home Of Retired Texas Couple Who Attended Jan. 6 Capitol Rally
    FBI Raids Home Of Retired Texas Couple Who Attended Jan. 6 Capitol Rally

    Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A retired Texas couple said FBI agents busted through the gate of their rural home, threw flashbangs, handcuffed them, and trained lasers on them before searching their home for evidence connected to the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol.

    Protesters are seen at rally at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

    Lora DeWolfe and Darrel Kennemer, who live on seven acres near San Marcos, Texas, told The Epoch Times they attended the Jan. 6 rally at the Capitol but did nothing wrong. They believe the FBI mistakenly identified Kennemer as someone else.

    The FBI didn’t arrest them, they said. Agents eventually produced a search warrant saying Kennemer was suspected of “assaulting, resisting or impeding” officers and “entering restricted building or grounds.”

    Both said they went no further than the Capitol steps on Jan. 6 and did not harm anyone or damage anything. They said the allegation of assault was false, and the FBI kept showing Kennemer a blurry photo of a man who looked similar but wasn’t Kennemer.

    Darrel Kennemer speaks to an officer on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington D.C. (Photo courtesy of Lora DeWolfe)

    “I vacillate between feeling mad and helpless,” DeWolfe said. “I was really sad. We just wanted an honest election.”

    “They’re corrupt, and they’re trying to scare us,” Kennemer said, adding he feels the FBI targeted him for just being at the rally.

    Raid Before Dawn

    Their ordeal began when their gate alarm woke them up in the pre-dawn hours of June 22, DeWolfe said. At first, they thought a deer had tripped the alarm, but DeWolfe got up and saw a white car. Kennemer got his AR-15 rifle and went outside, not knowing what to expect, she said.

    “I’m seeing one single white vehicle moving pretty fast, and I was thinking someone’s going to die,” Kennemer said.

    FBI officers got out of the white vehicle and told Kennemer, who had his rifle up in the air, to drop his weapon. He kept his rifle and asked the FBI to show him a warrant. Kennemer said someone threw a flash-bang at him repeatedly because he wouldn’t drop his weapon at first.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 20:05

  • Japanese Businessman Loses Entire City's Personal Data After Passing Out Drunk On A Tuesday Night
    Japanese Businessman Loses Entire City’s Personal Data After Passing Out Drunk On A Tuesday Night

    Who hasn’t gone all out for the random Tuesday night bender and hit the sake a little too hard after a tough start to the work week? Plenty of us.

    When narrowing down that field to the workers who have also passed out on the street and lost a flash drive containing the personal information of nearly 500,000 people, the herd thins out a little bit. 

    But according to Vice, that’s exactly what happened to one Japanese businessman in his 40s this past week. He ventured out for drinks in Osaka prefecture’s industrial Amagasaki city before waking up, hours later, on the street.

    His bag – containing his USB drive with the sensitive information he was carrying around – was missing. The drive was encrypted, the report says, and contained the personal data of Amagasaki’s 465,177 residents.

    Photo: Vice

    Among the information included about the residents was dates of birth, addresses, bank account numbers, and tax details. The man was working for a company called BIPROGY, who was hired by the local government to seek out who was eligible for tax exemptions. 

    The company put out a statement this week, telling the local press: “We deeply apologize to the citizens of Amagasaki, the city of Amagasaki, and all concerned for the inconvenience caused by the loss of important information entrusted to us.”

    The drive was eventually found on Friday, but not before angering many of the city’s residents. The local city office received more than 30,000 calls in one day related to the incident, the report says. 

    And who says there’s no happy endings? Vice, citing NHK, said the employee found his bag and the drive “near an apartment building he vaguely recalls passing by during his night out”. 

    If you think Tuesday’s bender was bad, just wait for the weekend…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 19:45

  • The Biden Administration Hits Peak Energy Absurdity
    The Biden Administration Hits Peak Energy Absurdity

    Authored by Anne Bradbury via RealClear Energy (emphasis ours),

    Methane Fee, Windfall Profits Taxes, Repealing IDCs, calls for FTC investigations into price gouging, and now a federal gasoline tax suspension. The Administration’s energy policy is disjointed and often counterproductive. Rather than flailing attacks on the oil and natural gas industry, leaders in Washington need a serious energy strategy that embraces all of America’s energy resources, including oil and natural gas. 

    (Eli Hartman/Odessa American via AP)

    In addition to these problematic legislative proposals, there are numerous concerning policies currently being implemented across the agencies.  The Administration is shutting down and blocking pipelines, greatly restricting oil and natural gas leasing on federal lands, slow walking LNG export permits, and issuing sweeping climate disclosure rules to discourage investment in the industry.

    These bad policies do nothing to address skyrocketing inflation and are having a real effect on the President’s approval rating, putting him at low that few presidents have experienced.

    Lest you dismiss this as partisan politics, let’s take a look back at the Obama White House’s statement on gasoline prices:

    “The truth is that there is no silver bullet to address rising gas prices in the short term, but there are steps we can take to ensure the American people don’t fall victim to skyrocketing gas prices over the long term.  That’s why since taking office the President has been focused on a sustained, ‘all-of-the-above’ approach to developing new domestic energy sources, expanding oil and gas production, and reducing our reliance on foreign oil…”

    The Obama White House advocated for an energy approach that included oil and natural gas, rather than spreading false narratives and pointing fingers.  They also knew the importance of domestic production, as they continued to hold federal lease sales for oil and gas development.  They looked to domestic producers to increase supply – rather than actively seeking foreign nations, like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, to produce more to meet our energy needs in America. 

    In contrast, the Biden Administration has not embraced an “all-of-the-above” approach. Instead, they continue to make confusing statements to the markets and the American people about role of domestic energy production:

    • “Let me answer your question very directly: President Biden remains absolutely committed to not moving forward with additional drilling on public lands.” (Gina McCarthy, April 2022). 

    • “We have to put the industry on notice: You’ve got six years, eight years, no more than 10 years or so, within which you’ve got to come up with a means by which you’re going to capture [emissions], and if you’re not capturing, then we have to deploy alternative sources of energy.” (Secretary John Kerry, April 2022).

    • “Oil prices are decreasing, gas prices should too…. Oil and gas companies shouldn’t pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.” (President Joe Biden, March 2022)

    The world knows that oil and gas producers do not set the price of gasoline. The price of gasoline is determined by the price of crude oil, which is set on the global market based on supply, demand, and costs.  Prices are also affected by policies and promises – like  those the Administration has been pursing since the election.  Promises that sounded good during a campaign, like “no new fracking on federal lands” and “a transition to renewables.”  But, campaign pledges don’t always equal good policy.  The past two years have shown us that the Administration’s rhetoric, policies, and finger pointing has not created unity, and no one is better off paying $5/gallon to get to and from work. 

    The answer is working together – with the oil and natural gas industry – on implementing the policies needed to bring down the cost of energy for the American people:

    • Lease federal lands and waters

    • Build necessary pipelines to transport oil and natural gas 

    • Encourage investment and access to capital 

    • Relieve supply chain bottlenecks  

    The 8.6 percent overall inflation is quickly approaching what Americans faced in the 1979 energy crisis during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, when prices climbed 11.4 percent, and the Carter Administration imposed gasoline rationing and wage-price controls. 

    Arnold Weber, the former director of the Nixon Cost of Living Council referred to President Carter’s anti-inflation policies and efforts to sell them to the American people as a “sort of decoy operation … creating the illusion of involvement and action without creating the basis for action.”

    We urge the Biden Administration to acknowledge the essential role of oil and natural gas for decades to come and focus on serious policy solutions that increase supply and help bring down energy prices. American families deserve more than the illusion of action when it comes to energy.

    *  *  *

    Anne Bradbury is CEO of the American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC) whose membership is composed of America’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production companies.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 19:25

  • West Coast Rail Networks Clogged As Supply Chain Normalization Delayed
    West Coast Rail Networks Clogged As Supply Chain Normalization Delayed

    The key question is when supply chain congestion eases in the US. The question to that answer is not yet, as a new Bloomberg report shows the US’ largest containerized seaport in Los Angeles and Long Beach in Southern California (responsible for 42% of all containerized trade with Asia) has been hit with worsening rail delays.

    Dwell times for rail-bound containers have been steadily increasing since February and are back to levels not seen since the major port bottlenecks of summer 2021. 

    The Port of Los Angeles has recently enlisted help from the White House to clear a backlog of rail-bound containers that’s tripled since February, taking up space on its docks and causing congestion. As of Monday, there were more than 28,000 rail-container units on the ground, about two-thirds of which had been waiting to be picked up for nine days or more. -Bloomberg

    Increasing rail congestion comes as thousands of dockworker contracts across the West Coast are about to expire following unsuccessful negotiations between labor unions and major railroads. 

    If dockworkers or railroad workers strike, normalizing supply chains would be delayed. There’s also the risk of China’s reopening, and the backlog of goods headed in containers for US West Coast ports could further snarl supply chains. 

    Bloomberg also outlines that trucking woes and lack of warehouse space exacerbate bottlenecks for rail networks. 

    Trucking

    More than half of the truck gates at the Port of Los Angeles are still going unused on average due in part to the inconsistent staffing and operation hours at the terminals and distribution centers outside of the port, on top of the lack of space at warehouses.

    Moving about 70% of the US’s freight tonnage, truckers don’t feel encouraged to go in during off-peak hours because parts of the supply chain often don’t operate around the clock, said Matt Schrap, chief executive officer of the Harbor Trucking Association. Before the bottlenecks emerged, truckers could pick up containers in the early morning and then store them at truck yards until space opened up at warehouses. But these sites are now “full of empty containers and chassis, and land has become an extreme premium.”

    “More trucks aren’t going to necessarily solve the thing — it’s a productivity issue,” Schrap said in an interview.

    Warehousing 

    The vacancy rate at Southern California facilities is now around 0.3%, with the lack of availability particularly acute in the Inland Empire counties of Riverside and San Bernardino, Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka said at a virtual meeting of harbor commissioners last week. During normal times, the vacancy rate stood as high as 5%, he added.

    “We can’t build these facilities fast enough, and even though we boast 2 billion square feet from the shores of the Pacific now out to the desert region of Southern California, we’ve got to turn that cargo out faster and have enough space under roof to manage all of these consumer and manufacturing products,” he said at a separate briefing earlier this month.

    The West Coast bottleneck appears to be building inland, in rail, trucking, and warehousing networks — adding to increasing delays as the supply chain congestion shows little signs of abating.  

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 19:05

  • How The Qualities Of Bitcoin Baffle Nocoiners
    How The Qualities Of Bitcoin Baffle Nocoiners

    Authored by Rowdy Yates via BitcoinMagazine.com,

    Traditionally, hard money has the two main qualities of autonomy and correlated-redeemability, but bitcoin has the former without the latter…

    WHAT’S IT BACKED BY?

    One of the most common criticisms from nocoiners remains, “But bitcoin isn’t backed by anything.”

    This criticism targets bitcoin’s dearth of a quality that I term “correlated-redeemability.”

    The most common rejoinder to this criticism is, “Your U.S. dollar isn’t backed by anything either.”

    The problem with this factually correct response is that it misses a deeper point.

    The deeper point is that while bitcoin lacks one traditional quality of hard money (correlated-redeemability), it possesses the primary but less visible quality of hard money: autonomy.

    This article is meant to explore the scope of autonomy, how it came to be overshadowed by correlated-redeemability and the relative value of these historically tandem qualities of hard currencies.

    A TALE OF TWO QUALITIES

    Traditional hard money has had two qualities: correlated-redeemability and autonomy. The first is easier to understand. Conceptually, correlated-redeemability is the quality of a currency that facilitates a rapid redemption for a stable amount of a commodity (traditionally a tangible one). Precious metal coinage illustrates how easily this quality can be understood. If someone pays for your labor with a gold coin, you exchange your unit of labor for a scarce metal that you can hold in your hand. Paper notes backed by precious metals are marginally more abstract, but because of historic exchange practices, they had concrete manifestations. Consider the U.S. government’s silver certificates, issued until the 1960s, which allowed mere plebs to exchange paper notes for genuine silver. The physical nature of correlated-redeemability helps make it cognitively accessible for the broader public.

    By contrast, a currency’s autonomy is considerably more abstract. Conceptually, currency autonomy is a quality that exists on a spectrum and reduces a sovereign’s capacity to manipulate the currency in a material way — think: inflation and debasement. Practically speaking, we can think of autonomy as the aggregation of barriers — tiny or big, physical or psychological — that put a check on schemes to manipulate the currency.

    THE SPECTRUM OF AUTONOMY

    As with any abstract idea, a parable can be a useful means of visualizing. Let’s imagine three sovereigns: Nayib, sovereign of a country that uses only bitcoin; Ike, sovereign of a country that uses only gold coinage; and Dick, sovereign of a country using a pure fiat currency.

    Nayib might want to increase his spending beyond tax revenue. However, he cannot increase the supply of bitcoin beyond what is written in the code. Additionally, Nayib does not automatically benefit from any expansion of the money supply unless he engages in successful, capital-intensive, proof-of-work mining. The net result: if Nayib tries to buy a G3 jet with deficit spending, the Gulfstream Corporation will have to accept an IOU instead of bitcoin. Nayib’s currency has high autonomy and only attenuated, uncorrelated-redeemability.

    Ike wants to be a profligate spender, but is constrained. If Ike’s expenses exceed his tax revenue, he has options, but none of them can be pursued in a cavalier manner. First, Ike can clip coins; as his administration comes into contact with coins, they can physically trim the edges and use the scraps to cast more coins. The upside is that this option isn’t terribly labor intensive. The downside is that even the blind of Ike’s country can detect the scheme. Second option: Ike can debase the metal of the coins. To do this, Ike needs to aggregate gold coins, schlep them to a furnace, mix gold with cheaper metals and mint newly-debased coins. This option is considerably more labor intensive, and by involving more coconspirators, the plot is increasingly subject to detection. With either option, Ike also has a psychological barrier, namely, he knows he is breaking the law regulating his own coinage. A third option is mining more gold ore to mint new coins. This third option has no psychological barrier, but it is the most labor-intensive of the three options. Ike’s currency has intermediate autonomy and immediate, correlated-redeemability — the qualities of traditional hard money.

    Dick is also a profligate spender, but as we all know he is not constrained. Dick’s country uses a fiat currency, so of course Dick just needs to have his treasurer hit the money-printing button, and the deficit is solved (at least in the short term). Additionally, because this is the nature of fiat currencies, Dick’s actions are perfectly legal, so he doesn’t even face psychological stigma for his actions. At the end of the day, there is no significant short-term cost to what Dick has done, and because of that low cost, the temptation for Dick to hit “CTRL P” remains quite high in perpetuity. Dick’s currency has de minimis autonomy and attenuated, uncorrelated-redeemability.

    This is the spectrum of currency autonomy: bitcoin > gold coinage > fiat.

    WHY IS REDEEMABILITY AN ELUSIVE CONCEPT?

    Prior to European voyages to Australia, a European would be forgiven if they believed that all mammals (animal species with lactating mothers) gave birth to live young. At the time, every mammal known to Europeans gave birth to live young. After Australian fauna became broadly known, the platypus threw a wrench into the paradigms of European biologists because the platypus is a species with lactating mothers, but the mothers laid eggs in lieu of live births. Once a real-world counterexample became available, it was relatively easy for biologists to disentangle traditionally tandem qualities of lactation and live births and then clearly identify the proper distinguishing characteristic of mammals to wit: lactating mothers.

    Prior to bitcoin, you would also be forgiven if you believed that all hard money must have correlated-redeemability. At the time, every traditional hard currency had the quality, e.g., gold coins, Yap stones, sea shells. After bitcoin, a wrench was thrown into the paradigm of hard money because bitcoin had autonomy without correlated-redeemability. With this real-world counterexample, we can now disentangle the traditionally tandem qualities of autonomy and correlated-redeemability and clearly identify the proper distinguishing characteristic of hard money to wit: autonomy.

    This history sheds light on why discussions of hard money have neglected autonomy and focused on correlated-redeemability. Historically, currency holders associated hard money with its most patent characteristics: the tactile and visible features of the correlated commodity. Autonomy by contrast, remained in the shadows, quietly checking schemes to manipulate the currency. To the extent autonomy was considered at all, it was probably only considered by sovereigns as an annoyance to their debasement plans.

    THE ENDOGENOUS VALUE OF AUTONOMY

    There is an inherent problem with valuing correlated-redeemability because this value is downstream of the integrity of the underlying monetary system. For example, if Ike debases his country’s coinage, a shop owner who is owed a single gold coin has his correlated-redeemability reduced in direct proportion to Ike’s debasement. If the shop owner receives a coin with 50% less gold, the shop owner’s correlated-redeemability for that precious commodity has been reduced by 50%. Therefore, correlated-redeemability has no endogenous value; the holders of commodities can always debase the commodities they custody.

    By contrast, autonomy’s value is endogenous. All things being equal, the more difficulty a schemer has in debasing the currency, the less the system will debase, therefore, autonomy tends to bolster monetary integrity and this is the value of autonomy, i.e., autonomy is upstream of monetary integrity. In the case of bitcoin, the autonomy of the currency prevents debasement from schemers and ensures integrity over time. In the case of gold coinage, the currency’s autonomy can strengthen monetary integrity and bolster correlated-redeemability, but the reverse is not true.

    BE PRECISE IN YOUR SPEECH

    Marduk, the ancient god of Babylon, derived his mythic powers from the ability to see clearly and speak magic words. The importance of identifying, naming and analyzing the qualities of hard money cannot be understated. This process is critical not only because it clarifies our understanding of hard money (seeing clearly), but also because it sharpens our verbal toolkit in the process (speaking clearly). Without a rhetorical means to decouple correlated-redeemability from hard money, “What’s it backed by?” remains an elusive critique to rebut, hollow though it may be.

    Bitcoiners intuitively understand the value proposition of autonomy, but this understanding is generally implicit. An explicit understanding of currency autonomy accelerates Bitcoiners’ capacity to educate and persuade nocoiners on the merits of bitcoin — the hardest extant money. Experience makes this point self-evident; reflect back on how many times you’ve had remarkable thoughts, but you lacked the words to articulate those thoughts until a meme, film or wordsmith came along and smashed the rhetorical barrier for you. A prime example of this rhetorical power is the “pill” parlance from “The Matrix” creators. Terms like “red pill,” “blue pill” and of course, “orange pill” allow you to describe a very cumbersome and abstract notion in a clear and precise way. Even if someone has never seen “The Matrix,” you can walk the newbie through the plot lines and still make your point. The cumbersome notions underpinning hard money pose similar difficulties. Through the use of anecdotes, a sharpened verbal toolkit and a clear understanding of hard money, Bitcoiners can shift the focus from correlated-redeemability to currency autonomy and push the dialogue forward.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 18:45

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Jun 28

Today’s News 28th June 2022

  • "Suitcases Full Of Drug Money": Credit Suisse Found Criminally Guilty in Money-Laundering Case Tied to Cocaine Ring
    “Suitcases Full Of Drug Money”: Credit Suisse Found Criminally Guilty in Money-Laundering Case Tied to Cocaine Ring

    Another day, another dismal development for the 2nd largest (but most damned) Swiss bank.

    On Monday, Credit Suisse Group was convicted of failing to prevent money laundering by a Bulgarian cocaine trafficker, in the first ever criminal conviction of a major Swiss bank in the country’s history. The verdict, in which a former relationship manager at the bank was also convicted on money laundering charges, was handed down by Switzerland’s top criminal court on Monday afternoon.

    The former employee, who prosecutors said regularly accepted suitcases of cash from one of the ring members that went beyond allowed limits, was given a 20-month suspended sentence. A person from another bank and two members of the crime ring were also found guilty of money-laundering charges. 

    There was a silver lining, as the penalty was purely token: Credit Suisse will be fined two million Swiss francs ($2.1 million) over “certain historical organizational inadequacies”,  or about how much the cocaine trafficker spent on hookers in one trip to Switzerland to deposit his drug money with Credit Suisse.

    Money aside, the decision is another blow to the tarnished reputation of Credit Suisse, which had argued the crimes date to an era when compliance standards were less stringent. It has been struggling with a series of scandals that have sent its shares to near-record lows, and may face a second criminal indictment in an unrelated case later this year.

    As Bloomberg notes, the case was criticized by Credit Suisse for having been brought so many years after the events in question. The bank expressed its “astonishment” in late 2020 when Swiss prosecutors publicly charged it with money laundering offenses, given the alleged crimes took place between 2004 and 2008.

    The court said Credit Suisse made it possible for the crime ring to launder money through the bank between July 2007 and December 2008 by failing to adequately monitor its accounts and make sure the business complied with anti-money-laundering rules. The crime ring allegedly recruited a Bulgarian wrestler and others in his orbit for operations transporting drugs and laundering money.

    Credit Suisse said in a pre-trial statement that it “unreservedly rejects as meritless all allegations in this legacy matter raised against it and is convinced that its former employee is innocent.” It also said previously that outside lawyers and consultants had reviewed its systems against money laundering and found its organizational setup was “correct and appropriate” in the period being probed.

    Prosecutors initially charged the bank with deficiencies between 2004 and 2008 but had to narrow the time frame because too much time had passed. Under Swiss law, local prosecutors can press criminal charges against banks if they believe those institutions didn’t do enough to screen clients and their cash for obvious ties to illicit activity. The former Credit Suisse manager, a woman who can only be named as E. under Swiss reporting restrictions, accepted deposits of used bank notes that regularly exceeded 500,000 euros ($528,650) at a time, according to the 515-page indictment.

    Cash deposits were very common given the parlous state of Bulgaria’s banks at the time, she said in testimony. Her lawyer also said she wasn’t sufficiently trained by the bank, and will appeal.

    The conviction hits Credit Suisse as it tries to turn a corner on financial losses and other scandals, including more than $5 billion in losses related to the collapse of family office Archegos Capital Management. 

    Credit Suisse said it would appeal the decision. It noted that the alleged offenses date to more than 14 years ago. It had said it was astonished to be charged when prosecutors brought the case in December 2020. The bank on Monday said it is continually testing its anti-money-laundering framework and has been strengthening it over time. 

    On Tuesday, Credit Suisse will update investors on plans to cut costs this year to help offset falling revenue in some divisions. It previously said it expects to post its third consecutive quarterly loss for the three months ending June 30.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 02:45

  • Almost All 5,000 Gang Members In Sweden Are Either 1st- Or 2nd-Generation Migrants
    Almost All 5,000 Gang Members In Sweden Are Either 1st- Or 2nd-Generation Migrants

    By Denes Albert of Remix News

    The urban crime gangs dominating Swedish cities are almost exclusively made up of immigrants, according to Amir Rostami, a leading criminologist and professor who based his findings on police data.

    In Sweden, the number of gang-related crimes is increasing every year, and as a result of mass and uncontrolled immigration, the authorities are losing control over more and more areas where migrant gangs are taking power.

    “It is not enough for many immigrants to come to Sweden from a less developed country and enjoy the benefits. They want excitement and want to get rich quickly,” says criminologist Rostami.

    Rostami has divided these gang members into two categories. Disorganized criminals are mostly made up of slightly younger members between 20 and 25 years old who have poorer impulse control, less education, and are primarily dealing with weapons and drugs. Then, there are the slightly more mature, rational, and better educated members who are involved in more extensive criminal networks; some of these members are even accountants, people with degrees, and former military personnel. This group is responsible for a huge share of crimes in Sweden, suspected of committing 40,000 criminal acts every year. These criminal networks not only compete with each other, but also work together.  

    Rostami sees himself as an example of someone who chose another life. He was born in Iran, came to Sweden with his family as an immigrant, and grew up in the Frölunda district of Gothenburg, which is now considered to be a “sensitive area” where large immigrant populations live. He said his upbringing was fraught with the risk factors of becoming a criminal, but instead of taking the path of crime, he chose to study, according to the Hungarian news outlet Magyar Nemzet.

    Regarding migrant gangs, the criminologist highlighted that the business is passed down within the family. He said that fathers and other relatives teach young males in the family to commit crimes. Rostami argues that it is an almost insurmountable task for society to bring these individuals into a crime-free way of life and requires far more resources than are available or can be reasonably allocated to the task.

    Police estimate that the number of people active in gang crimes in the so-called “sensitive areas” exceeds 5,000, of whom almost a 1,000 live in Gothenburg. According to Swedish police, almost all registered criminals have an immigrant background.

    It is estimated that in about 15 years, each immigrant criminal will cost taxpayers an average of 25 million króna (€2.35 million) over the migrant’s lifetime. This represents a total financial burden of SEK 125 billion króna (€11.7 billion) for society. A shortfall in taxes paid to society, to which these people would have contributed if they had chosen an honest life over crime, must also be factored in.

    According to Rostami and police records, all of the country’s convicted gang leaders are first- or second-generation migrants. Twelve of them are still serving their prison sentences, and one of them is on the run and hiding.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/28/2022 – 02:00

  • Newspeak In The 21st Century: How To Become A Model Citizen In The New Era Of Domestic Warfare
    Newspeak In The 21st Century: How To Become A Model Citizen In The New Era Of Domestic Warfare

    Authored by Cnythia Chung via ‘Through A Glass Darkly’ Substack,

    Disagreement has become an extremely sensitive issue lately; it was once thought that debate was an essential component to a strong and healthy democracy, however, we are now told that it is extremely dangerous, in fact, it may soon be categorised as a form of domestic terrorism. [This article was originally published January 27, 2021.]

    As early as mid-Nov 2020, Biden was already discussing the need to pass further laws against domestic terrorism. This is interesting since under the 2001 Patriot Act (which was meant to be a temporary enforcement in reaction to 9/11, however, is still in place 19 years later), domestic terrorism is already defined as;

    “activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state; (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.”

    So, the question begs, what else needs to be added to the Patriot Act, which was recognised at the time of its enforcement as something that should only be temporary since it was understood that it infringed upon civil liberties? Come to think of it, why is the Patriot Act still in place, which allows for the indefinite continuation of human rights violations such as warrantless wiretapping; illegal torture, kidnapping, and detention; mass surveillance; government secrecy; Real ID; no-fly list; political spying; abuse of material witness statutes; and attacks on academic freedom?

    As Glenn Greenwald wrote in his formidable paper The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming, “what needs to be criminalized that is not already a crime?”, keeping in mind that as of June 2020, the United States has the highest prisoner rate in the world, followed by El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Thailand and Palau.

    Well, the answer is apparently simple and as always for our own good. We have come to a point in time where the enemy is not some radicalized ideology, it is not some foreign despot, it is not even the threat of war (whether it be economic, cyber or nuclear), but rather it is ourselves. We, the people, are the new enemies of the State.

    You may protest “Not I! I am a model citizen! I pay my taxes on time, I am never late or call in sick for work, I make sure to be up-to-date with the newest ‘woke’ revelations and I don’t engage with anything outside of the mainstream matrix during my free-time.”

    People such as yourself think, that when the Biden Administration is calling for tougher laws against domestic terrorism, that it is obviously meant for the ‘other guy,’ those uneducated bigots who are screaming at the top of their lungs “Treason!” and inciting what we are told to be forms of ‘insurrection,’ all in the name of the archaic ideas of ‘patriotism’ and the ‘U.S. Constitution.’

    You, unlike so many others, have no problem recognising that the U.S. Constitution is actually part of the problem, that by the standards used today, the U.S. Constitution is itself responsible for ‘inciting violence’ and thus guilty of domestic terrorism, and thus needs to be revoked.

    But you see… that’s just not good enough.

    Though you are well on your way to becoming a model citizen in the 21st century, you still have a little ways to go. It is for this reason that a guide to 21st century Newspeak has been recently released to make sure that well-intentioned citizens like yourself are fully informed of what is required of you in terms of appropriate behaviour, as well as appropriate thoughts, and though this will take a little more time, appropriate instincts.

    21st Century Newspeak

    The first alteration that will need to take place is freedom of thought. It has been shown through peer-review studies that individual thoughts are susceptible to forming erroneous beliefs and can lead to dangerous behaviours such as refusal to integrate into a community standard.

    Once an individual refuses to integrate into its designated community, it is only a matter of time before this individual shows opposition and even antagonism towards said community. Thus failure to integrate is one of the first signs that an individual is on the path to becoming a domestic terrorist.

    Because the individual mind is flawed, it can no longer be trusted to be the standard of its own judgement of what is right and wrong. It is for this reason that we are introducing groupthink. This concept is not new, however, the difference is from now on the individual’s environment will only be allowed to reciprocate the values of groupthink, and all other thoughts outside of groupthink are to be banned and punishable under the new laws.

    Even if thoughts outside of groupthink appear as harmless to the collective, they are not, for any thought that is not groupthink threatens to lead to a different outcome than that intended by groupthink and thus is a threat to the security of the collective.

    In order to ensure commitment to groupthink, it will be mandatory that every individual engage in at least 2 minutes of Hate every hour throughout the day, every day. This can be achieved either by watching 2 minutes of Hate news, or by engaging in a public 2 minutes of Hate with a colleague, a friend or family member via social media.

    It is imperative that an individual watch the 15 minute morning and evening “What to Hate” news provided by the Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue), in order to be the most up-to-date with what are the ongoing and new subjects of Hate, and what were previous subjects of Hate which are no longer deemed to be subjects of Hate.

    It is most important that an individual never refer to a former subject of Hate as such. Any present subject of Hate must be seen as having always been a subject of Hate and any former subject of Hate must be seen as having never been a subject of Hate.

    This may appear as an impossible task, but we assure you it is entirely possible with the use of doublethink, which many of you have already been practising. Doublethink requires that one be both conscious and unconscious of the fact that they are telling deliberate lies while genuinely believing them; to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies. This makes up a part of our new Party slogan: FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.

    Those who excel the most in doublethink will receive the highest stations within our newly organised community, as safe-guards against the renegade, the domestic terrorist.

    Another alteration that will need to occur is how we think and refer to the past and the future. With the newly enforced groupthink, the present is what groupthink dictates it to be, which is subject to change, however, must be regarded as having always been.

    The past is what the present dictates it to be, if it were not, it could challenge the basis for the present. Thus to preserve the present, the past must serve the present, only justifying why we Hate what we presently Hate and why we Love what we presently Love and can do nothing to contradict these Party lines. There will be permitted no records of an alternative past, there will be no way to prove that the past was ever different from what the present dictates it to be, the only threat to this narrative is the record of the individual mind, and once this ceases to be there will only be the Minitrue record as the recorder of past Truth.

    In effect, the model citizen will perceive the past as dead and the future as unimaginable. The future is unimaginable because it is impossible to think of an alternative to the present, in fact, the mere act of thinking of an alternative to the present is considered a challenge to the status quo of the present, and thus is a challenge to groupthink, and thus is a form of domestic terrorism, which we will call from now on thoughtcrime.

    Thoughtcrime is essentially any thought pertaining to memory, judgement of right and wrong, thoughts of an alternative reality, and self-reflection, which are now all deemed forms of thoughtcrime. If an individual is to engage in any of these sorts of thoughts, it is only a matter of time before they will come into conflict with groupthink and the Party line, thus private thoughts are banned and punished under the new laws.

    It may seem an impossible task at first not to engage in private thoughts, but again, we assure you it is entirely possible using crimestop. Crimestop is the practice of not grasping analogies, failing to perceive logical errors, misunderstanding the simplest arguments, of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop is essentially, protective stupidity.

    It is imperative that one practice crimestop during any interaction with another individual, however, it is also imperative that one practice crimestop within their own inner-dialogue, such that even from your own conscience you will be protected from committing a thoughtcrime.

    Newspeak will also help dissuade from thoughtcrime. Newspeak is to be the new acceptable vocabulary, anything that references words outside of the most-up-to-date edition of the Newspeak dictionary will be considered Oldspeak and something to be construed as counter to groupthink. It is understood that by reducing the vocabulary to revolve around a few words such as good; which for example can be used as plusgood, doubleplusgood, ungood etc, it will serve to narrow the range of thought an individual is capable of, and thus reduce the capability of committing a thoughtcrime. How wonderful! That in the future we will be unable to commit crime for we will be incapable of its thought! This makes up another part of our new Party slogan: IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

    In terms of the new laws, in effect, nothing will change. Unacceptable behaviours and thoughts will not be designated as illegal per se; one reason for this is because we do not plan on having any public trials. Anyone who is in violation of conduct will simply be removed either temporarily into a “re-education facility” or will be vaporised. Any subject that has been vaporised will be removed from the collective memory records and can never be referred to as having ever existed.

    The reason why no public trials will be held from now on is because, as we have seen, dissent is infectious. Thus, holding public trials risk further encouragement towards dissent. It is for this reason that dissenters must be removed swiftly and quietly in the middle of the night. Such disappearances will occur relatively regularly and will eventually become the new normal, however, it will not be traumatic for the collective. The subject will simply cease to exist as if it were all just a dream, the structure of our daily routine unaffected.

    In order to ensure utmost compliance, the collective will be employing the use of children spies, this has already been occurring abroad, and proves to be very effective.

    Purges and vaporizations will be a necessary part of the government mechanics and will become the new normal. We have already discussed the necessity for vaporizations, as for the necessity of purges, it is because the community will be built so as to remain in stasis, however, this can only be accomplished through artificial means, for it is not natural that a thing remain the same but rather that it either improves or deteriorates.

    However, in order for the Party to maintain absolute control, there can be no change to the present except for that chosen by the Party, thus any change is a challenge to the Party. In order to facilitate an artificial environment of no change, resources must artificially be kept low, and purges need to occur so that this environment of scarcity is tightly controlled and maintained.

    In order for us to achieve this, our economy will have to go through stagnation, we will need to decrease the amount of land used for cultivation, we will no longer add capital equipment needed for industrial growth and great blocks of the population will be prevented from working and will be kept half alive by State charity. The wheels of industry cannot be allowed to turn so as to increase the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed, and in practice the only way of achieving this is by continuous warfare.

    War will continue under the Old Cold War doctrine. War will always be present, and yet will never be seen by the majority of our citizens, the reason for this being that war will not be about a real threat to security nor about real conquests but rather will be about maintaining the present status quo by exhausting the surplus of consumable goods, while also helping to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs.

    However, real war will be purely an internal affair, the war waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, with the object of the war as to keep the structure of society intact and unchanging.

    A peace that is truly permanent under this new ideology is no different than an invisible permanent war. For peace in our new era will equate to stability through no change. This makes up our first Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.

    Conclusion

    All of these means are necessary if we are to realise that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism, and that oligarchy is the only means to achieving peace, freedom and strength for the collective.

    However, we are still very far from this ideal and there is much that threatens its becoming, namely, the masses, or what we call the proles. So long as the masses believe that they are entitled to freedom of thought, our endeavours cannot succeed.

    The individual must voluntarily relinquish this. It cannot be taken from them no matter the degree of control and no matter the threat of physical harm. An individual’s mind is theirs and cannot be taken, instead, the individual must be led to believe that it is in their best interest to relinquish their mind.

    Let us do our best then to convince the individual that they are no longer fit to use their mind and let us pray that we are successful, for if we fail, our entire system of control fails with it.

    “You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity…Reality exists only in the human mind, nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

    – O’Brien in George Orwell’s “1984”

    *  *  *

    Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and a writer at Strategic Culture Foundation, consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 23:55

  • BRICS Summit Reaffirms That Russia Not As Isolated As NATO Suggests
    BRICS Summit Reaffirms That Russia Not As Isolated As NATO Suggests

    The recent BRICS summit managed to run its course this past week with very little fanfare, despite the fact that Russia is in the midst of a conflict with Ukraine that has led to a worldwide economic war. China is edging towards a potential invasion of Taiwan, and much of the planet is in the middle of a stagflationary crisis in the meantime.

    The one major takeaway from the summit was the reaffirmed stance of the BRICS that they would continue to work closely with Russia in economic terms.  

    Since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, there has been a running narrative in the western media that sanctions and the removal of Russian access to the SWIFT network would crush the country within a few months, leaving them penniless and unable to project military power.  This has not happened.

    A picture was painted by journalists and politicians of a completely isolated Russia, destroyed by a global cancel culture campaign that would de-nation them.  In reality, Russian trade, specifically their oil trade, has actually expanded.  Both China and India have increased their purchases of Russian oil while enjoying discounted prices.  Simultaneously, Europe and the US are suffering from oil and gas inflation and the EU is cutting vital oil and gas supplies from Russia.

    Any economist with a brain and a familiarity with the BRICS could have predicted this outcome, but the bias within the mainstream media is a powerful thing.  If there were any doubts that the BRICS might distance themselves from Russia, these were put to rest in the BRICS statement on the Ukraine situation.  While supporting humanitarian efforts within Ukraine as well as diplomatic solutions, the BRICS member took swipes and NATO countries for opportunism and instigation.  In other words, there will be no breakup with Russia and BRICS markets will continue to remain open to them. 

    This means that Russia’s war with Ukraine will be sustainable for many months to come, which means that sanctions and economic warfare will continue for many months to come.  Supply chain disruptions will continue unabated as Russian commodities remain off the market for the west, and this will add to the already high inflation we are currently dealing with.

    Further economic escalation could even lead to BRICS allies engaging in trade warfare as well.  The situation has a powderkeg potential beyond anything the world has seen in decades.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 23:35

  • The Depopulation Of Taiwan
    The Depopulation Of Taiwan

    Authored by Igor Chudov via Igor’s Newsletter,

    This is a continuation of my post from yesterday about a massive 13% decline in births in Germany. Such a decline is a nine-sigma event, meaning that it is so unlikely to occur by chance, that it would naturally happen as rarely as an asteroid striking the Earth.

    My article explored several more locales (UK, North Dakota, and Switzerland).

    But no other place stands out as much as Taiwan does.

    23% Drop in Birth Rate in Taiwan

    According to a Taiwan government report, the birth rate dropped by 23.24% in May 2022, compared to May 2021.

    I inputted historical birth rate data from Macrotrends for the years 2009-2021, and added the year 2022 as year 2021 adjusted down by 23.24%. Obviously, 2022 is not over and the number of Taiwanese babies to be born this year (or during the next 12 months) is unknown. So the chart below is an illustration of what would happen in the next 12 months if the 23.24% drop stays constant.

    When expressed in “sigmas”, units of standard deviation, the 23.24% drop in the birth rate in Taiwan is a 26-sigma event!

    This is can be described as “unimaginable” in terms of the likelihood of happening due to random chance.

    The Wolfram-Alpha illustration of likelihood by sigma only goes to ten-sigma. They thought that it would be pointless to show more sigmas. Except a 26-sigma drop in birth rate just happened in Taiwan.

    What Happened In Taiwan?

    Health experts are quick to blame Covid for all sorts of health problems afflicting those they advised to vaccinate. It is not the vaccine, they say, it is Covid. We tried to protect you with the vaccine, they would always insist. But you got Covid anyway, thanks to the evil antivaxxers, and your problems are due to Covid — that’s their explanation.

    We know for certain, though, that the drop in birth rate in Taiwan is NOT due to Covid. Yes, Taiwan is suffering from a terrible COVID pandemic right now (despite being 91% vaccinated), however, Covid in Taiwan only started around April 21 of 2022, and could not impact May birth rates much.

    To see what could cause the extreme drop in births, go back 9 months from May 2022, so to September 2021.

    Taiwan was a poster child for successful vaccination. 91% of all Taiwanese residents received a vaccine dose. By October 1, 2021, 56% of ALL people of Taiwan received Covid vaccines.

    They got a fairly usual mix of “safe and effective” AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Pfizer vaccines.

    People of Taiwan got their shots, felt assured that Covid-19 stops with every vaccinated person, and moved on with their lives.

    I doubt that the people of Taiwan noticed anything at the end of September. They knew for sure that their vaccines were safe and effective and would not affect their sperm or pregnancies. So they proceeded with family plans just as before, trying to make babies on purpose, or partying and having fun and getting pregnant accidentally, just as people do elsewhere.

    Except for 9 months later, they only gave birth to 77% of the number of babies expected.

    I hope that the people of Taiwan will start asking their authorities: what is happening to us?

    A Glimmer of Hope

    If you are like me, and you like babies, children, and grandchildren, you are probably upset by now and are wondering what will happen to all of us. Let me mention a possibility that, although unlikely in my opinion, may make this drop in birth rates temporary.

    Covid vaccines are known to “disrupt the menstrual cycle” and lower sperm counts. It is possible that some women, for a period of several months, could not conceive and become pregnant due to these disruptions. Because all Taiwanese women were vaccinated at almost the same time, those disruptions created a precipitous drop in birth rates.

    My hope, as someone who likes people, is that this will turn out to be the case. However, in my opinion, we will likely see the opposite, and reductions in birth rates will be permanent. Why? Because vaccinating young people was a crime. It was not a mistake. Let me not explain why, in this article.

    Crimes like this are NOT perpetrated to achieve a two-month drop in birth rates. Criminals of such nature who gave young people shots that they did not need, for sinister reasons, go for the jugular. Of course, not all people participating in vaccination campaigns were having such sinister intentions. But it is possible that some persons on top had criminal motives that they did not disclose.

    Again, I hope that the preceding paragraph will turn out to be unfounded. I was, and am, against any of that happening, do not support anything that is happening in Taiwan, and I am very worried.

    Time will tell.

    They Told Us it is Safe

    This fact check from Dec 5, 2020 says that the vaccine is definitely safe for pregnancy “because there is no evidence that it is unsafe”. No trial specifically for pregnancy and fertility was conducted. They just lied to us that it is safe — but had no way of knowing.

    Subscribe here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 23:15

  • The First Cut Might Not Be The Deepest
    The First Cut Might Not Be The Deepest

    Even Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid admits that he was “slightly surprised” at the results revealed by the following chart, lifted from his latest slidebook (available to professional subs).

    It shows what the median US CPI was at the start of the 13 hiking cycles in the last 70 years and also where it was at the first cut after these hiking cycles. Three things stand out from this and the table you can see in the chart book.

    1. Median CPI at the first hike was ‘only’ 2.5% so the Fed has always tried to lean against inflation relatively early in the upswing. However, this time round they didn’t hike until we hit 8.5%.
    2. Median CPI at the first cut was a still high 4.4%. This supports the notion that in normal times the Fed looks ahead rather than at the current level. I was still slightly surprised it was as high as this at the first cut, which offers some support to the market view of 36bps of cuts priced between March and December 2023 even if inflation is still high.
    3. The median time from last hike to first cut was only 4 months. This short time frame also surprised me. Again this would support the market view of cuts being priced in relatively soon after this hiking cycle ends.

    That, as Reid says, is the history, and it made Reid appreciate that cuts could come in this cycle when inflation is still high whether this would be a policy mistake or not. Where this cycle is so different though is that the first hike occurred very, very late in the inflation cycle. Whether this changes the dynamic, time will tell.

    For what it’s worth, Reid’s base case remains that the Fed will find it very difficult to ease policy notably given that inflation is going to be harder to dislodge.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 22:55

  • Abortion Clinics Start Closing After Roe v. Wade Ruling
    Abortion Clinics Start Closing After Roe v. Wade Ruling

    Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Abortion clinics in multiple states closed their doors on June 25 following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to pass their own laws regulating access to abortion.

    An exam room sits empty in the Planned Parenthood Reproductive Health Services Center in St Louis, Mo., on May 28, 2019. (Michael B. Thomas/Getty Images)

    Around half of the states are expected to press ahead with banning abortion after the high court’s landmark ruling, according to the Guttmacher Institute, while in a handful of states with so-called trigger laws, abortion has already become illegal.

    Abortion will either soon become—or already is—unlawful in at least 13 states, according to a tally by The Epoch Times: Idaho, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas.

    Bans in Mississippi and North Dakota will come into force when their respective attorneys general sign off, while Wyoming’s prohibition will take effect within days.

    Tennessee will have its ban applied in 30 days, while Idaho and Texas will see bans applied 30 days after the official judgment. Abortion has become illegal in the following states: Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Dakota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Utah.

    Clinics Close

    Alabama’s three abortion clinics stopped performing abortions as providers face prosecution under a law dating back to 1951.

    Staff at the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Huntsville on Friday told women in the waiting room that they could not carry out any more abortions that day, though the women were given a list of out-of-state clinics still doing abortions.

    At an abortion clinic in Little Rock, Arkansas, the doors to the patient area shut as soon as the Supreme Court’s decision was formally announced.

    “No matter how hard we prepare for bad news, when it finally hits, it hits hard,” a nurse at the clinic told the BBC.

    An abortion clinic in New Orleans, Louisiana, one of three that performs the procedure in the state, was also shuttered on Friday.

    Legal Uncertainty

    Abortion clinics elsewhere—including Arizona, Texas, and West Virginia—stopped performing abortions for fear of prosecution based on laws that predate Roe v. Wade.

    In Texas, where trigger laws don’t go into effect for another month, providers suspended abortions while they seek legal advice on whether they are subject to an abortion ban based on laws passed in the 1920s.

    Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, who announced the statewide closure of his agency’s office on Friday “in honor of the nearly 70 million unborn babies killed in the womb since 1973,” warned in a letter that prosecutors could immediately choose to pursue criminal prosecutions based on earlier laws that were unenforceable while Roe v. Wade stood.

    Similarly, the existence of a 19th-century abortion ban in West Virginia led a clinic there to stop performing the procedure.

    Several providers in Arizona halted abortions on Friday as they seek to determine whether pre-statehood laws may be grounds for prosecution.

    Overall, repealing Roe v. Wade means that some 36 million women of reproductive age will lose access to abortion in their states, according to research from Planned Parenthood.

    Predictably, the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has drawn mixed reactions, with demonstrators outside the Supreme Court voicing both indignation and jubilation.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 22:35

  • "More Money In Your Pocket" – Newsom To Helicopter Drop $17 Billion In "Inflation Relief" Stimmy Checks 
    “More Money In Your Pocket” – Newsom To Helicopter Drop $17 Billion In “Inflation Relief” Stimmy Checks 

    As the Federal Reserve attempts to crush aggregate demand through the most aggressive monetary tightening policies in decades to cool red-hot inflation, California Governor Gavin Newsom has come up with the brilliant idea to stoke even more demand through a new round of stimulus checks. 

    “Millions of Californians will be receiving up to $1,050 as part of a NEW middle-class tax rebate. 

    “That’s more money in your pocket to help you fill your gas tank and put food on the table,” Newsom tweeted Sunday night. 

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

    The “inflation relief package” is a staggering $17 billion and will provide relief payments on an income-based system. Bloomberg Law provides more details on how the stimulus scheme works for households:

    Individuals making as much as $75,000 a year, or joint filers making up to $150,000, would get $350 each plus $350 for one dependent for a maximum of $1,050. Those with income up to $125,000, or $250,000 filing jointly, would get $250 each plus another $250 for one dependent for a maximum of $750. Those earning more than $250,000, or $500,000 filing jointly, would get $200 each plus $200 for one dependent for maximum of $600.

    Newsom’s move to tackle high inflation by helicopter dropping billions of dollars in stimulus checks is utter nonsense and will only work counter to what the Fed is ultimately trying to achieve: recession by aggressively hiking interest rates and winding down the balance sheet to reduce aggregate demand, so consumer prices fall.

    Newsom’s stimulus checks could temporarily fuel inflation in the state as households would instantly spend the free money on whatever they please. Solving inflation with more government will only worsen the situation. This is also something the Biden administration fails to see (read: Biden Economic Adviser Asserts That More Government Spending Will Solve Inflation Crisis). 

    How long until California Democrats beg for price controls as their policies could incite even more inflation? They can’t keep blaming ‘Putin Price Hike’ if their policies spike inflation. 

    As no lessor authority than The Wall Street Journal Editorial board succinctly concluded:

    “Too bad this bribe, er, incentive to vote Democratic won’t offset the state’s fast-rising cost of living, high taxes or the premium Californians pay for energy, water and housing, among other things, due to progressive policies.”

    The Newsom manifesto appears to be from taxpayers according to their ability to the politicians according to their need.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 22:15

  • "Catastrophic Risk To Stocks And Bonds": Fed's Balance Sheet Caused Inflation, Not Low Rates
    “Catastrophic Risk To Stocks And Bonds”: Fed’s Balance Sheet Caused Inflation, Not Low Rates

    By Vincent Cignarella, Bloomberg Markets Live commentator and reporter

    The Fed’s balance sheet as a percentage of GDP is what is driving today’s inflation — not the nominal Fed Funds rate. This will emerge as a major risk to stocks and bonds if not managed soon.

    The chart below shows it was not the level of interest rates that contributed to higher inflation, but the Fed maintaining the size of the balance sheet at too-high levels for too long.

    If economic growth slows as many expect, the influence the balance sheet has on GDP will be even greater and may pose potential catastrophic risk to stocks and bonds.

    As growth slows, so must the balance sheet to maintain the equilibrium between supply and demand. The market will decide the level of rates; the Fed can just follow along.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 21:55

  • 'A Dire Warning For Democrats': Over 1 Million Voters Switch To GOP Over The Last Year
    ‘A Dire Warning For Democrats’: Over 1 Million Voters Switch To GOP Over The Last Year

    The Republican Party has been picking up support over the past year, as more than 1 million voters across 43 states switched to the GOP, according to voter registration data analyzed by the Associated Press.

    More than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party over the last year, according to voter registration data analyzed by The Associated Press. The previously unreported number reflects a phenomenon that is playing out in virtually every region of the country — Democratic and Republican states along with cities and small towns — in the period since President Joe Biden replaced former President Donald Trump. -AP

    Democrats, meanwhile, picked up just 630,000 new voters in the analysis of 1.7 million voters who had switched affiliations over the last 12 months. The data, which was provided by political data firm L2, used a combination of state voter records and statistical modeling.

    “While party switching is not uncommon, the data shows a definite reversal from the period while Trump was in office, when Democrats enjoyed a slight edge in the number of party switchers nationwide,” reads the report.

    The data points to a red wave brewing ahead of this fall’s midterms, according to Axios.

    The most damaging aspect of this shift to Democrats? The suburbs.

    According to the report, ‘well-educated swing voters who turned against Trump’s Republican Party in recent years appear to be swinging back.”

    Over the last year, far more people are switching to the GOP across suburban counties from Denver to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Republicans also gained ground in counties around medium-size cities such as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Raleigh, North Carolina; Augusta, Georgia; and Des Moines, Iowa. -AP

    More notables about the report via Axios:

    • The party switches were evident across the board — in red states and blue states, cities and small towns and suburban areas, AP found.
    • Of the nearly 1.7 million voters who changed parties in states with available data over the last year, some two-thirds went to the GOP.
    • “Biden and Democrats are woefully out of touch with the American people, and that’s why voters are flocking to the Republican Party in droves,” RNC chair Ronna McDaniel told the AP.

    Between the lines: One outlier was in Virginia, where Democrats saw an uptick in registered voters.

    “It’s more so a rejection of the left than embracing the right,” according to 37-year-old Ben Smith of Larimer County, Colorado, who says he reluctantly left the Democratic party over the last year after becoming concerned about his former party’s push for mandatory COVID-19 vaccines, as well as the party’s inability to tame crime while focusing on racial justice.

    AP called it a “dire warning for Democrats” who are already dealing with the macro effects of the economy reflecting in the polls this fall during midterms.

    What’s to blame?

    According to the report, suburban parents grew ‘increasingly frustrated’ over the prolonged pandemic-related school closures, while the RNC began hosting voter registration events at gas stations in suburban locations within swing states, such as Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

    “Biden and Democrats are woefully out of touch with the American people, and that’s why voters are flocking to the Republican Party in droves,” said RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel. “American suburbs will trend red for cycles to come” thanks to “Biden’s gas hike, the open border crisis, baby formula shortage and rising crime.”

    Over the last year, nearly every state — even those without high-profile Republican primaries — moved in the same direction as voters by the thousand became Republicans. Only Virginia, which held off-year elections in 2021, saw Democrats notably trending up over the last year. But even there, Democrats were wiped out in last fall’s statewide elections.

    In Iowa, Democrats used to hold the advantage in party changers by a 2-to-1 margin. That’s flipped over the last year, with Republicans ahead by a similar amount. The same dramatic shift is playing out in Ohio.

    In Florida, Republicans captured 58 percent of party switchers during those last years of the Trump era. Now, over the last year, they command 70 percent. And in Pennsylvania, the Republicans went from 58 to 63 percent of party changers. -AP

    To understand more about why disaffected Democrats have left their party (aside from the overwhelming obvious), click here.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 21:35

  • What To Expect In A Post-Roe World
    What To Expect In A Post-Roe World

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    Below is my Hill column on what to expect in a post-Roe world. That world is already taking shape with states crafting their laws reflecting the values of their citizens from Colorado passing a law protecting the right to abortion up to the moment of birth to Louisiana banning all abortions except in limited circumstances.

    The fact is that most Americans are in the middle in this debate with more nuanced views than many political leaders.

    In the months to come, we will see if that view will prevail in the majority of states.

    Here is the column:

    In their historic ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, six Supreme Court justices noted that the nation was grappling with this deeply divisive issue in 1973 but that “Roe abruptly ended that political process.” The court has now declared that the future of abortion will rest with 330 million Americans rather than nine justices.

    As this matter returns to the states, it is striking to consider what has changed legally and socially in the past 50 years. The comparison may hold some interesting surprises for politicians who are now declaring, as did President Biden, that “this fall, Roe is on the ballot.”

    How little has changed

    If one looks solely at the alignment of states, surprisingly little has changed. In 1973, 30 states banned abortion at any stage of a pregnancy, with some exceptions for the health of the mother. In the Dobbs litigation of 2022, 26 states asked the court to overturn Roe and its successor, Casey.

    Thus, we remain deeply divided.

    Roughly 16 states are poised or expected to make abortion illegal immediately under so-called trigger laws. South Dakota, Louisiana and Kentucky have immediate prohibitions that will come into effect. Missouri claimed to be the first to declare all abortion as unlawful except for medical emergencies.

    Twenty-seven states have protections for abortion that are expected to continue. States like Colorado, New Jersey, Oregon and Delaware actually protected abortion without any limit on the stage of a pregnancy — guaranteeing the right up to just before time of birth.

    Internationally, only seven countries allow abortion after the 20th week. While many countries have decriminalized abortion, most are closer to Mississippi than Michigan in limiting abortion to the first or second trimester.

    How much has changed

    While Dobbs is a major reversal of a long-standing precedent, much has changed legally since 1973. After Roe, the Supreme Court continued to expand protections over lifestyles and intimate relations. In the parade of horribles that followed Friday’s release of the Dobbs ruling, politicians and pundits warned that the decision could undo cases protecting contraception, same-sex marriage and other rights.

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Vice President Harris and other Democrats continue to claim that the court was taking the country back to the last century. The image of criminalized homosexuality, marriage bans and contraception limits is unnerving — but also untrue.

    In the Dobbs decision, the court’s majority expressly, repeatedly rejects the application of this holding to these other rights. Indeed, it is relatively rare to see the court go to this extent to proactively close off the use of a new case in future cases. The court said that “intimate sexual relations, contraception, and marriage” are not impacted by its holding because “abortion is fundamentally different, as both Roe and Casey acknowledged.” It noted that abortion is unique in dealing with “what those decisions called ‘fetal life’ and what the law now before us describes as an ‘unborn human being.’”

    The court repeatedly stressed that those claiming the country will be put into a legal Wayback Machine are simply using the opinion “to stoke unfounded fear that our decision will imperil those other rights.” It could not be more clear, as the court said, that “rights regarding contraception and same-sex relationships are inherently different from the right to abortion because the latter (as we have stressed) uniquely involves what Roe and Casey termed ‘potential life.’”

    The court and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence repeat, almost mantra-like: “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Only Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that these other cases should be examined, yet even he stressed this opinion expressly rejects that application.

    Putting aside the legal changes, there are major technological changes since 1973 that will impact the post-Roe world. Roughly 60 percent of abortions today are carried out at home, not in clinics, using pills with mifepristone and misoprostol to abort a pregnancy. In 2021, the Food and Drug Administration permanently removed the in-person requirement for these prescriptions and allowed women to access the drugs via telehealth appointments and online pharmacies. It will be difficult for states to interfere with such prescriptions, particularly if the federal government protects such access.

    How we have changed

    The greatest change may be us. As this issue returns to the states for citizens to decide, we are a different country than we were in 1973. Great strides have been made in the advancement of women and a wider acceptance of people making decisions about their own lives and values. While we remain divided on abortion, the public seems far more moderate and unified than the leaders of either party.

    While some Democrats are voicing absolute views of abortion, and some Republicans are calling for total bans, most Americans hold a more nuanced view.

    In 1975, polling showed 54 percent supported abortion under some circumstances, with 21 percent saying it should be entirely legal; 22 percent said it should be illegal.

    According to recent polling by the Pew Research Center, only 8 percent of adults say abortion should be illegal without exception, while just 19 percent say abortion should be legal in all cases, without exception. Yet, polls also show that 65 percent of Americans would make most abortions illegal in the second trimester, and 80 percent would make most abortions illegal in the third trimester.

    These polls suggest that the majority of Americans will continue to live in states protecting abortion while citizens would support limits like the one in Mississippi. In Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) announced an effort to limit abortions to Mississippi’s 15-week standard but expressed a willingness to compromise on that cutoff date. In other words, there may be room for compromise as states work out their own approaches to abortion.

    Of course, none of the political or legal realities will likely penetrate the rage and rhetoric following the decision.

    Indeed, there is a tendency toward Roe revisionism. Roe supporters ignore that Roe’s constitutional rationale was always controversial, including among some liberals. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for example, called the ruling “heavy-handed judicial activism” and felt the decision went too far. The original Roe actually died years ago when it was gutted by Casey in 1992 in its logic and tests. It was later the subject of 5-4 decisions that created a confusing muddle of what constituted “undue burdens.”

    Such revisionism is a natural part of grieving. In Shakespeare’s “Richard III,”the Queen Mother was asked how to deal with the hate of loss. She responds: “Think that thy babes were sweeter than they were; And he that slew them fouler than he is.” The same is true of Roe revisionism. Roe is now presented as inviolate and beyond question in its constitutional footing, while the opinion that slew it is presented as threatening every right secured since 1973.

    Our post-Roe world will not be written by Congress with the proposed federalization of Roe or another 50 years of conflicting court decisions. Instead, it will rest with citizens in 50 different states in coming years. The process just might surprise us.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 21:15

  • Nigerian Governor Orders Mass Issuance Of Gun Permits To Counter Murderous Hordes
    Nigerian Governor Orders Mass Issuance Of Gun Permits To Counter Murderous Hordes

    Gun permits have rarely been issued in Nigeria—but that’s about to change.

    In the face of rampant violence by huge gangs of heavily armed bandits, one state governor has ordered the mass issuance of gun permits to citizens desperate for a chance to protect themselves. 

    For over a decade, Nigerians living in the country’s northwestern states have endured an endless plague of looting, kidnapping and murder at the hands of gangs and ethnic militias, which Nigerians call bandits. The violence has taken its steepest toll on the states of Zamfara and Kaduna.  

    A map showing the states of Nigeria, with the northwestern Zamfara and Kaduna states highlighted

    The bandits operate from bases in remote forests where terrain makes offensive operations by Nigerian security forces more difficult and dangerous. In addition, “Nigeria’s security forces are stretched fighting an Islamist insurgency in the northeast of the country, leaving individual states to rely on vigilante groups to tackle the bandits,” reports Reuters.

    In addition to the money they gain through robbery and kidnapping, the bandits also control gold mines, giving them additional resources to fund weapons purchases. 

    Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton helped give Nigeria’s murderous bandits a powerful advantage over citizens and police alike. The collapse of Libya’s government after the U.S.-NATO-led regime change war boosted the flow of military weapons throughout West Africa. According to a 2016 OXFAM report, Libya’s illicit arms market has enabled online purchase of rifles, heavy machine guns, rocket-launchers, anti-tank guided missiles and grenade launchers. 

    With government increasingly incapable of stopping the onslaught, the bandits have been emboldened. In early January, some 200 people were killed in Zamfara as bandits used violence on civilians as a form of retaliation for government airstrikes on their base. In a two-day orgy of violence, up to nine villages were attacked, with bandits shooting villagers while looting and burning their homes. 

    Last week, bandits attacked two churches in the neighboring Kaduna state, killing eight people and kidnapping 38.

    And now, Bello Matawalle, the governor of Zamfara state, has decided his citizens deserve at least a fighting chance against formidable foes. Specifically, the governor ordered the police commissioner to issue 500 licenses in each of the state’s 19 emirate subdivisions.

    “Government is ready to facilitate people, especially our farmers, to secure basic weapons for defending themselves,” said Ibrahim Magaji Dosara, Zamfara information commissioner.

    Nigerian bandits at their base in 2021 (via Wikipedia) 

    Perhaps betraying an affinity for gun control—even in as desperate a situation as that faced by Nigerians—Associated Press couldn’t help but strike a skeptical tone: “It was not yet clear how arming citizens would help prevent the attacks; authorities have admitted that even the Nigerian police are sometimes overwhelmed during violent attacks.” 

    The expansion of gun ownership is one of a variety of measures against the marauders. Others include the closure of gas stations in particularly dangerous areas, and a ban of motorcycles, which are integral to the bandits’ modus operandi. Upwards of 300 or more motorcyclists descend on villages at once, typically with both an armed rider and an armed passenger.

    “Anybody found riding a motorbike within the areas [are] considered bandits and security agencies are thereby directed to shoot such persons at sight,” said Dosara.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 20:55

  • Watch: Shocking Toxic Gas Leak Kills At Least 10, Injures 100s In Jordanian Port
    Watch: Shocking Toxic Gas Leak Kills At Least 10, Injures 100s In Jordanian Port

    Via Middle East Eye,

    At least 10 people died and more than 250 were injured on Monday, when toxic gas leaked from a tank in the Jordanian port of Aqaba, state media has reported.

    The death toll is expected to rise, officials said, with hospitals in the port city at maximum capacity.

    The leak happened after a tank filled with a substance reported to be liquid chlorine fell during transportation, said Amer al-Sartawi, the spokesperson of the Public Security Directorate.

    Footage circulating on social media showed the spread of the gas leak.

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

    Translation: Watch: The moment a toxic gas tank fell in Aqaba.

    The southern beach in the governorate of Aqaba was evacuated before the leak was brought under control, the official said. 

    “The area was immediately isolated, and specialists began to deal with the accident. Meanwhile, the Civil Defence transferred a number of injuries to the hospital, and they are all under treatment,” the spokesman added.

    The injured were taken to Prince Hashem Military Hospital in the city of Iba’a, as well as the Islamic Hospital, and a third private hospital, in addition to those treated at a temporary field hospital.

    The Jordan Social Security Corporation said it was maintaining a close eye on the condition of the injured in case of air evacuation to other hospitals.

    Jordanian Prime Minister Bishr al-Khasawneh has ordered an investigation, to be headed by the minister of interior.

    An environmental official was quoted by Jordanian media as saying “the impact of gas is currently declining, and there is no harm to public health as a result of the accident”.

    The head of the chemical industries sector in the Jordan Chamber of Industry, Ahmed al-Bas, said the gas was “liquid chlorine”, which he described as a basic industrial substance used as a steriliser.

    Al-Bas said high concentrations of the gas were toxic, but low concentrations were not harmful.

    He stressed that the impact of Monday’s leak “will fade within a very short time with the spread of gas in the atmosphere, especially since the place is open”.

    “In the first moments of leakage and explosion, the gas is fatal, and after a short period it becomes harmful and causes a coma, then when it vanishes in the air it becomes without effect,” he said.

    Al-Bas added that “within hours” of the leak, there would be no risk to humans from the gas.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 20:35

  • Even One Of The Biggest Bears Expects The S&P To Dead-Cat Bounce To 4,100
    Even One Of The Biggest Bears Expects The S&P To Dead-Cat Bounce To 4,100

    It’s almost as if just like Wall Street bulls live in an echo chambered world, where nobody dares to take a breath out of step over fears of toppling the collective construct of stupidity and laziness where everyone is wrong but at least everyone agrees to be wrong at the same time, so the bears have some odd convergence of views, including the market inflection points. How else can one explain that a little over a week after Wall Street’s biggest bull, Michael Hartnett, actually demonstrated glimmers of bullishness in “At SPX 3600 Nibble, At 3300 Bite, At 3000 Gorge“, today the 2nd biggest Wall Street bear, Morgan Stanley’s Michael Wilson, also joined the bear market rally bandwagon and in his latest Weekly Warm Up Note (available to professional subs) writes that even though the market’s fair value will eventually head (far) lower (which in itself is remarkable since Wilson is calling for much lower risk markets over time even though his economists still don’t have the guts to make a recession their base case, leaving the bearish strategist to drift alone in the bearish void), for now “US equity markets can rally further.”

    Specifically, in addition to the lower rates and oil prices helping support the belief in a soft landing, Wilson notes that “there is still some equity demand from Pension funds that need to rebalance at the end of the month/quarter this week” similar to what we previewed last week, and here Morgan Stanley agrees with Goldman’s estimates, writing that the bank’s QDS team “estimates about $25-$30B of equity demand globally with approximately $15-$20B for the US” in terms of quarter-end pension demand. That according to Wilson is “a substantial amount of excess demand and if retail joins in like last week, that could carry equity prices higher before 2Q earnings season begins and the revisions arrive.” Furthermore, it is unlikely to see a slew of pre- announcements ahead of earnings as most companies have already managed 2Q results and likely want to wait a few more weeks for more data before providing guidance for 3Q and the rest of the year in some cases.

    Finally, the MS strategist calculates that a Fib retracement of 38-50% of the entire decline would not be unnatural or out of line with prior bear market rallies, particularly ones associated with a recession at the end which is yet to come: “In S&P 500 terms that would translate into 4100-4200 or approximately 5-7% upside from Friday’s close.”

    Let’s start at the top.

    Walking us through last week’s events, Wilson writes that with talk of recession increasing sharply over the past few weeks and culminating with Fed Chair Powell’s 2-day Congressional testimony, markets decided enough bad news had been priced. Furthermore, the MS strategist also thinks the sharp decline in both oil and interest rates helped ease some of the concerns on inflation which still remains elevated and public enemy (certainly Biden approval rating enemy) number one.

    In Wilson’s view, both the fall in oil and rates are being driven more by the fears of an economic slowdown, or worse, rather than a real peak in inflation and, therefore, peak Fed hawkishness. However, with markets so oversold and bearishness so pervasive, “equity investors have taken the bullish view and re-rated stocks higher via both the interest rate and Equity Risk Premium (ERP) channels.”

    Next, some math: based on Friday’s close, the S&P 500 is trading back at 16.3x or 1 turn higher than where it was at the prior week’s lows. In other words, Wilson cautions that “all of the move last week was due to valuations moving higher which seems unusual given the growing concern about earnings. In fact, even taking into account the fall in 10-year yields, the Equity Risk Premium is back to 300bps.” That to the MS strategist “makes little sense in the context of the likely negative earnings revisions coming in 2Q and still rising risk of recession over the next 6-12 months. As our fair value valuation framework (Exhibit 2) shows, the S&P 500 is now meaningfully mis-priced again for the current PMI and rates backdrop (even with the recent fall in bond yields).”

    Like we said: it’s a little awkward being one of the most vocal Wall Street bears without your economists even daring to make a recession their base case. It sure must lead to a lot of confused client calls… But we digress.

    As Wilson adds, another way to think about this set up is that the internals of the equity market (as least some of them as shown in the charts below) are much further along in terms of thinking about the risk of recession than bonds, a point even Goldman made over the weekend.

    Meanwhile, economic signals like the copper versus gold ratio and the economic surprise index are also saying the same thing.

    Furthermore, echoing a point we have repeatedly made in recent weeks, Wilson points out that “the Treasury market appears potentially ready to accept the risks to growth and the possibility that the Fed may not be able to complete the amount of tightening that is now priced into the bond market” Perhaps the best measure of this change is the terminal rate which started to fall last week, too.

    And so, with short-term rolling correlations between equities and real yields now deeply negative once again, this recent decline in bond yields has been perceived as positive for equities…

    … which however Wilson views is “ultimately a misread”, because as he explains, “for this read (falling yields=positive for equities) to continue to hold, we’d likely need to see a continuation of falling yields in the context of cresting inflation pressures, an associated less hawkish Fed policy path, more durable economic growth than we expect and a re-acceleration in earnings revisions.” The combination of those factors (i.e., one iteration of the soft landing) is feasible, but is not likely, in Wilson’s view.

    All of which is to say that the strategist sees the recent rebound in equities as just another bear market rally on the path to fair value price levels of 3400-3500 (his tactical base case, even though he still can’t claim a recession as his base case). Of course, if and when he does – as we noted last week –  a recession would likely bring tactical price lows closer to ~3000 (as Wilson published in his mid-year outlook in May where he hedged his bets, a recession is embedded in his bear case). Additionally, the June 2023 point in time price target associated with that bear case is 3350, which implies a temporary overshoot to the downside (~3000) of that target before working back toward that price level next May.

    In short, Wilson is still a bear – just as Hartnett is – and does not see the bear market ending any time soon, although as he adds, “it may feel like it over the next few weeks as markets take the lower rates as a sign the Fed can orchestrate a soft landing and prevent a meaningful revision to earnings forecasts.”

    * * *

    Which then brings us to his latest hedge (so that he can say he was right in either case, whether stocks surge from here or tumble), and also brings us to the topic of his latest note. In the context of last week’s (bear market) rally (which Goldman thinks has the makings of an entirely new ramp higher), Wilson thinks US equity markets can rally further. Here’s how much:

    In addition to the lower rates and oil prices helping support the belief in a soft landing, there is still some equity demand from Pension funds that need to rebalance at the end of the month/quarter this week. Our QDS team estimates about $25-$30B of equity demand globally with approximately $15-$20B for the US. That’s a substantial amount of excess demand and if retail joins in like last week, that could carry equity prices higher before 2Q earnings season begins and the revisions arrive. We think it’s unlikely to see a slew of pre-announcements ahead of earnings as most companies have already managed 2Q results and likely want to wait a few more weeks for more data before providing guidance for 3Q and the rest of the year in some cases.  Finally, a retracement of 38-50% of the entire decline would not be unnatural or out of line with prior bear market rallies, particularly ones associated with a recession at the end which is yet to come.

    In S&P 500 terms that would translate into 4100-4200 or approximately 5-7% upside from Friday’s close, which Wilson thinks is the possible upside from here; and if such a rally were to continue, it would likely be led by the longer duration / interest rate sensitive stocks–i.e. Nasdaq.

    That said, Wilson is quick to hedge that “in no way are we suggesting the bear market is over or that earnings estimates won’t have to come down. Instead, we are simply being realistic about the viciousness of bear markets and their ability to confound all market participants at times, even the bears.“

    What is behind Wilson’s persistent bearishness? Because as the strategist points out next when he turns back to the fundamentals, there is continuing weakness as earnings revisions breadth remains in negative territory

    And while this can often be a slow moving measure, it continues to decelerate in negative territory, which is “usually a precursor to a consolidation in forward EPS.” On that score, Wilson finds it interesting that “2023 net income ex-commodity sectors has actually been stagnant for several months. This points to the notion that the continued grind higher in forward earnings of the overall market has largely been driven by commodity sectors.” Of course, given that commodities are a cost for most of the market, “this is not ultimately a healthy development.”

    Finally, in response to client inquiries around the changing composition of the momentum factor, Wilson took a look at how the sector weights within momentum have evolved over the last week, month, 3 months, 1 year and YTD. Unsurprisingly, given recent price action, Energy has seen its weight decline over the last week, while Discretionary’s weight has jumped higher amid the market’s squeeze higher. Completing the factor picture, healthcare’s weight has jumped significantly in recent months, while Tech’s weight has fallen materially

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 20:15

  • Flurry Of Calls Among Saudi Diplo Staff And Spy Coincided With 9/11 Hijackers' Arrival
    Flurry Of Calls Among Saudi Diplo Staff And Spy Coincided With 9/11 Hijackers’ Arrival

    Authored by Brian McGlinchey via Stark Realities

    FBI agents investigating Saudi ties to 9/11 discovered a troubling set of phone calls among Saudi embassy and consulate officials, an extremist American cleric and a Saudi agent in San Diego—calls that took place in the weeks leading up to the first two hijackers’ arrival in Los Angeles and while they were settling in.

    The timing raises suspicions of a premeditated scheme to shepherd the hijackers into American life—and some of the call participants personally did just that.

    The phone links are described across thousands of pages of FBI documents released between September 2021 and April 2022. Many of the documents are from Operation Encore, an FBI investigation of Saudi government ties to the 9/11 plotters.

    The first two hijackers to reach the United States were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who acted as “muscle” hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon.

    According to a 2008 Operation Encore document, “multiple San Diego sources and other individuals associated with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi during their time in southern California believed that the two hijackers must have been given ‘tazkia’ prior to arriving in the United States.”

    The document defines “tazkia” as one person’s vouching for another. Someone already in America “would then, because of this individual’s relationship with the tazkia-providing individual, have provided any and all assistance that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi would need during their time in the United States.”

    Hazmi and Mihdhar spoke very little English upon their arrival, to the extent of not even being able to read street signs. The two hijackers’ “only qualifications appeared to be support for [Osama bin Laden] and their ability to obtain visas,” says an FBI report.

    Given their unfamiliarity with the United States and its language, it seems certain these first two hijackers on U.S. soil would have indeed needed help from people already in the country.

    That help came, and phone records suggest it was pre-arranged, facilitated and supervised by Saudi government officials, employees and an intelligence asset.

    Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived in Los Angeles in January 2000. Soon after, one of the men involved in the flurry of phone calls, Omar al-Bayoumi, met the two, invited them to move to San Diego, and facilitated their renting of an apartment and other facets of becoming situated in the United States.

    A 2017 FBI document declared that “recent source information confirmed that al-Bayoumi was, at the time of the 9/11 attacks, employed as a paid cooptee of Saudi Arabian intelligence services.” A 2006 document says he later provided “substantial financial support” to a Kurdish Salafist group formed by former al Qaeda and Taliban members.

    In addition to Bayoumi, another key figure in the Operation Encore files was Fahad al-Thumairy, an official at the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles described as a “Salafi fanatic.”

    Side-by-side photos of a slender, bearded Fahad al-Thumairy and a round-faced, turbaned Omar al-Bayoumi

    Thumairy was at the center of a burst of phone activity leading up to and following the hijackers’ arrival. According to an Operation Encore document:

    “During a three-day period at the end of December 1999, approximately two and a half weeks prior to the arrival of Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, Al-Thumairy made a number of phone calls that are significant in that the pattern of contact, including individuals and frequency, does not appear to have been duplicated prior to nor after this date.” . . .

    “[Southern District of New York] feels that these telephonic contacts prior to the arrival of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi are an important turning point in these investigations. It shows a prior relationship between these individuals who, in the upcoming months, have extensive telephonic and face-to-face contact with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.”

    Twenty-one calls involving Thumairy during this time included contacts with:

    • Bayoumi, the Saudi intelligence asset who helped the hijackers

    • Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who later rose to infamy as an al-Qaeda cleric and organizer killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. In 2000, Awlaki was an imam at a southern California mosque. He’d later move to northern Virginia at a time when some of the hijackers had also situated themselves there.

    • A “Somali/Yemeni student” in San Diego whose name is redacted. While redactions always leave some uncertainty, the document appears to indicate this individual’s phone had contact with a phone number in Yemen that served as an international al Qaeda switchboard.

    • The Saudi embassy in Washington

    • The Islamic Affairs section at the Saudi embassy

    While the first document doesn’t name the individuals Thumairy talked to at the Saudi embassy in Washington, another file indicates his contacts there included:

    • Adel al-Sadhan, an Islamic Affairs section employee working for Mussaed al-Jarrah, another Saudi embassy official of FBI interest. “Al-Sadhan is believed to help al-Jarrah support extremist Saudi Sunnis in the United States,” said the FBI.

    • Mutaib al-Sudairy, an embassy administrative officer who later moved to Kansas and lived with an al Qaeda procurement officer said to have provided the phones used in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa.

    According to an FBI report:

    “[REDACTED] along with telephone and financial analysis, indicates Al-Sadhan and al-Sudairy may have assisted in laying the groundwork for the arrival of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar in southern California and served as an advance team to vet those who would later assist both hijackers.”

    Their alleged advance team activity extended well before the hijackers arrived.

    A 2010 FBI report says Sadhan first visited Los Angeles and Thumairy in December 1998: “Investigators believe his visit was to begin preparations for al-Thumairy’s subsequent assistance to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.” Another document says Sudairy and Sadhan visited San Diego for six weeks in the summer of 1999 and were hosted by Bayoumi.

    On December 12, 1999—about a month before the hijackers arrived—a Saudi individual named al-Jraithen arrived in Los Angeles and was registered at a hotel where Bayoumi was also registered.

    Phone records point to Thumairy, Bayoumi and Awlaki being involved with Jraithen’s visit, along with another Los Angeles consulate employee, Mohammed al-Muhanna, who’s elsewhere described as an “Islamic extremist associated with a radical form of Salafi ideology” and who is “heavily connected/linked to Saudi Sunni extremists operating inside the U.S.”

    An FBI agent, after noting some redacted indications that Jraithen’s visit held great importance, wrote, “It is possible that al-Jraithen provided the tazkia for al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi, ensuring that when the hijackers arrived the following month, they were taken care of by a network of individuals in Southern California.”

    The hijackers arrived in Los Angeles on January 13, 2000. According to a 2008 FBI document, a “confidential human source” told investigators about a call from overseas made to the King Fahad Mosque in Los Angeles where al-Thumairy was an imam.

    The source said someone asked for al-Thumairy and stated “the guys” were coming and needed to be picked up at the airport; the source understood “the guys” was a reference to Mihdhar and Hazmi.

    FBI files say a man named “Johar”—likely Mohammed Johar—was “tasked” by Thumairy to pick up the hijackers at LAX and “take care of them during their time in Los Angeles.” Two days after their arrival, Thumairy made several calls to Saudi Arabia.

    About two weeks after the hijackers landed, Bayoumi first met them at a Mediterranean restaurant in Los Angeles. He invited them to move to San Diego, where he lived.

    Bayoumi later told U.S. investigators it was a chance encounter, but it came within a couple hours after he had a meeting at the Saudi consulate with an employee described as having “extremist views.” As Stark Realities was first to report last month, in its declassification, the FBI inadvertently revealed that man’s name is “Mana.”

    On that same pivotal day, Bayoumi had a six-minute call with the Saudi embassy. He also received a $10,000 wire transfer from a man the FBI believed to be a brother-in-law who “worked for the PC.” It’s not clear what that abbreviation means. One former agent I spoke to wonders if the author mistakenly dropped an “A” in a reference to the Saudi Presidency of Civil Aviation or PCA, an entity that paid Bayoumi’s salary for a no-show job at a Saudi government contractor in California.

    Suspicious calls continued after the hijackers moved to San Diego:

    “Al-Bayoumi called al-Sudairy five (5) times while the hijackers were in San Diego with al-Bayoumi. The dates of the calls are significant. The first set of calls are 24 January, 26 January, and 30 January 2000—on these particular days al-Bayoumi met the hijackers in Culver City, CA and talked to them about coming to San Diego. The next call occurred on 2 February 2000. On 4 February 2000, al-Bayoumi co-signed a loan agreement for the apartment he obtained for the hijackers and brought them to a Bank of America to assist them in opening a bank account.

    An hour after Bayoumi helped the hijackers open the account, Awlaki called a Bank of America number. Two hours after that, Bayoumi called Awlaki.

    Bayoumi’s final call to al-Sudairy at the Saudi embassy came on February 7, 2000, after the hijackers were fully settled in the same apartment complex where Bayoumi lived.

    Five hundred eighty-two days later, Hazmi and Mihdhar passed through security at Dulles Airport and boarded American Airlines Flight 77.

    Stark Realities undermines official narratives, demolishes conventional wisdom and exposes fundamental myths across the political spectrum. Read more and subscribe at starkrealities.substack.com

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 19:55

  • Sri Lanka Suspends Fuel Sales Amid Economic Collapse; Asks Russians For Help 
    Sri Lanka Suspends Fuel Sales Amid Economic Collapse; Asks Russians For Help 

    A broke and extremely cash-strapped Sri Lanka halted all fuel sales except for essential services in a desperate attempt to manage a severe fuel shortage — allowing the government to buy some time and send two government officials to Russia to negotiate a fuel deal. 

    “From midnight today, no fuel will be sold except for essential services like the health sector, because we want to conserve the little reserves we have,” government spokesman Bandula Gunawardana said in a pre-recorded statement, obtained by AFP News. 

    The Sri Lankan government announced only essential services would operate and be allowed access to fuel until July 10 because of a fuel shortage

    “Sri Lanka has never faced such a severe economic crisis in its history,” Gunewardena added.

    The move comes less than a week after Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said the debt-laden economy of the island nation has “completely collapsed:” 

    “We are now facing a far more serious situation beyond the mere shortages of fuel, gas, electricity, and food. Our economy has faced a complete collapse. 

    “It is no easy task to revive a country with a completely collapsed economy, especially one that is dangerously low on foreign reserves,” ” Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe told parliament on June 22.

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

    “The country is also facing record-high inflation and lengthy power blackouts, all of which have contributed to months of protests — sometimes violent — calling on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to step down,” AFP said. 

    While the government said talks were held with the IMF, India, China, and Japan for new credit lines, negotiations to purchase heavily discounted Russian crude oil are set to begin this week. 

    Power and Energy Minister Kanchana Wijesekera said the two ministers would arrive in Russia early this week to continue talks about directly purchasing Russian fuels, according to AP News. 

    “There is an advantage for us if we could buy oil directly from the Russian government or the Russian firms. There are talks going on,” Wijesekera told reporters Sunday.

    Earlier this month, Sri Lanka turned to Russia for cheap oil to purchase crude roughly $30 below the international spot price. The South Asian country said it received 90,000 tons of Russian crude but will need a lot more. 

    Sri Lanka’s move to take Russian oil raises Western eyebrows as the country has remained neutral since the Ukraine war began. The country is in collapse as foreign exchange reserves plummeted by 70% in the last two years and have suspended foreign debt repayments — 10% of the $51 billion of the external debt owned is owed to China. 

    The government’s mishandling of the country’s economy and suspension of fuel sales could exacerbate social unrest. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 19:35

  • Far-Left Groups Use Map Created By University Professors To Target Pregnancy Centers
    Far-Left Groups Use Map Created By University Professors To Target Pregnancy Centers

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

    Radical pro-abortion activists are reportedly using an interactive map developed by two University of Georgia professors to plan their violent attacks on pregnancy resource centers.

    A message written on the wall of a pro-life pregnancy resource center that was set on fire in Longmont, Colorado, on June 25, 2022. (Longmont Police Department)

    These centers, which typically offer pregnancy tests and counseling services from a pro-life perspective, have been vandalized, smashed, and set on fire in growing numbers across the country in the weeks leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

    While these centers’ locations are public knowledge, perpetrators have been using online tools that collect and organize this information in a way that makes it easier for them to find the next target.

    One of such tools is the Crisis Pregnancy Center Map, a project led by Andrea Swartzendruber and Danielle Lambert, both professors at the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department at the University of Georgia. The interactive map identifies the exact street addresses of over 2,500 pro-life clinics.

    The stated purpose of the map is “to provide location information about all of the crisis pregnancy centers operating in the U.S.” The website also refers to these centers as “fake women’s health centers” primarily aimed to “prevent people from having abortions.”

    “There’s reason to think that people seeking health services may not know exactly what these centers are and the services they offer,” Swartzendruber said in 2018 when the CPC map first went online.

    According to Fox News, far-left extremists are using the map to mark their next targets while trying to refrain from explicitly calling for violence.

    Puget Sound Anarchists, an Antifa-affiliated group operating out of Washington state, included the CPC map in a post celebrating the vandalism of a pro-life clinic in the state by another radical group. The group itself in May publicly claimed responsibility for vandalizing four different churches in Olympia, Washington, because of their supposed ties to pregnancy resource centers.

    “You can find your nearest fake abortion clinic on the Crisis Pregnancy Center Map,” the post read.

    In Minnesota, left-wing anti-police group Twin Cities Encampment Responders posted a link to the map shortly after the release of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

    “A map of anti-abortion fake clinics, including dozens around the Twin Cities area … you know, just because information is power,” the group wrote in the post, which has since been shared hundreds of times.

    Colorado Springs Antifa, a group known for doxxing people affiliated with right-wing groups, shared a Twitter post containing a link to the CPC map alongside the message, “For the night owls.”

    A graphic accompanying the original post reads, “Your local crisis pregnancy center tonight. Mask up. Stay dangerous.”

    One of the latest attacks on pregnancy resource centers took place on Saturday morning in Longmont, a northern suburb of Denver. According to the police, the building was set ablaze and covered with graffiti messages such as “Bans off our bodies” and “If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you.”

    The facility is run by Life Choices, a Christian non-profit organization that offers free services related to pregnancy and sexual health. In a statement, Life Choices Executive Director Kathy Roberts said the center is “devastated and stunned by this frightening act of vandalism.”

    “What we hope the perpetrators of this act understand is that an attack on Life Choices is ultimately not an attack on a political party or act of,” Roberts said. “It is an attack on those who walk through our doors every day in need of diapers, pregnancy tests, limited ultrasounds, clothing, financial and parenting classes, support, and so much more. It is an attack on a place that is supposed to be safe for women, men, and their families.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 19:15

  • Activity In Tropics Emerges As Next Big Hurricane Could Send Gas Prices To "Apocalyptic" Levels
    Activity In Tropics Emerges As Next Big Hurricane Could Send Gas Prices To “Apocalyptic” Levels

    Three tropical disturbances are being closely monitored for development in the Atlantic as fears mount that above-average storms could wreak havoc on oil/gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico and send gas prices at the pump to “apocalyptic” heights. 

    “The lull in the tropics has come to an end as we’re now watching three different areas for development from the Gulf of Mexico to the central Atlantic,” The Weather Channel reports. 

    The first system is an area of low pressure in the northern Gulf of Mexico and is expected to track westward early this week and could dump heavy rains along with parts of the Texas coast. Even though the storm has low probabilities of formation over the next 2-5 days, the system is situated near the Gulf Coast (PADD 3), which has the highest concentration of US refineries. 

    The second is a disturbance located 900 miles east-southeast of the southern Windward Islands and has a 70% chance of cyclone formation in 2 days with probabilities at 90% for five days. Called Invest 94L, the storm is expected the strengthen as it enters the Caribbean Sea this week. Behind Invest 94L is a tropical wave with a 20% probability of developing into a storm over the next five days. 

    The elevated tropical activity comes as OPIS energy analysis global head Tom Kloza told Fox Bussiness,” if we have an active tropical season” that impacts domestic refining efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, then it could send gas prices to “apocalyptic” heights. 

    “I think for gasoline, we go back above $5 and apocalyptic numbers come into play with hurricanes. 

    “The thing that people have to watch and is really insidious for inflation are the values for diesel and jet fuel. Stocks of those fuels are not building, they’re tight internationally and that’s where we’re going to have to pay the piper in the last 100 days of the year,” Kloza said. 

    Tropical activity in the Gulf can shutter offshore drilling rigs and onshore refining operations. And given today’s extremely tight refining capacity and a bulk of the nation’s refineries are situated on the Gulf Coast, we “have to cross our fingers that no refining infrastructure gets damaged by hurricanes or by the electric grid,” Kloza said. 

    Ahead of the hurricane season, which began on the first of June, Bloomberg Markets’s Jake Lloyd-Smith warned about the consequences of an active hurricane season and how it could severely disrupt refinery operations. 

    Everyone, including the Biden administration, has figured out that the bottleneck in refining is the culprit behind soaring diesel and gasoline prices. The US is structurally short and down 1 million barrels from April 2020 to 17.95 million bpd as of June. 

    All it would take is one (or multiple) major hurricanes with direct landfall on the Gulf Coast (or PADD 3) to send fuel prices at the pump even higher. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 18:55

  • NY Supreme Court Tosses Law Allowing Noncitizens To Vote
    NY Supreme Court Tosses Law Allowing Noncitizens To Vote

    The New York Supreme Court on Monday struck down a NYC law allowing noncitizens to vote, handing a victory to the Republican National Committee (RNC) which filed a lawsuit against the law in January.

    The Court said in its decision that the city has no legal authority to allow illegal immigrants to vote, according to the Daily Caller.

    “There is no statutory ability for the City of New York to issue inconsistent laws permitting non-citizens to vote and exceed the authority granted to it by the New York State Constitution,” wrote the court. “Though voting is a right that so many citizens take for granted, the City of New York cannot ‘obviate’ the restrictions imposed by the Constitution.”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAccording to the RNC, approximately 1 million noncitizen adults live in NYC, and claimed they could comprise 15% or more of the vote in local races – which violates the state constitution requiring that voters be US citizens.

    “Today’s ruling is a huge victory for election integrity and the rule of law: American elections should be decided by American citizens. The [Republican National Committee (RNC)] is proud to head a broad coalition in successfully challenging this unconstitutional scheme and will continue to lead the effort across the country to ensure only citizens can vote in America’s elections,” said RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in a statement.

    According to a spokesperson for the NYC law department, the ruling is “disappointing … for people who value bringing in thousands more New Yorkers into the democratic process,” adding “we are evaluating next steps.“

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 18:35

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jun 27

Today’s News 27th June 2022

  • EU Says Africa Should Stop Buying Russian Fertilizer — But Can't Make It Themselves
    EU Says Africa Should Stop Buying Russian Fertilizer — But Can’t Make It Themselves

    In an attempt to encourage African nations to stop buying Russian fertilizer, the European Union developed a working plan that would help then develop their own fertilizer plants.

    The draft, dated June 15 and prepared by aides of European Council President Charles Michel, was to be presented at a summit of EU leaders last week, however the EU Commission then “explicitly opposed the text,” warning that supporting fertilizer production in developing nations was incompatible with their ‘green’ initiatives.

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    According to Reuters, the original text of the draft conclusions from the June 23-24 summit, the EU executive commission is urged to devise a plan “to support the development of fertiliser manufacturing capacity and alternatives in developing countries”.

    The Commission, however, urged governments to change the text so that it would only promote alternatives to fertilizers – or a more efficient use of fertilizers, as manufacturing it themselves would be “inconsistent with the EU energy and environment policies.”

    Higher fertilizer prices have been putting upward pressure on food prices worldwide, as farmers cut back on nutrients for their crops, resulting in lower yields.

    “Food prices will skyrocket because farmers will have to make profit, so what happens to consumers?” said Uche Anyanwu, an agricultural expert at the University of Nigeria.

    The aid group Action Aid warns that families in the Horn of Africa are already being driven “to the brink of survival.”

    The U.N. says Russia is the world’s No. 1 exporter of nitrogen fertilizer and No. 2 in phosphorus and potassium fertilizers. Its ally Belarus, also contending with Western sanctions, is another major fertilizer producer.

    Many developing countries — including Mongolia, Honduras, Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, Mexico and Guatemala — rely on Russia for at least a fifth of their imports. –NPR

    “Many people will not use fertilizers at all, and this as a result, lowers the quality of the production and the production itself, and slowly, slowly at one point, they won’t be able to farm their land because there will be no income,” said Greek farmer Dimitris Filis, who grows olives oranges and lemons, adding “you have to search to find” ammonium nitrate, while the cost of fertilizing a 25-acre olive grove has doubled.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 02:45

  • Luongo: The End Of The European Colonial Powers & The Tyranny Of Physics
    Luongo: The End Of The European Colonial Powers & The Tyranny Of Physics

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

    I sat down last weekend for a long chat with Alexander Mercouris of The Duran and Crypto Rich to discuss the rapidly evolving situation in Europe. Long time readers know that I’ve been handicapping the collapse of the European Union for years.

    That idea isn’t based on my personal antipathy for Eurotrash commies and eugenicists, though it is quite large. In fact, the deeper we go into 2022 the more that antipathy rises to near unquenchable levels. The sheer arrogance and stupidity of Europe’s leadership is nothing short of breathtaking.

    Today we are looking at a situation where an entire continent’s leadership is in the process of committing ritualistic suicide and yet is obsessed with portraying these self-inflicted wounds to the world as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s fault.

    A common trait among all malignant narcissists is the inability to take any responsibility for their own actions, seeking to always shift blame onto someone else. You see this behavior in children. And it only manifests itself in adulthood because the parents refused to put any boundaries on the child or inflict any consequences on them.

    Look at Europe’s leaders today and to a person, man or woman, there is not one shred of self-reflection or contrition. The problem is just as endemic here amongst the Davos-affiliated American leadership. Fungal President Joe Biden keep yammering on about the “Putin Price Hike” or blaming oil companies for not being patriotic enough to keep gas and diesel prices affordable for nearly every American.

    But it was just a few weeks ago where these same people were telling us that we had to endure slightly higher prices at the pump to starve Russia and defend Ukraine.

    Biden and his party apparatchiks simply can’t give this idea up as we’re now just over four months to the mid-term elections.

    I already told you what the real cost at the pump is all about, RINs, renewable offset blending credits, which are strangling small refiners.

    But in Europe the real story is beyond comprehension. It can be summed up in the following meme:

    And yet if you listen to Europe’s leadership what are they talking about? Expanding NATO to include Finland and Sweden. Backing Lithuania’s disastrous blockade of overland goods into Kaliningrad, in clear violation of that country’s treaty with Russia. The EU parliament and the leaders of France, Germany, and Italy all backing Ukraine’s invitation into the bloc.

    These are all to which Russia will correctly respond with shifting its exports East rather than West and put paid Putin’s words from his speech at SPIEF 2022 last week.

    “The European Union has lost its political sovereignty, and its bureaucratic elites are dancing to someone else’s tune, doing everything they are told from on high and hurting their own people, economies, and businesses.”

    The whole speech is worth your time and the best highlight reel is this Twitter thread, not for what it implies for crypto, as the author implies, but for humanity in general. Debt is a slave’s system. It’s not real wealth, only the pretense of wealth.

    The big takeaway is exactly what I’ve been talking about on this blog for years: The end of sovereign debt as the basis for global reserves. The world will move, quickly, towards a commodity-backed monetary standard, where some form of discipline will be enforced on governments, who are torching their credibility by the day, because of reality.

    Real wealth is in things which sustain your life.

    Eventually physics and the limitations of time catch up with every central planner and their grand dreams of global domination. The tyranny they decry isn’t racism, a lack of tolerance or even tribalism, it is simply math and the physics of energy production.

    That is Putin’s big crime, reminding everyone of this basic fact.

    The narcissists who try to blame him for their woes will never admit they were wrong. They would rather continue manipulating events to steer the world towards the unthinkable blaming him and us for not bowing to their wisdom.

    Listen to them carefully and all you will hear is, “It’s not my fault!”

    But it is.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/27/2022 – 02:00

  • 'There Was No Plan To Attack': Oath Keepers FBI Interviews Contradict Indictment Charges
    ‘There Was No Plan To Attack’: Oath Keepers FBI Interviews Contradict Indictment Charges

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

    An Indiana Oath Keepers leader who was in charge of security operations for the group in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, was indicted by a federal grand jury on June 24 on five counts related to violence at the U.S. Capitol.

    Members of the Oath Keepers are seen during a protest against the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results by the U.S. Congress, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Jim Bourg/Reuters)

    Michael Greene, 39, of Indianapolis, was arrested in Indiana on a warrant from Washington. An indictment unsealed June 24 charges Greene with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding (aiding and abetting), conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging any duties, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds, and tampering with documents or proceedings (aiding and abetting).

    Greene was added to a superseding indictment against seven other Oath Keepers, including Donovan Crowl, Sandra Parker, Bennie Parker, Laura Steele, Connie Meggs, William Isaacs, and James Beeks.

    Greene, who also goes by the name Michael Simmons, is not accused of seditious conspiracy, a charge leveled in a different indictment against nine Oath Keepers, including the group’s founder, Elmer Stewart Rhodes III.

    Rhodes and his eight co-defendants were named in the latest 13-count superseding indictment unsealed in Washington, also on June 24. The other defendants in the seditious conspiracy case include Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, Roberto Minuta, Joseph Hackett, David Moerschel, Thomas Caldwell, and Edward Vallejo.

    The overarching cases against the Oath Keepers allege the group conspired to prevent the counting of Electoral College votes by a joint session of the U.S. Congress at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The goal, according to federal prosecutors, was to keep then-President Donald J. Trump in office and prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr. from assuming the presidency.

    All of the current 17 Oath Keepers defendants have pleaded not guilty to all charges. Defense attorneys say the indictments are a vast misreading and twisting of communications between group members who came to Washington to do nothing more than keep event participants safe from attacks by Antifa radicals.

    “At 1:42 p.m. on January 6, Greene sent a text message to an acquaintance stating, ‘Storming the capital’ (sic) along with a photograph that depicted the advancing mob on the west side of the Capitol grounds,” the Department of Justice stated in a news release. “Greene communicated with Rhodes and others during the afternoon. At about 3:09 p.m., Greene texted an acquaintance, ‘Congress evacuated.’”

    FBI Notes Contradict Indictments

    Greene’s indictment surprised some case observers, coming nearly 13 months after he was interviewed by FBI agents regarding his participation with the Oath Keepers at events in various cities. As a key leader at the D.C. events on Jan. 6, his input cited in the FBI reports contradicts much of what is alleged against Rhodes and other Oath Keepers defendants.

    According to the FBI’s case notes from interviews with Greene on May 4 and May 25, 2021, he told agents there was no Oath Keepers plan to attack the U.S. Capitol. His role on Jan. 6 was to oversee security for speakers at various events at or near the Capitol, he said. Oath Keepers who entered the Capitol building did not do so at his instruction or that of Rhodes, he told agents.

    Greene, who was identified in the redacted FBI notes as “Person 10,” told agents his job “was providing VIP security at select stages … where ‘protectees’ would be giving speeches.”

    “The security detail encompassed stage security and the protection of those individuals as they returned to their vehicles,” the FBI report said. “Person 10 cited the need for this protection after the Trump rally in December [2020] when individuals had been attacked by Antifa as they were leaving the rally.”

    Greene was standing with Rhodes near a downed fence on the northeast side of the Capitol during part of the afternoon of Jan. 6, the report said. “Person 10 learned afterwards OKs had entered the U.S. Capitol, however, advised no plan by the OKs included anyone going inside the U.S. Capitol.”

    In his FBI interviews, Greene said the message he sent out stating “they have taken ground at the capital (sic)” was an effort to get the Oath Keepers to regroup and leave the area of the Capitol building.

    Greene also told FBI agents that no Oath Keepers assaulted any law enforcement personnel or forced their way into the Capitol. “Person 10 heard the door was open and the group walked in,” the FBI report said.

    One group of Oath Keepers climbed the east steps of the Capitol below the historic Columbus Doors and went inside the Rotunda. Some of those Oath Keepers intervened in a potentially deadly standoff between a U.S. Capitol Police officer and a group of angry protesters inside the Small House Rotunda, witnesses reported.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 23:30

  • "Jetpack Man Is Back": FAA Investigates New Mysterious Sighting Near LA Airport 
    “Jetpack Man Is Back”: FAA Investigates New Mysterious Sighting Near LA Airport 

    The mysterious “Jetpack Man” was reportedly spotted by a commercial airline pilot in the skies over Los Angeles last Thursday. 

    “We heard that the jetpack man is back,” an air traffic controller at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) said in audio obtained by FOX 11.

    FAA confirmed that an “airline pilot reported seeing an object that might have resembled a jetpack 15 miles east of Los Angeles International Airport” on Thursday afternoon. 

    “The FAA has worked closely with the FBI to investigate every reported jetpack sighting,” the agency said, indicating “so far no sightings have not been verified.” 

    This is not the first time sightings of what appears to be a person operating a jetpack have been spotted by commercial pilots landing or taking off from LAX. We’ve documented several sightings over the last two years:

    “We Just Passed A Guy In A Jet Pack”: FBI Investigating After Pilots Report Sighting At 3,000 Feet

    Airline Crew Spots’ Guy In Jetpack’ Flying 6,000 Feet Over LAX In 2nd ‘Dangerous’ Incident

    Stunning Video Appears To Capture Mysterious LA’ Jetpack Man’

    There’s even speculation jetpack man could just be an inflatable balloon resembling Jack Skellington from Tim Burton’s movie Nightmare Before Christmas. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 23:00

  • China Delivers Advanced Frigate To Pakistan Navy
    China Delivers Advanced Frigate To Pakistan Navy

    By Joe Saballa of The Defense Post

    China has delivered a second Type 054A/P frigate to the Pakistan Navy, providing a further boost to Islamabad’s maritime defense.

    Named the PNS Taimur, the frigate is reportedly equipped with cutting-edge weapons and sensors to support maritime surveillance and combat missions.

    It also has the latest combat management and electronic warfare systems, making it suitable in multi-threat environments.

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    The new ship is expected to enable the Pakistan Navy to meet emerging challenges to its maritime

    Concerns Over Defective Warships

    Earlier this week, it was reported that Pakistan is facing serious mechanical issues with some warships developed by Chinese companies.

    A recent Geopolitica.info analysis revealed that the Chinese-made frigates are ineffective at hitting targets due to faulty onboard missile systems.

    The frigates’ engines were also found to be defective, negatively impacting operational speed.

    security and regional peace.

    Earlier this year, Pakistan received its first of four Chinese-made multi-role frigates, the PNS Tughril.

    –

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 22:30

  • John Mearsheimer's Ukraine Crystal Ball
    John Mearsheimer’s Ukraine Crystal Ball

    A new talk by Professor John J. Mearsheimer has recently been made public, wherein the famous author and political science theorist details the causes and consequences of the Ukraine war. Mearsheimer became more well-known, and “controversial” in establishment circles, after it emerged that he clearly predicted going back to 2014 the war which kicked off in Feb. 2022.

    He had said in a 2014 University of Chicago lecture, “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked.” This tragedy for the Ukrainian people is playing out now, with little hope that now totally defunct Russia-Ukraine ceasefire talks will halt the fighting. Other than efforts of France’s Macron, attempts at basic diplomacy and direct communications are all but dead.

    As the lecture intro describes: Prof. Mearsheimer focused on both the origins of the war in Ukraine and some of its most important consequences. He argues that the crisis is largely the result of the West’s efforts to turn Ukraine into a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Russian leaders viewed that outcome as an existential threat that had to be thwarted.

    While Vladimir Putin is certainly responsible for invading Ukraine and for Russia’s conduct in the war, Prof. Mearsheimer states that he does not believe he is an expansionist bent on creating a greater Russia.

    Regarding the war’s consequences, the greatest danger is that the war will go on for months if not years, and that either NATO will get directly involved in the fighting or nuclear weapons will be used — or both. Furthermore, enormous damage has already been inflicted on Ukraine. A prolonged war is likely to wreak even more devastation on Ukraine.

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    Mearsheimer calls the war an “unmitigated disaster” and with “no end in sight” – for which he lays chief blame on the West. Lately student groups at the University of Chicago, as well as some pundits within the mainstream media, have sought to censor his views and “cancel” him  – despite that he’s been on record and consistent in his predictions and views for years.

    WATCH the full new Mearsheimer talk below:

    Prof. John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 22:00

  • It Costs $22,648 And Requires 11 Agencies To Start A Restaurant In San Francisco
    It Costs $22,648 And Requires 11 Agencies To Start A Restaurant In San Francisco

    By Simon Black of Sovereign Man

    In a report called Barriers to Business, the Institute for Justice (IJ) analyzed 20 US cities for how easy it is to open five different types of businesses. To cover a range, those businesses included a restaurant, a retail bookstore, a food truck, a barbershop, and a home-based tutoring business.

    Entrepreneurs who want to start a restaurant, for example, have 13 different fees totaling $5,300, on average across the 20 cities. In San Francisco, those fees reach $22,648.

    Remember, these costs and regulatory hurdles are all in addition to the normal costs and work of opening a restaurant.

    The IJ also looked at the number of regulatory steps, and the number of government agencies it took to open a business. On average, across the 20 cities, it took 55 steps and eight government agencies just to open a barbershop.

    And as if the cost and time burden wasn’t enough, the report found that in many of the cities, it was not even clear what all the requirements were to start a business.

    For example, the report analyzed if a city gave entrepreneurs a “one-stop-shop” to open a business.

    That means a website which clearly lays out the requirements, and allows the owner to complete most forms in one portal. IJ also looked at whether the portal is user-friendly and allows the business owner to track progress and organize their information from one online account.

    None of the cities received a 5/5 for the one-stop-shop, while Birmingham and Des Moines received a 0. But Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans, New York, Pittsburgh and San Francisco came close, with a 4/5.

    And that shows that simply looking at one factor is not enough. Sure, San Francisco may make it relatively easy to navigate the process, but that doesn’t make up for the enormous cost.

    And in Raleigh, it may only cost about $1,300 in fees to open a restaurant, but the city meets only 1/5 one-stop-shop criteria.

    What this means: 

    The report correctly observes that “You shouldn’t need a law degree to start the small business of your dreams.” Obviously, these types of costs and burdens are the exact opposite of what made America so strong and prosperous in the first place.

    It’s no surprise that businesses are fleeing San Francisco, where it costs tens of thousands of dollars in fees to start a restaurant.

    Meanwhile, in San Antonio, Texas, it costs $2,477 and in Jacksonville, Florida, it’s $2,794.

    Sadly, in terms of the number of agencies and bureaucratic steps involved, these cities aren’t much better than San Francisco.

    What you can do about it:

    We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: local really matters. It is worth noting that the report only looked at medium to large cities. But when you are looking to start a business, you may be locating in a smaller city or town.

    It makes sense to shop around, by town or county, to see what the requirements are before committing to a location. This will make it easier on you, but it also represents voting with your feet.

    Also consider the type of business you will be opening. The total steps it took to open a home-based tutoring business was the fewest of any other business analyzed in all 20 cities.

    That is a good sign, since many of the most promising small-business opportunities these days are home-based. We even talked about the revolution in alternative schooling programs to replace public schools in this Sunday Intelligence article from March.

    Service providers are popping up to support micro-schools, and regulations in many states, like Florida, allow former public school teachers to easily start a home-based schooling program. Some states, such as Arizona, even allow school choice funds to be spent on these types of private programs.

    With parents fed-up with woke indoctrination and COVID protocols in school, the market is there. And in many places, the regulatory burden is relatively small.

    If you have an online business which provides services, you should consider Puerto Rico’s Act 60 tax incentives. Companies which export their services to customers outside of Puerto Rico can pay just a 4% corporate tax rate, then distribute dividends to the company owner tax free.

    And of course, you should always consider looking outside of your home country for opportunities as well.

    As we mentioned earlier, the free-market American dream of starting any business easily is not what it used to be.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 21:30

  • Hedge Fund CIO: How Will The Fed Do QT? Each Crisis Has Increased Markets' Dependency On Fed Liquidity
    Hedge Fund CIO: How Will The Fed Do QT? Each Crisis Has Increased Markets’ Dependency On Fed Liquidity

    By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management

    “The Fed is “all in” on re-establishing price stability,” Fed Governor Waller pronounced in pleasantly direct language. “Experience has shown that markets need time to adjust to a turn from accommodation to tightening.”

    In response to questions, Waller spoke with blunt determination: “I don’t care what’s causing inflation, it’s too high, it’s my job to get it down. The higher rates and the path that we’re putting them on, it’s going to put downward pressure on demand across all sectors.”

    Powell offered his own sober message, “A soft landing is our goal. It is going to be very challenging. It has been made significantly more challenging by the events of the last few months – thinking of the war and of commodities prices and further problems with supply chains.”

    New York Fed economists provide a bit more precision, arguing that “the chances of a hard landing are about 80%,” starting in Q4 2022.

    Something will break. Something always does.

    Digital did and the regulatory landgrab has started in full force. Lagarde, with plenty of serious policy decisions ahead, observed that “crypto assets and DeFi have the potential to pose real risk to financial stability.”

    Spain’s Minister of Finance, Montero, announced digital asset owners would need to declare holdings and trading “in anticipation of regulations that would soon be carried out throughout the European Union.”

    The East-West divide is clear in policy focus. President Xi is focused on growth, vowing to “strengthen macro-policy adjustment and adopt more effective measures to strive to meet the social and economic development targets for 2022 and minimize the impacts of Covid-19.”

    Strains in emerging markets are being managed from within. Sri Lanka’s 22mm people are in the most severe economic crisis in nearly a century and India’s Foreign Secretary Kwatra underlined, “India stands ready to help Sri Lanka through promoting investments, connectivity and strengthening economic linkages,” beyond the $4bln aid already provided.

    The East-West center of gravity between global war and peace sits in Kaliningrad, a tiny Russian province pressed between NATO countries. Lithuanian President Nauseda offered that “Russia cannot be stopped by persuasion, cooperation, appeasement or concessions.”

    Elevated rhetoric continued when Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov drew comparison to Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union. “The EU and NATO are bringing together a contemporary coalition to fight and, to a large extent, wage war against Russia.”

    * * *

    Liquidity Unknowns I: How much QT is too much QT? We don’t know. There is no tidy math formula, no general equilibrium model, no linear approximation that will tell you. The trouble is, in a world of false precision, everyone wants a number. And policymakers have a hard time saying, “we don’t know,” especially when it’s true. Through the week ending June 22, balances with Federal Reserve Banks – previously known as ‘excess reserves’ – stood at $3.115trln. Powell guided the market that the end point for the Fed balance sheet would shrink another $2.5trln to $3trln. How does that math work?

    Unknowns II: Yet again new tools were needed in this cycle. To make sure rates didn’t fall below the Fed’s floor, they needed a broader mechanism to absorb excess liquidity. That mechanism was private sector access to the reverse repo facility. Remember the 2018 period of QT. Excess reserves were $1.9trln before liquidity conditions started to bite in September. Private sector reverse repos were basically zero. Today? $2.5trln. The Fed’s liabilities are acting as the riskless asset to private money funds in a way. The Fed clearly thinks reverse repos will decline. We don’t know. Behavior could drive it up if everyone wants liquidity and wants to face the Fed. As reverse repos rise, excess reserves decline. QT has more liquidity plumbing risk today – tools can turn into weapons.

    Unknown III: The risks are different but the strategy with QT is the same – start small, increase gradually, and then let it run. It isn’t the obvious choice. Reducing the pace as liquidity is withdrawn is a more natural path – you typically slow as you approach a stop sign, after all. We will know when the tightening – both in liquidity and interest rates – has gone too far. Weak links will break. Digital plays the role of EM in this cycle – big enough to be noticed, not enough to get policy to stop. Asset deflation, a USD credit crunch, and risks from maturity transformation has led to capital controls with 11 digital intermediaries. As in the Asia Crisis, the ecosystem will respond to gain independence and resilience.

    Unknown IV: Digital is the warning sign, not the circuit-breaker. Typical candidates – a rapid rise in the US dollar, EM currency and debt crisis, and banking strain – are just not applicable. After each crisis is a response, and those responses act like a vaccine against future ‘shocks.’ Emerging markets have insulated themselves with large holdings in the US dollar. Currency depreciation forced EM central banks into more orthodox positions well ahead of the Fed, ECB, and BOJ. Banks don’t have the space to make the mistakes of the GFC, with leverage financing pushed to capital markets. But markets have not been weaned from liquidity. To the contrary, each crisis has increased dependency on Fed liquidity.

    Unknown V: The adjustment in broader markets is orderly. How else would it be? Disorder is how it ends, not how it starts. “It is like jumping from the 100th floor of a building and saying, ‘so far, so good’ halfway into the drop,” a prolific investor remarked when confronted with “contained” language head of the GFC. Liquidity transformation in traditional markets, the driver of digital weakness, is everywhere. And it is a so-far, so-good story. ETF discounts make the point emphatically. An illiquidity pocket means that ETFs would clear the way closed-end funds do – hunting for a price where a buyer is willing to absorb the liquidity risk. Mortgage ETFs are down 9.7% for the year and trade exactly on net asset value. So far, so good.

    Unknown VI: What we can see is rarely the problem. The grandest mismatch resides in private markets. “Prior to the pandemic, many had already grown concerned about public market valuations and were exploring private capital markets in the hopes of addressing lower return projections for their traditional 60/40 portfolios.” Pronouncements like these became the norm. A generation of “J-curve” investors – the pattern of private investments to draw capital and then deliver rapid returns – was born. Everyone wants a liquidity buffer. Nobody has one. And in the everything bubble, to get one you are selling assets in the hole. You sell what you can. You promise never again, even if enticed by the Fed toolkit. Until it happens again.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 21:13

  • State Department To Pay 'Havana Syndrome' Victims Six-Figures
    State Department To Pay ‘Havana Syndrome’ Victims Six-Figures

    The US State Department is readying six-figure payments for the victims of mysterious brain injuries known as “Havana Syndrome,” according to AP, citing officials and a congressional aide.

    Alex Sandoval

    Both current and former State Department staff and their families who suffered “qualifying injuries” since 2016 will receive payments between $100,000 and $200,000 each – with specific amounts to be based on the severity of the victims’ injuries.

    The payments will only cover victims employed by the State Department as well as their dependents – around 20% of cases – while other victims will have to seek compensation from whatever federal agency employed them.

    The officials and aide spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the expected publication next week of the State Department’s plan to compensate victims under the terms of the HAVANA Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law last year.

    That draft rule is expected to be published early next week and will not become final until after a 30-day period in which public comment will be solicited. The State Department, along with the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management, will consider the comments before enacting a final rule. -AP

    According to the report, the HAVANA Act will authorize the State Department to “provide payments to personnel for certain qualifying injuries to the brain,” and requires the agency to publish plans for deploying the funds.

    The mysterious syndrome, which in January the CIA ruled out Russia or other ‘hostile powers’ as the cause, have affected US personnel in foreign embassies, who complained of nausea, severe headaches, disorientation, vomiting, and even concussion-like symptoms.

    Out of literally hundreds of alleged instances, some which were claimed to have happened in the streets of D.C., the CIA says it only considers “about two dozen cases” instances where they “cannot rule out foreign involvement”. 

    Since 2017 there’s been an estimated 200 possible Havanda Syndrome incidents. Last year The Wall Street Journal called attention to “a steady expansion of attacks on American spies and diplomats posted overseas by unknown assailants using what government officials and scientists suspect is some sort of directed-energy source.”

    As we noted at the time, bizarre reports began to emerge that nearly two dozen American diplomats – and a handful of Canadians – serving at embassies in Havana suffered hard-to-pin-down symptoms from the alleged “sonic attacks”. But from the start anything in the way of actual evidence was lacking – other than the reports of the strange symptoms themselves (something which varied from person to person, and remained highly subjective in terms of description or severity). The whole initial episode focused on the US Embassy in the Cuban capital gave rise to endless theories.

    One prime theory that emerged in 2019 ascribed it to a natural phenomenon due to sounds produced by crickets in Havana.

    This particular theory wasn’t merely based on the musings of some random US officials, but was advanced by a team of scientists, and was featured in The Guardian in 2019. Other scientists had simultaneously posited the possibility of mass hysteria among staff serving in a high stress environment. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 20:00

  • US Will "Continue To Provide Seamless Access" To Abortion In Military: Defense Secretary
    US Will “Continue To Provide Seamless Access” To Abortion In Military: Defense Secretary

    Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,

    Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a statement suggesting that the Defense Department intends to maintain the military’s access to abortion.

    “Nothing is more important to me or to this Department than the health and well-being of our Service members, the civilian workforce, and DOD families. I am committed to taking care of our people and ensuring the readiness and resilience of our Force. The Department is examining this decision closely and evaluating our policies to ensure we continue to provide seamless access to reproductive health care as permitted by federal law,” Austin said in a June 24 press release.

    The Supreme Court decision leaves the matter of abortion laws to states. Of 50 U.S. states, 26 are likely or certain to ban abortion now that the Supreme Court has struck down Roe v. Wade, according to research group Guttmacher Institute.

    Thirteen states already have “trigger laws” in place that ban most abortions. These were set to come into effect immediately following the Supreme Court ruling. Many of the country’s military bases are in states like Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama where abortion is expected to be mostly outlawed.

    Women make up around 20 percent of the 1.3 million active-duty force of the American military. Almost 95 percent of women in the military are of reproductive age, according to estimates by the Defense Department. Military women also have a 50 percent higher rate of unplanned pregnancy when compared to women from the general populace.

    Abortion Leave

    At present, the military’s health program for service members and their families, Tricare, only covers abortions in case of rape, incest, or when the woman’s life is in danger.

    For all other abortion procedures, women have to go off-base and pay for these services from their own pockets.

    …

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 19:30

  • Explosive Report Confirms Expansive CIA 'Stealth Network' Of Spies & Commandos Inside Ukraine
    Explosive Report Confirms Expansive CIA ‘Stealth Network’ Of Spies & Commandos Inside Ukraine

    A fresh New York Times report has confirmed what many already suspected – that the CIA is still very active inside Ukraine – especially with training as well coordinating weapons among its Ukrainian allies. The Times report details “a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training,” based on US and European intelligence officials with knowledge of the operations. The report says Ukrainian forces are reliant on this Western clandestine network “more than ever” while outgunned by the Russians.

    This comes months after investigative journalist Zach Dorfman’s bombshell expose in Yahoo News which detailed how a prior 8-year long CIA covert program to train Ukrainian fighters helped provoke the Russian invasion. The only question that remained after that March report was the extent to which the CIA was still active in the ongoing fight against the invading Russians.

    Special operations file image, via Sandboxx

    The new Times reporting confirms that the US program is not only active and ongoing, but appears larger in scale than previously thought given the CIA’s close cooperation with the Ukrainians is happening both inside and outside the country, across multiple locations.

    “Much of this work happens outside Ukraine, at bases in Germany, France and Britain, for example. But even as the Biden administration has declared it will not deploy American troops to Ukraine, some C.I.A. personnel have continued to operate in the country secretly, mostly in the capital, Kyiv, directing much of the vast amounts of intelligence the United States is sharing with Ukrainian forces, according to current and former officials,” the report indicates.

    It appears much the CIA’s work in Ukraine is centered on coordinating intelligence with local intel services and counterparts. “Few other details have emerged about what the C.I.A. personnel or the commandos are doing, but their presence in the country — on top of the diplomatic staff members who returned after Russia gave up its siege of Kyiv — hints at the scale of the secretive effort to assist Ukraine that is underway and the risks that Washington and its allies are taking,” NY Times continues.

    Over the weekend, Canada also has been reported to have special operations troops inside Ukraine. This was reported months ago, but with a separate NYT report offering further confirmation. “Both CTV and Global News reported in late January that Canadian special forces had been sent to Ukraine, but National Defence did not comment on that deployment,” Ottawa Citizen writes Sunday. Back in January, a full two months before the invasion, Yahoo News disclosed the following:

    The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.

    The CIA-trained forces could soon play a critical role on Ukraine’s eastern border, where Russian troops have massed in what many fear is preparation for an invasion. The U.S. and Russia started security talks earlier this week in Geneva but have failed thus far to reach any concrete agreement.

    While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it, said a former senior intelligence official in touch with colleagues in government.

    These details further seems to authenticate those voices which have been insisting NATO and Russia are in fact waging a proxy war inside Ukraine, a label which Biden administration officials have previously sought to deny and downplay.

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

    Writes NY Times further of the international nature of Ukraine’s on-the-ground assistance, “At the same time, a few dozen commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine.”

    But the report adds the caveat that “The United States withdrew its own 150 military instructors before the war began in February, but commandos from these allies either remained or have gone in and out of the country since then, training and advising Ukrainian troops and providing an on-the-ground conduit for weapons and other aid, three U.S. officials said.”

    This strongly suggests the very scenario that many long suspected: that CIA operations which had gone on for eight years in Ukraine didn’t wind down or cease upon the Feb.24 start of the Russian invasion, but only increased and were ramped up. Of course, the same goes for the Pentagon’s special operations presence inside the country and along its Western borders, particularly in Poland.

    On Sunday, the Kremlin underscored angrily that even as such clandestine programs are made public via deliberate “leaks” to the media, Washington has refused to answer simple questions regarding Western operatives and mercenaries inside Ukraine – also after a couple of American fighters were recently captured.

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

    Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Sunday:

    “As [Russian Ambassador to London Andrey] Kelin said, they [Western countries] are writing some provocative, boorish things. They don’t want to answer the question we ask about their activities.”

    She charged the West with only seeking to perpetuate the conflict, saying, “They are sparing no effort so that the conflict in Ukraine continued as long as possible. We remember what US 43rd President George Bush Jr said: Ukraine’s mission is to kill as many Russians as possible…. They have endowed Ukraine and the Kiev regime with this duty.

    “They are using (Ukraine – TASS) as an instrument and the entire logistics are centered round that – weapons supplies, sending people, anything to keep the conflict burning, as [UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson told [French President Emmanuel] Macron today, to prevent the settlement of this situation. Otherwise, their plan will fail,” Zakharova said according to TASS.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 19:00

  • Home Showings Across US Plunge 24%, Mortgage Rates Remain Elevated
    Home Showings Across US Plunge 24%, Mortgage Rates Remain Elevated

    Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,

    Home showings across the United States have fallen, according to a report by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), with all four regions registering a decline.

    Home showings—when a potential buyer takes a private home tour with an agent—were down by 24 percent year-on-year in May, with total showings across the country at 785,005, said the NAR SentriLock Home Showings Report. SentriLock is a lockbox and real estate management solutions company.

    All four regions in the United States saw a decrease in showings year-on-year, with the Northwest falling by 55 percent, Midwest by 29 percent, West by 27 percent, and the South by 14 percent.

    Total SentriLock cards fell 2 percent YoY to 214,868. The cards allow realtors access to Sentrilock lockboxes—which hold keys to a home and allow communal access to all real estate agents—and indicate the number of realtors who conduct the showing.

    The number of showings per card, which reflects the strength of buyer interest per listed property, decreased 23 percent YoY in May nationwide. Region-wise, showings per card in the West fell by 29 percent, the South by 23 percent, and the Midwest by 22 percent. Only the Northeast registered an increase at 45 percent.

    Meanwhile, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) fell by two points to 67 in June, which the organization called a “troubling sign” for the housing market and broader economy.

    According to NAHB Chair Jerry Konter, the six consecutive monthly declines of HMI is a “clear sign of a slowing housing market in a high-inflation, slow-growth economic environment.”

    This is the lowest HMI reading since June 2020. The index had hit a record high of 90 at the end of 2020 when the pandemic triggered strong demand for homes.

    Elevated Mortgage Rates

    The fall in home showings is happening as mortgage rates remain at elevated levels. A 30-year fixed-rate mortgage had an average interest rate of 5.81 percent as of June 22, according to data from Freddie Mac.

    Realtor.com is expecting home prices and mortgage rates to continue climbing while home sales drop as buyers get priced out from homeownership, based on a June 13 analysis of market trends. The rise in mortgage rates is driven by the U.S. Federal Reserve hiking interest rates to control inflation, the company noted.

    “Rising interest rates have shifted the foundation of the economy as well as the housing market. So many homebuyers take out mortgages so that rising rates affect how expensive homeownership is,” said the company’s Chief Economist Danielle Hale. “It’s causing buyers to make tough trade-offs and disrupting the housing market.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 18:30

  • 40,000 National Guard Troops Face Unemployment As Vaccine Deadline Imminent
    40,000 National Guard Troops Face Unemployment As Vaccine Deadline Imminent

    Up to 40,000 Army National Guard troops – around 13% of the force – could be fired for not getting the mandated COVID-19 vaccine (which has limited efficacy against Omicron, doesn’t stop transmission, has been linked to elevated heart problems, and has been mandated for a healthy demographic that rarely dies of the disease).

    Michigan Army National Guard Sgt. Mark Abbott administers a COVID-19 vaccine

    Guard soldiers have until Thursday to get the jab, according to the Associated Press, which notes that between 20% and 30% of Guard soldiers in six states remain unvaccinated.

    “We’re going to give every soldier every opportunity to get vaccinated and continue their military career. Every soldier that is pending an exemption, we will continue to support them through their process,” Lt. Gen. Jon Jensen, director of the Army National Guard, told AP. “We’re not giving up on anybody until the separation paperwork is signed and completed. There’s still time.”

    Last year, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered all service members to get the vaccine, with different branches maintaining different deadlines for the jab. The Army National Guard was given the maximum amount of time, largely because its roughly 330,000 soldiers are scattered throughout the country, including remote locations.

    The Army Guard’s vaccine percentage is the lowest among the U.S. military — with all the active-duty Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps at 97% or greater and the Air Guard at about 94%. The Army reported Friday that 90% of Army Reserve forces were partially or completely vaccinated.

    The Pentagon has said that after June 30, Guard members won’t be paid by the federal government when they are activated on federal status, which includes their monthly drill weekends and their two-week annual training period. Guard troops mobilized on federal status and assigned to the southern border or on COVID-19 missions in various states also would have to be vaccinated or they would not be allowed to participate or be paid. -AP

    Complicating matters is a rule that Guard soldiers deployed on state active duty may not require a vaccination, depending on state-level mandates. 

    According to the report, at least seven governors have asked Austin to reconsider, or drop, the vaccine mandate for National Guard members – with some having filed or joined lawsuits to that end.

    Austin, apparently following his own special brand of science, told them to pound sand, saying that Covid-19 “takes our service members out of the fight, temporarily or permanently, and jeopardizes our ability to meet mission requirements,” adding that troops will either need to get vaccinated or lose their Guard status.

    “When you’re looking at, 40,000 soldiers that potentially are in that unvaccinated category, absolutely there’s readiness implications on that and concerns associated with that,” said Jenson, adding “That’s a significant chunk.” 

    AP reports that around 85% of Army Guard soldiers are fully vaccinated, while 87% are at least partially vaccinated.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 18:00

  • The Asininity Of Inflation Expectations, Once Again By Powell & The Fed
    The Asininity Of Inflation Expectations, Once Again By Powell & The Fed

    Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

    Jerome Powell and the St. Louis Fed are both concerned over inflation expectations. Let’s investigate.

    What Do Financial Markets Say about Future Inflation?

    From the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, please consider What Do Financial Markets Say about Future Inflation? by YiLi Chien and Julie Bennett.

    The Importance of Inflation Expectation

    The effectiveness of monetary policy hinges critically on inflation expectations. If economic agents, such as households and firms, expect higher inflation in the future, the rational reaction is to purchase goods and services right away in order to avoid higher future prices. As a result, the demand for goods and services immediately rises and so does the price level, which results in higher inflation right away. Hence, the Federal Reserve needs to anchor economic agents’ long-term inflation expectations close to the inflation target in order to effectively combat inflation. This blog post looks at the recent movements in so-called market-based inflation expectations for various time horizons.

    ….

    Conclusion

    In short, according to the inflation swap data, market participants believe the Federal Reserve can and will control the high inflation rate, despite price increases being more persistent than previously thought. The well-anchored longer-term inflation expectation provides additional supporting evidence of this.

    I will rebut this nonsense again, but first let’s consider another article on the alleged importance of inflation expectations. 

    The Strange Art of Asking People How Much Inflation They Expect

    Please consider The Strange Art of Asking People How Much Inflation They Expect

    “By about what percent do you expect prices to go up or down on the average, during the next 12 months?”

    The answers people give to this question—this exact question—produce one of the most important numbers for the U.S. economy.

    It’s the question the University of Michigan asks respondents to its Survey of Consumers. Because that survey is the longest-running such survey of consumer attitudes, dating back to 1946, its data about price increases have become the benchmark for economists who obsess over expectations of inflation.

    When Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said last week that the Fed was raising interest rates by 0.75 percentage point, he cited an uptick in the responses people gave to the Michigan survey, saying, “It was quite eye-catching and we noticed that.”

    Crucial Variable Says Gregory Mankiw

    “Expected inflation is a crucial variable, but it’s probably one of the hardest of the crucial variables to measure,” said Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw.

    The first quirk is that many people have only a vague idea of how much prices will rise, and tend to respond with large (sometimes implausibly large) round numbers: 5%, 10%, 15%, even 50%. In other words, people don’t gravitate toward a common assessment—they disagree sharply about how much inflation to expect, as Mr. Mankiw puts it.

    Second, partisanship colors people’s views. This is a well-known trend when assessing measures of consumer confidence: Democrats become extremely optimistic, and Republicans extremely pessimistic, the moment a Democratic president is elected. And vice versa. It has recently come to hang over inflation data, too.

    The question “by about what percent per year do you expect prices to go (up/down) on the average, during the next 5 to 10 years?” is followed by a careful script to ensure that people are providing an estimate of annual increases, not cumulative.

    Richard Curtin, former head of the University of Michigan survey, says the tendency to gravitate toward large, round numbers is a genuine reflection of how people think. 

    He sees a bit of condescension from economists who are skeptical that consumers could have well-formed views about inflation.

    I Condemn the Surveys and the Economists 

    Q: Why?
    A: The premise is ridiculous. 

    Q: What premise?
    A: “If economic agents, such as households and firms, expect higher inflation in the future, the rational reaction is to purchase goods and services right away in order to avoid higher future prices.”

    That actually seems logical and to a meaningless degree it can temporarily happen. 

    Gasoline Example

    Suppose a person thinks the price of gasoline will rise. That person then fills up his tank when it is half empty rather then three-quarters empty. 

    The person buys no more gas than he would otherwise, and perhaps even less by driving less. There is no place to store gas other the car. 

    Most people will not bother with the inconvenience of filling up twice as often to save a few cents, and it is meaningless if they do. No additional gas is purchased. 

    Toilet Paper Example

    Similarly, we have seen a rush on toilet paper on fears of supply, causing temporary shortages, but what then? 

    Does the price of toilet paper keep rising forever? Or after some number of roll hoarding does the situation self-correct?

    Medical Expense Example

    If consumers think the cost of a heart surgery will rise dramatically next year, will they rush out and have two of them now to avoid the price hike? 

    Clearly the answer is no.

    Rent Example

    Rent gets to the heart of the matter. It is over 31 percent of the CPI.

    What can consumers do about rising rent prices? Will they rush out and rent two houses if they expect an increase?

    No, they won’t do that, but they might rush to buy a home. Alas, neither the Fed nor economists see home price inflation as inflation.

    Curiously, the rush to buy homes (asset prices in general) is the one place where expectations matter. But economists ignore that, focusing on what doesn’t.

    Please consider Why Do We Think That Inflation Expectations Matter for Inflation? (And Should We?) by Jeremy B. Rudd at the Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs Federal Reserve Board.

    Policy Errors

    Economists and economic policymakers believe that households’ and firms’ expectations of future inflation are a key determinant of actual inflation. A review of the relevant theoretical and empirical literature suggests that this belief rests on extremely shaky foundations, and a case is made that adhering to it uncritically could easily lead to serious policy errors.  

    The study also debunked the highly touted Phillips Curve.

    Here are a few direct quotes.

    • The direct evidence for an expected inflation channel was never very strong.

    • It is an irony of history that, when Phelps and Friedman sought to justify their proposed theoretical specifications, they were faced with the uncomfortable fact that empirical Phillips curves appeared to be remarkably stable.

    • These techniques are similar in spirit to those employed in the 1990s to estimate new-Keynesian models; hence, they suffer from the same sorts of problems—discussed below—that attend empirical estimates of those models.

    • Friedman’s derivation of the expectations-augmented Phillips curve implies that the real product wage should be strongly countercyclical (recall that in this model firms are always assumed to be on their labor demand curves). In particular, Friedman states as a matter of fact that “. . . selling prices of products typically respond to an unanticipated rise in demand faster than prices of factors of production,” which would in turn imply the empirical prediction that the price Phillips curve is steeper than the wage Phillips curve. However, in U.S. data this prediction is completely at odds with the evidence.

    • Most standard tests of the new-Keynesian Phillips curve suffer from such severe potential misspecification issues or such profound weak identification problems as to provide no evidence one way or the other regarding the importance of expectations (much the same statement applies to empirical tests that use survey measures of expected inflation).

    • What little we know about firms’ price-setting behavior suggests that many tend to respond to cost increases only when they actually show up and are visible to their customers, rather than in a preemptive fashion. 

    Common Sense and Practical Examples

    Common sense and practical examples suggest that inflation expectations theory is ass backward.

    So much of the CPI is nondiscretionary that it’s difficult to impossible for CPI expectations to matter. 

    Yet, economists focus on expectations that don’t matter and ignore the expectations that do matter, namely asset prices!

    I have written about this several times previously, two of them before I even found the Fed study supporting my view. 

    Asset Irony

    People will rush to buy stocks in a bubble if they think prices will rise. They will hold off buying stocks if they expect prices will go down.

    People will buy houses to rent or fix up if they think home prices will rise. They will hold off housing speculation if they expect prices will drop.

    The very things where expectations do matter are the very things the Fed ignores.

    Hello Fed, Inflation Expectations Are Unglued, No Longer Well Anchored

    Inflation Expectations data from New York Fed, chart by Mish

    On April 11, I commented Hello Fed, Inflation Expectations Are Unglued, No Longer Well Anchored

    The New York Fed survey already shows inflation expectations are not anchored.

    Even the three-year median point projection is 4.88%, well over the Fed’s target rate of 2.00%.

    Powell was shocked that the University of Michigan survey showed the same thing.

    I commented “It’s a good thing that inflation expectations are a blatantly ridiculous concept. Even the Fed’s own research papers make that conclusion.”

    It’s a good thing inflation expectations are not self-fulfilling because expectations are now unglued.

    Fed Studies Debunk the Phillips Curve

    Both studies were done by Fed staffers.

    Yet, Fed Chairs Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell did not believe the Fed’s own study.

    Stupidity Still Well Anchored

    You have to be trained to believe in nonsense and stick with it despite all evidence to the contrary. 

    Yet, Powell and the St. Louis Fed trust their disproved inflation expectations models. It has led to policy errors already and will lead to more of them.

    This is group think in action. There is no diversity of thought at the Fed.

    Historical Perspective on CPI Deflations: How Damaging are They?

    Regarding policy errors and the accurate warning by the Monetary Affairs Division of the Federal Reserve Board, please consider Historical Perspective on CPI Deflations: How Damaging are They?

    A BIS study concluded “Deflation may actually boost output. Lower prices increase real incomes and wealth. And they may also make export goods more competitive.“

    Indeed, that must be the case as more goods for less money by default improves standards of living.

    The Fed was hell bent on reducing standards of living via inflation. Now they struggle to undo the inflation and asset bubble consequences they created. 

    The Fed is the problem, not the solution.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 17:30

  • Best Cities To Live Out Golden Years On $1,500 Budget Amid Inflation Storm 
    Best Cities To Live Out Golden Years On $1,500 Budget Amid Inflation Storm 

    Retirees face the harsh realities of not generating enough retirement income to sustain current spending habits amid the worst inflation in four decades.

    Millions of Americans living out their golden years are readjusting their retirement income and altering spending behaviors to survive the inflation storm sparked by the Federal Reserve and the federal government’s spending spree during COVID that sparked inflation which has since become a significant policy error. The Fed has since unleashed the most aggressive quantitative tightening scheme in decades to tame inflation and could easily tip the economy into recession later this year or in 2023. 

    Financial turmoil has put retirees in a tough spot because they don’t want to drain their savings and be forced to re-enter the labor market as Walmart greeters. 

    So if retirees want to maintain their current standard of living, there’s a new study by GOBankingRates that has found the top metro areas where baby boomers can comfortably survive for less than $1,500 a month.  

    Still, living on a fixed income doesn’t mean you have to miss out on a satisfying retirement. In the right place, you might discover that you can stretch your budget further and spend your golden years enjoying yourself. To help you find such a place, a GOBankingRates study identified American cities where you can realistically retire on a budget of $1,500 a month.

    The study took the cost-of-living index from Sperling’s Best Places and applied it to customer expenditure data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find the average cost of living in the given city. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in each city was also sourced from ApartmentList. Locations that fell below a certain livability score on AreaVibes or had a below-average portion of the population above 65 were eliminated, and only the places offering the best combination of bills under $1,500 and strong livability for seniors were left. – GOBankingRates

    GOBankingRates found Odessa, Texas; Wayne, Indiana; St. Cloud, Minnesota; Lake Charles, Louisiana; Lawton, Oklahoma; and Lansing, Michigan, the most affordable areas where retirees could live out their golden years (currently) for less than $1,500. 

    Odessa, Texas

    • Total monthly expenditures: $1,385.63
    • Livability score: 67

    Odessa, in western Texas, is known for its oil rigs, Friday night high school football and a working re-creation of William Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. With the lowest average monthly rent on the list, $487, retirees should have a few dollars to spare for football or theater tickets.

    Fort Wayne, Indiana

    • Total monthly expenditures: $1,397.29
    • Livability score: 80

    Retirees who settle in Fort Wayne would find it affordable, as well as a great place to make friends. People ages 65 or older make up 14 % of the city’s population. Rent averages $634 per month but healthcare costs are $453.83 a month — the second-lowest rate in the study.

    • Cloud, MinnesotaTotal monthly expenditures: $1,404.64
    • Livability score: 68

    St. Cloud, about an hour’s drive northwest of Minneapolis, has the lowest monthly healthcare costs on the list, an average of $444.71. The grocery costs are the highest, however, at $328.43.

    Lake Charles, Louisiana

    • Total monthly expenditures: $1,446.59
    • Livability score: 69

    Located along Interstate 10 between Houston and New Orleans, Lake Charles offers plenty of things for retirees to do, from enjoying museums to water activities to wildlife experiences. It is one of three cities on the list with an average monthly rent of less than $600 but healthcare costs higher than $500 a month.

    Lawton, Oklahoma

    • Total monthly expenditures: $1,483.75
    • Livability score: 66

    In Lawton, retirees can expect to spend a bundle on healthcare. Average monthly costs of $660.52 are higher than rent, which comes in at an affordable $519. The city of about 93,000 people has the lowest grocery costs in the study at an average of $304.73 per month.

    Lansing, Michigan

    • Total monthly expenditures: $1,485.48
    • Livability score: 65

    The average monthly rent in Lansing, Michigan’s state capital, is $701 — the highest of the cities on the list. However, the average monthly cost of groceries, $308.45, is the second-lowest of the cities included here.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 17:00

  • The Illinois Political Establishment's Shameful Response To The Departure Of Ken Griffin And Citadel
    The Illinois Political Establishment’s Shameful Response To The Departure Of Ken Griffin And Citadel

    By Mark Glennon of Wirepoints

    On a wall in Ken Griffin’s office at Citadel in Chicago, I’m told by people who worked there, hangs a thank you note from a six-year old. Like many kids that age, he was enthralled by prehistoric creatures so he wrote to thank Griffin for funding Evolving Planet, a permanent wing in Chicago’s Field Museum.

    The six-year old was my son, who asked if he could write it after my wife had taken him for what must have been the fifth time to the exhibit.

    I was proud that he had the simple decency to feel a need to thank somebody.

    I wish I could say the same about the Illinois political establishment’s send-off to Griffin and Citadel, who are leaving for Florida. There was no decency in any of it.

    Griffin is among the most successful financial entrepreneurs in history and Citadel was a crown jewel in Illinois’ economy. But the decency of a proper send-off was nowhere to be found in Illinois’ leadership. There wasn’t even the standard, “we’re disappointed to see them go,” which they usually say about corporate departures. Just a kick out the door for a golden goose.

    Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s response was petty and rude. As reported by Greg Hinz at Crain’s, Pritzker’s terse statement doesn’t even name Griffin or Citadel. “Countless companies are choosing Illinois as their home, as we continue to lead the nation in corporate relocations and had a record number of business start-ups in the past year,” said Pritzker’s statement. “We will continue to welcome those businesses—including Kellogg, which just this week announced it is moving its largest headquarters to Illinois—and support emerging industries that are already creating good jobs and investing billions in Illinois, like data centers, electric vehicles and quantum computing,” the statement added. That was it.

    Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s response was only slightly better. She did thank Citadel and its team for their philanthropic work and economic impact, but went on to dismiss their importance, making absurd claims about how well Chicago is doing. “Our economic outlook has never been stronger and we will continue to build upon a best-in-class recovery in the nation amongst large U.S. cities,” she said.

    If other members of Illinois’ ruling class said anything of substance at all I cannot find them.

    Then there’s Rich Miller, a columnist and blogger who is better described as the de facto spokesperson for Illinois’ political establishment.

    His Twitter post and headline said, “After apparent spectacular political failure, Ken Griffin takes ball, goes home to Florida.” What a venal and irresponsible response to a sad event that will truly hurt already struggling Chicago and Illinois.

    Miller went on to ridicule Griffin’s statement that his decision to leave was driven in part by employees asking to relocate. “Yeah, it’s about the employees,” Miller wrote. Miller and others cynically ascribe Griffin’s decision only to the failing campaign of Richard Irvin for governor, who Griffin heavily supported. Employee concerns about crime, taxes, corruption, insurmountable debts and all the rest had nothing to do with it, they’d have us believe.

    Illinois’ loss from Citadel’s departure is enormous. Griffin has personally donated roughly $1.5 billion during his residency in Illinois to a range of philanthropic causes. Over $600 million of that was in Chicago.

    Griffin alone has paid more than $200 million in yearly state taxes in recent years, and huge tax sums no doubt have also been paid by his 1,000 Illinois employees, many of whom are very well paid. The Washington Free Beacon reports that Citadel employees have funneled over $1 billion to the state’s coffers over the past decade. See my colleagues’ separate article with more details on the impact.

    None of that is of much importance, apparently, to those happy to see him leave.

    How would Griffin haters explain their glee over his departure? If they were asked, they’d probably say what quite a few of them were saying on social media. It’s the standard characterization of conservatives like Griffin: He’s just another rich guy who cares nothing about the little guy. That’s why he regularly opposed the establishment, which is dedicated to equality. Helping the little guy is what we’re about in Illinois, and we don’t want people like him who oppose that.

    Maybe someday they will be confronted with how that equality thing has been working out in Illinois after decades of near complete one-party rule. If that happened, they’d face the reality that Illinois ranks much worse than the national average – ninth worst compared to other states – in the standard measure for income inequality. They’d see that Illinois is no better than middling when measured by the number of its citizens below the poverty line, ranking twenty-second highest among the states. They’d be reminded that Illinois’ unemployment rate persistently lags the nation, and much more

    The list goes on and on, but actual results mean nothing to them. It’s the thought and the words that they pretend to think count.

    There’s a special irony here and a more important lesson. Illinois did reduce inequality by driving Griffin away. Inequality drops whenever the rich flee. But does that really help the poor and middle class? Of course not.

    The point was made nicely in a recent op-ed by two University of Chicago law professors. More billionaires will increase income inequality here, “but that would be a boon to government revenue,” they wrote. “When it comes to policies, Illinois would be better served by ones that attract successful entrepreneurs, not ones that drive them out of the state.”

    Those are the policies Griffin supported while he was here, and that’s what earned him the establishment’s ire.

    So here we are. Illinois is now more equal. And poorer. The political establishment has one less opponent to worry about. The planet indeed evolves, as Griffin’s wing at the Field Museum displays. Just not always for the better.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 16:30

  • "When Not If…" – Monster Of A Recession On Deck
    “When Not If…” – Monster Of A Recession On Deck

    While everyone has been transfixed by the unexpected drop in the UMich 5/10 year inflation expectations, which dropped to 3.1% from a preliminary 3.3% print, which means that the alarm signal that prompted the Fed to panic last week and prompted the market to aggressively reprice (lower) the odds of future Fed hikes…

    … the report also showed the lowest consumer sentiment reading in the 70-year history of the series, realistically speaking a far more troubling indicator than what a small group of respondents think inflation will be in 10 years (spoiler alert, it will be much higher than they expect).

    So as Friday’s Chart of the Day titled “When not if…” from Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid (excerpted from his latest chartbook, available to professional subs) shows, this is remarkable when the unemployment rate is so low. We have never seen such a divergence between the two series. The full survey shows that inflationary pressures are the main reason confidence is so low.

    Eyeballing the chart, while sentiment is clearly more volatile than unemployment, the peaks in sentiment and lows in unemployment tend to broadly coincide. Reid circled the main occasions where sentiment has notably led unemployment and, interestingly, they were all between the late 1960s and the late 1970s when inflation structurally picked up. All of those situations led to a recession and a sharp turn higher in unemployment. Indeed, if sentiment is the leading indicator and if unempolyment is set to soar to 14%, we are about to have a monster recession on out hands.

    As Reud concludes, “with unemployment currently so low it might still take a while for a recession to play out it’s almost certainly when not if. I would love to have a more optimistic message to deliver. If you have one please email me as I would be only too happy to be proved wrong and persuaded otherwise. Hopefully my mail box will be so full that I’ll be very bullish on the economy by Monday.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 16:00

  • CDC Confirmed Post-Vaxx Death From Blood-Clotting Two Weeks Before Alerting Public: Emails
    CDC Confirmed Post-Vaxx Death From Blood-Clotting Two Weeks Before Alerting Public: Emails

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed in late 2021 that a person died from blood clotting after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine that had been linked with an increased risk of blood clotting, but did not alert the public for two weeks, newly obtained emails show.

    A general view of the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta, Ga., on April 23, 2020. (Tami Chappell/AFP via Getty Images)

    Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC official, told colleagues at the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Dec. 2, 2021, “We have confirmed a 9th TTS death following Janssen vaccination,” according to emails obtained by The Epoch Times through a Freedom of Information Act request.

    TTS refers to thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, a condition that features low platelet levels combined with blood clots.

    Officials had recommended a nationwide pause on the administration of the vaccine, produced by Johnson & Johnson (J&J) subsidiary Janssen, in April 2021 after six women experienced TTS after J&J vaccination and three died. But they lifted the pause after determining the vaccine remained safe and effective.

    The condition was not discussed much in the ensuing months, despite the CDC later reporting that five additional deaths occurred before Aug. 31, 2021. Shimabukuro gave a single update, in mid-October 2021, saying five total deaths had been reported.

    That was until December 2021. Twelve days after Shimabukuro alerted colleagues of the ninth death, the FDA urged healthcare workers not to administer the vaccine to people with certain conditions because of the TTS risk. Two days after that, Dr. Isaac See, another CDC official, informed the public during a meeting that nine deaths had occurred post-vaccination.

    It’s unclear when the CDC learned of the sixth, seventh, and eighth deaths.

    The CDC takes reports made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and attempts to confirm the reports, including post-vaccination deaths. A higher number of post-vaccination TTS deaths have been reported to the system than the number the CDC has verified.

    One day after Shimabukuro confirmed the ninth death, his message was forwarded by Dr. Amanda Cohn, another CDC official, to CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.

    “See below, information on a 9th completely tragic death from TTS,” Cohn wrote.

    “Many thanks for letting us know … any tragic case,” Walensky responded.

    The emails were partially redacted; one was fully redacted.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 15:30

  • CNN's Navarro Cites Own Autistic & Special Needs Family Members In Making Case For Abortion
    CNN’s Navarro Cites Own Autistic & Special Needs Family Members In Making Case For Abortion

    In recent commentary reacting to the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, prominent CNN pundit and co-host of The View Ana Navarro “shocked” by bluntly suggesting live on air that some of her own special needs family members, her brother included, should have been… well, we’ll let her say it:

    “I am not anybody to tell you what you need to do with your life or with your uterus.” She then mentioned special needs people in her family, saying, “I have a family with a lot of special needs kids. I have a brother who’s 57 and has the mental and motor skills of a one-year-old. And I know what that means financially, emotionally, physically for a family. And I know not all families can do it.” 

    She also spoke of her “step-granddaughter who was born with Down syndrome” and her “step-grandson who is very autistic, who has autism…” 

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

    Yes, she really suggested that her family and others could benefit from open access to abortion to prevent their autistic family members, as well as for anyone with slow motor skills, from ever having been born.

    Given this precisely echoes the arguments that eugenicists during the time of the Nazi Third Reich made in arguing the “unfit” should be exterminated, Navarro’s commentary was met with widespread disgust and horror among pro-life social media users. Many suggested that this is where the ‘logic’ of abortion advocates actually leads.

    But even S.E. Cupp, also a CNN host, who is on record as being ‘pro-choice’ but has a special needs child – also reacted fiercely. She called out Navarro personally, saying the following:

    “You said you have a step-grand daughter with Down’s syndrome, and a ‘step-grandson who is very autistic.’ And that ‘there are mothers and people who are in that society or in that community will tell you they’ve considered suicide because that’s how difficult it is to get help.”

    Cupp then said: “I have an autistic child. I have never met a parent of an autistic child or any parent of a special needs child who said they’d wished they’d aborted him or her.”

    In the series of tweets, Cupp stated she remains against Roe being overturned, while stressing she is horrified by what Navarro appears to be advocating: “I have been clear. I don’t want Roe overturned. But don’t even for a second make it about our special needs kids. NOT EVEN ONE SECOND,” she tweeted.

    Navarro later tried to distance herself from her prior CNN commentary amid huge backlash, saying her words had been “twisted”, claiming in a follow-up tweet: “Some have twisted my words. Won’t stop me calling it out: Banning women’s choices, but NOT funding enough aid for kids & adults w/special needs & disabilities, or a safety-net for single moms & poor families, or safe, loving foster care & adoption, isn’t Pro-life. It’s hypocrisy.”

    S.E. Cupp (left), Ana Navarro (right), via Mediaite

    And yet her original words were clear as she personally invoked family members including her disabled brother in extolling the ‘virtues’ of abortion.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/26/2022 – 15:00

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jun 26

Today’s News 26th June 2022

  • The Return Of Industrial Warfare
    The Return Of Industrial Warfare

    Authored by Alex Vershinin via the Royal United Services Institute,

    Can the West still provide the arsenal of democracy?

    The war in Ukraine has proven that the age of industrial warfare is still here. The massive consumption of equipment, vehicles and ammunition requires a large-scale industrial base for resupply – quantity still has a quality of its own. The mass scale combat has pitted 250,000 Ukrainian soldiers, together with 450,000 recently mobilised citizen soldiers against about 200,000 Russian and separatist troops. The effort to arm, feed and supply these armies is a monumental task. Ammunition resupply is particularly onerous. For Ukraine, compounding this task are Russian deep fires capabilities, which target Ukrainian military industry and transportation networks throughout the depth of the country. The Russian army has also suffered from Ukrainian cross-border attacks and acts of sabotage, but at a smaller scale. The rate of ammunition and equipment consumption in Ukraine can only be sustained by a large-scale industrial base.

    This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war. If the US government is planning to once again become the arsenal of democracy, then the existing capabilities of the US military-industrial base and the core assumptions that have driven its development need to be re-examined.

    Estimating Ammo Consumption

    There is no exact ammunition consumption data available for the Russia–Ukraine conflict. Neither government publishes data, but an estimate of Russian ammunition consumption can be calculated using the official fire missions data provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense during its daily briefing.

    Number of Russian Daily Fire Missions, 19–31 May

    Although these numbers mix tactical rockets with conventional, hard-shell artillery, it is not unreasonable to assume that a third of these missions were fired by rocket troops because they form a third of a motorised rifle brigade’s artillery force, with two other battalions being tube artillery. This suggests 390 daily missions fired by tube artillery. Each tube artillery strike is conducted by a battery of six guns total. However, combat and maintenance breakdowns are likely to reduce this number to four. With four guns per battery and four rounds per gun, the tube artillery fires about 6,240 rounds per day. We can estimate an additional 15% wastage for rounds that were set on the ground but abandoned when the battery moved in a hurry, rounds destroyed by Ukrainian strikes on ammunition dumps, or rounds fired but not reported to higher command levels. This number comes up to 7,176 artillery rounds a day. It should be noted that the Russian Ministry of Defense only reports fire missions by forces of the Russian Federation. These do not include formations from the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist republics, which are treated as different countries. The numbers are not perfect, but even if they are off by 50%, it still does not change the overall logistics challenge.

    The Capacity of the West’s Industrial Base

    The winner in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers is still based on which side has the strongest industrial base. A country must either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can be rapidly converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer seems to have either.

    Presently, the US is decreasing its artillery ammunition stockpiles. In 2020, artillery ammunition purchases decreased by 36% to $425 million. In 2022, the plan is to reduce expenditure on 155mm artillery rounds to $174 million. This is equivalent to 75,357 M795 basic ‘dumb’ rounds for regular artillery, 1,400 XM1113 rounds for the M777, and 1,046 XM1113 rounds for Extended Round Artillery Cannons. Finally, there are $75 million dedicated for Excalibur precision-guided munitions that costs $176K per round, thus totaling 426 rounds. In short, US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. If the initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only extend the artillery supplied for three weeks.

    The US is not the only country facing this challenge. In a recent war game involving US, UK and French forces, UK forces exhausted national stockpiles of critical ammunition after eight days.

    Unfortunately, this is not only the case with artillery. Anti-tank Javelins and air-defence Stingers are in the same boat. The US shipped 7,000 Javelin missiles to Ukraine – roughly one-third of its stockpile – with more shipments to come. Lockheed Martin produces about 2,100 missiles a year, though this number might ramp up to 4,000 in a few years. Ukraine claims to use 500 Javelin missiles every day.

    The expenditure of cruise missiles and theatre ballistic missiles is just as massive. The Russians have fired between 1,100 and 2,100 missiles. The US currently purchases 110 PRISM, 500 JASSM and 60 Tomahawk cruise missiles annually, meaning that in three months of combat, Russia has burned through four times the US annual missile production. The Russian rate of production can only be estimated. Russia started missile production in 2015 in limited initial runs, and even in 2016 the production runs were estimated at 47 missiles. This means that it had only five to six years of full-scale production.

    If competition between autocracies and democracies has really entered a military phase, then the arsenal of democracy must radically improve its approach to the production of materiel in wartime

    The initial stockpile in February 2022 is unknown, but considering expenditures and the requirement to hold substantial stockpiles back in case of war with NATO, it is unlikely that the Russians are worried. In fact, they seem to have enough to expend operational-level cruise missiles on tactical targets. The assumption that there are 4,000 cruise and ballistic missiles in the Russian inventory is not unreasonable. This production will probably increase despite Western sanctions. In April, ODK Saturn, which makes Kalibr missile motors, announced an additional 500 job openings. This suggests that even in this field, the West only has parity with Russia.

    Flawed Assumptions

    The first key assumption about future of combat is that precision-guided weapons will reduce overall ammunition consumption by requiring only one round to destroy the target. The war in Ukraine is challenging this assumption. Many ‘dumb’ indirect fire systems are achieving a great deal of precision without precision guidance, and still the overall ammunition consumption is massive. Part of the issue is that the digitisation of global maps, combined with a massive proliferation of drones, allows geolocation and targeting with increased precision, with video evidence demonstrating the ability to score first strike hits by indirect fires.

    The second crucial assumption is that industry can be turned on and off at will. This mode of thinking was imported from the business sector and has spread through US government culture. In the civilian sector, customers can increase or decrease their orders. The producer may be hurt by a drop in orders but rarely is that drop catastrophic because usually there are multiple consumers and losses can be spread among consumers. Unfortunately, this does not work for military purchases. There is only one customer in the US for artillery shells – the military. Once the orders drop off, the manufacturer must close production lines to cut costs to stay in business. Small businesses may close entirely. Generating new capacity is very challenging, especially as there is so little manufacturing capacity left to draw skilled workers from. This is especially challenging because many older armament production systems are labour intensive to the point where they are practically built by hand, and it takes a long time to train a new workforce. The supply chain issues are also problematic because subcomponents may be produced by a subcontractor who either goes out of business, with loss of orders or retools for other customers or who relies on parts from overseas, possibly from a hostile country.

    China’s near monopoly on rare earth materials is an obvious challenge here. Stinger missile production will not be completed until 2026, in part due to component shortages. US reports on the defence industrial base have made it clear that ramping up production in war-time may be challenging, if not impossible, due to supply chain issues and a lack of trained personnel due to the degradation of the US manufacturing base.

    Finally, there is an assumption about overall ammunition consumption rates. The US government has always lowballed this number. From the Vietnam era to today, small arms plants have shrunk from five to just one. This was glaring at the height of the Iraq war, when US started to run low on small arms ammunition, causing the US government to buy British and Israeli ammunition during the initial stage of the war. At one point, the US had to dip into Vietnam and even Second World War-era ammo stockpiles of .50 calibre ammunition to feed the war effort. This was largely the result of incorrect assumptions about how effective US troops would be. Indeed, the Government Accountability Office estimated that it took 250,000 rounds to kill one insurgent. Luckily for the US, its gun culture ensured that small arms ammunition industry has a civilian component in the US. This is not the case with other types of ammunition, as shown earlier with Javelin and Stinger missiles. Without access to government methodology, it is impossible to understand why US government estimates were off, but there is a risk that the same errors were made with other types of munitions.

    Conclusion

    The war in Ukraine demonstrates that war between peer or near-peer adversaries demands the existence of a technically advanced, mass scale, industrial-age production capability. The Russian onslaught consumes ammunition at rates that massively exceed US forecasts and ammunition production. For the US to act as the arsenal of democracy in defence of Ukraine, there must be a major look at the manner and the scale at which the US organises its industrial base. This situation is especially critical because behind the Russian invasion stands the world’s manufacturing capital – China. As the US begins to expend more and more of its stockpiles to keep Ukraine in the war, China has yet to provide any meaningful military assistance to Russia. The West must assume that China will not allow Russia to be defeated, especially due to a lack of ammunition. If competition between autocracies and democracies has really entered a military phase, then the arsenal of democracy must first radically improve its approach to the production of materiel in wartime.

    The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 23:30

  • Airlines Say Understaffed FAA "Crippling" East Coast Traffic
    Airlines Say Understaffed FAA “Crippling” East Coast Traffic

    Last week, Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg warned airlines that they faced federal government action—presumably including fines—over mounting flight cancellations and delays. While pilot shortages won’t be quickly resolved, Buttigieg urged airlines to hire more customer service representatives to help customers rebook when things go wrong.  

    On Friday, the airline industry group Airlines for America (A4A) turned the tables, saying the Federal Aviation Administration’s own understaffing is “crippling” East Coast air traffic. The group’s members include American Airlines, Delta, United, Southwest, JetBlue and Alaska Airlines as well as shippers FedEx and UPS.

    “One of our A4A member carriers estimates that air traffic control (ATC) related issues were a factor in at least one-third of recent cancellations,” the letter said. The group asked Buttigieg to arrange a meeting in which the FAA would share its controller staffing plan for the July 4th weekend and the rest of the summer travel season. 

    In a diplomatically-worded letter to Buttigieg, Airlines for America called out air traffic control shortages at two key FAA facilities:

    • New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON N-90). Located in Westbury, Long Island, this facility acts a single hub controlling approaches to JFK, Newark and LaGuardia airports, along with dozens of smaller airports, including Teterboro and Long Island MacArthur.
    • Jacksonville Center (JAX). This Jacksonville, Florida facility controls 160,000 square miles of airspace parts of Florida, Georgia, Alabama and the Carolinas—including airspace over 225 civilian and 20 military airports. 

    The two-page letter notes that “JAX has been understaffed for 27 of the last 30 days, which is crippling to the entire east coast traffic flows.” 

    Jacksonville Center is one of 20+ domestic control centers overseeing flights during the “en route” phase between departure and destination

    Buttigieg’s earlier shot across the industry’s bow came after his own flight was cancelled, forcing him to drive from Washington to New York. Fittingly, the cancellation happened on the day after Buttigieg met with airline executives.  

    “That is happening to a lot of people, and that is exactly why we are paying close attention here to what can be done and how to make sure that the airlines are delivering,” Buttigieg told the Associated Press. Approximately 2,800 U.S. flights were cancelled over Memorial Day weekend, and now July 4th looms large.  

    Airlines for America identified other opportunities to reduce pressure on the nation’s air traffic system, including:

    • The establishment of “a real-time, dynamic scheduling and management tool of special activity airspace used by the Department of Defense (DoD) to optimize the use of the national airspace system for all stakeholders”
    • “Reduction of airspace closures due to commercial space launches and more optimal scheduling of such events to avoid high-volume air traffic times”

    The group also noted that U.S. air carriers reduced their planned summer flights by 15% compared to what they’d targeted at the beginning of 2022, and have “accelerated robust hiring and training programs in all areas, including flight crew, customer service agents and airport staff in addition to increasing pay for many positions.”

    On Friday, the Air Line Pilots Association announced its approval of a new contract that would hike the pay of United Airlines pilots by more than 14% over the next year and a half, seemingly paving the way for similarly-large pay-hikes at competing carriers. 

    As we’ve previously reported, a pilot shortage is a major factor in the deluge of flight cancellations and delays. As United CEO Scott Kirby told investors,

    “The pilot shortage for the industry is real, and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five-plus years.”

    We’ve also noted that an exorbitant training requirement imposed by Congress in 2010 as a knee-jerk reaction to a 2009 plane crash is needlessly contributing to the pilot shortage.      

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 23:00

  • CDC Investigating "Large, Ongoing" Outbreak Of Rare Disease In Florida
    CDC Investigating “Large, Ongoing” Outbreak Of Rare Disease In Florida

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

    The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is investigating a “large, ongoing outbreak” of a rare disease in Florida.

    In a press release, the CDC said Wednesday that meningococcal spread among homosexual males, including those with HIV, in the Florida outbreak.

    “Getting vaccinated against meningococcal disease is the best way to prevent this serious illness, which can quickly become deadly,” said Jose R. Romero, the head of the CDC’s immunization and respiratory disease division, in the release. 

    “Because of the outbreak in Florida,” he added, ”and the number of Pride events being held across the state in coming weeks, it’s important” that homosexual men get the vaccine.

    At least 24 cases and 6 deaths among homosexual males have been reported so far, according to the agency.

    “People can find a meningococcal vaccine by contacting their doctor’s office, pharmacy, community health center, or local health department,” the news release said.

    “Insurance providers should pay for meningococcal vaccination for those whom it is recommended for during an outbreak. In Florida, anyone can get a MenACWY vaccine at no cost at any county health department during the outbreak.”

    The Florida Department of Health first issued an alert about an outbreak in Leon County several months ago.

    …

    Despite treatment, 10–15 in 100 people die of the disease, the agency says. Up to 20 percent of survivors may have long-term disabilities such as loss of limbs, deafness, brain damage, and problems with the central nervous system.

    …

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 22:30

  • FBI Raids Three Cult-Like Churches Said To Prey On US Veterans
    FBI Raids Three Cult-Like Churches Said To Prey On US Veterans

    FBI agents on Thursday raided three churches in the southern United States that have been accused of functioning as cults that prey on military veterans and active duty service members—and profiteer from their government benefits.

    The Savannah Morning News reports that the three raided churches are associated with each other. Each is located near a U.S. Army base: 

    • The Assembly of Prayer Christian Church near Augusta, Georgia is just outside the gate of Fort Gordon
    • The House of Prayer Christian Church in Hinesville, Georgia is less than eight miles from Fort Stewart
    • The Assembly of Prayer Christian Church in Killeen, Texas is less than four miles from Fort Hood

    Agents outside the Assembly of Prayer Church near Fort Gordon on Thursday (via WFXG FOX54)

    While the FBI has not released a statement, reporting suggests agents were executing search warrants without making arrests…yet.  

    In 2020, an advocacy organization called Veterans Education Success sent an 11-page letter to the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Georgia Veterans Service alleging that the churches “target veterans in order to access GI Bill funding, VA disability compensation and VA home loans.” 

    Former member Gladys Jordan—whose 28-year-old son remains in the church near Fort Gordon and refuses to talk to her—told The Daily Beast:

    “They have a fraudulent Bible college and a so-called ‘home’ for the soldiers. They bring them in and give them a home-cooked meal, and from there… they have them lie to the VA to get into the Bible college, they steal their benefits, and they never get a diploma from there that’s worth anything because it’s not valid.” 

    In its letter, Veterans Education Success said it was approached by multiple veterans who said the church organization had defrauded them. In addition to being coached on how to mislead the VA during its curriculum inspections, the veterans said the church is “coaching veterans [to apply] for VA disability so they will receive 100% ratings and pressuring them into paying their disability compensation to [the church] through tithes.”

    Many veterans who applied for VA disability had “nothing wrong with them and were told to falsely state whatever was necessary to get 100% for a specific disability,” former students told Veterans Education Success. 

    Police outside a large church building with metal siding
    Police outside the House of Prayer Church near Fort Stewart (Lewis Levine for The Savannah Morning News)

    Former church members also say the church takes out mortgages in members’ names and forges signatures to do so. One service member said he returned from a deployment to Iraq to find five houses had been purchased in his name. 

    Former students at the bible college said they were compelled to recruit new students during class time. When base authorities shooed the student-recruiters away from barracks and post exchanges, the church resorted to sending students who were still on active duty to recruit in uniform. Some say higher-ranking active duty members would use their rank to force lower-ranking soldiers to attend the church. 

    Veterans Education Success says all of the military veteran former students interviewed by the organization’s lawyers used or exhausted their GI Bill benefits without receiving a completion certificate—for whatever that would be worth. Some attended the “college” for over 10 years. 

    Financial shenanigans are only part of the troubling tales. Former members also allege cult-like practices, including stalking of members who try to leave the church and even an attempted abduction. One church leader is said to claim to be one of the “last prophets” and that he communicates directly with God. 

    Amber Fitz-Randolph lives near Fort Hood and manages a Facebook page honoring installation soldiers who’ve died. She told Daily Beast the Assembly of Prayer is “absolutely a cult…(they) were sneaking into barracks at all hours to torment and threaten soldiers who wanted to stop going, or wouldn’t give them enough money.”  

    The Assembly of Prayer Church in Killeen, Texas (Lauren Dodd/Killeen Daily Herald)

    “The cult leader, Rony Denis, is infatuated with Jim Jones,” said Jordan. “This is a modern-day Jim Jones cult. That’s my scare, that he’s gonna take my son to another country and do the same thing that Jim Jones did.” 

    The three raided churches are just the tip of the iceberg: Former member says there are 12 churches in the network, 11 of which are near military installations. 

    If the organization and its leaders are truly comparable to Jim Jones, the FBI’s raid could foreshadow dangerous events for church members in the near future. After all, government scrutiny of Jones triggered the mass suicide of 909 people at his commune in Jonestown, Guyana.  

    an aerial photgraph shows hundreds of bodies on the ground at Jim Jones' compound in Guyana
    From the FBI files, an aerial photo of the aftermath of the November 1978 mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana 

     

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 22:00

  • Canada To Spend Billions On NORAD So US Can Rule World
    Canada To Spend Billions On NORAD So US Can Rule World

    Authored by Yves Engler via AntiWar.com,

    The Liberals are intent on funneling ever more of our collective resources to bolster the US Empire, spending lavishly to “modernize” Canada’s chief bi-national military accord. Early this week, Canada’s Defense Minister Anita Anand announced the government would spend $4.9 billion to upgrade the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The federal government said it will devote $40 billion to NORAD over 20 years, but it may be far more than that noted David Pugliese in a story headlined: “Cost to modernize NORAD set at $40 billion, but will final tally be higher?”

    The media and government framed the announcement as strengthening Canada’s defenses. According to the Globe and Mail report, “the Canadian government has pledged $4.9 billion over six years to help upgrade North America’s air defenses, addressing the growing threat posed by hypersonic missiles and advanced cruise missile technology developed by Russia and China.”

    Image source: Canadian Armed Forces

    But it’s absurd to present NORAD as a defensive arrangement. Its lead actor has 1,000 international bases and special forces deployed in 149 countries. Rather than protect Canada and the US, NORAD supports violent missions led by other US commands. In 1965 NORAD’s mandate was expanded to include surveillance and assessment sharing for US commands stationed worldwide (United States European Command, United States Pacific Command, United States Africa Command, etc.).

    The Pentagon has put satellites into space to enable first strike ballistic missile defense (BMD). While Paul Martin’s Liberals claimed to oppose BMD, they granted “full cooperation by NORAD in missile defense work,” explained Richard Sanders in a Press for Conversion report on the subject. In 2004 Ottawa formally permitted the US BMD system to use data from NORAD’s “Integrated Tactical Warning/Attack Assessment.”

    It’s called “missile defense” because it’s designed to defend US missiles sites after they launch offensive operations. US-installed missile defense systems in Romania and Korea, for instance, are designed primarily to stop opponents’ missiles following a US first strike. US space-based missile defense interceptors able to eliminate Russia’s early warning satellites without warning puts that country on edge. This ratchets up the arms race and the likelihood of nuclear war.

    NORAD has also drawn Canada into US belligerence in other ways. During the July 1958 US invasion of Lebanon NORAD was placed on “increased readiness” while US troops checked secular Arab nationalism after Iraqis toppled a Western-backed king (at the same time British troops invaded Jordan to prop up the monarchy there).

    In a higher profile incident, Canadian NORAD personnel were put on high alert when the US illegally blockaded Cuba in October 1962. This transpired even though Prime Minister John Diefenbaker hesitated in supporting US actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    During the 1973 Ramadan/Yom Kippur/Arab – Israeli War NORAD was placed on heightened alert. Washington wanted to deter the USSR from intervening on Egypt’s behalf. NORAD systems offered surveillance and communications suppozsart to the 1991 war on Iraq. It monitored the region and provided information to launch US Patriot surface-to-air missiles. NORAD ballistic missile warnings were also sent to Ottawa and Canadian units in Bahrain.

    Department of National Defence Photo: Underground Canadian NORAD complex under Armed Forces Base North Bay

    NORAD also supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The same can be said for US bombing in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, etc.

    Thousands of Canadian military personnel assist NORAD’s operations. One hundred and fifty Canadians are stationed at NORAD’s central collection and coordination facility near Colorado Springs, Colorado. Hundreds more work at regional NORAD outposts across the US and Canada and many pilots are devoted to the Command.

    A Royal Canadian Air Force general is the vice commander of NORAD and runs the entire command when the US commander is absent. In discussing the two countries’ most significant bilateral military accord, Ann Griffiths explains, “NORAD brings the Canadian military more deeply within the US defense establishment than any other ally. The United States quite simply, would not entrust such responsibilities to the military of any other close ally, not even Britain.”

    NORAD makes Canada a junior partner to US militarism. If Canada was truly a force for good in the world, a peacekeeper and adherent of a rules based international order, Ottawa would withdraw from NORAD, rather than spend billions more strengthening it.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 21:30

  • Optimism Slowly Returns To The Tourism Sector
    Optimism Slowly Returns To The Tourism Sector

    Coming off the worst year in tourism history, 2021 wasn’t much of an improvement, as travel remained subdued in the face of the persistent threat posed by Covid-19.

    According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), export revenues from tourism (including passenger transport receipts) remained more than $1 trillion below pre-pandemic levels in 2021, marking the second trillion-dollar loss for the tourism industry in as many years.

    As Statista’s Felix Richter details below, while the brief rebound in the summer months of 2020 had fueled hopes of a quick recovery for the tourism sector, those hopes were dashed with each subsequent wave of the pandemic.

    And despite a record-breaking global vaccine rollout, travel experts struggled to stay optimistic in 2021, as governments kept many restrictions in place in their effort to curb the spread of new, potentially more dangerous variants of the coronavirus.

    Halfway through 2022, optimism has returned to the industry, however, as travel demand is ticking up in many regions.

    Infographic: Optimism Slowly Returns to the Tourism Sector | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    According to UNWTO’s latest Tourism Barometer, industry experts are now considerably more confident than they were at the beginning of the year, with 48 percent of expert panel participants expecting a full recovery of the tourism sector in 2023, up from just 32 percent in January. 44 percent of surveyed industry insiders still think it’ll take until 2024 or longer for tourism to return to pre-pandemic levels, another notable improvement from 64 percent in January.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 21:00

  • Majority Of C-Suite Execs Thinking Of Quitting, 40% Overwhelmed At Work: Deloitte Survey
    Majority Of C-Suite Execs Thinking Of Quitting, 40% Overwhelmed At Work: Deloitte Survey

    Authored by Naveen Anthrapully via The Epoch Times,

    A majority of C-suite executives are considering leaving their jobs, according to a Deloitte survey of 2,100 employees and C-level executives from the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia.

    Almost 70 percent of executives admitted that they are seriously thinking of quitting their jobs for a better opportunity that supports their well-being, according to the survey report published on June 22. Over three-quarters of executives said that the COVID-19 pandemic had negatively affected their well-being.

    Roughly one in three employees and C-suite executives admitted to constantly struggling with poor mental health and fatigue. While 41 percent of executives “always” or “often” felt stressed, 40 percent were overwhelmed, 36 percent were exhausted, 30 percent felt lonely, and 26 percent were depressed.

    “Most employees (83 percent) and executives (74 percent) say they’re facing obstacles when it comes to achieving their well-being goals—and these are largely tied to their job,” the report says. “In fact, the top two hurdles that people cited were a heavy workload or stressful job (30 percent), and not having enough time because of long work hours (27 percent).”

    While 70 percent of C-suite execs admitted to considering quitting, this number was at only 57 percent among other employees. The report speculated that a reason for such a wide gap might be the fact that top-level executives are often in a “stronger financial position,” due to which they can afford to seek new career opportunities.

    Interestingly, while only 56 percent of employees think their company executives care about their well-being, a much higher 91 percent of C-suite administrators were of the opinion that their employees believe their leaders took care of them. The report called this a “notable gap.”

    Resignation Rates

    The Deloitte report comes amid a debate about resignation rates in the U.S. workforce. Over 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in April, with job openings hitting 11.9 million, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In the period from January 2021 to February 2022, almost 57 million Americans left their jobs.

    Though some are terming it the “Great Resignation,” giving it a negative connotation, the implication is not entirely true since most of those who quit jobs did so for other opportunities. In the same 14 months, almost 89 million people were hired. There are almost two jobs open for every unemployed person in the United States, according to MarketWatch.

    In an Economic Letter from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published in April, economics professor Bart Hobijn points out that high waves of resignations were common during rapid economic recoveries in the postwar period prior to 2000.

    “The quits waves in manufacturing in 1948, 1951, 1953, 1966, 1969, and 1973 are of the same order of magnitude as the current wave,” he wrote. “All of these waves coincide with periods when payroll employment grew very fast, both in the manufacturing sector and the total nonfarm sector.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 20:30

  • "It's Infuriating": DC Democrats In Chaos, Demand Biden Act On Abortion
    “It’s Infuriating”: DC Democrats In Chaos, Demand Biden Act On Abortion

    Democrats are seething with rage over Friday’s 6-3 majority decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, sending the question of abortion rights back to the state-level.

    “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” read the opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito.

    Pro-abortion protesters sprung to action, deploying posters which read “Bans off my Body” and other slogans.

    Hours after the news broke, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) called the decision “illegitimate,” and encouraged people to get “into the streets” to protest.

    Her call for what we’re sure will be ‘mostly peaceful’ protests prompted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to accuse the Democrat of ‘launching an insurrection,’ adding “Any violence and rioting is a direct result of Democrat marching orders.”

    “I will explain this to you slowly: exercising our right to protest is not obstruction of Congress nor an attempt to overturn democracy,” AOC replied, to which Greene asked AOC why she won’t support pardons for Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, why she is “a shill for the MIC (military industrial complex) funding war in Ukraine,” or “are you too busy organizing baby killing riots?”

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsBehind the carnival tent curtain, DC insiders are furious and are demanding that the Biden administration DO SOMETHING!

    “It’s infuriating. What the hell have we been doing?” one Democratic strategist told The Hill. “Why are we not talking about this every single day? Why hasn’t Biden made this the issue for Democrats? If we don’t step up, we’ve got ourselves to blame.“

    Since a leaked draft of the gut-punching Supreme Court opinion surfaced in early May, Democrats have said they wanted to see more guidance from Biden. But the president has been consumed by domestic issues including record-high inflation and the latest mass shootings in the country, in addition to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

    Democrats say Biden must do more to lead and fire up the base if he hopes to get Democrats to turn out this fall.  

     “A more forceful stance would be welcome from the rank and file,” said William Galston, who chairs the Brookings Institution’s governance studies program. -The Hill

    On Friday, Biden delivered a weak address from the White House, at one point struggling to find the words to describe the moment before spitting out: “It’s a – it just – it just stuns me,” even though the Supreme Court decision leaked on May 2 and everybody knew this was likely coming.

    And what is Biden’s solution? After acknowledging that he’s ‘severely limited’ in what he can do as president, he encouraged Democrats to vote for pro-abortion candidates in November’s midterms that would make it possible to pass a ‘right to abortion’ law.

    “This decision must not be the final word. My administration will use all of its appropriate, lawful powers, but Congress must act,” said Biden, adding: “This fall, Roe is on the ballot. Personal freedoms are on the ballot, the right to privacy, liberty, equality, they’re all on the ballot. … And with your vote, you can act. You can have the final word. This is not over.”

    Former President Obama, who in 2009 said that legislation to codify abortion rights into federal law was ‘not the highest legislative priority’ – tweeted: “Today, the Supreme Court not only reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, it relegated the most intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues—attacking the essential freedoms of millions of Americans.”

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ripped the “GOP’s dark and extreme goal of ripping away women’s right to make their own reproductive health decisions.”

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

    Democratic strategist Joel Payne said, very strategically: “What’s challenging for the president is that all the other domestic challenges have prevented him from having the political capital to galvanize the base in a moment like this.”

    “Because of Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, the Republican Party & their supermajority on the Supreme Court, American women today have less freedom than their mothers. Radical Republicans are now charging ahead with their crusade to criminalize health freedom.” Of course, unborn American children have more protections than they’ve had in 50 years.

    Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the decision “one of the darkest days our country has ever seen.”

    And the Attorney General, Merrick Gardland, got extremely political, saying in an official statement: “The Justice Department strongly disagrees with this Court’s decision. This decision deals a devastating blow to reproductive freedom in the United States.”

    Kamala?

    Another Democratic strategist suggested that failure to employ Kamala Harris as the face of the White House’s pro-abortion stance is a huge mistake.

    “How great would that have been?” the anonymous strategist asked rhetorically. “Why aren’t we deploying someone who understands and could speak to this moment from the heart?”

    Eh…

    Young Democrats feel abandoned

    According to HIT Strategies’ chief researcher Roshni Nedungadi, 75% of young voters 18-34 years-old want abortion rights protected and don’t believe Democrats are doing enough to fight back on the issue.

    “They feel that they need to see Democrats and the White House fighting for them,” she said, adding “I really think as many voices as they can have, saying the same thing over and over again.”

    The question for November; can Democrats rally the base around the right abort an unborn child, after a summer of ‘mostly peaceful protests’?

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 20:00

  • New Monkeypox Study Holds Possible Clue To Fast Spread Of Virus
    New Monkeypox Study Holds Possible Clue To Fast Spread Of Virus

    Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

    A new study into monkeypox holds a possible clue as to why the virus is spreading so quickly, with researchers saying they have discovered that the virus contains an unusually high number of mutations, which may represent “accelerated evolution.”

    The new monkeypox strain was found to have an average of 50 mutations in samples examined by Portuguese researchers, while only around 10 would normally be expected, according to the new peer-reviewed study, published on June 24 in the medical journal Nature Medicine.

    The unexpectedly high number of genetic variations in the currently spreading monkeypox variant suggests that the virus may be fast-adapting, with possible implications for transmission speed.

    “Our data reveals [sic] additional clues of ongoing viral evolution and potential human adaptation,” the research team wrote in the study.

    …

    The current outbreak has seen a total of 2,103 lab-confirmed monkeypox cases, including one death, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

    “The outbreak of monkeypox continues to primarily affect men who have sex with men who have reported recent sex with new or multiple partners,” the WHO said.

    …

    In the United States, health authorities said in a June 24 tally that they’ve identified 201 cases of monkeypox.

    The Biden administration said on June 22 that it was expanding monkeypox testing capacity by shipping tests to five commercial laboratory companies.

    “By dramatically expanding the number of testing locations throughout the country, we are making it possible for anyone who needs to be tested to do so,” said Xavier Becerra, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

    “All Americans should be concerned about monkeypox cases,” he added.

    …

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 19:30

  • Keith Olbermann Calls For The Supreme Court To Be Dissolved
    Keith Olbermann Calls For The Supreme Court To Be Dissolved

    With all the wailing and gnashing of teeth going on over the Supreme Court’s decision to end Roe vs. Wade and pass the lawmaking onus on to the states, the court’s decision to overturn New York’s ban on conceal carry and other gun rights might get buried in the chaos.  Extreme leftist and corporate “journalist” Keith Olbermann certainly had a lot to say about it, though.

    Incensed by the idea that a government body might actually rule against common leftist policy, the calls for violence and even (*gasp) insurrection have been rising.  Specifically, the left believes that intimidation or outright dissolution of the Supreme Court is justifiable.  

    Olbermann argues for exactly that, while also presenting a bizarre assertion that states should ignore the decision and violate our 2nd Amendment rights anyway because they are “just a court” and “can’t enforce the ruling.”  One could apply the same logic and say that the states should have ignored Roe vs. Wade and made abortion illegal this entire time because the Supreme Court “can’t enforce the ruling.”

    One factor that Olbermann also seems to overlook is the reality that the people of a particular state could also ignore the state government’s attempts to enforce unconstitutional gun laws.  How is New York going to compel the citizenry to give up their gun rights if millions of them take up arms and refuse to submit?  Two can play that game, and this dynamic never crosses Olbermann’s mind.

    The left appears to be intent to abandon any semblance of diplomacy or checks and balances to get what they want, but they may be greatly overestimating their chances should political disagreement turn into physical conflict.   

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 19:00

  • The World Is Failing In Both Energy Affordability And Climate Goals
    The World Is Failing In Both Energy Affordability And Climate Goals

    Authored by Alex Kimani via OilPrice.com,

    • Global energy investment is forecast to rise by 8 percent to $2.4 trillion this year.

    • Investment in renewables is rising, but it’s nowhere near the levels necessary to limit global warming within a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase.

    • IEA: Inflation has brought the first increases in the cost of renewables in a decade.

    • U.S. shale spending remains far below 2019 levels in 2022.

    Global energy investment is on the rise and expected to grow by 8 percent annually this year, pushed up by record spending on clean energy, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its new report World Energy Investment 2022.  

    On the face of it, that’s great news for global energy supply and climate goals. But in reality, the rising trend is a function of galloping inflation, a deepening divide between developed and emerging economies’ investment trends, and an increase in coal investments as the biggest economies in Asia prioritize energy security amid soaring energy prices and upended energy markets following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    “As things stand, today’s energy investment trends show a world falling short on climate goals, and on reliable and affordable energy,” the IEA itself admitted as much in its report.

    Inflation To Eat Up Nearly Half Of Investment Increase

    Global energy investment is forecast to rise by 8 percent to $2.4 trillion this year, with renewables and grid investments increasing at the fastest pace.

    Still, nearly half of the $200 billion increase in investment in 2022 is likely to be eaten up by higher costs rather than bringing additional energy supply capacity or savings. Costs are soaring amid supply chain pressures, tight labor, and energy services markets, and surging steel and cement prices, the Paris-based agency said.

    Inflation has also brought the first increases in the cost of renewables in a decade, and as capital-intensive technologies, renewables face a stronger impact from pressures affecting the cost of raw materials and financing than other forms of power generation, the IEA notes.

    “Renewable equipment manufacturers are passing on some of these pressures in their products, with increases in the cost of solar PV panels and wind turbines of 10-20% and attempts to renegotiate existing contracts, depending on the technology and region,” the agency said.

    Cost pressures could raise the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from variable renewables by 20-30 percent this year compared to 2020.

    Nevertheless, the IEA says, investment in renewables remains attractive due to the role of clean energy in the energy transition, especially if backed by supportive government policies and incentives.

    Renewable Investment Is A Tale Of Two Worlds

    While renewables investment and capacity installations are continuously rising in developed economies and China, the developing and emerging economies are stuck at the same level of clean energy investment as in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, the IEA’s estimates showed.

    Apart from some bright spots such as growth in wind and solar in Brazil and utility-scale renewables in India, the developing economies except China struggle to see renewable energy investment take off. Those major regional variations in clean energy investment “underline the risk of new dividing lines on energy and climate,” the IEA notes, adding that “overall, the relative weakness of clean energy investment across much of the developing world is one of the most worrying trends revealed by our analysis.”

    The cost of capital can be up to seven times higher in developing markets than in advanced economies. Moreover, in developing economies excluding China, public funds to back renewables are lacking, policy frameworks are often weak, economies are threatened by soaring inflation and increased poverty, and borrowing costs are rising.

    “Much more needs to be done to bridge the gap between emerging and developing economies’ one-fifth share of global clean energy investment, and their two-thirds share of the global population,” the IEA said.  

    Fossil Fuel Investment Caught Between Climate Goals And Energy Security

    Investment in renewables is rising, but it’s nowhere near the levels necessary to limit global warming within a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase. At the same time, investment in fossil fuels, including coal, is set to increase this year, undermining the global pathway to climate goals on the one hand, but still insufficient to meet rising global energy demand, on the other hand.

    “Overall, today’s oil and gas spending is caught between two visions of the future: it is too high for a pathway aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C but not enough to satisfy rising demand in a scenario where governments stick with today’s policy settings and fail to deliver on their climate pledges,” the IEA said.

    Investment in new coal supply is rising amid energy security concerns.

    “High prices and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine mean that fuel supply investment is currently viewed through an energy security lens, but climate pressures cannot be put aside,” the IEA said.

    Investment in coal supply jumped by 10 percent last year, led by Asia, and is likely to rise by another 10 percent this year to reach $116 billion, which would be higher than the 2019 investment of $104 billion.

    In upstream oil and gas, investment is also set for a 10-percent rise this year, to $417 billion, but it lags the $500 billion investment in 2019, per the IEA’s estimates. Moreover, cost escalation is diminishing the impact of higher spending on activity levels. Only the national oil companies in the Middle Eastern oil exporters are set to spend more this year than in 2019, as Saudi Arabia and the UAE look to boost oil production capacity.

    Despite an expected increase of U.S. shale investments, the level of 2022 spending is still expected to be around 30 percent below 2019 levels, as operators focus on profitability and capital discipline rather than production expansion, the IEA noted. 

    In refining, the sector saw in 2021 the first net reduction in global capacity for the first time in 30 years, as near-record levels of capacity were retired in 2020 and 2021, contributing to the current tightness in global fuel markets. Investment in refining, however, is not certain going forward, the IEA says.

    “However, the strong financial performance and high utilisation rates seen in recent months may not necessarily translate into higher investment levels given lingering uncertainty around the long-term outlook for oil demand.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 18:30

  • IMF Slashes US Growth Forecast But Claims Recession Will Be 'Narrowly Avoided'
    IMF Slashes US Growth Forecast But Claims Recession Will Be ‘Narrowly Avoided’

    The IMF was one of the first establishment institutions to admit that inflation was a legitimate threat to the US economy last year, however, they were very late to the game compared to economists in the alternative media.  In March of 2021 IMF analysts were still arguing that inflation would be “transitory” despite the enormous $6 trillion covid stimulus in 2020 which was injected by the Federal Reserve directly into US retail markets through covid checks and PPP loans (helicopter money).  Nearly all of the IMF’s predictions on inflation turned out to be wrong.

    This fact should be taken into consideration as the IMF now claims that US Growth will cool but recession will be ‘narrowly avoided’ while stating that the economy is ‘in recovery.’  The IMF does not really explain its logic on this prediction, but that’s usually how they operate.  Whenever they are wrong, they don’t admit it and they move on to the next wrong prediction.  Either that, or they know that circumstances are about to get worse and they don’t want the public to have the opportunity to prepare.

    The IMF is predicting positive growth in US GDP this year even though GDP entered a decline in the first quarter of 2022 before the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates.  Prices also continue to rise in most necessities despite indications that the Fed plans to continue rate hikes through the year.  In the meantime, the jobs market is edging towards renewed losses as covid money and credit dry up.  In other words, the classic conditions for a stagflation crisis are in place.   

    This means that even with recession pressures on the horizon price inflation remains a problem, which suggests that the Fed will have to continue raising interest rates in order to combat it.  Further recessionary consequences are baked into the cake on top of rising prices.

    It should be noted that the IMF among many other globalist institutions and major banks warned only a month ago that a ‘dire’ global food shortage was on the way this year, and that a storm was on the horizon.  Yet, as soon as the Fed raised interest rate by a mere 75bps the establishment shifted to a different narrative, asserting suddenly that deflationary conditions will “balance out” price spikes.

    The IMF seems to be painting a future economy in which the rest of the world is in crisis, but the US will be just fine.  And, like we saw with their inflation predictions, this fanciful notion should be taken with a grain of salt.   

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 18:00

  • Doctors' Group Urges Biden Administration To End Quarantine, Vaccine Recommendations For Children
    Doctors’ Group Urges Biden Administration To End Quarantine, Vaccine Recommendations For Children

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A group of doctors is urging top government officials to quickly reverse recommendations that have left children in isolation for days and advice that virtually every child get a COVID-19 vaccine.

    “We strongly urge you to revise the CDC’s COVID-19 guidelines with regards to testing, isolation, and vaccine recommendations for children to ensure that public health policies are not doing more harm than good,” the group, Urgency of Normal, wrote in a June 21 open letter to Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

    Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks in Washington on June 16, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

    The CDC’s guidelines say that people, including children, who are exposed to COVID-19 should quarantine for at least five days, and encourage widespread COVID-19 testing.

    The agency also recommends that all children 6 months of age or older get a COVID-19 vaccine, following the recent authorization of the Moderna and Pfizer shots for kids under 5.

    The doctors noted that many European countries, U.S. states, and other areas have updated COVID-19 policies to greatly reduce periods of quarantine, COVID-19 testing frequency, and forced vaccination.

    They’re asking U.S. officials to adapt to a “test-to-treat” approach, which would focus on recommending vaccination and treatments to those at the highest risk from COVID-19, which are primarily the elderly and others with serious underlying health conditions.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 17:30

  • Remote-Working Americans Don't Even Need Passport For World's Best Work And Play City
    Remote-Working Americans Don’t Even Need Passport For World’s Best Work And Play City

    There has always been a clear division between work and play. Yet there’s a new travel trend dubbed “workcations,” where white-collar workers can remotely work from mountain cabins in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to a beach resort in Tulum, Mexico, to the jungles of Costa Rica and even large metro areas like Paris, Tokyo, and Miami. Once they’re finished work for the day, they explore the outdoors, local food markets, and whatever the nightlife has to offer. 

    Booking a workcation could be challenging because there are so many factors about a metro area that workers need to be aware of for a productive and fun time. 

    Icelandair, the top airline carrier in Iceland, commissioned a study examining 150 cities around the world for various factors related to a wellness workcation. They did the heavy lifting and uncovered the best 25 cities globally for remote work while also focusing on the importance of personal wellbeing and acts of self-care. 

    Icelandair used several factors to determine the top metro areas for a workcation, including quality of life, internet speed, air pollution, cost of living, health care, and safety. 

    They found that the best city in the world for remote work is one where Americans don’t even need a passport, and it’s not the beaches of San Diego or the vast forests of Yellowstone National Park, but Kansas City, Missouri. 

    For those unfamiliar with Kansas City, it’s a metro area on Missouri’s western edge, straddling the border with the state of Kansas — known for barbecue, jazz heritage, and fountains. It ranks the highest on Icelandair’s factors than any of the 150 cities worldwide that the airline examined. 

    Vienna, Austria, and Wellington, New Zealand round out the list of the top three metro areas for remote work worldwide. 

     

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 17:00

  • Maxine Waters: "To Hell With The Supreme Court! We Will Defy Them!"
    Maxine Waters: “To Hell With The Supreme Court! We Will Defy Them!”

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Congresswoman Maxine Waters responded to the landmark abortion ban by vowing, “To hell with the Supreme Court! We will defy them!

    Waters made the comments shortly after it was announced that abortion is being sent back to the states, with Roe v Wade being overturned.

    “They ain’t seen nothing yet, women are going to control their bodies no matter how they try to stop them,” insisted Waters.

    “To hell with the Supreme Court! We will defy them! Women will be able to control their bodies and if they think black women are intimidated, are afraid, they got another thought coming,” she added.

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    “Black women will be out in droves – we will be out by the thousands, we will be out by the millions, we’re going to make sure we fight for the right to control our own bodies,” asserted Waters.

    As we highlighted earlier, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is spewing similar rhetoric, gathering outside the Supreme Court to shout that it is “illegitimate.”

    Now watch as all the same people who accused Trump of “inciting” January 6 incite actual violence in the form of riots over the next few nights.

    Far-left pro-abortion groups have already vowed to stage a “night of rage” in response to the ruling.

    The Department of Homeland Security has also warned crisis pregnancy centers, Catholic churches, and pro-life institutions that they should brace for attacks, with several having already been targeted in recent weeks.

    Buckle up for the next few nights, there might be a few “mostly peaceful” demonstrations ahead.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 16:30

  • Russia To Transfer Nuclear-Capable Missiles To Belarus "Within Months": Putin
    Russia To Transfer Nuclear-Capable Missiles To Belarus “Within Months”: Putin

    At a moment US media and much of the West is consumed with the historic Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Russian President Vladimir Putin just issued what’s possibly the most alarming and escalatory statement thus far in the four-month long Ukraine war.

    On Saturday Putin for the first time informed his close ally Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that he has approved supplying Belarus with nuclear capable long-range missiles. Minsk has long offered to host Russian nukes as a ‘deterrent’ against the West – a prospect which Lukashenko had very provocatively offered even in the months leading up to the Feb.24 invasion of Ukraine. This move will likely be viewed from Washington as a first step in moving toward a heightened nuclear posture in Eastern Europe.

    Image source: BelTA

    Reuters writes of the announcement, “Russia will supply Belarus with Iskander-M missile systems, Russian President Vladimir Putin told a televised meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Saturday. Delivery will take place within a few months, he added.”

    Putin referenced nuclear-capability, according to a transcript of the televised remarks: “In the coming months, we will transfer to Belarus Iskander-M tactical missile systems, which can use ballistic or cruise missiles, in their conventional and nuclear versions.”

    The report underscores further that “The Iskander-M is a mobile guided missile system with a range of up to 500 km (300 miles). The missiles can carry conventional or nuclear warheads.”

    Currently, Putin and Lukashenka are meeting face-to-face in St. Petersburg on the 30th anniversary of the two countries establishing diplomatic relations, which eventually led to the so-called ‘Union State’ pact of 1999, and has persisted till now, which also enabled Russia to muster much of its forces on Belarusian territory just ahead of the Ukraine invasion.

    Belarus has maintained that it has not been a direct participant in hostilities in Ukraine; however, it’s well-known to have played the role of a key hub of Russian logistics and support. In the past days, Ukrainian defense and intelligence officials have alleged that the Kremlin is actively trying to draw Belarus into the war on its side.

    Kiev on Saturday said the northern Chernihiv region came under “massive bombardment” from rockets “fired from the territory of Belarus and from the air” in a major cross-border attack, which isn’t the first time the Ukrainians have leveled such a charge.

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    “Today’s strike is directly linked to Kremlin efforts to pull Belarus as a co-belligerent into the war in Ukraine,” a Ukrainian intelligence statement said.

    Likely, Putin’s announcement of an impending transfer of Iskander missiles to Belarus is also intended as a counter-action in response to Ukraine achieving EU-candidate status. While it’s obvious that actual EU membership could take years, if it happens at all, the view from Moscow is that EU integration is typically followed by a bid for NATO membership.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 16:00

  • The Great Crash Of 2022
    The Great Crash Of 2022

    Authored by Kristoffer Mousten Hansen via The Mises Institute,

    We are now well past the corona crisis of 2020, and most of the restrictions around the world have been repealed or loosened. However, the long-term consequences of arbitrary and destructive corona policies are still with us—in fact, we are now in the middle of the inevitable economic crisis.

    Proclaiming the great crash and economic crisis of 2022 is at this point not especially prescient or insightful, as commentators have been predicting it for months. The cause is still somewhat obscure, as financial and economic journalism still focuses on whatever the Federal Reserve announces. But the importance of the Fed’s moves is greatly exaggerated. The Fed cannot set interest rates at will; it cannot generate a boom or a recession at will. It can only print money and create the illusion of greater prosperity, but ultimately, reality reasserts itself.

    The real driver of the present crisis is monetary inflation. Back in 2020, I (along with many others) pointed out the role of inflationary monetary policy in the corona crisis. While consumer price inflation is now the most apparent consequence, the real damage occurred in the capital structure of the economy. This is the cause of the present crisis.

    A Business Cycle, of Sorts

    While to most people the most obvious consequence of the corona inflation was the transfer payments they received from the government, the real action occurred in the business sector. Through various schemes, newly created money was channeled to the productive sector from the Fed via the Treasury. The result was a classic business cycle of unsustainable expansion ending in inevitable depression.

    The immediate effect of the inflow of easy money was twofold. First, it hid some of the economic distortions that lockdowns and other restrictions caused. Since they received government funds to make up for lost revenue and to cover higher costs, businessmen maintained production lines that really should have been shut down or altered in some way due to lockdowns. Second, easy money induced capitalists to make new, unsound investments, as they thought the extra money meant greater capital availability.

    These investments were unsound not because the government quickly turned off the money spigot again: they were unsound because the real resources were not there; people had not saved more to make them available. The supply of complementary factors of production had not increased, or not as much as suggested by the increase in money available for investment. As the businesses expanded and increased demand for these complementary factors, their prices therefore rose. To keep the boom going, businesses have started to borrow more money in the market, driving up interest rates. But there is no cheap credit to be had at this point, since there haven’t been additional infusions of cheap money since the initial inflation of 2020, so interest rates are quickly rising. This is the real explanation of the inversion of the yield curve: businesses are scrambling for funding as they find themselves in a liquidity shortage, since their input prices are rising above their revenues. It’s not the market front-running the Federal Reserve or any other fancy expectations-based cause: interest rates rise because businesses are short on capital.

    The following chart shows the increase in producer prices compared to consumer prices—an increase of almost 40 percent since the beginning of 2020 is clearly unsustainable. That consumer prices have not increased as much is a clear indication that we’re dealing with a business boom and that businesses can’t expect future revenues that will cover their elevated costs. Nor are we simply seeing oil price increases due to disruptions in supply. Oil and energy commodities complement virtually all production processes, so inflation-induced investment will lead to an early rise in oil and energy prices.

    Figure 1: Producer and Consumer Price Indices, January 2019–May 2022

    Eventually, interest rates will be bid too high, and businessmen will have to abandon their investments. Many will throw inventories on the market at almost any price to fund their liabilities, cut back their workforces, and likely go bankrupt. This appears to be happening already, as CNBC is reporting many layoffs in tech companies.

    A likely consequence of this bust will be a banking crisis: as the share of nonperforming loans increases, bank revenues will dry up, and banks may find themselves unable to meet their own obligations. A crisis could develop, leading to what has been called “secondary deflation”: the contraction of the money supply as deposits in bankrupt banks simply evaporate. While that is a consummation devoutly to be wished, it is unlikely, to put it mildly, that the Federal Reserve will let things get to that point. This neatly brings us to a central question: What is the central bank doing right now?

    The Contractionary Fed

    Surprising as it sounds, the Fed really is pursuing a tightening policy. Not necessarily the one they officially announced—they are not, in fact, reducing their balance sheet, but an extremely tight policy nonetheless.

    It is worth pointing out that the Fed is really a one-trick pony: all it can do is create money, either directly or indirectly by giving banks the reserves necessary for bank credit expansion. All the stuff about setting interest rates is secondary, if not irrelevant: the market always and everywhere sets interest rates. Central banks can only influence interest rates by, you guessed it, printing money.

    Figure 2: M2 (billions of dollars), January 2019–April 2022

    While the Fed was very inflationary back in 2020 as figures 2 and 3 show, it has since reversed course and become not only conservative, but outright contractionary. That is, not only has the growth rate slowed down, but there was a real, if small, fall in the quantity of money in early 2022.

    Figure 3: M2 (percent change), January 2019–April 2022

    This contraction is not immediately evident if we only look at the Fed’s overall balance sheet, because since March 2021, the Fed has aggressively increased the amount of reverse repurchase agreements (reverse repos) they hold (or owe, technically). In a reverse repo transaction, the Fed temporarily sells a bond to a bank (just as they temporarily buy a bond from a bank in a repo transaction). This sucks reserves from the system, just as repos add reserves to the system. From virtually zero in March 2021, the amount of reverse repos has increased to $2,421.6 billion as of June 15, reducing the amount of available reserves by the same amount. The Fed balance sheet has not shrunk due to simple accounting: the bond underlying the repo transaction is still recorded on the Fed balance sheet. Banks, meanwhile, benefit from this transaction even though their reserves are temporarily reduced, earning a practically risk-free 0.8 percent (the Fed increased the award rate on reverse repos to 1.55 percent on June 15 and will likely increase it in the near future as the market rate keeps rising).

    Figure 4: Reverse Repurchase Agreements, March 2021–June 2022

    Whatever this is, it’s not a policy that will feed inflation—in fact, inflation really will be transitory if the Fed continues its present policy. This is somewhat ironic, as the Fed has increased its holdings of inflation-indexed bonds, suggesting its economists themselves do not believe the transitory narrative. Of course, it’s possible that the Fed may simply be gearing up for the next round of inflationary policy.

    What is certain is that the Fed is now neutralizing its previous inflation. The great 2020 inflation went first to the US Treasury account at the Fed and then to the government’s favored clients. As the government drew down its account, money went to the banks and was deposited at the Fed as reserves. At this point, the inflation could have accelerated. The banks were already flush with reserves and could have extended credit on top of the tidal wave of additional reserves flowing into them. This would likely have happened as the market rate of interest started rising, if not earlier, but by sucking banks’ reserves out the Fed is limiting banks’ inflationary potential. Credit expansion is still possible, as the banks maintain a historically elevated reserves-deposits ratio of around 20 percent and have since 2020 been liberated from any kind of legal reserve requirement. But by reducing the reserves in the system, the Fed is effectively preventing this development. After peaking at over 23 percent, the reserve ratio has steadily declined since September 2021, hitting 19 percent in April, as shown in figure 5. Since reverse repo transactions have continued in May and June, the monetary contraction seen in the first quarter is likely ongoing, although we will have to wait for more recent money supply figures to confirm this.

    Figure 5: Banks’ Reserve Ratio, May 2020–April 2022

    What Happens Now?

    Whatever happens next, one thing is clear: the crisis is already upon us. Stock market declines and financial market chaos are really epiphenomena, headline capturing though they may be. The damage has already been done. And while I’ve here focused on the covid era, we were already heading for crisis in 2019—the coronavirus just provided an excuse for one last gigantic inflationary binge.

    This means that it’s not simply the malinvestments of the last two years that needs to be cleared out—it’s the accumulated capital destruction of the last fifteen years that’s now becoming apparent. How much capital was wasted in tech start-ups that had no chance of ever turning a profit? As this piece in The Atlantic points out, enormous amounts of capital were poured into technology projects aimed at the hip urban millennial lifestyle—and now that they cannot cover operating costs with endless infusions of venture capital, prices are spiking and companies are laying off workers. The boom in construction is also at an end, as demand for housing is unlikely to remain elevated as mortgage rates rise.

    In all likelihood, the Fed is not going to stay the course. Pressure from finance and from government is likely to force it back into inflation, but this inflation can’t prevent the bust. As Ludwig von Mises pointed out, you can’t paper over the economic crisis with yet another infusion of paper money; the crisis will play out, whatever the central bank decides to do. What the Fed can do is continue funding the government and bailing out the financial system when they come under pressure. Both will be very inflationary.

    We should not celebrate the Fed for refraining from inflating the money supply at the moment—after all, its previous recklessness caused the problems to begin with—but let’s hope the Fed stays the course for now. The longer a new round of inflation is delayed, the more radical will the purge of malinvestment and clown-world finance be. High inflation is also possible, perhaps even more likely, given the political pressures.

    In that case, Weimar, here we come!

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 15:30

  • Gallup: Confidence In Supreme Court Hits 'Historic Low'
    Gallup: Confidence In Supreme Court Hits ‘Historic Low’

    With the US Supreme Court handing Democrats their biggest defeat in recent memory; repealing both Roe v. Wade and New York’s prohibition on conceal and carry, Gallup is out with a new poll suggesting that confidence in the highest court in the land has hit a ‘historic low.’

    According to the report, 25% of US adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the US Supreme Court, a drop from 36% a a year ago, and 5% below the previous low in 2014.

    And of course, Keith Olbermann has called for the court’s dissolution…

    More from Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones (emphasis ours),

    These results are based on a June 1-20 Gallup poll that included Gallup’s annual update on confidence in U.S. institutions. The survey was completed before the end of the court’s term and before it issued its major rulings for that term. Many institutions have suffered a decline in confidence this year, but the 11-point drop in confidence in the Supreme Court is roughly double what it is for most institutions that experienced a decline. Gallup will release the remainder of the confidence in institutions results in early July.

    The Supreme Court is likely to issue a ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case before its summer recess. The decision will determine the constitutionality of a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. A leaked draft majority opinion in the case suggests that the high court will not only allow the Mississippi law to stand, but also overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court ruling that prohibits restrictions on abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. Americans oppose overturning Roe by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

    In September, Gallup found the Supreme Court’s job approval rating at a new low and public trust in the judicial branch of the federal government down sharply. These changes occurred after the Supreme Court declined to block a Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, among other controversial decisions at that time. Given these prior results, it is unclear if the drop in confidence in the Supreme Court measured in the current poll is related to the anticipated Dobbs decision or had occurred several months before the leak.

    The prior low in Supreme Court confidence was 30% in 2014, which was also the year when confidence in major U.S. institutions in general hit a low point, averaging 31%.

    Public confidence in the Supreme Court has been lower over the past 16 years than it was before. Between 1973 and 2006, an average of 47% of U.S. adults were confident in the court. During this 33-year period, no fewer than four in 10 Americans expressed high confidence in the court in any survey, apart from a 39% reading in October 1991 taken during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.

    Since 2006, confidence has averaged 35% and has not exceeded 40% in any survey.

    Democrats, Independents Behind Confidence Slide

    Confidence in the Supreme Court is down by double digits among both Democrats (30% to 13%) and independents (40% to 25%) this year, but it is essentially unchanged among Republicans (37% to 39%).

    The Democratic figure is the lowest Supreme Court confidence rating Gallup has measured for any party group historically, eight points lower than the 21% figure among Democrats in 2019. Independents’ 25% confidence rating is the lowest registered for that group historically, with the prior low being 28% in 2015.

    Republican confidence has been lower in the past than now, with the 26% measured in 2010 still the lowest for GOP supporters to date. That low point occurred after Barack Obama picked a liberal justice, Sonia Sotomayor, in 2009 and nominated another, Elena Kagan, in 2010 before the poll was conducted.

    While Republicans’ confidence hasn’t changed much in the past year, it has come down significantly from 53% in 2020. That measure was taken during Donald Trump’s reelection year — after he had two of his nominees confirmed to the Supreme Court, but before a third Trump justice was confirmed days prior to his being defeated for reelection in November.

    Bottom Line

    The Supreme Court is likely to issue one of its most consequential rulings at a time when public confidence in the institution has never been lower. If, as expected, the conservative-leaning court rules to overturn Roe v. Wade, it is unclear whether that decision would further harm the institution’s reputation among Americans or perhaps improve it if Americans agree with the court’s reasoning. Invalidating Roe would allow state governments to decide whether abortion is legal or illegal in their state.

    The public may have already taken the Supreme Court’s stance on the abortion issue into account, with its decision on the Texas law and the leaked draft majority opinion on the Mississippi law. But an actual, rather than hypothetical or expected, decision may have more potency in shifting Americans’ views of the court.

    To stay up to date with the latest Gallup News insights and updates, follow us on Twitter.

    Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works.

    View complete question responses and trends (PDF download).

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 15:00

  • Diesel Demand Set To Drop As Economies Enter Recession: Kemp
    Diesel Demand Set To Drop As Economies Enter Recession: Kemp

    By John Kemp, senior energy analyst

    U.S. diesel consumption is likely to decline by 200,000 to 600,000 barrels per day (5%-15%) over the next year as the economy slows in response to rising interest rates.

    The Federal Reserve is not deliberately trying to induce a recession to bring inflation under control, central bank chief Jerome Powell told legislators on Wednesday. But he said that was a possible and foreseeable outcome of rapid rate rises – an interesting application of the doctrine of double effect.

    The central bank hopes for soft landing but feels it must risk a hard one to reduce inflation running at the fastest rate for 40 years. Distillate fuel oil, a category that includes diesel, gas oil and heating oil, are the petroleum products most sensitive to changes in the business cycle so they will be impacted most as the rate of growth slows.

    Even if the central bank can engineer a mid-cycle slowdown, rather than a cycle-ending recession, consumption of distillates is very likely to decline over the next year.

    Both recessions and mid-cycle slowdowns have tended to reduce consumption of distillates by between 5% and 15% compared with the previous year.

    With the volume of distillates supplied to domestic customers in the United States running at a little over 4 million barrels per day, the expected decline is equivalent to between 200,000 and 600,000 bpd.

    Eurozone Recession

    Europe’s distillate consumption is likely to see a similar or greater fall as the region’s economy enters a recession in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the impact of sanctions.

    Eurozone manufacturers are already on the leading edge of a recession, according to preliminary data from purchasing managers’ surveys for the first part of June.

    The eurozone composite manufacturing activity index slumped to 52.0 (47th percentile for all months since 2006) in early June, down from 54.6 (65th percentile) in May and 63.4 (100th percentile) in June 2021.

    Rapidly escalating prices for crude, diesel, gasoline, gas and electricity as well as food are likely to force households and businesses to reduce spending over the next few months, pushing the economy into recession.

    Lower volumes of manufacturing, construction and freight transportation activity will in turn cut diesel and gas oil consumption in the region, likely by a similar amount to the United States.

    Lower distillate consumption is the only way to resolve shortages caused by the rapid rebound in economic activity after pandemic lockdowns, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and sanctions imposed by the United States, the EU and their allies in response on Russia’s oil exports.

    In time, reduced distillate consumption will give the global refiners a chance to replenish severely depleted inventories and take some of the heat out of diesel crack spreads and prices.

    Ultimately, reduced distillate consumption will stabilize and then lower fuel prices and transportation costs, which will flow through into slower inflation later in 2022 and 2023.

    But the transition to lower oil prices and slower inflation is likely to involve a painful contraction in manufacturing and construction activity and employment first.

    The Fed and the other major central banks may not intend to induce a recession or a significant mid-cycle slowdown, but that is the logical effect of sharply higher interest rates and tighter financial conditions.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/25/2022 – 14:30

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Jun 25

Today’s News 25th June 2022

  • New 6-Nation Pacific Pact Proposed To Beat Back Beijing's Unrestricted Warfare
    New 6-Nation Pacific Pact Proposed To Beat Back Beijing’s Unrestricted Warfare

    Authored by Daniel Teng via The Epoch Times,

    Democratic countries are proposing a new Pacific-wide pact to strengthen cooperation and development efforts in the region to combat Beijing’s influence building and hybrid warfare operations.

    The “Partners in the Blue Pacific” would involve the United States, Australia, France, Japan, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom to provide “closer, more purposeful, and more ambitious cooperation.”

    “Too often, our efforts have been uncoordinated, creating duplication in some cases and gaps on the others,” according to a concept note about the pact. The partnership was earmarked by U.S. Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell at a Center for Strategic and International Studies meeting on June 23.

    The program would look at strengthening the Pacific Islands Forum, facilitate regular engagement and dialogue between partners, and map existing projects and coordinate future ones to avoid “lost opportunities.”

    The development of the Partners in the Blue Pacific will come in close consultation with Pacific leaders and will target areas such as climate change, maritime security (China’s illegal fishing fleet), health, education, and providing better access to infrastructure.

    Working Together to Deal with the ‘Grey Zone’

    South Pacific expert Cleo Paskal has called for better coordination and for democratic nations to leverage each other’s strengths to deal with Beijing’s unrestricted or grey zone warfare in the region.

    “Each of the Quad [Australia, India, Japan, and the United States] members have their own unique track records and capabilities to contribute,” she wrote in The Australian newspaper along with Anthony Bergin of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

    “France is [also] a key Pacific player with nearly 3,000 defence personnel in the region. We need to get our relationship back on track for that reason alone.”

    The South Pacific has become a hotbed of geopolitical competition as the Chinese Communist Party pushes to win influence over Pacific leaders in the region.

    Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s recent tour to eight nations in the region exemplified this trend, with the minister signing a swathe of new bilateral deals to tighten cooperation.

    Paskal warned that the increasing influence of Beijing also saw the weakening of democratic institutions and the gradual rise of authoritarianism.

    “Those weapons are used to weaken the target country from the inside and to fragment and create disorder in the target country so that it is less able to withstand Chinese influence,” Paskal previously told The Epoch Times.

    “That process of creating instability and fragmentation can be described as creating a state of ‘entropy’—of political, social, and economic entropy—where things start to just break down. And in that state of disorder, China can create a new order with itself and its proxies at the centre.”

    Crumbling Democratic Institutions

    A key example is the signing of the security deal between Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and Beijing, which could pave the way for the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy to station troops, weapons, and naval ships in the region.

    Sogavare’s prime ministership has not been without controversy. One report revealed that 39 of 50 pro-Beijing members of Parliament received payments from the National Development Fund operated in conjunction with the Chinese Embassy.

    While opposition leader Matthew Wale accused the prime minister of not delivering basic services, over-centralising power, and exploiting the country’s timber industry for the benefit of a few logging companies and to line his own pockets.

    Late last year, local anger erupted, and protests were held in the capital Honiara against Prime Minister Sogavare, which resulted in three deaths and the Chinatown district being razed.

    “You start to get this distortion in the society that creates an enormous amount of social anger. If you are from a democratic background, you think that’s a bad thing,” Paskal said. “But if you accept this premise of entropic warfare being the desired outcome from Beijing, you actually do want to create disruption within the society.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 23:40

  • The Link Between Soaring Food Prices & Political Instability
    The Link Between Soaring Food Prices & Political Instability

    The Russian war in Ukraine has had immediate repercussions for global food markets given the countries’ role as major exporters of essential agricultural products, such as wheat, sunflower oil, barley and corn, while also affecting perishable foods like fruits and vegetables.

    As shown in FAO data, the price of basic food products has surged since the invasion of Ukraine after already having followed an upward trend since 2020 over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Infographic: The Link Between Soaring Food Prices and Political Instability | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, in the past, similar surges in the price of food have led to unrest, mostly in developing countries, and even coincided with the Arab Spring in 2011, when populations in North Africa and the Middle East cornered by oppressive regimes and feeling the additional squeeze on their livelihoods due to high prices rose up and toppled several regional regimes. The current level of food prices is even surpassing the peaks observed in 2011 and 2008, when food and other prices rose dramatically, causing unrest in several African countries as well as in Bangladesh, Haiti, Indonesia and Yemen. The onset of the global financial crisis put an end to the price surge that year.

    In the current situation, Human Rights Watch has warned that food crisis could hit North Africa and the Middle East again, as several countries in the region are major importers of Russian or Ukrainian food products. 

    According to Cornell University economics professor Chris Barrett, the potential for unrest is again heightened.

    As of early June, food prices had already fueled protests all over the world, including in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Europe.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 23:20

  • Everybody's Guilty: To The Police State, We're All Criminals Until We Prove Otherwise
    Everybody’s Guilty: To The Police State, We’re All Criminals Until We Prove Otherwise

    Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.”

    – Hunter S. Thompson

    The burden of proof has been reversed.

    No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.

    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 has 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.

    Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.

    Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.

    Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association. In the government’s latest assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—the Biden Administration has likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This latest government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative. 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 this way, government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

    Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention. In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.

    Thought crimes. 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. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

    Security checkpoints and fusion centers. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. Fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.

    Surveillance, precrime programs. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time, whether or not they have committed a crime. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. With the increase in precrime programs, threat assessments, AI algorithms and surveillance programs such as SpotShotter, which attempt to calculate where illegal activity might occur by triangulating sounds and images, the burden of proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders us all suspects and overcriminalization which renders us all lawbreakers.

    Mail surveillance. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

    Threat assessments and AI algorithms. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    No-knock raids. No-knock, no-announce SWAT team raids are what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us. Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid. No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day. Police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year nationwide.

    Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the public, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry. This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.

    Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.

    Asset forfeiture schemes. Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme. As libertarian Harry Browne observed, “Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that’s been taken.”

    Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut it off altogether. The message: we cannot be trusted to obey the law or navigate the world on our end.

    Bodily integrity. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid with these mandates is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.

    Limitations on our right to move about freely. We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. For instance, license plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, police can track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.

    The war on cash and the introduction of digital currency. Digital currency provides 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. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue. A cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—plays right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).

    The Security-Industrial Complex. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn. What this has amounted to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield. As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.

    These programs 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 ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.

    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.

    In effect, you will disappear.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 23:00

  • New Study Finds Hawaii, Oregon, Among Least Affordable States To Live In
    New Study Finds Hawaii, Oregon, Among Least Affordable States To Live In

    Careers board Lensa produced a new study this week laying out the least and most affordable states to live in in the United States. The study looked at “the affordability gap in states around the US, comparing the cost of living to the average wage to reveal the percentage difference.”

    To arrive at its conclusions, it looked at grocery costs, housing prices, the cost of utilities and transportation costs. 

    The study found that “Hawaii was the least affordable state in the US with the national average wage being a whopping 20.32% less than the average cost of living. Hawaii also had one of the highest housing spends in the study, spending $13,864 on housing.”

    In second place was Oregon, followed by Maine and Oregon. This chart shows the top 15 least affordable states to live:

    As far as the most affordable places to live, the study found: “Virginia was named the most affordable state in the US with the national average wage being a whopping 49.64% higher than the average cost of living.  Virginia also had one of the lowest transportation costs, spending $8,716 per year on transport.”

    Illinois followed closely behind, with the national wage being 44.8% higher than the average cost of living, the study said. Texas came in third. 

    The study also found:

    • California and New York are also featured in the least affordable states. California’s national wage was only 4.38% higher than the average cost of living. New York’s national average wage was only 8.54% higher than the average cost of living. 

    • The top three most affordable states all had a 40% difference between the national average wage and the cost of living, whilst the others also had a 30% difference between the national average wage and the cost of living.

    You can view the full study here. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 22:40

  • Satellite Imagery Shows Construction Of US Military Facility In Pacific
    Satellite Imagery Shows Construction Of US Military Facility In Pacific

    Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

    Satellite imagery revealed that the United States is constructing a new military facility in the Pacific, possibly preparing an alternative landing site for its airforce should the military bases on Guam become inoperable.

    Land-clearing activity has been spotted at Tinian International Airport in the Northern Mariana Islands, based on satellite images obtained by The War Zone on June 15.

    An annotated satellite image showing the full scope of planned construction as part of the Tinian Divert Airfield project. USAF

    Past satellite imagery from the Planet Lab suggests that construction work at the site started in May.

    This appears to correspond to the Tinian divert airfield projects that commenced in February, which will cost about $162 million and are expected to complete by 2025.

    At the first project’s ground-breaking ceremony in February, brigadier-general Jeremy Sloane, commander of the 36th Wing, emphasized the importance of the Tinian divert airfield projects for the U.S. forces.

    “Its airfield, roadway, port, and pipeline improvements will provide vital strategic, operational, and exercise capabilities for the U.S. forces and support humanitarian assistance and disaster relief,” Sloane said, DVIDS reported.

    In May 2019, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands government signed a 40-year lease agreement with the U.S. Defense Department, which was worth $21.9 million for the U.S. Air Force’s divert airfield on Tinian.

    This was consistent with the U.S. Air Force’s decision in 2016 to designate Tinian International Airport as a backup site if the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam becomes unavailable due to a natural disaster or enemy attack.

    The divert airfield project would also include the construction of fuel storage, maintenance facility, and other infrastructure on Tinian to support cargo and tanker aircraft, and training exercises.

    US Upgrading Military Bases in Guam to Counter China

    The Pentagon said in its global defense review last year that Washington will be focusing on the upgrade and expansion of military bases in Guam and Australia “to deter potential Chinese military aggression and threats from North Korea.”

    Mara Karlin, deputy assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Defense, said the Indo–Pacific region was marked as the focal point for the U.S. military in the review, in which it “directs additional cooperation with allies and partners across the region.”

    “In Australia, you’ll see new rotational fighter and bomber aircraft deployments, you’ll see ground forces training and increased logistics cooperation,” Karlin said.

    “More broadly across the Indo–Pacific, you’ll see a range of infrastructure improvements in Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Australia.”

    The review was commissioned by the Biden administration in February 2021, and while it provided some details of the future of the military’s global posture, the review was largely classified.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 22:20

  • Prepare For A Tidal Wave Of Evictions
    Prepare For A Tidal Wave Of Evictions

    A tidal wave of evictions could be ahead. More than eight million Americans are behind on rent payments, and the CDC’s series of eviction moratoriums has long since expired. In other words, the government safety net to keep people off the streets is gone. 

    With no federal eviction moratorium in place, 8.4 million Americans, or about 15% of all renters, who are behind on rent, are at risk of being evicted. The new figures were part of a Census Bureau survey conducted between June 1 to June 13 of households and was first reported by Bloomberg. 

    The survey found that 3.5 million households were somewhat likely to leave their rented spaces (homes/apartments) within the next two months because of an eviction. Most of these folks are of the working poor class and situated in large metro areas from New York to Atlanta, where the cost of living, including shelter, food, and fuel, has skyrocketed. 

    About 6.7 million households said their rents increased, on average, $250 per month over the last year. The increase doesn’t sound like a lot but remember that many of these folks are being crushed under the weight of the highest inflation in four decades. Their credit cards are maxed out, and savings are drained as wages fail to keep up with soaring consumer prices. 

    This shocking revelation is a reminder that today’s current economic backdrop, which some say is stagflationary, could quickly morph into recession and surging jobless.

    So who will the Biden administration blame for the coming tidal wave of evictions? He can’t keep blaming “Putin.” 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 22:00

  • Brzezinski's Proxy War Playbook
    Brzezinski’s Proxy War Playbook

    Authored by Patrick Macfarlane via The Libertarian Institute, 

    In 1998, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbiegnew Brzezinski told Le Nouvel Observateur that the CIA “knowingly increased the probability” that the Russians would invade Afghanistan by covertly supporting the Mujahideen before the Soviet invasion. Later in that same interview, Brzezinski claims that this covert intervention caused the end of the Soviet Union:

    Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

    In July 2014, almost six months after the Maidan Revolution and Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea, Brzezinski hinted at a similar plan for Ukraine, although he couched it in defensive terms.

    He wrote on the Atlantic Council’s blog:

    If Ukraine has to be supported so that it does resist, the Ukrainians have to know the West is prepared to help them resist. And there’s no reason to be secretive about it. It would be much better to be open about it and to say to the Ukrainians and to those who may threaten Ukraine that if Ukrainians resist, they will have weapons. And we’ll provide some of those weapons in advance of the very act of invasion. Because in the absence of that, the temptation to invade and to preempt may become overwhelming. But what kind of weapons is important. And in my view, they should be weapons designed particularly to permit the Ukrainians to engage in effective urban warfare of resistance.

    In September 2014, Brzezinski revisited the topic in an MSNBC interview:

    Brzezinski: For the moment, the NATO alliance—as well as Europe and America jointly—have not been giving military aid to Ukraine. But I would not exclude the possibility of some defensive weaponry being given to the Ukrainians before too long, simply if the Russians, and particularly Putin, continue to try to intimidate Ukraine. That’s not the same thing as defending them; it’s helping them defend themselves.

    MSNBC: Is that the middle path you think the United States is going to take—something more than economic sanctions, but less than proxy war?

    Brzezinski: I think so. It seems to me that if we really are serious about Ukraine having the right to be an independent state with a friendly relationship with Europe, but not necessarily a member of NATO, and if Ukraine is not only threatened but actually victimized by Russia using force, then some defensive arms — publicly given — but only defensive weaponry, handed over to the Ukrainians makes eminent sense. It contributes to greater stability and it’s more likely to deter Mr. Putin than if he’s in effect given the green light to use as much force as he feels like.

    Despite Brzezinski’s defensive framing in Ukraine, Washington’s support for the Ukrainian military bears many similarities to its support of the Mujahideen.

    The first documented CIA support to the Mujahideen came in July 1979 when “a small political action program [was approved] to support the burgeoning [Afghan] insurgency through Pakistan.” After the invasion, Washington’s clandestine assistance to the Mujahideen sought to “get arms in [their] hands and keep them fighting.”

    These efforts consisted of sales of military equipment through the Pakistani ISI. The most effective support included the transfer of Stinger missiles, which equipped the Mujahideen to destroy Russian helicopters. In the Reagan years, these transfers were facilitated by the deployment of “CIA Special Activities Division paramilitary officers.”

    In early February 1980, Brzezinski visited Pakistan for a series of meetings with then-Pakistani President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq to discuss American support to Pakistan in the wake of the Soviet invasion. As a part of the delegation, Brzezinski made a “symbolic visit” to Afghan refugees in the Khyber Pass. Speaking of the Mujahideen, he told the refugees:

    We know of their deep belief in God and we are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You’ll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail. And you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and God is on your side.

    In January 2022, a month before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was revealed by US intelligence officials that the CIA had been providing covert assistance to the Ukrainian military since 2014. The program began under Barack Obama, was expanded under Donald Trump, and continued under Joe Biden. According to Yahoo News:

    The multiweek, U.S.-based CIA program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” intelligence and other areas, according to former officials.

    …The program has involved “very specific training on skills that would enhance” the Ukrainians’ “ability to push back against the Russians,” said the former senior intelligence official.

    The training, which has included “tactical stuff,” is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,” said the former official.

    One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.”

    Although some of the cited intelligence officials denied the training aimed to “create an insurgency,” much of the training is dually applicable. The semantic squirming that Brzezinski and other intelligence officials employ in their attempts to distinguish defensive support from prepping an insurgency is literally in-credible. This is especially true considering the type of weapons that complimented this training: “sniper rifles, armed boats, RPGs, and Javelin anti-tank missiles[.]”

    Further, in an address that is eerily similar to Brzezinski’s 1980 visit to the Khyber Pass, Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) spoke to the Ukrainian 36th Separate Marine Brigade. During the January 2, 2017 address, Graham and McCain praised the Ukrainian soldiers.

    Graham: “I admire the fact that you will fight for your homeland. Your fight is our fight. 2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia. Enough of the Russian aggression. It is time for them to pay a heavier price…Our promise to you is to take your cause to Washington, inform the American People of your bravery, and make the case against Putin to the World.”

    McCain: “I believe you will win. I am convinced you will win and we will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win. We have succeeded not because of equipment but because of your courage. So I thank you and the world is watching because we [] cannot allow Vladimir Putin to succeed here, because if he succeeds here, he will succeed in other countries.”

    In the 1980s, Brzezinski’s covert “bleeder” strategy was calculated to give the USSR “its own Vietnam,” which Brzezinski later claimed caused the end of the Soviet Union.

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    In spring and early summer 2022, the goal of Washington’s involvement in Ukraine became more openly stated: regime change in Moscow. Was this always the objective?

    Unlike the debatable effect of Brzezinski’s 1980s Afghanistan intervention, Washington’s involvement in Ukraine was directly cited by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a casus belli. In his February 2022 speech, Putin stated:

    Any further expansion of the North Atlantic alliance’s infrastructure or the ongoing efforts to gain a military foothold of the Ukrainian territory are unacceptable for us. Of course, the question is not about NATO itself. It merely serves as a tool of US foreign policy. The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I have to note is our historical land, a hostile “anti-Russia” is taking shape. Fully controlled from the outside, it is doing everything to attract NATO armed forces and obtain cutting-edge weapons.

    Brzezinski’s influence on the foreign policy establishment is immense. Brzezinski was among the first to call for the end of Putin’s government. He was also among the first to compare Putin to Hitler. Brzezinski’s protégés include such figures as Barack Obama, Madeline Albright, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, and Antony Blinken.

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    Although Washington’s actual role in provoking the Soviet invasion is debatable, one must wonder: if the Russian invasion of Ukraine were to bring the end of Putin’s Russia, would Brzezinski’s ghost and its lineage of Straussian ghouls champion Washington’s role in exacerbating the conflict? More importantly, if regime change is the goal, what cost must the world be made to pay?

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 21:40

  • Here Comes Deflation: Toyota Asks Suppliers To Lower Prices As Volumes Ramp
    Here Comes Deflation: Toyota Asks Suppliers To Lower Prices As Volumes Ramp

    Could it be possible that deflation is finally on its way? It seems as though Toyota thinks so. 

    The auto manufacturer is breaking a trend in the industry of succumbing to rising prices and is asking “certain parts companies” to cut prices for the upcoming third quarter now that it expects to be ramping up output.

    Based in Japan, Toyota has a history of asking suppliers to share price savings that occur as a result of buying in volume. These cuts usually amount to about 1% price cuts per year, according to Nikkei Asia, who reported the story. 

    The automaker got no such discount this spring, but Toyota now sees a recovery in output that prompted it to ask suppliers for lower prices.

    It also said it wants to “give support to suppliers particularly feeling the squeeze”, which includes helping cover high costs for materials, energy and logistics and helping pay for storage that suppliers have taken on in anticipation of more volume. 

    Toyota negotiates prices twice a year, Nikkei reported – usually once for the first half of the year and once for the second half. This year, it skipped its negotiations for the first half of the year and is asking for the price cuts heading into the second half. 

    The company said it expects to build 800,000 vehicles worldwide in July, exceeding the 770,000 produced last year. For the back half of the year, the company sees a global production average of about 850,000 units per month, on par with its all time high. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 21:20

  • Did Durham Play Us For A Fool?
    Did Durham Play Us For A Fool?

    Authored by Emerald Robinson via The Right Way,

    It’s the summer of 2022 — and where are all those Durham indictments you were promised? And where’s that much-discussed Durham report? Do you know that you’ve been played for a fool yet — or are you still watching Fox News? Maybe you need another year to figure out the entire game. Maybe you still believe Bill Barr! Didn’t that legendary windbag tell us that the wheels of justice grind very slow but justice is coming?

    Let’s turn back the clock two years — in case you forgot what AG Bagpipes promised the American public.

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    Indictments are coming!

    People will know the names of these people!

    Criminal prosecutions! Not just a report!

    Notice that (then) AG Bill Barr promises justice for the Russia Hoax while at the very same time excluding Obama and Biden as subjects of the Durham investigation.

    That’s the moment that you should have known: the fix is in.

    The entire “tick tock” narrative that followed was brought to you (mostly) by Fox News and Bill Barr.

    People ask me all the time how I knew — all the way back in the early months of 2020 — that the Durham investigation was a sham. (What do I mean by a sham —you ask? I mean a counterfeit of real justice — a ploy — a ruse to mislead the public.) It wasn’t because I had sources at the FBI or the DOJ. I correctly predicted the Durham investigation was a joke because the Huber investigation was a joke, and because the Hillary Clinton email investigation was a joke, and because the Huma Abedin laptop investigation was a joke, and because the Jeffrey Epstein investigation was a joke….

    You get the idea.

    I correctly predicted that the federal government doesn’t really investigate itself in order to successfully prosecute Democrats. Call it Emerald’s Law.

    The people who disagreed with me (publicly at the time) all worked at Fox News, or appeared on Fox News, or were guests on Fox News — and these people were all in the business of misleading their audience because the GOP establishment wanted its voters to be fooled. Bill Barr didn’t really want to arrest or prosecute Democrats — and certainly not in 2020. After all, the GOP establishment was busy collaborating with Democrats in 2020 to steal the November election from President Trump — or don’t you remember?

    In other words: the Durham investigation was simply the clean-up phase of Spygate disguised as an investigation of Spygate. This was perfectly obvious at the time — and it remains obvious today. It doesn’t take two years for the DOJ to prosecute its targets. You know that — right? Just ask Roger Stone. When the DOJ really wants to prosecute you, it’s easy to tell because two dozen special agents in SWAT gear appear at your door in a pre-dawn raid with a CNN camera crew already stationed across the street.

    And that’s just for the crime of “lying to Congress.”

    Did you really think that John Durham need two years to bring serious indictments against the Spygate plotters? Did you really fail to notice that his low-level indictments came just as the statue of limitations expired? Or that Durham brought minimal charges that were always going to bring minimal sentences?

    That’s because John Durham was the cleaner.

    Don’t tell me that you actually believed that one guy at the DOJ was going to investigate how the DOJ and the FBI and the CIA were trying to sabotage President Trump all by himself? All the majors players in Spygate walked away while Durham sent you on a wild goose chase hunting for commas in charging documents — and that wild goose chase was so successful in conservative media that you’re still talking about two low-level guys getting charged with process crimes four years after Durham supposedly started his investigation.

    Durham kept you high on the hopium for four years. That was his real job. He actually made you think that Spygate plotters were going to be prosecuted during the Biden Administration — or the Third Obama Administration as it should properly be called. It’s almost as if you somehow forgot that Obama and Biden were the ones who met on January 5th, 2017 to conceal the Obama Administration’s illegal spying on the Trump campaign (since Trump was now President-Elect) and to formally launch the Russia Hoax.

    So the joke is on you.

    As I said on Twitter at the time: “At the current rate of speed that Durham’s investigation moves, we can expect the guilty to be prosecuted sometime during the second Hunter Biden administration.”

    One of the giant red flags about the Durham investigation from the very beginning was that he allowed Democrat super-attorney (and 2016 Hillary Clinton general counsel) Marc Elias to run around for years interfering in our elections. Durham even allowed the Democrats’ “dirty-ops-org-disguised-as-a-law-firm” Perkins-Coie to separate itself legally from Elias just three weeks before he charged their employee Michael Sussmann! Elias was so certain that Durham was a nothing-burger that he even took over the Black Lives Matter corporate franchise while Durham was still investigating!

    How’s that for justice?

    You should also notice by now that Democrats never have to play stupid games like “tick tock trust the plan” because they’re too busy actually fabricating evidence, planting false media stories, and falsely prosecuting Trump officials like General Flynn, George Papadopoulos, and Paul Manafort.

    They’re too busy getting simpletons like (then) AG Jeff Sessions to recuse himself in order to bring down the Trump Administration.

    In fact, the Spygate plotters (Obama, Biden, Rice) are currently in control of the White House — in case you hadn’t noticed. How’s that for getting away with it? Sure, Durham made a valiant attempt to transfer the blame for the whole scandal onto Hillary Clinton and her campaign aides — but Hillary Clinton wasn’t meeting with James Comey about the Russia Hoax in the White House and texting Peter Strozk and Lisa Page was she?

    Durham even tried to get the American public to believe that the FBI and the CIA had somehow been fooled by Hillary Clinton into investigating Trump. That’s right: the FBI and the CIA claimed to be innocent rubes who were deliberately led astray by Lady Macbeth. Spygate was reduced to something about the Alfa Bank, and whether Michael Sussmann told the FBI that he represented a client when he dropped off “information” on thumb drives at Langley seemingly three days a week in 2017.

    The Sussmann media coverage was absurd from the start — but every conservative media outlet on Earth ran these stupidities with a straight face in 2022. There were moments during the trial of Michael Sussmann when it was easy to believe that Sussmann’s case had more to do with Perkins Coie billing the Clinton campaign for two thumb drives — rather than, you know, participating in a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the sitting President.

    That’s what happens when you reduce a criminal conspiracy to overthrow the sitting President into a single charge of lying to the FBI. The elephant in the room transforms into a fly, and then the fly gets swatted.

    Durham’s job was to run out the clock during the Trump Administration — he was there to protect Obama and Biden and the national security state from any accountability. Think about it. Why did you trust Durham at all? You trusted John Durham because you were told to trust him by Bill Barr — and the same people who told you to trust Barr were the ones who told you to trust Rod Rosenstein. Before that, you were told that Matt Whitaker was riding to the rescue. Do you even remember being told to trust John Huber? And who can forget trusting Jeff Sessions?

    Do you see where this is going?

    Let’s ask a different question: why do you need to trust anybody? The Left burns down entire cities in coordinated riots to achieve its political objectives. The Left tries to assassinate a conservative Supreme Court justice to stop anti-abortion legislation right after forcing a liberal Supreme Court justice into retirement in order to install an even more left-wing justice. The Left, in other words, trusts nobody because it only cares about results.

    Meanwhile, you were told: sit back and watch the show.

    You were told: trust the plan.

    The question is: why were you dumb enough to believe Durham in the first place?

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    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 21:00

  • Cadillac's $300,000 Luxury EV To Be Revealed This Summer 
    Cadillac’s $300,000 Luxury EV To Be Revealed This Summer 

    Cadillac has a near-term desire to reclaim its decades-old slogan “Standard of the World” with a $300,000 all-electric luxury sedan unveiled this summer. 

    WSJ reports the “Celestiq” will be a flagship luxury sedan, equipped with an all-wheel-drive electric powertrain capable of a +300-mile driving range and packed with groundbreaking technologies (including a hands-free assisted-driving system). 

    Cadillac plans to produce only 500 Celestiqs per year in an $81 million facility at GM’s Global Technology Center in Warren, Michigan. 

    “The Celestiq price tag could run well beyond $300,000 depending on added features, and the car is scheduled to go into production by late 2023,” WSJ noted, citing people familiar with the project. 

    Celestiqs will be priced in a range comparable to the Mercedes-AMG S65 ($230k), Bentley Flying Spur ($214k), and Rolls-Royce Ghost ($312k). Cadillac wants Celestiq to be the ultimate status symbol and the Holy Grail of luxury vehicles after being outshined by numerous luxury car makers from Europe for decades. 

    Here are teaser images of the Celestiq. 

    Front driver’s side of the vehicle. 

    Center console of the Celestiq show car. 

    Fox News says the unveiling could happen as soon as July. 

    The question remains if Cadillac can reclaim its old slogan: “Standard of the World.” 

    … and one last question: Who the hell is going to buy a $300,000 Cadillac? 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 20:40

  • Reactivation Of Chickenpox Virus Following COVID-19 Injections On The Rise
    Reactivation Of Chickenpox Virus Following COVID-19 Injections On The Rise

    Authored by Meiling Lee via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Doctors and scientists are seeing an increase in the reactivation of the chickenpox virus, known as varicella-zoster virus (VZV), following the COVID-19 injections.

    A child gets a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Conn., on Jan. 6, 2022. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

    The chickenpox virus is one of the eight herpes viruses known to infect humans. After a person contracts and recovers from chickenpox, the virus never leaves the body but lies dormant in the nervous system years later until it gets reactivated as shingles, or herpes zoster (HZ).

    Federal health authorities claim that there’s no correlation between COVID-19 injections and shingles, but studies show that there is a higher incidence of shingles in people who’ve received the vaccine.

    Israel was one of the earlier countries to publish a case series of six women (out of 491 participants) with an autoimmune disorder who developed shingles 3 to 14 days after receiving the first or second dose of Pfizer COVID-19 shot. None of the 99 participants in the control group developed shingles. The study was published in the journal Rheumatology in April 2021.

    “To our knowledge, there were no reports of varicella-like skin rash or HZ in the mRNA-based vaccines COVID-19 clinical trials and our case series is the first one to report this observation in patients within a relatively young age range: 36–61, average age 49 ± 11 years,” the authors wrote.

    They hoped that publishing the case series would “raise awareness to a potential causal link between COVID-19 vaccination as a trigger of HZ reactivation in relatively young patients with stable AIIRD [autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases].”

    Man with scarring from shingles on June 21, 2022. (Meiling Lee/The Epoch Times)

    In a different case study from Taiwan, researchers reported three healthy men ages 71, 46, and 42 who developed shingles two to seven days following the first dose of the Moderna or AstraZeneca COVID-19 injection.

    “HZ does not often appear after the administration of other kinds of vaccinations,” the researchers wrote. “But we believed that there might be a link between COVID-19 vaccine and HZ emergence.”

    “One of the reasons is the short delay of onset after vaccination. The other reason is that these three patients were immunocompetent,” they added.

    The largest study to date, based on real-world data (pdf) of more than two million patients, found that there was a higher incidence of shingles among the vaccinated (who received a COVID-19 shot within 60 days) than in the unvaccinated cohort, who were diagnosed with shingles within 60 days of visiting a healthcare office for any other reason.

    According to the researchers, the risk of developing shingles was calculated as 0.20 percent for the vaccinated group and 0.11 percent for the unvaccinated, and the “difference was statistically highly significant.”

    “Reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus appears to be a potential ADR [adverse drug reaction] to COVID-19 vaccines, at least for mRNA LNP-based formulations,” the authors wrote, adding that “vaccination against COVID-19 seems to potentially raise the risk of precipitating HZ [herpes zoster].”

    Dr. Richard Urso, an ophthalmologist, and drug design and treatment specialist, told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program in April 2022 that of the three to five patients he sees a week with long COVID or problems after receiving the COVID-19 shot, “a huge number of them have reactivated Epstein-Barr, herpes simplex, herpes zoster, CMV.”

    Regardless of the rise in reports of shingles after the rollout of the COVID-19 shots, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claims that it has not detected any safety signal between the two.

    “FDA has not seen a safety signal for shingles/herpes zoster following administration of the approved or authorized COVID-19 vaccines,” Abby Capobianco, FDA press officer told The Epoch Times via email last month, adding that the agency “will continue to closely monitor the safety of these vaccines.”

    The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also alleges that “there is no current connection” between COVID-19 vaccines and the reactivation of the chickenpox virus.

    CDC spokesperson Scott Pauley said that any adverse reactions experienced after receiving a COVID-19 shot are temporary and a positive sign that the vaccine is working.

    “Some people have side effects from the vaccine, which are normal signs that their body is building protection,” Pauley wrote in an email to The Epoch Times. “These side effects may affect their ability to do daily activities, but they should go away in a few days. Some people have no side effects, and allergic reactions are rare.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 20:20

  • Vancouver Apologizes To Homeless For Trauma Caused By Street Cleanings
    Vancouver Apologizes To Homeless For Trauma Caused By Street Cleanings

    The city of Vancouver has apologized to homeless people for causing ‘harm’ during daily street sweeps in which personal belongings have been discarded.

    The CBC reports that the apology comes on the heels of a Tuesday evening City Council discussion calling for changes to the way said sweeps are conducted.

    Sweeps occur daily Monday through Friday, as a team of city workers accompanied by police officers clear debris from sidewalks of the Downtown Eastside. According to the city, crews are trained to remove litter, garbage and abandoned structures – but not “clearly personal belongings.”

    According to homeless advocates, however, the sweepers sometimes throw out items that are valued by vagrants.

    In October, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) called for an end to the daily sweeps – after interviews with nearly 100 homeless people reveled that people claim to have lost “invaluable personal belongings” to the cleanup efforts – including indigenous art, family photos and the ashes of loved ones.

    “My boyfriend and I had our tents sliced up, and they used the excuse to say they are checking inside to see if there are overdoses taking place,” one homeless woman told the CBC.

    During one five-day period in 2021, an estimated $2,410 worth of personal property was seized by sweepers, according to a report conducted by several organizations including Pivot Legal Society. 

    According to Pivot Legal Society campaigner Meenakshi Mannoe, things are thrown out or stored in a way that makes retrieval difficult.

    “People aren’t given notice about where their belongings are taken. They’re not given a receipt on what was taken…. What we hear from folks is that their belongings are trashed.“

    The city’s deputy general manager of engineering, Taryn Scollard, said in a statement that “We sincerely regret and apologize for any harm and trauma that has been created as a result of this work and recognize important items have been discarded.”

    The Tuesday evening motion called for the city to develop an alternative community-led process for cleanups, rather than the police. What’s more, storage facilities and the creation of a ‘lost and found’ system will be part of the proposed changes.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 20:00

  • Assange Put On Suicide Watch After Patel Decision, Family Says
    Assange Put On Suicide Watch After Patel Decision, Family Says

    Authored by Joe Lauria via Consortium News,

    After British Home Secretary Priti Patel signed Julian Assange’s extradition order last week the authorities in Belmarsh prison stripped Julian Assange and threw him into a completely empty cell in an attempt to prevent his suicide, Assange’s father has said. 

    It was just one more instance in which the prison humiliated his son, Shipton told a rally on Tuesday night at the offices of the junge Welt newspaper in Berlin. About 300 people attended, with an overflow crowd watching on close circuit TV in the courtyard. 

    “The ceaseless malice that has descended upon Julian, a deluge of malice, the strip-searching of Julian… this is the latest humiliation,” Shipton said. “The staff of the jail, their concern after hearing he has to be extradited to the United States, thought he may commit suicide. Their solution was to strip him naked, and put him in a bare cell.”

    John and Gabriel Shipton at Berlin rally. Image source: Joe Lauria

    Testimony was heard from expert defense witnesses during Assange’s extradition hearing that he might try to end his life in prison once he learned he was going to the United States. 

    It is not the end of the road for Assange legally, however. His lawyers have until July 1 to file for an appeal of Patel’s decision to the High Court. They also intend to apply for a cross appeal of issues such as the political nature of the charges, the threat to free speech and the reported CIA plot to kidnap or kill Assange before his arrest.

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    Shipton and Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, are in Berlin to lobby the German government to put pressure on the United States to drop the case against Assange.

    On Monday, the Shiptons met with Tobias Lindner, the minister of state, at the German foreign ministry. “It was a practical and appropriate step for Tobias to take, to welcome Julian Assange’s father and bother into the foreign ministry,” John Shipton said. “The invitation in itself and the meeting in the foreign ministry indicates that the German government is sincere in bringing about the freedom of Julian Assange.”

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    But Shipton said he would like to hear a public statement from Germany in support of his son. “We’d like Tobias to confirm what he’s said.”

    A German government spokesman on Monday said however that Germany was unlikely to intervene with either the UK or the US: “This is a legal process that is already in motion, so I would be a little wary of political intervention,” he said, the French Press Agency (AFP) reported.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 19:40

  • How Far Will This Dead-Cat Rally Bounce: Goldman, JPMorgan Traders Duke It Out
    How Far Will This Dead-Cat Rally Bounce: Goldman, JPMorgan Traders Duke It Out

    While regular readers are well aware that among Goldman’s flow traders (who actually are damn good at what they do unlike the bank’s equity sellside research desk which is quite often atrocious and just follow the penguin echo-chamber parade) the likes of Scott Rubner (whose reports we cover in our professional subscriber section) are staunch permabulls and always see the light at the end of the tunnel, one name that always takes the contrarian, a growing bearish faction has been headed by Matt Fleury who has recently emerged as one of the biggest Goldman trading desk bears (see from March “Goldman Trader: “The Set Up For An Equity Market Crash Is As High As I Have Seen It” where Fleury was spot on). Which is why we found it notable that earlier this week, just as stocks were tumbling, that none other than Fleury turned strongly (if briefly, or rather ‘tactically’) bullish, saying “equities are very oversold here. I think the scope for a relief rally from here very good into early July.”

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    Below we excerpt some of the key charts he highlighted in his note (available to pro subscribers):

    1. Percent of SPX names 52 week highs vs lows:

    2. The number of SPX names with a 9d RSI sub 30 is 345x.

    This is where that will look like if that holds to 14d RSI middle of next week:

    3. We are pricing in a large earnings downgrade now:

    4. Percent of names in SPX500 trading above 50dma:

    5. Percent of names at 52week lows:

    6. The bid for FAAMG calls has evaporated

    … and so forth. The full note is available to pro subscribers in the usual place.

    We bring this up because Fleury was obviously right, and the tactical rally, dead cat bounce, whatever you want to call it is here, with spoos surging 200 points in just the past few days.

    Of course, Fleury did not flip from bearish to  bullish – he merely timed, correctly, the latest dead cat bounce into what still remains a bear market, and will be a bear market until the Fed pivots (some time in September), and relents dovishly at which point all asset classes will explode higher.

    But what about the duration of the current bear-market rally: how long can this dead cat continue to bounce?

    For the answer we go to JPM index trader Jason Hunter (whose note is also available to professional subs) who writes this morning that the S&P 500 is trying to build upon the initial rebound from the extreme oversold conditions realized last week, and “needs to clear 3810-3900 resistance to confirm a short-term trend reversal.”

    Well, with spoos now trading at 3,890, it appears that the reversal is now here, even if heading into today’s data the signals skewed bullish as Hunter adds, echoing Fleury: “the deep oversold conditions and bullish momentum divergence signals already in place imply an increased probability for additional upside into July.”

    How far does the JPM strategist see the move extending? According to Hunter, “the potential bullish momentum signal on the weekly time frame that can trigger this Friday would bolster that upside bias for the early weeks of summer. We believe the move will extend toward key resistance levels near 4100 over that period... A move through that area is required to bullishly shift the medium-term trend dynamics, something we think would coincide with shifting inflation and policy rate expectations.”

    But before everyone rushes to mortgage their newborn and pledge their left kidney to buy spoos, a less euphoric take comes from our friends at SpotGamma, who point out in their morning note that “rallies into June OPEX should be categorized as “short covering” and subject to failure.” That said, the Gamma geeks add that they look for a “positive drift” into 6/30 expiration, with SPX 4000 their major upside level into 6/30. On the other side, the 3600 JPM 6/30 short put strike (3620) is their major downside support into June 30th (the June 30 expiry removes large put positions and may expose the market to further downside into July).

    Some more observations from SG:

    While volume & OI continues to build at 3800 in SPX, its 380 in SPY thats gained some decent size. If you check the data table below you will see that 4000 is the largest gamma level for SPX (aka “Absolute Gamma Strike”) while its 380 in SPY. This is looking like its setting up a pretty clean range of 3800-4000 into next Thursday (June quarterly OPEX).

    We noted last week that the loss of June OPEX would bring a reduction in negative gamma due to puts expiring. This equates to a reduction in volatility (as dealers have smaller hedges), which generally produces upward drift in markets. You can see the lower vol thats been produced below. The bottom histogram shows us the distribution of S&P prices for the last 5 days (red) vs last 30 days (light blue).

    Spotgamma also ends on a bullish tone, however, and notes that if equity vol is going to start coming in here (VIX now <28) that should be a key driver of higher equity prices into the June 30 expiration.

    In short, the onus is now on the bears to push risk lower.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 19:37

  • These Are The World's Angriest Countries
    These Are The World’s Angriest Countries

    Nearly everybody experiences anger in everyday life, whether it’s frustrations about making ends meet, the state of public transport or a misunderstanding at work. Gallup’s 2021 Global Emotions Report set out to gauge emotions (including anger levels) in more than 100 countries around the globe.

     

    As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, anger tends to manifest itself more often in certain parts of the world, particularly in the Middle and Near East.

    Infographic: The World's Angriest Countries | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Gallup found that 49 percent of people in Lebanon had experienced anger on the day before they were surveyed, the highest rate recorded anywhere in the world. After years-long economic turmoil and high inflation, a massive explosion in Beirut’s port destroyed large parts of the city in 2020, once more stoking anger at the country’s government for not enforcing safety measure or having the capacity to help those who were harmed.

    High levels of anger were also measured in Turkey, which had been dealing with runaway inflation even before the war in Ukraine and whose government has taken a turn for the authoritarian lately. Armenians, who experienced a flare-up of war in 2020 with neighbor Azerbaijan, also had elevated levels of anger. After years of war, Iraqis and Afghans also have a long list of topics to be angry about which includes a lack of basic public services in many parts of the countries.

    Mali and Sierra Leone were the angriest countries outside the Middle East, Near East and Persia, with 35 percent of respondents having experienced anger the previous day.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 19:20

  • Giant Sunspot Currently Facing Earth And Still Growing Capable Of Emitting Powerful Solar Flares
    Giant Sunspot Currently Facing Earth And Still Growing Capable Of Emitting Powerful Solar Flares

    Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

    A fast-growing giant sunspot that can emit solar flares has more than doubled in size in recent days and is currently facing Earth, according to experts.

    Sunspots are dark areas of strong magnetic fields on the sun’s surface. They appear dark because they are much colder than other parts of the sun’s surface, having formed at areas where magnetic fields are particularly strong, according to NASA.

    Because of the strong magnetic field, magnetic pressure increases while the surrounding atmospheric pressure decreases, resulting in the lower temperatures.

    Sunspots are also associated with eruptive disturbances such as solar flares, which are fast moving eruptions of radiation, and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which is when large masses of plasma and highly magnetized particles violently eject from the sun. Flares move at the speed of light and take about eight minutes to reach earth, while CMEs can take three to four days to reach earth.

    The fast-growing sunspot noted by experts is known as AR3038.

    “Yesterday, sunspot AR3038 was big. Today, it’s enormous,” Tony Phillips, the author of SpaceWeather.com wrote on Wednesday.

    “The fast-growing sunspot has doubled in size in only 24 hours,” Phillips added.

    The expert noted that the magnetic field surrounding AR3038 could potentially blast M-class solar flares, or medium-sized flares, towards Earth.

    Photos from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory taken on June 22 show the sun with numerous sunspots, with AR3038 looking particularly big after evolving over the past few days.

    The sunspot has doubled in size each day for the past three days and is roughly 2.5 times the size of Earth, C. Alex Young, associate director for science in the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in an email to USA Today.

    ‘No Cause for Concern’

    However, Rob Steenburgh, the acting lead of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Forecast Office has said there is no need to panic, noting that sunspots naturally grow in size.

    “This is what sunspots do,” he told USA Today. “Over time, generally, they’ll grow. They go through stages, and then they decay.”

    Young also noted that while the sunspot is producing flares, it “does not have the complexity for the largest flares” and there is only a 30 percent chance that it will create medium-sized flares. The chances it will create large flares are even smaller at 10 percent, the expert said.

    W. Dean Pesnell, the project scientist of the Solar Dynamics Observatory, also offered reassurance that there is no need for concern, telling the publication that AR3038 is a “modest-sized active region” that “has not grown abnormally rapidly and is still somewhat small in area.”

    As of June 22, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), which monitors solar flares, has not issued any warnings for them.

    However, if solar flares such as an X1-class solar flare are released from the sun, they can potentially create disruptions to communication satellites and long-distance cables here on earth, wreaking havoc with the world’s internet.

    Another expert, Andrés Muñoz-Jaramillo, lead scientist at the SouthWest Research Institute in San Antonio, also stressed that there is no need for concern, explaining: “I want to emphasize there is no need to panic,” and that the sunspots “happen all the time.”

    “We are prepared and doing everything we can to predict and mitigate their effects. For the majority of us, we don’t need to lose sleep over it,” Muñoz-Jaramillo said.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 19:00

  • Roadway Congestion Returns To China, Signals Tighter Global Oil Supplies 
    Roadway Congestion Returns To China, Signals Tighter Global Oil Supplies 

    A surge in road traffic has been seen in China after two of the largest cities reopened following two months of lockdowns and restrictions, indicating the economy could be restarting and refined crude product demand is rising. 

    BloombergNEF examined Baidu traffic data and found Beijing and Shanghai roadway congestion jumped once travel restrictions under the zero-tolerance strategy to combat infections eased in early June. 

    The return of the two most important cities sent an index monitoring congestion of 15 Chinese cities with the highest vehicle registration above a January 2021 baseline.

    The reopening of China comes as COVID infections in Shanghai and the rest of mainland China have dramatically receded after spiking in March, peaking in April, and moving lower through May. 

    As China eases COVID restrictions in top cities and congestion data soars, it’ll boost demand for crude and refined products.

    Dai Jiaquan, a director at the oil research department at CNPC, recently said a roadway recovery could boost demand by 1.6 million barrels a day on a quarterly basis from July to September. This comes as the US summer driving season is well underway, and North America, as well as much of the world, is structurally short refined products, such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, mainly because of refinery capacity woes. 

    Vitol Group Chief Executive Officer Russell Hardy told the audience Tuesday at the Qatar Economic Forum that China’s increasing fuel demand in an already tight global market means prices won’t drop that much. 

    “The market’s a little bit concerned that we’re running out of spare capacity and is beginning to factor that into prices,” Hardy said. 

    He continued: “It depends on lockdowns, but we’d expect it to steadily come back through the second half of the year.” 

    Hardy’s similarly bullish message was echoed by Exxon Mobil CEO who said this week that global oil markets may remain tight for another three to five years largely because of a lack of investment since the pandemic began.

    So +$100/bbl Brent oil is the new normal?

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 18:40

  • 2 Dozen States To Restrict Abortions After Supreme Court Decision
    2 Dozen States To Restrict Abortions After Supreme Court Decision

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

    More than two dozen states will move to restrict abortions following the Supreme Court’s Friday ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

    The Guttmacher Institute, a research group, says that 13 states have “trigger laws” that bar most abortions that will take effect immediately after the ruling Friday.

    They are Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.

    Five more states had respective bans on abortion from the time before the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973.

    They include Alabama, Arizona, Michigan, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

    Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and South Carolina, according to the Institute, have laws that ban abortions after the 6-week mark. Those laws will be revisited after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

    Meanwhile, the legislatures of Florida, Indiana, Montana, and Nebraska appear likely to ban abortion based on previous and current efforts, the group says.

    Overall, 26 of 50 U.S. states are likely or certain to ban abortion after the ruling was handed down Friday, the Institute says.

    “Beyond the 26 states certain or likely to attempt to ban abortion immediately, other states have demonstrated hostility toward abortion by adopting multiple restrictions in the past, but are not likely to ban abortion in the near future. Notably, North Carolina has a pre-Roe abortion ban in place, but it is unclear if the state’s law would be implemented quickly. However, this analysis may change in the next few years,” according to the institute’s website.

    The Center for Reproductive Rights, a pro-abortion group, estimates that 25 states are likely to ban abortion. That group believes that Montana, Iowa, and Florida will not—but that North Carolina and Pennsylvania will.

    Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in an opinion for the majority Friday, wrote that Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed Roe, was incorrect on the day it was decided and must be overturned. The authority to regulate abortion doesn’t rest in the court system, he argued, adding that only legislatures have that power.

    “We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe and Casey must be overruled, and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Alito wrote.

    Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined Alito. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that he would have stopped short in ending Roe, adding that he would have upheld the Mississippi law at the heart of the case.

    Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

    “With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent,” they said in their opinion.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 18:20

  • AIPAC Lobbies Against Probe Of US-Palestinian Journalist Likely Murdered By Israeli Sniper
    AIPAC Lobbies Against Probe Of US-Palestinian Journalist Likely Murdered By Israeli Sniper

    Twenty-four U.S. senators sent a letter to President Biden on Thursday urging an FBI and State Department investigation of the May 11 killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank. They did so in defiance of the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which actively lobbied against the letter. 

    Abu Akleh, a star reporter for al Jazeera, was shot in the head on May 11 in the West Bank town of Jenin, as she and her crew reported on an Israeli raid on a refugee camp. The Al Jazeera crew and other witnesses said Israeli forces were responsible, but the Israeli government raced to blame “Palestinian terrorists firing indiscriminately,” tweeting a video that purported to support the claim. 

    However, demonstrating a sharply heightened capacity for honest reporting about Israel when Israel’s victim happens to be a journalist, several major U.S. media outlets have investigated the incident and concluded Abu Akleh was most likely killed by Israeli security forces.   

    CNN was particularly forceful, saying its multifaceted forensic investigation concluded that Abu Akleh was “shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.” In addition to video and acoustic evidence, the tight shot group on the tree she was standing next to was indicative of careful and deliberate fire, an expert told CNN. Abu Akleh and her crew were all wearing helmets and vests marked “PRESS.” 

    • Associated Press said its reconstruction of the incident “lends support to assertions from both Palestinian authorities and Abu Akleh’s colleagues that the bullet that cut her down came from an Israeli gun.”

    • The Washington Post said its examination of several dozen videos, social media posts and photos of the event, along with two physical inspections of the area and two independent expert acoustic analyses of the gunshots, “suggests an Israeli soldier…likely shot and killed Abu Akleh.”

    • Late to the party and lukewarm in language, the New York Times on Monday said the bullet that struck Abu Akleh “was fired from the approximate position of an Israeli military vehicle.”

    According to Reporters Without Borders, Israel has killed at least 30 journalists since 2000, including two Palestinians shot by IDF snipers while reporting on protests near the Gaza-Israel border in 2018.

    Israel has demanded that the Palestinian Authority turn over the bullet that killed Abu Akleh. The Palestinian Authority says it will only furnish the bullet to an outside third party or United Nations investigation. 

    In their Thursday letter to Biden calling for a State Department and FBI investigation, 24 Democratic and independent senators wrote: 

    “We believe that, as a leader in the effort to protect the freedom of the press and the safety of journalists, and given the fact that Ms. Abu Akleh was an American citizen, the U.S. government has an obligation to ensure that a comprehensive, impartial, and open investigation into her shooting death is conducted — one in which all parties can have full confidence in the ultimate findings.”

    On Wednesday, State Department spokesman Ned Price deflected calls for an FBI probe, saying the Biden administration instead wants Israel and the Palestinian Authority to share evidence and “bridge” their investigations. Pressed on Israel’s capacity to pursue an honest investigation, Price said, “Israel does have the wherewithal to conduct an investigation that is transparent, that is impartial, and that – importantly – culminates in accountability.”

    The Senate letter follows a similar one last month signed by 57 House members. The senators said the need for “an independent investigation under U.S. auspices to determine the truth…has been made even more urgent by the new information that has emerged in recent weeks.”

    AIPAC, which on Thursday thanked the House appropriations committee for approving another $3.3 billion in “security assistance” to Israel, urged senators not to sign the letter. In its messaging to legislators, AIPAC said “the circumstances surrounding the death of Ms. Abu Akleh remain unclear despite the hasty conclusions of various media outlets.”  

    The moderate pro-Israel lobby organization J Street—which calls itself “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace” and seeks to supplant AIPAC as the most influential pro-Israel force among Democrats—issued a statement on Thursday endorsing the drive for a U.S. investigation. 

    Earlier, J Street senior vice president Dylan Williams took to Twitter to condemn AIPAC’s maneuvering:

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    It’s almost as if Williams is accusing AIPAC of putting loyalty to Israel ahead of loyalty to America. (Don’t try that at home, kids.)  

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    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 18:00

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Jun 24

Today’s News 24th June 2022

  • Russia Warns Of 'Non-Diplomatic' Response Over Kaliningrad Blockade
    Russia Warns Of ‘Non-Diplomatic’ Response Over Kaliningrad Blockade

    Russia’s Foreign Ministry has threatened that their response to transit restrictions on Kaliningrad by Lithuania will be “practical” and “not diplomatic,” the Jerusalem Post reports.

    Over the past week, Lithuania has implemented a ban on various rail transit goods going to Russia’s far-western exclave of Kaliningrad to comply with EU sanctions on items such as coal, advanced technology, metals and construction materials.

    “As for response measures, now possible measures are being worked out in an interdepartmental format,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told state-owned TASS. “Both Lithuania and the EU, through their diplomatic missions in Moscow, were told that such actions are inadmissible and that the steps taken must be changed and the situation returned to a legal and legitimate course. If this is not done, then, of course, and this was emphasized at all levels in Moscow, retaliatory actions will be inevitable.”

    “On the question of what they will be…Will they be exclusively in the diplomatic plane? [The] answer is no. They will not be in the diplomatic, but in the practical plane,” she added.

    The EU enforcement measure being implemented from Vilnius marks a complete break in a three decade long treaty that’s been in effect…

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    Kaliningrad’s governor Alikhanov has already called on Russian federal authorities to prepare tit-for-tat measures against Lithuania in wake of the transit ban.

    According to Zakharova, however, this ‘tit-for-tat’ may be a little more explosive than Lithuania counted on. 

    On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that while it’s “premature” to discuss possible Kremlin responses, “concrete measures” are under discussion in response to the sanctions. “There is no set format, here the main thing for us is to respond to such unfriendly steps, and not meet any deadlines,” he added.

    Additionally on Wednesday, Leonid Slutsky, head of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, stated that one possible response to the Kaliningrad restrictions could be cutting off Lithuania from the common electricity supply system between Russia, Belarus and the Baltic states, according to Interfax.

    Slutsky added that another possible response could be banning the transit of Lithuanian truckers through Russia. -Jerusalem Post

    Meanwhile, Moscow has responded to the use of Western arms in Ukraine.

    According to a Thursday statement by Peskov, Russia’s defense ministry will monitor how the West is arming Ukraine with weapons from Germany and the US, adding that the weapons would have to “reach the frontline” without being destroyed on the way.

    Peskov was responding to a question over whether Moscow would trust Ukraine’s promises to Western nations not to use provided weapons to attack Russia.

    “We carefully record all episodes of the use of these weapons,” he continued. “So, if any of these weapons reach the front lines and are not destroyed by our military, we will track how they are being used.”

    German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht on Wednesday told lawmakers in Berlin that Ukrainian counterpart Alexy Reznikov assured her that Kiev will only use Western weapons for self defense, and not to strike Russian territory. The day before, Germany delivered seven 155mm PzH 2000 howitzers and other military equipment to the Ukrainian armed forces.

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    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 02:45

  • UK Unveils New Law To Ease Strike Disruptions As Rail Network Paralysed For 2nd Time In A Week
    UK Unveils New Law To Ease Strike Disruptions As Rail Network Paralysed For 2nd Time In A Week

    Authored by Alexander Zhang via The Epoch Times,

    The UK government has announced new legislation to enable businesses to supply agency workers to plug staffing gaps during industrial action, as train services were disrupted again by the second nationwide strike of the week.

    Following widespread travel chaos on Tuesday, some 40,000 members of the Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers’ union (RMT) walked out again on Thursday, and are expected to go on strike again on Saturday.

    Union leaders launched what they touted as the “biggest rail strike in modern history” after rail operators refused to agree to the union’s demands including a 7 percent pay rise.

    On Thursday, the government announced new measures to help reduce disruption from strike action by removing the restrictions on businesses supplying temporary agency workers to cover striking staff.

    ‘Not Sustainable’

    The move would reverse a legal restriction introduced under former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair that prevents employers from hiring agency workers to cover for striking staff.

    The government said the existing restriction “can have a disproportionate impact, including on important public services, causing severe disruption to the UK economy and society.”

    Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: “Once again trade unions are holding the country to ransom by grinding crucial public services and businesses to a halt. The situation we are in is not sustainable.”

    He said repealing the restrictions will “give businesses freedom to access fully skilled staff at speed, all while allowing people to get on with their lives uninterrupted to help keep the economy ticking.”

    Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said that “far too many hard working families and businesses were unfairly affected by unions’ refusal to modernise” and the new legislation will “ensure any future strikes will cause even less disruption.”

    Network Rail, which manages Britain’s rail network, welcomed the new legislation but the opposition Labour Party and unions condemned it as a “recipe for disaster.”

    Millions Working From Home

    On Thursday, major railway stations were much quieter than normal as services were crippled by the strike. Just one in five trains are running, and they are mostly restricted to main lines, with around half of the network closed.

    But Shapps said, “Despite the best efforts of militant union leaders to bring our country to a standstill, it’s clear this week’s strikes did not have the desired impact due to more people being able to work from home.”

    Broadband provider Virgin Media O2 said it recorded an increase in usage of up to 10 percent on the first day of the strikes on Tuesday, indicating that “millions more people are working from home” this week.

    National Highways senior network planner Frank Bird said traffic flows on motorways and major A roads on Thursday morning were “remarkably good,” despite earlier fears of a surge in traffic as train passengers switch to road transport during the rail strikes.

    He said: “Two years on [from the COVID-19 pandemic] we’ve learned to work in different ways, people are working from home, so it’s a very different picture. People are still able to carry on working even though the rail dispute is ongoing.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/24/2022 – 02:00

  • Escobar: Exile On Main Street – The Sound Of The Unipolar World Fading Away
    Escobar: Exile On Main Street – The Sound Of The Unipolar World Fading Away

    Authored by Pepe Escobar,

    The future world order, already in progress, will be formed by strong sovereign states. The ship has sailed. There’s no turning back.

    Let’s cut to the chase and roll in the Putin Top Ten of the New Era, announced by the Russian President live at the St. Petersburg forum  for both the Global North and South.

    The era of the unipolar world is over.

    The rupture with the West is irreversible and definitive. No pressure from the West will change it.

    Russia has renewed with its sovereignty. Reinforcement of political and economic sovereignty is an absolute priority.

    The EU has completely lost its political sovereignty. The current crisis shows the EU is not ready to play the role of an independent, sovereign actor. It’s just en ensemble of American vassals deprived of any politico-military sovereignty.

    Sovereignty cannot be partial. Either you’re a sovereign or a colony.

    Hunger in the poorest nations will be on the conscience of the West and euro-democracy.

    Russia will supply grains to the poorer nations in Africa and the Middle East.

    Russia will invest in internal economic development and reorientation of trade towards nations independent of the U.S.

    The future world order, already in progress, will be formed by strong sovereign states.

    The ship has sailed. There’s no turning back.

    How does it feel, for the collective West, to be caught in such a crossfire hurricane? Well, it gets more devastating when we add to the new roadmap the latest on the energy front.

    Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, in St. Petersburg, stressed that the global economic crisis is gaining momentum not because of sanctions, but exacerbated by them; Europe “commits energy suicide” by sanctioning Russia; sanctions against Russia have done away with the much lauded “green transition”, as that is no longer needed to manipulate markets; and Russia, with its vast energy potential, “is the Noah’s Ark of the world economy.”

    For his part Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller could not be more scathing on the sharp decline in the gas flow to the EU due to Siemens’ refusal and/or incapacity to repair the Nord Stream 1 pumping engine: “Well, of course, Gazprom was forced to reduce the volume of gas supplies to Europe by 20%+. But you know, prices have increased not by 20%+, but by several times! Therefore, I’m sorry if I say that we don’t feel offended by anyone, we are not particularly concerned by this situation.”

    If this pain dial overdrive was not enough to hurl the collective West – or NATOstan – into Terminal Hysteria, then Putin’s sharp comment on possibly allowing Mr. Sarmat to present his business card to “decision-making centers in Kiev”, those that are ordering the current shelling and killing of civilians in Donetsk, definitely did the trick:

    “As for the red lines, let me keep them to myself, because this will mean quite tough actions on the decision-making centers. But this is an area that shouldn’t be disclosed to people outside the military-political leadership of the country. Those who deserve appropriate actions on our part should draw a conclusion for themselves – what they may face if they cross the line.”

    Baby please, stop breaking down

    Alastair Crooke has masterfully outlined  how the collective West’s zugzwang leaves it lumbering around, dazed and confused. Now let’s examine the state of play on the opposite side of the chessboard, focusing on the BRICS summit this Thursday in Beijing.

    As much as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and ASEAN, now it’s time for a reinvigorated BRICS to step up its game. In conjunction, these are the key organizations/instruments that will be carving the pathways towards the post-unipolar era.

    Both China and India (which between them were the largest economies in the world for centuries before the brief Western colonial interregnum) are already close and getting closer to “the Noah’s Ark of the world economy”.

    The G20 – hostages of the Michael Hudson-defined FIRE scam that is the core of the financialized neoliberal casino – is slowly fading away, while a potential new G8 ramps up: and that is directly connected to BRICS expansion, one of the key themes of this week’s summit. An expanded BRICS with a parallel G8 configuration is bound to easily overtake the Western-centric one in importance as well as GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP).

    BRICS in 2021 already added Bangladesh, Egypt, the UAE and Uruguay to its New Development Bank (NDB). In May, at Foreign Ministry-level debates, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Thailand were added to the 5 BRICS members. Leaders of some of these nations will be connected to the Beijing summit.

    BRICS plays a completely different game from the G20. They aim for the grassroots, and it’s all about slowly “building trust” – a very Chinese concept. They are creating an independent Credit Rating Agency – away from the Anglo-American racket – and deepening a Currency Reserves Arrangement. The NDB – including its regional offices in India and South Africa – has been involved in hundreds of projects. Time will tell: one day the NDB will make the World Bank superfluous.

    Comparisons between BRICS and the Quad, a U.S. concoction, are silly. Quad is just another crude mechanism to contain China. Yet there’s no question India treads on tightrope walker territory, as it’s a member of both BRICS and Quad, and made a vastly misguided decision to walk out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the largest free trade deal on the planet – opting instead to adhere to the American pie-in-the-sky Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF).

    Yet India, long term, skillfully guided by Russia, is being steered to find essential common ground with China in several key issues.

    BRICS, especially in its expanded BRICS+ version, is bound to increase cooperation on building truly stable supply chains, and a settlement mechanism for resources and raw material trade, which inevitably has to be based in local currencies. Then the path will be open for the Holy Grail: a BRICS payment system as a credible alternative to the weaponized U.S. dollar and SWIFT.

    Meanwhile, a torrent of bilateral investments from both China and India in the manufacturing and services sector around their neighbors is bound to lift up smaller players in both Southeast Asia and South Asia: think Cambodia and Bangladesh as important cogs in a vast supply wheel.

    Yaroslav Lissovolik had already proposed a BEAMS concept as the core of this BRICS integration drive, uniting “the key regional integration initiatives of BRICS economies such as BIMSTEC, EAEU, the ASEAN-China free trade agreement, Mercosur and SADC/SACU.”

    It’s only (BRICS) rock’n roll

    Now Beijing seems eager to promote “an inclusive format for dialogue spanning all the main regions of the Global South via aggregating the regional integration platforms in Eurasia, Africa and Latin America. Going forward this format may be further expanded to include other regional integration blocks from Eurasia, such as the GCC, EAEU and others.”

    Lissovolik notes how the ideal path from now on should be “the greater inclusivity of BRICS via the BRICS+ framework that allows smaller economies that are the regional partners of BRICS to have a say in the new global governance framework.”

    Before he addressed the St. Petersburg forum on video, President Xi called Putin personally to say, among other things, that he’s got China’s back on all “sovereignty and security” themes. They also, inevitably, discussed the relevance of BRICS as a key platform towards the multipolar world.

    Meanwhile, the collective West plunges deeper into the maelstrom. A massive national demonstration of trade unions this past Monday paralyzed Brussels – the capital of the EU and NATO – as 80,000 people expressed their anger at the rising and rising cost of living; called for elites to “spend money on salaries, not on weapons”; and yelled in unison “Stop NATO.”

    It’s zugzwang all over again. The EU’s “direct losses”, as Putin stressed, provoked by the sanctions hysteria, “could exceed $400 billion a year”. Russia’s energy earnings have hit record levels. The ruble is at a 7-year high against the euro.

    It’s a blast that arguably the most powerful cultural artifact of the entire Cold War – and Western supremacy – era, the perennial Rolling Stones, is currently on tour across a “caught in a crossfire hurricane” EU. On every show they play, for the first time live, one of their early classics: ‘Out of Time’.

    Sounds much like a requiem. So let’s all sing, “Baby baby baby / you’re out of time”, as one Vladimir “it’s a gas, gas, gas” Putin and his sidekick Dmitry “Under My Thumb” Medvedev seem to be the guys really getting their rocks off. It’s only (BRICS) rock’n roll, but we like it.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 23:40

  • How (Un)Affordable Is Gas In Latin America?
    How (Un)Affordable Is Gas In Latin America?

    As gas prices have risen around the world, not each region and country is impacted equally.

    Globally, the average price for a liter of gas was $1.44 USD on June 13, 2022.

    But, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang details below, the actual price at the pump, and how affordable that price is for residents, varies greatly from country to country. This is especially true in Latin America, a region widely regarded as one of the world’s most unequal regions in terms of its income and resource distribution.

    Using monthly data from GlobalPetrolPrices.com as of May 2022, this graphic by Latinometrics compares gas affordability in different countries across Latin America.

    Gas Affordability in 19 Different Latin American Countries

    To measure gas affordability, Latinometrics took the price of a liter of gas in 19 different Latin American countries and territories, and divided those figures by each country’s average daily income, using salary data from Statista.

    Out of the 19 regions included in the dataset, Venezuela has the most affordable gas on the list. In Venezuela, a liter of gas is equivalent to roughly 1.3% of the country’s average daily income.

    This isn’t too surprising, as Venezuela is home to the largest share of proven oil reserves in the world. However, it’s worth noting that international sanctions against Venezuelan oil, largely because of political corruption, have hampered the once prosperous sector in the country.

    On the other end of the spectrum, Nicaragua has the least affordable gas on the list, with one liter of gas costing 14% of the average daily income in the country.

    Historically, the Nicaraguan government has not regulated gas prices in the country, but in light of the current global energy crisis triggered in large part by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the government has stepped in to help control the situation.

    As the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues with no end in sight, it’ll be interesting to see where prices are at in the next few months.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 23:20

  • Nancy Pelosi’s Husband Could Face Jail Time After DUI Charge Filed Thursday
    Nancy Pelosi’s Husband Could Face Jail Time After DUI Charge Filed Thursday

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

    Paul Pelosi and Nancy Pelosi attend the TIME 100 Gala 2019 Cocktails at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City on April 23, 2019. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images for TIME)

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) husband, Paul Pelosi, was charged Thursday with driving under the influence with injury—stemming from a May arrest.

    A press release issued by the Napa County District Attorney’s office said Paul Pelosi, 82, allegedly had a blood alcohol content of 0.082 percent, which is over the legal limit in California, after he crashed his vehicle. The blood sample, the DA’s office said, was obtained two hours after the collision at around 12:32 a.m.

    “Based upon the extent of the injuries suffered by the victim, the District Attorney filed misdemeanor charges. This decision is consistent with how our office handles these cases with similar injuries,” the office said in a statement on Thursday evening.

    Several weeks ago, the California Highway Patrol said Pelosi was involved in a collision with a Jeep in Napa County. Speaker Pelosi wasn’t with him at the time, and a spokesperson for her said she was in Rhode Island giving a speech to college graduates, while describing the incident involving her husband as a personal matter.

    Her husband is scheduled to appear in a Napa County court on Aug. 3, said the DA’s office last week. His mugshot was released about a week ago.

    Punishment

    Under state law, Pelosi now could face a short stint in jail and several years’ worth of probation, according to the news release.

    “The punishment for driving under the influence causing injury as a misdemeanor is set by California law. It includes up to five years of probation, a minimum of five days in jail, installation of an ignition interlock device, fines and fees, completion of a court-ordered drinking driver class, and other terms as appropriate,” the DA’s office said on Thursday.

    *  *  *

    Following Pelosi’s arrest, officials in Northern California refused to release footage of Paul’s arrest to the Times.

    “The Public Records Unit (PRU) has determined the Department possesses records responsive to your request,” the California Highway Patrol told Fox News in response to a California Public Records Act request from the news outlet.

    The law enforcement agency added:

    “However, the Napa County District Attorney’s Office has advised the release of records would jeopardize an ongoing investigation. As such, records are being withheld pursuant to Government Code section 6254 (f).”

    Pelosi was driving a 2021 Porsche when the accident occurred.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 23:00

  • Only 23% Of New Yorkers Can Afford Median Rent Amid "Incredibly Tight Market"
    Only 23% Of New Yorkers Can Afford Median Rent Amid “Incredibly Tight Market”

    Living in a spacious apartment with no roommates in Midtown Manhattan is one of the hallmarks of feeling like you’ve made it in New York City. But that era is over for many as skyrocketing rents and wages failing to outpace inflation have sparked a housing affordability crisis.

    Bloomberg cites a New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development report that found only 23% of full-time workers in the city can afford median rent. 

    The city’s report used the median asking rent of $2.75k for vacant and available units in 2021, and 2020 salary data showed that only 23% of full-time workers in New York made over $100k. 

    If renters followed the 30% rule, a popular standard for budgeting rent that says a maximum of 30% of your monthly income before taxes should be spent on rent, then those making over $100k could afford the 2021 median rent was only 23% of all workers. 

    Affordability worsened this year as appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate revealed median rents in May topped $4,000 for the first time. 

    Matthew Murphy, the executive director of the NYU Furman Center, said the “incredibly tight rental market” and robust demand have pushed rent prices sky-high, adding: “The inventory and supply has not kept up with intense demand.”

    Compound the affordability crisis in the rental market with soaring food and energy costs, and many New Yorkers are struggling to survive in the worst inflationary period in four decades. 

    The dream of living in a spacious apartment alone in Midtown is over, as some New Yorkers might have to find roommates to help pay rent. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 22:40

  • The Federal Bureau Of Tweets: Twitter Is Hiring An Alarming Number Of FBI Agents
    The Federal Bureau Of Tweets: Twitter Is Hiring An Alarming Number Of FBI Agents

    Authored by Alan MacLeod via Mint Press News,

    Twitter has been on a recruitment drive of late, hiring a host of former feds and spies. Studying a number of employment and recruitment websites, MintPress has ascertained that the social media giant has, in recent years, recruited dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.

    Chief amongst these is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI is generally known as a domestic security and intelligence force. However, it has recently expanded its remit into cyberspace. “The FBI’s investigative authority is the broadest of all federal law enforcement agencies,” the “About” section of its website informs readers. “The FBI has divided its investigations into a number of programs, such as domestic and international terrorism, foreign counterintelligence [and] cyber crime,” it adds.

    For example, in 2019, Dawn Burton (the former director of Washington operations for Lockheed Martin) was poached from her job as senior innovation advisor to the director at the FBI to become senior director of strategy and operations for legal, public policy, trust and safety at Twitter. The following year, Karen Walsh went straight from 21 years at the bureau to become director of corporate resilience at the silicon valley giant. Twitter’s deputy general counsel and vice president of legal, Jim Baker, also spent four years at the FBI between 2014 and 2018, where his resumé notes he rose to the role of senior strategic advisor.

    Meanwhile, Mark Jaroszewski ended his 21-year posting as a supervisory special agent in the Bay Area to take up a position at Twitter, rising to become director of corporate security and risk. And Douglas Turner spent 14 years as a senior special agent and SWAT Team leader before being recruited to serve in Twitter’s corporate and executive security services. Previously, Turner had also spent seven years as a secret service special agent with the Department of Homeland Security.

    When asked to comment by MintPress, former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley said that she was “not surprised at all” to see FBI agents now working for the very tech companies the agency polices, stating that there now exists a “revolving door” between the FBI and the areas they are trying to regulate. This created a serious conflict of interests in her mind, as many agents have one eye on post-retirement jobs. “The truth is that at the FBI 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement,” she said.

    Many former FBI officials hold influential roles within Twitter. For instance, in 2020, Matthew W. left a 15-year career as an intelligence program manager at the FBI to take up the post of senior director of product trust at Twitter. Patrick G., a 23-year FBI supervisory special agent, is now head of corporate security. And Twitter’s director of insider risk and security investigations, Bruce A., was headhunted from his role as a supervisory special agent at the bureau. His resumé notes that at the FBI he held “[v]arious intelligence and law enforcement roles in the US, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East” and was a “human intelligence and counterintelligence regional specialist.” (On employment sites such as LinkedIn, many users choose not to reveal their full names.)

    Meanwhile, between 2007 and 2021 Jeff Carlton built up a distinguished career in the United States Marine Corps, rising to become a senior intelligence analyst. Between 2014 and 2017, his LinkedIn profile notes, he worked for both the CIA and FBI, authored dozens of official reports, some of which were read by President Barack Obama. Carlton describes his role as a “problem-solver” and claims to have worked in many “dynamic, high-pressure environments” such as Iraq and Korea. In May 2021, he left official service to become a senior program manager at Twitter, responsible for dealing with the company’s “highest-profile trust and safety escalations.”

    Other former FBI staff are employed by Twitter, such as Cherrelle Y. as a policy domain specialist and Laura D. as a senior analyst in global risk intelligence.

    Many of those listed above were active in the FBI’s public outreach programs, a practice sold as a community trust-building initiative. According to Rowley, however, these also function as “ways for officials to meet the important people that would give them jobs after retirement.” “It basically inserts a huge conflict of interest,” she told MintPress. “It warps and perverts the criminal investigative work that agents do when they are still working as agents because they anticipate getting lucrative jobs after retiring or leaving the FBI.”

    Rowley – who in 2002 was named, along with two other whistleblowers, as Time magazine’s Person of the Year – was skeptical that there was anything seriously nefarious about the hiring of so many FBI agents, suggesting that Twitter could be using them as sources of information and intelligence. She stated:

    Retired agents often maintained good relationships and networks with current agents. So they can call up their old buddy and find out stuff… There were certainly instances of retired agents for example trying to find out if there was an investigation of so and so. And if you are working for a company, that company is going to like that influence.”

    Rowley also suggested that hiring people from various three-letter agencies gave them a credibility boost. “These [tech] companies are using the mythical aura of the FBI. They can point to somebody and say ‘oh, you can trust us; our CEO or CFO is FBI,’” she explained.

    Twitter certainly has endorsed the FBI as a credible actor, allowing the organization to play a part in regulating the global dissemination of information on its platform. In September 2020, it put out a statement thanking the federal agency. “We wish to express our gratitude to the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force for their close collaboration and continued support of our work to protect the public conversation at this critical time,” the statement read.

    One month later, the company announced that the FBI was feeding it intelligence and that it was complying with their requests for deletion of accounts. “Based on intel provided by the FBI, last night we removed approximately 130 accounts that appeared to originate in Iran. They were attempting to disrupt the public conversation during the first 2020 U.S. Presidential Debate,” Twitter’s safety team wrote.

    Yet the evidence they supplied of this supposed threat to American democracy was notably weak. All four of the messages from this Iranian operation that Twitter itself shared showed that none of them garnered any likes or retweets whatsoever, meaning that essentially nobody saw them. This was, in other words, a completely routine cleanup operation of insignificant troll accounts. Yet the announcement allowed Twitter to present the FBI as on the side of democracy and place the idea into the public psyche that the election was under threat from foreign actors.

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

    Iran has been a favorite Twitter target in the past. In 2009, at the behest of the U.S. government, it postponed routine maintenance of the site, which would have required taking it offline. This was because an anti-government protest movement in Tehran was using the app to communicate and the U.S. did not want the demonstrations’ regime-change potential to be stymied.

    A carnival of spooks

    The FBI is far from the only state security agency filling Twitter’s ranks. Shortly after leaving a 10-year career as a CIA analyst, Michael Scott Robinson was hired to become a senior policy manager for site integrity, trust and safety.

    The California-based app has also recruited heavily from the Atlantic Council, a NATO cutout organization that serves as the military alliance’s think tank. The council is sponsored by NATO, led by senior NATO generals and regularly plays out regime-change scenarios in enemy states, such as China.

    The Atlantic Council has been associated with many of the most egregious fake news plants of the last few years. It published a series of lurid reports alleging that virtually every political group in Europe challenging the status quo – from the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP in Great Britain to PODEMOS and Vox in Spain and Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece – were all secretly “the Kremlin’s Trojan Horses.” Atlantic Council employee Michael Weiss was also very likely the creator of the shadowy organization PropOrNot, a group that anonymously published a list of fake-news websites that regularly peddled Kremlin disinformation. Included in this list was virtually every anti-war alternative media outlet one could think of – from MintPress to Truthout, TruthDig and The Black Agenda Report. Also included were pro-Trump websites like The Drudge Report, and liberatarian ventures like Antiwar.com and The Ron Paul Institute.

    PropOrNot’s list was immediately heralded in the corporate press, and was the basis for a wholescale algorithm shift at Google and other big tech platforms, a shift that saw traffic to alternative media sites crash overnight, never to recover. Thus, the allegation of a huge (Russian) state-sponsored attempt to influence the media was itself an intelligence op by the U.S. national security state.

    In 2020, Kanishk Karan left his job as a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research (DFR) Lab to join Twitter as information integrity and safety specialist – essentially helping to control what Twitter sees as legitimate information and nefarious disinformation. Another DFR Lab graduate turned Twitter employee is Daniel Weimert, who is now a senior public policy associate for Russia – a key target of the Atlantic Council. Meanwhile, Sarah Oh is simultaneously an Atlantic Council DFR Lab non-resident senior fellow and a Twitter advisor, her social media bio noting she works on “high risk trust and safety issues.”

    In 2019, Twitter also hired Greg Andersen straight from NATO to work on cybercrime policy. There is sparse information on what Andersen did at NATO, but, alarmingly, his own LinkedIn profile stated simply that he worked on “psychological operations” for the military alliance. After MintPress highlighted this fact in an article in April, he removed all mention of “psychological operations” from his profile, claiming now to have merely worked as a NATO “researcher.” Andersen left Twitter in the summer of last year to work as a product policy manager for the popular video platform TikTok.

    Twitter also directly employs active army officers. In 2019, Gordon Macmillan, the head of editorial for the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa region was revealed to be an officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. This bombshell news was steadfastly ignored across the media.

    Positions of power and control

    With nearly 400 million global users, there is no doubt that Twitter has grown to become a platform large and influential enough to necessitate extensive security measures, as actors of all stripes attempt to use the service to influence public opinion and political actions. There is also no doubt that there is a limited pool of people qualified in these sorts of fields.

    But recruiting largely from the U.S. national security state fundamentally undermines claims Twitter makes about its neutrality. The U.S. government is the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world. As far back as 2011, The Guardian reported on the existence of a massive, worldwide U.S. military online influence campaign in which it had designed software that allowed its personnel to “secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.” The program boasts that the background of these personas is so convincing that psychological operations soldiers can be sure to work “without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.” Yet Twitter appears to be recruiting from the source of the problem.

    These former national security state officials are not being employed in politically neutral departments such as sales or customer service, but in security, trust and content, meaning that some hold considerable sway over what messages and information are promoted, and what is suppressed, demoted or deleted.

    It could be said that poachers-turned-gamekeepers often play a crucial role in safety and protection, as they know how bad actors think and operate. But there exists little evidence that any of these national security state operatives have changed their stances. Twitter is not hiring whistleblowers or dissidents. It appears, then, that some of these people are essentially doing the same job they were doing before, but now in the private sector. And few are even acknowledging that there is anything wrong with moving from big government to big tech, as if the U.S. national security state and the fourth estate are allies, rather than adversaries.

    That Twitter is already working so closely with the FBI and other agencies makes it easy for them to recruit from the federal pool. As Rowley said, “over a period of time these people will be totally in sync with the mindset of Twitter and other social media platforms. So from the company’s standpoint, they are not hiring somebody new. They already know this person. They know where they stand on things.”

    Is there a problem?

    Some might ask “What is the problem with Twitter actively recruiting from the FBI, CIA and other three-letter agencies?” They, after all, are experts in studying online disinformation and propaganda. One is optical. If a Russian-owned social media app’s trust, security and content moderation was run by former KGB or FSB agents and still insisted it was a politically neutral platform, the entire world would laugh.

    But apart from this, the huge influx of security state personnel into Twitter’s decision-making ranks means that the company will start to view every problem in the same manner as the U.S. government does – and act accordingly. “In terms of their outlooks on the world and on the question of misinformation and internet security, you couldn’t get a better field of professionals who are almost inherently going to be more in tune with the government’s perspective,” Rowley said.

    Thus, when policing the platform for disinformation and influence campaigns, the former FBI and CIA agents and Atlantic Council fellows only ever seem to find them emanating from enemy states and never from the U.S. government itself. This is because their backgrounds and outlooks condition them to consider Washington to be a unique force for good.

    This one-sided view of disinformation can be seen by studying the reports Twitter has published on state-linked information operations. The entire list of countries it has identified as engaging in these campaigns are as follows: Russia (in 7 reports), Iran (in 5 reports), China (4 reports), Saudi Arabia (4 reports), Venezuela (3 reports), Egypt (2 reports), Cuba, Serbia, Bangladesh, the UAE, Ecuador, Ghana, Nigeria, Honduras, Indonesia, Turkey, Thailand, Armenia, Spain, Tanzania, Mexico and Uganda.

    One cannot help noticing that this list correlates quite closely to a hit list of U.S. government adversaries. All countries carry out disinfo campaigns to a certain extent. But these “former” spooks and feds are unlikely to point the finger at their former colleagues or sister organizations or investigate their operations.

    The Cold (cyber)war

    Twitter has mirrored U.S. hostility towards states like Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, attempting to suppress the reach and influence of their state media by adding warning messages to the tweets of journalists and accounts affiliated with those governments. “State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution,” it noted.

    In a rather bizarre addendum, it explained that it would not be doing the same to state-affiliated media or personalities from other countries, least of all the U.S. “State-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the U.K. or NPR in the U.S. for example, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy,” it wrote. It did not explain how it decided that Cuban, Russian, Chinese or Iranian journalists did not have editorial independence, but British and American ones did – this was taken for granted. The effect of the action has been a throttling of ideas and narratives from enemy states and an amplification of those coming from Western state media.

    As the U.S. ramps up tensions with Beijing, so too has Twitter aggressively shut down pro-China voices on its platform. In 2020, it banned 170,000 accounts it said were “spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China,” such as praising its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic or expressing opposition to the Hong Kong protests, both of which are majority views in China. Importantly, the Silicon Valley company did not claim that these accounts were controlled by the government; merely sharing these opinions was grounds enough for deletion.

    The group behind Twitter’s decision to ban those Chinese accounts was the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a deeply controversial think tank funded by the Pentagon, the State Department and a host of weapons manufacturers. ASPI has constantly peddled conspiracy theories about China and called for ramping up tensions with the Asian nation.

    ASPI – The Gov’t-Funded Conspiracist Think Tank Now Controlling Your Social Media Feed

    Perhaps most notable, however, was Twitter’s announcement last year that it was deleting dozens of accounts for the new violation of “undermining faith in the NATO alliance.” The statement was widely ridiculed online by users. But few noted that the decision was based upon a partnership with the Stanford Internet Observatory, a counter-disinformation think tank filled with former spooks and state officials and headed by an individual who is on the advisory board of NATO’s Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence. That Twitter is working so closely with organizations that are clearly intelligence industry catspaws should concern all users.

    Not just Twitter

    While some might be alarmed that Twitter is cultivating such an intimate relationship with the FBI and other groups belonging to the secret state, it is perhaps unfair to single it out, as many social media platforms are doing the same. Facebook, for example, has entered into a formal partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, whereby the latter holds significant influence over 2.9 billion users’ news feeds, helping to decide what content to promote and what content to suppress. The NATO cutout organization now serves as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” according to a Facebook press release. Anti-war and anti-establishment voices across the world have reported massive drops in traffic on the platform.

    The social media giant also hired former NATO Press Secretary Ben Nimmo to be its head of intelligence. Nimmo subsequently used his power to attempt to swing the election in Nicaragua away from the leftist Sandinista Party and towards the far-right, pro-U.S. candidate, deleting hundreds of left-wing voices in the week of the election, claiming they were engaging in “inauthentic behavior.” When these individuals (including some well-known personalities) poured onto Twitter, recording video messages proving they were not bots, Twitter deleted those accounts too, in what one commentator called a Silicon Valley “double tap strike.”

    An April MintPress study revealed how TikTok, too, has been filling its organization with alumni of the Atlantic Council, NATO, the CIA and the State Department. As with Twitter, these new TikTok employees largely work in highly politically sensitive fields such as trust, safety, security and content moderation, meaning these state operatives hold influence over the direction of the company and what content is promoted and what is demoted.

    Likewise, in 2017, content aggregation site Reddit plucked Jessica Ashooh from the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force to become its new director of policy, despite the fact that she had few relevant qualifications or experience in the field.

    Jessica Ashooh: The Taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant Tabbed to Do It

    In corporate media too, we have seen a widespread infiltration of former security officials into the upper echelons of news organizations. So normalized is the penetration of the national security state into the media that is supposed to be holding it to account, that few reacted in 2015 when Dawn Scalici left her job as national intelligence manager for the Western hemisphere at the Director of National Intelligence to become the global business director of international news conglomerate Thomson Reuters. Scalici, a 33-year CIA veteran who had worked her way up to become a director in the organization, was open about what her role was. In a blog post on the Reuters website, she wrote that she was there to “meet the disparate needs of the U.S. Government” – a statement that is at odds with even the most basic journalistic concepts of impartiality and holding the powerful to account.

    Meanwhile, cable news outlets routinely employ a wide range of “former” agents and mandarins as trusted personalities and experts. These include former CIA Directors John Brennan (NBC, MSNBC) and Michael Hayden (CNN), ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (CNN), and former Homeland Security Advisor Frances Townsend (CBS). And news for so many Americans comes delivered through ex-CIA interns like Anderson Cooper (CNN), CIA-applicants like Tucker Carlson (Fox), or by Mika Brzezinski (MSNBC), the daughter of a powerful national security advisor. The FBI has its own former agents on TV as well, with talking heads such as James Gagliano (Fox), Asha Rangappa (CNN) and Frank Figliuzzi (NBC, MSNBC) becoming household names. In short, then, the national security state once used to infiltrate the media. Today, however, the national security state is the media.

    Social media holds enormous influence in today’s society. While this article is not alleging that anyone mentioned is a bad actor or does not genuinely care about the spread of disinformation, it is highlighting a glaring conflict of interest. Through its agencies, the U.S. government regularly plants fake news and false information. Therefore, social media hiring individuals straight from the FBI, CIA, NATO and other groups to work on regulating disinformation is a fundamentally flawed practice. One of media’s primary functions is to serve as a fourth estate; a force that works to hold the government and its agencies to account. Yet instead of doing that, increasingly it is collaborating with them. Such are these increasing interlocking connections that it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where big government ends and big media begins.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 22:20

  • Pozsar Was Right Again: Shipping Costs Soar 82,000% Amid Global Supply Chain Chaos After Ukraine
    Pozsar Was Right Again: Shipping Costs Soar 82,000% Amid Global Supply Chain Chaos After Ukraine

    Several months ago, Credit Suisse strategist and former NY Fed “liquidity plumber” Zoltan Pozsar predicted that as a result of Russian commodity exports being shunned by western nations and/or distributors while greeted by eastern nations (such as India and China) would would find delight in the 30% discount to spot on Russian oil, shipping costs would soar as a result of the challenging – and expensive – realignment of global supply chains which would see legacy tanker flows be scrapped only to be resurrected in the form of much more expensive alternatives.

    Well, Pozsar was right again because four months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the resulting dislocation of global fuel markets has lead to a surge in shipping costs of products such as diesel by sea.

    Rates to haul fuels such as gasoline and diesel, known in the industry as clean tanker freight, have more than doubled this year to the highest since April 2020, according to Baltic Exchange data. On one key route in Asia, ship owners are now earning over $47,000 a day transporting products from South Korea to the distribution hub of Singapore, compared with $98 a day prior to the war.

    The Russian invasion has exacerbated a tightening of energy markets, upending trade flows and forcing buyers to scour the world for alternative fuel supplies, according to Bloomberg. At the same time, an initial surge in rates for hauling crude hasn’t been sustained, partly due to reduced demand from China, leading to some shipowners switching part of their fleet to haul fuels rather than oil, according to two tanker charterers.

    The last time clean tanker freight rates were this elevated was in early 2020, after the pandemic decimated oil consumption and forced fuel producers to export as much product as possible to alleviate swelling storage tanks. Now, we are observing a mirror image of that predicament as demand for ships to haul fuels is expected to climb by 6% this year, underpinned by Europe, said Anoop Singh, head of tanker research at Braemar ACM Shipbroking.

    “The European resolve to reduce reliance on Russian supplies will likely outlive the war in Ukraine and that will re-draw trade routes,” said Singh, who notes that Russia was the single largest external supplier of diesel to Europe prior to the war.

    Furthermore, and also as Zoltan predicted, more long-range class ships are being used to transport refined fuels since the invasion in late February, according to S&P analysts Fotios Katsoulas and Krispen Atkinson. Longer voyages are reducing the amount of available capacity on vessels and driving up freight rates, they said. LR tankers are the most common and are used to carry both products and oil.

    The surge in rates is being replicated across other regions. Ship owners transporting fuel from the Middle East to Japan on a route known as TC-5 — a key passage for naphtha — were earning more than $50,000 a day on Wednesday, compared with as low as $61 a day in February, an 82000% increase,  according to Baltic Exchange data. The cost of shipping fuel from the US to Brazil on the TC-18 route was near $37,000 a day, up “more modestly”, from $3,800 a day four months ago.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 22:00

  • Victor Davis Hanson: Why The Left Will Cut Biden Loose
    Victor Davis Hanson: Why The Left Will Cut Biden Loose

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

    Republican pundits and conservative activists are debating whether they can win in 2024 with the successful Trump agenda, but without the controversial former President Donald Trump as their nominee.

    The Democrats have a similar, but far more serious dilemma with President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2024.

    Unlike the Trump Administration’s successful four years, Biden’s tenure has been an utter disaster. There are no policy offsets to the personal liabilities and unpopularity of Biden himself.

    Biden’s liabilities transcend his physical infirmities, his advanced age, and his seeming geometric rather than arithmetic rate of mental decline.

    Biden, moreover, proves daily that he is not a nice guy. His excesses, past and present, are precisely those the Left considers mortal sins.

    Walking back Biden’s absurdities has become the nonstop, tiresome task of many on the Left. As they face a midterm disaster in November, many no longer see any compensating reasons not to drop Biden.

    When the Republicans take the House of Representatives in 2022 there will be nonstop investigations of Hunter Biden’s alleged tax avoidances, his possibly illegal work as an unregistered foreign agent, and Joe Biden’s untaxed compensation he received from the Biden lobbying consortium.

    Consider also Biden’s nastiness.

    During the 2020 campaign he personally attacked a young co-ed as a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” and a stocky questioner was reduced to “fat.”

    Unlike Trump’s art of the deal, exaggerations, and distortions, Biden says things that are not simply untrue, but abjectly preposterous — such as the United States currently has a lower inflation rate than major European industrial powers.

    In Biden’s world, there were no COVID-19 vaccinations until he took the oath of office. Russian President Vladimir Putin, or the oil companies, or the refiners, or Trump are responsible for the historic crippling gasoline price hikes he caused by canceling drilling and pipeline projects.

    Biden claims his negative-growth, hyperinflating economy is not disastrous but strong.

    He serially lies that he drove a semi-truck. He has not been to the Middle East 38 times. He never received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Nor was he a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

    The MAGA movement is not the “most extreme political organization in American history.”

    In other words, Biden reveals the same fantasies and plagiarism that ended his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

    On matters of race and sexuality, Biden is the epitome of that for which the Left, supposedly, has zero tolerance. Biden was infamous for damning with praise candidate Barack Obama as the first “clean” and “articulate” African American presidential candidate.

    In a fake patois, Biden once warned an audience of black professionals that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

    During the 2020 campaign, candidate Biden derided a black journalist as a “junkie” and lambasted a radio host and his audience with the claim “you ain’t black” if they didn’t support his candidacy.

    Spinning racialist fables like Biden’s “Corn Pop” stories would brand any conservative politician as a racist. As president, Biden still uses the term “negro,” and he called an African American advisor “boy.”

    On disturbing matters of sexuality, Biden is even more coarse.

    After the Justice Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the nation was lectured that “women must be believed.” But it was the Left who attacked former Biden aide Tara Reade who surfaced in 2016 to accuse then Senator Biden, her former boss, of sexually assaulting her.

    Biden himself had a creepy history of invading the private space of young women — inappropriately kissing them, hugging and squeezing them, and smelling and blowing into their hair and ears.

    Finally, Biden was forced to apologize — sort of — by claiming he belonged to an earlier generation when such aggression was simply normal behavior. It was not then or now.

    The latest controversies whirl around the British tabloid Daily Mail’s publication of the diary of Biden’s own daughter.

    From the Mail’s lurid reporting, Ashley Biden seems to suggest that she showered with her father at an age when “showers w/ my dad (probably [were] not appropriate).” And she seemed to connect Biden familial inappropriateness with her regret over being “hyper-sexualized (at) a young age.”

    When Trump was accused by porn star Stormy Daniels of a consensual tryst or was caught on old Access Hollywood tape crudely boasting about touching inappropriately female admirers, the resulting uproar nearly derailed the Trump 2016 campaign.

    The point is not just the asymmetrical treatment that has shielded Biden’s cognitive decline, his rude outbursts, his outrageous racialist slurs, and bizarre sexual aggressiveness.

    Instead, the Left now fears Biden’s terrible polls and a worse record – and the resulting damage he is doing to the Democratic Party.

    In such a losing political context, Democrats will soon find no further reason to cover for Biden’s own serial abhorrent personal behavior on matters of financial probity, sex, race, and truthfulness.

    No wonder they are growing desperate to find ways to cut him loose – without making Vice President Kamala Harris his successor.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 21:40

  • North Dakota AG Investigates Bill Gates Farmland Purchase
    North Dakota AG Investigates Bill Gates Farmland Purchase

    The North Dakota Attorney General’s office is investigating a land transaction involving one of the biggest farmland owners in America, billionaire Bill Gates. 

    In a letter dated June 21, Attorney General Drew Wrigley’s office asked the Red River Trust, an entity connected to Gates, about a recent purchase of a multi-thousand-acre potato farm, according to local news KFYR.

    Wrigley’s office informed the trust that all corporations or limited liability companies are strictly “prohibited from owning or leasing farmland or ranchland in the state of North Dakota” and “engaging in farming or ranching.”

    “In addition, the law places certain limitations on the ability of trusts to own farmland or ranchland,” the letter said.

    Red River Trust has 30 days to respond from June 21 to Kerrie Helm, the AG’s Corporate Farming Enforcement Division, about the farm purchase.

    “Our office needs to confirm how your company uses this land and whether this use meets any of the statutory exceptions, such as the business purpose exception, so that we may close this case and file it in our inactive files,” the letter continued.

    A corporation or LLC “found in violation” of the anti-corporate farming laws could face harsh penalties, such as a $100k fine and one year to divest the land. 

    AgWeek revealed the trust spent $13.5 million on a 2,100-acre potato farm in Pembina County in November 2021.

    North Dakota AG Commissioner Doug Goehring told KFYR that many people across the state are “upset” and “livid” about the billionaire purchasing farmland. 

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

    Over the years, Gates has quietly amassed 270,000 acres of farmland across the country through personal investment vehicles, though still a small slice of the nearly 900 million total farm acres.

    Gates isn’t alone. Other billionaires, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, have recently increased farmland holdings. 

    Could this be why billionaires are buying so much farmland? 

    Rockefeller Foundation President did warn a “massive, immediate food crisis” is on the horizon. 

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

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 21:20

  • Four Injured In New Zealand After Mass Stabbing Attack
    Four Injured In New Zealand After Mass Stabbing Attack

    Authored by Rebecca Zhu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A New Zealand man has injured four people in a random “fast-paced” mass stabbing attack with a large kitchen knife before police arrived and apprehended him.

    Police tape surrounds a scene associated with a suspicious death at another property on Farmer Crescent in Lower Hutt, New Zealand, on Sept. 21, 2012. (Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

    The victims and the offender, who was also wounded, have been confirmed as sustaining “moderate” injuries.

    The man began stabbing people in Murrays Bay, Auckland, at around 11 a.m. local time, then walked to Mairangi Bay, where members of the public helped stop the rampage, including someone who reportedly used a crutch to trip the offender.

    Waitematā District Commander Superintendent Naila Hassan told reporters that if the public did not intervene to stop the attack, it could have ended “a lot worse.”

    “A number of members of the public were following him, and eventually, one of them intervened,” she said. “It could’ve been a lot worse, and that’s why I really need to acknowledge the bravery of those members of the public that intervened to bring this to a conclusion.”

    Hassan acknowledged that the incident was “extremely traumatic” for the victims and wanted to assure the public that it was an “isolated incident.”

    She also emphasised that the attack was “random” and not a “hate crime.”

    “The victims were of different gender, ethnicity, and age,” Hassan said.

    The offender is currently in custody under police guard at Auckland City Hospital and will be undergoing further assessments.

    ‘He Just Started Running At Me’

    A local woman told the New Zealand Herald that she had run away screaming for help after a man with a “big knife” chased her off Murrays Bay beach.

    “I was wearing headphones and went to take the headphones off to talk to him [when he approached] because that’s what I thought he wanted,” she said.

    However, the woman’s gut instinct told her something was wrong, putting her on edge before he “just started running at me,” she said.

    The woman immediately called the police when she managed to shake the man off her tracks. The police arrived 10 minutes later, but she did not witness the arrest.

    Another witness said the man chased after a young girl who screamed.

    “We thought she was being silly, she was shrieking,” she told Stuff News. “He stabbed two people, totally random … it all happened very quickly.”

    “He then tried to stab another teenage girl, but she got away.”

    Police will be increasing their local presence as a result of the incident.

    The attack is the latest in a string of crime incidents in New Zealand as the country experiences what has been called a significant crime wave.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 21:00

  • Federal Jury: City Must Pay $59,657 After SWAT Team Wrecks Innocent Woman's House
    Federal Jury: City Must Pay $59,657 After SWAT Team Wrecks Innocent Woman’s House

    After a SWAT team wrecked an innocent woman’s house, the city of McKinney, Texas essentially told her “tough luck” and refused to compensate her. In a case that could have nationwide property rights implications, a federal jury on Wednesday awarded her $59,656.59 in damages—and more may be coming. 

    The jury award follows an April 29 ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Amos Mazzant III that the city’s “intentional and foreseeable” destruction of Vicki Baker’s house constituted a government “taking” that compelled the city to pay just compensation. 

    Vicki Baker's damaged house after the SWAT team attacked it
    Vicki Baker’s house after a SWAT team attacked it

    The case marks a “sea change in the law,” according to Baker’s attorney, Jeffrey Redfern of the liberty-minded Institute for Justice: 

    “Everyone agrees with the general proposition that the government has to pay for the property it takes, but courts across the country had held that this rule just did not apply to the police. But the police are part of the government, which this victory makes abundantly clear.” 

    Baker is likely to receive additional compensation: The jury also found that the city’s refusal to pay Baker constituted a violation of her civil rights, making the city liable under federal civil rights law too. 

    It all started in July 2020, when a fugitive took shelter in Baker’s suburban Dallas home, which had just gone under contract for sale after she’d renovated it. Baker, who had recently beaten cancer and was retiring to Montana, notified police and a standoff ensued.

    Eventually, McKinney police decided to attack the house with a BearCat armored vehicle, breaking windows and their frames, destroying the garage door, leveling the backyard fence, knocking down the front door, and firing approximately 30 tear gas containers into the home, which broke drywall. Baker’s daughter’s dog was blinded and deafened in the attack. When police entered, they found the fugitive had already committed suicide.

    A demolished window, frame and all
    One of multiple windows destroyed by the SWAT team—frame and all

    “I contacted the city of McKinney and asked how to file suit against them for recovery. I was told…there was absolutely no possible recovery, that the city had never paid such a claim and they had no intention of doing that,” said Baker. 

    Naturally, Baker’s homebuyer backed out of the deal. She proceeded to spend months and tens of thousands of dollars putting the house back in order.

    The SWAT team’s extensive use of tear gas meant that, in addition to fixing the damage already described, Baker had to hire a hazardous materials remediation team to clean the entire house. Carpets had to be replaced. To cover the expense, she withdrew money from her IRA and ran up over $20,000 on her credit cards.

    Her repeated follow-ups with the city culminated in a letter from an entity that manages liability claims for Texas governments. It read: 

    “Based on the facts, we have concluded that there is no liability on the part of the City or any of its employees. Per our discussion, the officers have immunity while in the course and scope of their job duties. For this reason, we must respectfully decline this claim in its entirety.” 

    The city of McKinney, Texas told Vicki Baker it had no responsibility for this and other destruction throughout her home

    Destruction by government action is a standard exclusion in homeowners insurance policies. If the city of McKinney didn’t compensate Baker, she’d have to bear the entire cost of the SWAT team’s mayhem. 

    Enter the Institute for Justice, a national civil liberties law firm on a mission “to end widespread abuses of government power and secure the constitutional rights that allow all Americans to pursue their dreams.” 

    The Institute for Justice worked with Baker to file a federal suit in March 2021 against the city, arguing that its decision to wreck Baker’s home without compensation violated both the Texas and U.S. constitutions. 

    “The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the Fifth Amendment‘s takings clause ‘was designed to bar government from forcing some people alone to bear public burdens which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole’,” said attorney Jeffrey Redfern in an Institute for Justice video that explained the case (embedded below).  

    “Pursuing a fugitive is a legitimate government interest, but if the government deliberately destroys innocent people’s property in the process, those people must be compensated,” said Institute for Justice attorney Will Aronin.

    “My priority has always been to make sure that cities like McKinney cannot treat other people the way I’ve been treated,” said Baker. “I expect today’s victory to send a message to governments across the country that they have to pay for what they break.”  

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 20:40

  • Mistake To Recommend COVID-19 Vaccines For All Children: Top Danish Health Official
    Mistake To Recommend COVID-19 Vaccines For All Children: Top Danish Health Official

    Authored by Zachary Steiber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    COVID-19 vaccines should not have been recommended for all children aged 5 and up, a top Danish health official has said.

    Director of Denmark’s National Board of Health Søren Brostrøm addresses a press conference to explain why the AstraZeneca vaccine is stopped in Denmark, in Copenhagen, on April 14, 2021. (Philip Davali / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP via Getty Images)

    Søren Brostrøm, the director general of the Danish Health Authority, told TV 2 that it was a mistake to broadly vaccinate children based on the knowledge that has accumulated since late 2021.

    Children aged 5 to 15 were advised to get a vaccine then, as the Omicron variant of Covid-19 became dominant around the world.

    “I want to look all parents of children who have vaccinated their child in the eye and say, ‘You did the right thing and thank you for listening,‘” Brostrøm said.

    “But at the same time—and this is the important thing to maintain confidence—I will admit and say that we have become wiser and we would not do the same today. And we will not do that in the future either,” he added.

    Studies on the effects of the vaccines have shown that they confer little protection against infection from the virus. Research has also increasingly indicated that the vaccines do not protect well against severe disease in children, who are largely at little risk from severe outcomes if they get the virus.

    Denmark’s new vaccine strategy recommends adults get vaccinated but specifies different advice for children.

    “Children and adolescents only very rarely have a serious course of COVID-19 with the Omicron variant, which is why the offer of primary vaccination for children between 5 and 17 years will not be a general offer, but can be given after specific medical assessment,” authorities said on Wednesday.

    At the same time, Brostrøm encouraged adults to get vaccinated and, if they already have received a primary series, to get a booster, and if they’ve already received a booster, to get a second booster due to waning protection against Omicron.

    He said the country did well amid the pandemic in the winter of 2021 even though it removed restrictions due to vaccination. “The strategy for the coming winter is also that the vaccines should get us through a new wave without restriction,” he said in a statement.

    Like many nations, Denmark offers Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. Both have two-dose primary series.

    As of June 15, approximately 85 percent of Danes have received one vaccine dose, about 77 percent have received two or three doses, and about 66 percent have received four doses, according to the Danish Vaccination Register.

    About 40 percent of children have been vaccinated.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 20:20

  • What Is Stagflation And Why Has The Establishment Been In Denial About It?
    What Is Stagflation And Why Has The Establishment Been In Denial About It?

    Unless you were an adult living in the US through the crisis of the 1970s into the early 1980s, you probably have no memory or experience with the concept of stagflation.  In general, most economic downturns involve deflationary pressures only, and lead to moderate recession events that cause job losses and higher poverty but nothing that has the potential to crash the entire system.   Stagflation is a different threat entirely.

    There is a considerable amount of disinformation circulating these days about what stagflation is and whether or not we are in the middle of such a crisis.  Much of the disinfo has been perpetuated by the Biden White House and the mainstream media.  In short, they’ve been denying that the danger exists even though all the signs are right in front of us.  When liars get caught, they often gaslight instead of admitting defeat.

    Stagflation is basically a combination of deflationary conditions in some areas of the economy coupled with price inflation in other areas, including necessities.  The mainstream narrative is that technical stagflation requires “high unemployment” along with rising prices, but this is simply not true.  At the height of stagflation crisis under President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the unemployment rate was only 7%, which is not great but also not “high” historically.  Stagflation was considered a national problem through the 1970s and yet the average unemployment rate during that decade was 5.4%.

    In other words, anyone that claims that you “must have” high unemployment before you can have stagflation is being dishonest.  High unemployment is often a side effect of stagflation at the end of the cycle, but not a requirement for stagflation to begin.

    Signs of stagflation include:  Falling or stagnant GDP, falling retail sales, falling PMI (manufacturing and services), falling or stagnant wages, declining stock markets, etc.  When these circumstances are coupled to the loss of buying power in a currency and rising prices in most goods and utilities, then you have stagflation.  

    This kind of instability is perhaps the worst of all worlds because prices continue to increase even though demand is falling.  It signals a severe problem with a nation’s currency system, or a collapsing supply chain or both.  The root systems of the entire economy are rotten, this is the only way that stagflation can happen.  

    The initial trigger for the stagflationary conditions of the 1970s was the removal of the US dollar from the last vestiges of the gold standard under Nixon (at the behest of global central bankers).  The US eventually escaped the crisis by exporting inflation overseas as the dollar’s share of global trade increased as the world reserve currency.  Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker also jacked up interest rates to around 20%, which did ultimately lead to an unemployment rate of 11% in the 1980s and dragged prices down enough to stop the bubble.

    Will this happen again?  It’s hard to say, but current dynamics suggest that prices will not stop rising for many months to come, and GDP, retail, PMI, wages, and other areas of the economy are now in decline.  We are, in fact, in the middle of a stagflation event.  Unfortunately we cannot export our inflation anymore because US dollar usage overseas is in decline.  This means more dollars in circulation within the US, and that means continued price spikes.  

    The corporate media has made a concerted effort to downplay the notion of stagflation in the public sphere until recently.  This is most likely because of the panic that would take place should people actually be made aware of the gravity of the threat.  There is also the theory that certain groups of people (Great Reset globalists) would benefit greatly from economic turmoil, and the less the public is made aware of the danger the more unprepared they will be for the crisis.  The more unprepared people are, the easier they are to control through fear and through government handouts.

    Solutions to stagflation vary according to specific circumstances, but since the most viable cause would be instability in the currency, that means the currency system as a whole needs to be addressed.  Supply chain issues can be dealt with over time by increasing PRIVATE manufacturing and production within a country (not government nationalization of manufacturing or price controls).  If people start making some of their own goods at home while localizing production for necessities like food and energy, then prices will inevitably come down.  However, currency devaluation requires a wider solution.  

    Local communities and states could create their own currency scrip to help offset dollar devaluation.  States could create their own banking institutions, much like North Dakota has done, to help fund local industry and alleviate credit pressures.  At the national level, the dollar could be coupled to some form of commodity standard such as a gold standard and this would have immediate effects on inflation, slowing it down or stopping it completely.  Finally, there could be a moratorium on government deficit spending.  This would mean shrinking the size of government substantially, but frankly that could only be a good thing.  And finally, ending the Federal Reserve would put an end to the stimulus and QE that created the crisis in the first place.   

    Obviously none of these solutions would be endorsed by the Biden Administration and they might even try to stop individual states from implementing their own fixes.  It will be up to state governments and communities to defy Biden and cure the stagflationary curse before it destroys everything.      

     

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 20:00

  • "I Don't Believe In Censoring Art": Paramount CEO Rejects Trigger Warnings
    “I Don’t Believe In Censoring Art”: Paramount CEO Rejects Trigger Warnings

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    Paramount CEO Bob Bakish has refused to add trigger warnings to the company’s historical content, asserting, “I don’t believe in censoring art.”

    Bakish says the back catalogue for the film studio’s new subscription streaming service Paramount+ will not be censored to please modern politically correct sensibilities.

    “By definition, you have some things that were made in a different time and reflect different sensibilities,” Bakish said.

    “I don’t believe in censoring art that was made historically, that’s probably a mistake. It’s all on-demand – you don’t have to watch anything you don’t want to.”

    As we have previously highlighted, other streaming platforms and broadcasters have censored or outright deleted old shows and movies for containing so-called ‘offensive’ content.

    Earlier this year, UK streaming platform ITV Player censored a “homophobic” line from the 2002 Spiderman movie when Spiderman says to Bonesaw, “That’s a cute outfit. Did your husband give it to you?”

    During the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, UK broadcaster Sky also tagged numerous movies, some little over a decade old, with a message warning viewers that they might be offensive.

    “This film has outdated attitudes, language and cultural depictions which may cause offence today,” stated the trigger warning.

    During the same year, PBS removed Gone With the Wind from its platform, in the process erasing the first black female actress to win an Oscar, while the BBC also announced it was removing Little Britain from its schedule despite the fact that the TV comedy series satirizes every demographic, often highlighting small minded attitudes of bigots.

    Last year, NBC also announced that it was scanning 17,000 hours of past WWE content to weed out “racist” material in order to avoid it appearing on the network’s new Peacock streaming device.

    Iconic historical books are also being re-written to reflect ‘modern attitudes’, including George Orwell’s 1984.

    *  *  *

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    In the age of mass Silicon Valley censorship It is crucial that we stay in touch. I need you to sign up for my free newsletter here. Support my sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Get early access, exclusive content and behinds the scenes stuff by following me on Locals.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 19:40

  • Tata Technologies' CEO Puts India In The Semiconductor Spotlight
    Tata Technologies’ CEO Puts India In The Semiconductor Spotlight

    As focus turns to a new cooperation between BRIC nations as a result of Western sanctions on Russia, some are also asking whether or not India is going to be a key player in the new global semiconductor industry. 

    Raja Manickam, CEO of Tata Technologies was out this week making the case for India and Southeast Asia as a destination for chipmakers, according to Nikkei. His case is that the country has an attractive location with easy access to shipping routes. 

    “It’s always location, location and location,” Raja said this week while talking at a semiconductor conference organized by the SEMI industry association. He criticized where semi manufacturing currently takes place in Asia, calling the area prone to “geopolitical worries” and “natural disasters”.

    Taiwan and South Korea are currently the two leading players in the industry and both countries face renewed tensions with China and North Korea, the report points out. 

    The Indian government has already put into place a $10 billion incentive program to develop a semiconductor ecosystem. 

    Raja continued: “The government has done its part and the respective states are also competing with their own incentive packages. It is on the part of the Indian private sector to step up.”

    He also made his case for the industry needing India just as much as India could use the productive capacity: “Many big semiconductor [companies] have research and development based in India, so it’s only logical for the research centers to be surrounded by manufacturing plants.”

    He pointed out that India “offers a massive end-user market”.

    Loy Hwee Chuan, executive director for telecommunications, media and technology at Singapore’s DBS Bank, was in agreeance with Raja. Chuan said: “[The] overall semiconductor market in India is expected to grow at [an] 18.8% compound annual growth rate, reaching $64 billion in 2026. We would be able to see more investments in India and Southeast Asia as manufacturers adopt the ‘China plus one’ strategy.”

    Raja concluded: “When Tata does something, its usually huge and Tata Sons Chairman Chandra (Natarajan Chandrasekaran) has already signaled that semiconductors is going to be one of his key priorities.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 19:20

  • BLM Supporter Sentenced To 10 Years Prison For Violence During Portland Riots
    BLM Supporter Sentenced To 10 Years Prison For Violence During Portland Riots

    Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    An Indiana man has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for playing a significant part in fueling violence during the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and rioting in Portland, Oregon.

    A woman pulls a quilt from the display case inside the Oregon Historical Society during a riot in Portland, Ore., Oct. 11, 2020. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

    Malik Fard Muhammad, 25, was sentenced on Tuesday for “repeatedly and intentionally jeopardizing the lives of police officers, destroying public property, and encouraging others to commit violence during protests that occurred in Portland in 2020,” according to the Justice Department.

    In addition to 10 years in prison, Muhammad gets three years of supervised release. Although the DOJ did not mention the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the press release, Muhammad was arrested in 2020 following evidence collected at a BLM protest turned riot.

    During the BLM demonstrations that ended in violence on Sept. 21, 2020, Muhammad threw a beer growler made into a Molotov cocktail on a police officer sitting inside his vehicle. The officer jumped out when he saw the firebomb, which did not blow, hurtling towards him.

    Muhammed was arrested and charged with attempted aggravated murder, attempted assault in the first degree, attempted murder in the first degree, and unlawful manufacture of a destructive device, along with other crimes.

    “Anyone who thinks they can get away with trying to murder police officers and destroy this city should think again,” Police Chief Chuck Lovell said in a statement last year announcing Muhammed’s arrest.

    “Holding accountable those individuals whose sole focus is violence and destruction, like Mr. Muhammad, is central to our ongoing effort to support the rights of all Oregonians,” said Scott Erik Asphaug, U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon.

    The district attorney’s office said that Muhammad intentionally and repeatedly jeopardized the lives of police officers, engaged in activities that destroyed public property like smashing the Oregon Historical Society’s windows, while calling on others to commit violence.

    “The right to protest peacefully is absolute,” said ATF Seattle Field Division Special Agent in Charge Jonathan T. McPherson. “But it is clear Mr. Muhammad didn’t come to exercise his rights. He came from out-of-state to bring violence to our community.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 19:00

  • United Airlines Cuts 12% Of Newark Flights To Reduce Delays 
    United Airlines Cuts 12% Of Newark Flights To Reduce Delays 

    United Airlines’ announcement to reduce domestic flights from Newark Liberty International Airport to resolve flight disruptions sent airline stocks tumbling Thursday, underperforming the broader market. 

    United told Reuters it would temporarily cut 50 daily departures, representing 12% of its 425 daily flights from Newark. The change will be effective July 1 and wouldn’t result in the airline exiting airports across the country. 

    United executives said the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approved the temporary cut on June 17, citing Newark airport construction and air traffic control problems. In a previously unreported letter seen by Reuters, the agency said reducing flights could “help carriers manage delays during terminal and runway construction projects.”

    “After the last few weeks of irregular operations in Newark, caused by many factors including airport construction, we reached out to the FAA and received a waiver allowing us to temporarily adjust our schedule there for the remainder of the summer.

    “Even though we have the planes, pilots, crews, and staff to support our Newark schedule, this waiver will allow us to remove about 50 daily departures which should help minimize excessive delays and improve on-time performance – not only for our customers, but for everyone flying through Newark,” United’s executive vice president and COO Jon Roitman wrote in a letter to staff. 

    United shares closed down 2.5% on the news. The S&P Airlines Industry Index fell as much as 3% but recovered some losses by the end of the cash session, closing down around 1%. The index has yet to recover from the virus pandemic and peaked in April 2021 and now approaches COVID lows. 

    Through mid-June, FlightAware data shows Newark had the second-most delays of any U.S. airport, behind Chicago Midway. 

    The airline industry has struggled with flight cancellations and delays due to many factors, including pilot and staffing shortages, weather-related issues, robust consumer demand, and, as Untied described above, infrastructure woes. 

    Last week, more than 10,000 flights were delayed or canceled, leaving travelers across the country furious and struck at airports, some for more than 24 hours. The spate of flight disruptions was enough for Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to warn airlines to fix their problems ahead of the increased travel season associated with the Fourth of July holiday or face consequences. 

    Besides United, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Delta Air Lines, JetBlue Airways, Alaska Airlines, and Spirit Airlines have also reduced flights to address congestion. Some carriers are pulling flights from smaller airports. 

    United’s CEO Scott Kirby pointed out a significant issue plaguing airlines: a pilot shortage. The industry is short a whopping 12,000 pilots, and Kirby said: “there’s no quick fix.” Pilots have staged protests due to being overworked. 

    So maybe once demand simmers down, flight disruptions abate, but that might not be until the second half of the year, according to Raymond James analyst Savanthi Syth. She pointed out a more significant pullback in demand will be seen in 1H23, followed by a recovery into 2024. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 18:40

  • Police Department Shows Off 'Pride Cruiser' Which Encourages People To "Report Hate Crimes"
    Police Department Shows Off ‘Pride Cruiser’ Which Encourages People To “Report Hate Crimes”

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

    The Columbus Division of Police has been ridiculed on Twitter for proudly showing off a “pride cruiser” vehicle adorned with the LGBT rainbow flag that encourages people to “report hate crimes.”

    A video clip posted to the police department’s official Twitter page shows Officer Lutz, an “LGBTQI+ liaison officer,” introducing the car.

    “And we’re unveiling right now our pride cruiser for the month of June…I’m excited about this cruiser, it’s great for representation,” says Lutz.

    The car features multi-colored rainbow decals along with the full updated ‘progress pride flag’, which includes non-binary, intersex and transgender colors.

    Written on both sides of the vehicle in blue capital letters are the words “REPORT HATE CRIMES.”

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

    However, the clip didn’t go down well even with leftists, one of whom responded, “report hate crimes” does that include when it’s CPD officers murdering Black people.”

    Another commented, “who am i supposed to report the hate crime to when y’all are doing it.”

    Other respondents wondered where their representation was.

    “Can we have a nuclear family cruiser next? No?” asked one.

    “I guarantee you that most of your officers and employees are embarrassed by this nonsense,” said another.

    “Following record murder totals in 2020 and 2021, this is the priority of @MayorGinther,” remarked radio host Bruce Hooley.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 18:20

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jun 23

Today’s News 23rd June 2022

  • Mapping Europe's Incarcerated
    Mapping Europe’s Incarcerated

    Russia and Turkey had the highest incarceration rates of the Council of Europe in 2021, according to the organization’s Annual Penal Statistics on Prison Populations.

    As Statista’s Anna Fleck details below, their latest figures show that Russia had 328 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants in 2021, while Turkey followed close behind with 325 out of 100,000.

    Infographic: Mapping Europe’s Incarcerated | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Scotland, England and Wales also had fairly high rates of incarceration, coming out well above the 102 median average of European countries, with 135 and 132, respectively.

    Liechtenstein and Monaco represented the least incarcerated countries per 100,000 population, with 31 and 33, respectively.

    According to the Council of Europe, Europe saw its prison population fall between 2020 and 2021.

    This has been attributed to delays and the slowing down of the judicial systems through the pandemic, as well as the release schemes used in some countries to prevent or reduce the spread of Covid-19.

    For this reason, the decline is expected to be temporary, with reports already emerging of figures climbing once more.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 02:45

  • Ukraine War Blows Up EU's Superpower Delusion
    Ukraine War Blows Up EU’s Superpower Delusion

    Authored by Soeren Kern via The Gatestone Institute,

    The leaders of France, Germany and Italy have jointly visited Ukraine in an attempt to present a unified European front regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. The one-day visit was long on rhetoric but short on substance: European unity remains elusive.

    When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the European Union responded the following day with a package of unprecedented economic sanctions aimed at isolating Russia.

    The EU, which was praised for displaying “determination, unity and speed” in its response to Putin, was said to be facing a “transformative moment” that would allow the bloc to become a “geostrategic actor” on the global stage. An observer claimed that the EU had become “a top geopolitical protagonist” and that Europe “discovered that it’s a superpower.”

    On March 21, less than a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, European officials announced an ambitious plan for the EU to achieve “strategic autonomy” aimed at placing the 27-member bloc on equal footing with China and the United States. The implicit objective was to enable a “sovereign” EU to act independently of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in matters of defense and security. That plan is now in shambles.

    As the war has dragged on, European unity has collapsed and efforts to transform the European Union into a European superstate — a United States of Europe — have been exposed for what they are: delusions of grandeur.

    The EU’s largest member states — France and Germany — have sought to appease Putin at the expense of Ukrainian sovereignty. French President Emmanuel Macron, the strongest backer of European strategic autonomy, insists that Putin should not be “humiliated” and has even called on Ukraine to make territorial concessions to help the Russian dictator save face.

    Meanwhile, German Prime Minister Olaf Scholz, for reasons that remain unclear, has stubbornly refused to supply Ukraine with the weapons it needs to defend itself against Russian aggression.

    The Franco-German appeasement has infuriated most Central and Eastern European members of the EU and NATO. They rightly fear that if Putin’s imperial pretensions are not stopped in Ukraine, he will set his sights next on them.

    Russian revanchism, and the EU’s divided response, has produced a clear shift in the bloc’s balance of power on security matters. France and Germany have long arrogated to themselves de facto leadership of the EU — and have expected other member states to fall into line. The failure of Paris and Berlin to confront Putin’s aggression has created an EU leadership vacuum that Poland, the Baltic states and other former communist countries have filled. A return to the pre-war status quo seems unlikely.

    Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has underscored the indispensability of the United States and NATO for European defense and security. France and Germany, by failing to defend the most basic Western values, have undermined their own trustworthiness and dependability. Other EU member states can be expected to strongly oppose any efforts to develop an independent European military capacity that undermines the transatlantic alliance.

    Humiliating Putin

    Macron and Scholz in particular have repeatedly sought to accommodate Putin. Both, for instance, have held numerous one-on-one telephone calls with the Russian leader — calls that other EU member states have criticized as counterproductive because such conversations may convince Putin that he can end the war on his terms. After one such phone call on May 13, Scholz called for a ceasefire in Ukraine but did not demand that Russia immediately withdraw all its troops from Ukrainian territory.

    Germany, despite repeated promises, still has not transferred a single heavy weapon to Ukraine, according to the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. Some say Scholz is playing for time. The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel recently reported that Scholz refuses to utter the words “Ukraine must win” because he believes that Ukraine cannot achieve victory.

    Others think the German chancellor is waiting for the war to end so that German industry can resume doing business with Russia. Whatever his motivation, Scholz’s dithering has seriously damaged Germany’s credibility, according to policy experts from across the political spectrum. Scholz seems unable or unwilling to consider, after the lessons of Britain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, that if Putin wins in Ukraine, he might turn his sights next on Europe.

    Meanwhile, Macron has clung to his pretense of turning the EU into a sovereign superstate. During a speech to the European Parliament on May 9, the French president called for building a “stronger and more sovereign Europe” that can become “the master of its own destiny.” He added that the war in Ukraine “must not distract us from our agenda.”

    Macron, who has provided military support to Ukraine, also warned against humiliating Putin and called for reaching an agreement with Russia “to build new security balances” in Europe. That was widely interpreted as a call for Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Putin.

    On June 3, Macron repeated his warning about humiliating Putin. Speaking to French media, he said:

    “We must not humiliate Russia so that when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic channels. I am convinced that France’s role is to be a mediating power.”

    Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba responded:

    “Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France. We all better focus on how to put Russia in its place. This will bring peace and save lives.”

    Polish President Andrzej Duda, in an interview with the German newspaper Bild, said that the phone calls with Putin were akin to talking to Adolf Hitler:

    “I’m amazed at all the talks that are being held with Putin at the moment. By Chancellor Scholz, by President Emmanuel Macron. These talks are useless. What do they do? They only legitimize a person responsible for the crimes committed by the Russian army in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin. He is responsible for it. He made the decision to send the troops there. The commanders are subordinate to him. Did anyone talk to Adolf Hitler like that during WWII? Did someone say Adolf Hitler had to save face? That we should proceed in such a way that it is not humiliating for Adolf Hitler?“

    John Chipman, head of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, tweeted:

    “The end of French exceptionalism. Once you claim your main role to be a mediator between right and wrong, days of grandeur are over.

    “‘Saving face’ is a weak diplomatic aim; Putin can take personal responsibility for his face.

    “Humiliation: a mild punishment for war crimes.”

    National Interests

    Some observers have speculated that Macron’s obsession with Putin’s humiliation stems from a faulty understanding of the June 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which officially ended World War I. Long-standing orthodoxy has held that the terms imposed on Germany were humiliating and fueled the nationalist sentiment that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II, but contemporary scholars have challenged that narrative: the Treaty of Versailles, they say, was not tough enough on Germany.

    Others suspect that Macron and Scholz are seeking a new 19th century-style Concert of Europe in which France, Germany and Russia agree to divide Europe into spheres of influence. Such an agreement would, presumably, turn Ukraine into a vassal state of Russia.

    Still others believe that France and Germany are primarily concerned with protecting national business and financial interests in Russia.

    German Member of the European Parliament Reinhard Bütikofer noted:

    “As Moscow hardliners question whether Europe will ‘survive’ the current crisis, President Macron says: ‘We must not humiliate Russia.’ Macron appears not to realize that defending Ukraine against Russia’s aggression is also about defending Europe’s common security. Putin wants more than just to dominate Ukraine. Macron sees France’s interests decoupled from those of Eastern and Central Europe.”

    Bütikofer’s comment goes to the heart of the issue: national interests still matter. One of the EU’s founding myths has been that national sovereignty is an outmoded concept and that the national interests of the EU’s 27 member states can be subsumed under a new “European interest.” The war in Ukraine and the differing responses to it have proven that national interests still matter and will continue to do so.

    Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš, in an interview with Politico, argued that the only way to achieve lasting peace and security in Europe is for Russia to lose the war in Ukraine:

    “The difficulty is that some of my colleagues have a false belief … peace at any cost. Peace at any cost is what we have done for 20 years with Putin. Peace at any cost means Putin wins. We end up losing. Now, in the self-interest of Germany, and France and Italy and everyone else, if we really want security in Europe, Russia has to lose, they finally have to realize they cannot operate in this way. And collectively, we have the ability to make that happen.”

    Transatlantic Relations

    Meanwhile, transatlanticism is enjoying a surge in popularity. A new survey by Globsec, a think tank based in Bratislava, found broad support (79%) across nine countries in Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) for NATO’s role as security guarantor.

    The survey also found significant growth in the CEE countries’ perception of the United States as a strategic partner. In Poland, for instance, such perceptions increased from 54% in 2021 to 73% in 2022. By contrast, Polish perceptions of Germany as a strategic partner plummeted from 48% in 2021 to 27% in 2022.

    “The perception that the US is a strategic partner has soared by 10 percentage points since 2021,” according to the report. “Washington is now viewed as a key ally in NATO by 3/4 of respondents in the CEE region.”

    German analyst Marcel Dirsus noted:

    “Without American support, Ukraine would already be done. Countries like Germany and France have made European autonomy even more difficult because nobody east of the Oder River trusts them to come through when things get rough….

    “What good are more German tanks to Poland or Estonia if neither they nor Russia thinks that Berlin would be willing to use them to defend Warsaw or Tallinn?

    “I very much doubt central Europeans who were already skeptical about European autonomy or sovereignty or whatever the phrase of the day is are looking at Macron and Scholz and think now is the time to rely more on Paris and Berlin. If anything, they’ll double-down on America.”

    Polish analyst Konrad Muzyka agreed:

    “Ukraine’s shown that France and Germany are unwilling to increase costs on Russia for its attack on Ukraine. Paris and Germany are unwilling to send equipment to Ukraine, what makes people think its soldiers will die for Tallinn, Vilnius, Riga or Warsaw?”

    American foreign policy expert Elliot Cohen concluded:

    “President Macron continues, perversely, to talk about an exit from the war, to include European security guarantees for Ukraine. Why on earth would any Ukrainian think France or Germany could or would fight on their behalf? This is vanity, not statesmanship, at work.”

    Rhetoric versus Substance

    On June 16, Macron, Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, joined by Romanian President Klaus Iohannis, arrived in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv for the first time since the beginning of the war. The visit was designed, apparently, to dispel criticism of European disunity and inconsistent support for Ukraine.

    The leaders pledged that the EU would not force Ukraine to surrender or give up territory to end the war. “Ukraine will choose the peace it wants,” Draghi said. “Any diplomatic solution cannot be separated from the will of Kyiv, from what it deems acceptable to her people. Only in this way can we build a peace that is just and lasting.”

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was also invited to attend the G7 Summit to be held in Germany on June 26-28, and the NATO Summit in Madrid on June 29-30.

    The three leaders expressed support for Ukraine to be given candidate status for EU membership, but Macron stressed that such status would be accompanied by a “roadmap” that would include “conditions.” Previously, Macron, Scholz and Draghi all said that Ukraine’s EU bid could take decades.

    German MP Norbert Röttgen criticized Scholz’s trip to Ukraine as political showmanship:

    “Chancellor Scholz created high expectations for his trip to Ukraine. He did not fulfill them with the ‘yes’ to EU membership and the invitation to the G7 summit. Ukraine needs quick help now, we owe it. EU membership is a matter of decades.”

    Europe analyst David Herszenhorn, writing for Politico, noted:

    “Despite the encouraging rhetoric, the trio of leaders — representing the EU’s biggest, richest and most powerful countries — did not announce any dramatic new military or financial assistance for Ukraine, which might help tip the war in Kyiv’s favor.

    “By contrast, U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced an additional $1 billion in support for Ukraine….

    “While Ukraine has been pushing hard to win candidate status, that designation alone offers little indication about when, or even if, Ukraine would ever formally become a member….

    “Many EU officials and diplomats said it is difficult to imagine Ukraine making much progress toward actual membership until it is no longer at war, and Macron has said that the overall process could take a decade or longer.”

    Correspondents Guy Chazan, Roman Olearchyk and Amy Kazmin, writing for the Financial Times, concluded:

    “French president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian prime minister Mario Draghi did not just have warm words for Ukraine — they also backed its bid to join the EU.

    “But once the euphoria wore off, some Ukrainians wondered whether the visit of the three leaders, who were also joined by Romania’s president Klaus Iohannis, marked a triumph of ceremony over substance.

    “Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin, summed up the ambivalence. EU membership for Ukraine lay far off in the future, he told Germany’s ZDF TV. ‘But right now what we need is to survive,’ he said. ‘And for that we need heavy weapons.’

    “Anyone hoping the visit would break the logjam in the delivery of such kit will have been disappointed. The only new pledge came from Macron, who said France would supply six additional Caesar howitzers, on top of the 12 it has already given Ukraine….

    “The issue of weapons continues to loom over relations between Ukraine and its allies. Presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted earlier this month that Ukraine needed 1,000 howitzers, 300 multiple rocket launchers, 500 tanks, 2,000 armored vehicles and 1,000 drones to achieve parity with Russia and ‘end the war.’ The equipment western countries have committed to provide so far falls far short.”

    Expert Commentary

    Irish analyst Judy Dempsey, in an article — “German Ambiguity Is Deciding Ukraine’s Future” — published by the Brussels-based think tank Carnegie Europe, wrote that Scholz’s delay in sending heavy weapons to Ukraine was hurting Kyiv’s chances of preserving its sovereignty, and that it was damaging Germany’s standing across Europe:

    “Scholz’s position reveals a lack of leadership and with it a lack of conviction and consistency. It is also about a fear of antagonizing the Kremlin. The German political elites that grew up during the Cold War don’t want to give up their special business and political ties to Moscow. They are still reluctant to accept Russia’s motives in Georgia, Syria, Belarus, and now Ukraine.

    “These motives are about Russia positioning itself to reshape Europe’s post–Cold War order. The longer Scholz continues his ambiguity toward Ukraine, the greater the likelihood that Putin will use the German chancellor and French President Emmanuel Macron to push Ukraine into a compromise and ultimately change Europe’s security architecture.

    “In practice, that would have devastating consequences for the transatlantic relationship which Putin has long sought to weaken. It would divide Europe. As it is, Poland and the Baltic states are deeply distrustful of France’s and Germany’s relations with Putin. They are also frustrated that Paris and Berlin do not take the Russian imperialist agenda seriously.

    “Beyond Ukraine, Scholz’s ambiguity is hurting all of Europe. Putin will not hesitate to exploit it both militarily and politically.”

    Former MI6 head John Sawers, in an article — “Macron is Playing a Risky Game on Ukraine” — published by the Financial Times, warned that the French president’s insistence that Putin should not be humiliated could lead to a premature ceasefire that locks in Russian gains:

    “The west has two goals in the war in Ukraine: to uphold Ukrainian sovereignty and to deter Russia from any similar assaults on European countries in the future.

    “However, the fighting in the Donbas region is ugly and it is tempting to support any move that would bring it to an end. Unsurprisingly, there have been calls for an early peace initiative, while French president Emmanuel Macron has said that it is important not to ‘humiliate’ Russia over its invasion — a remark that drew a frosty response from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff.

    “The problem is that a ceasefire now would lock in Russia’s military gains on the ground. There is no reason to think that Vladimir Putin would agree to pull back….

    “If another round of European diplomacy leaves Russia once again sitting on its military gains in Ukraine, then Putin will regain political strength at home and feel empowered to launch new military adventures in the future. The Ukrainians want to fight on and they need our continued support — advanced weapons and ever tougher sanctions on Russia. That means several more months of ugly fighting. But a premature ceasefire will help Putin snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. No western leader should be his enabler.”

    Austrian political scientist Ralph Gert Schöllhammer, in an article — “Why Europe Hedges Its Support for Ukraine” — published by The Wall Street Journal, argued that Paris and Berlin worry that an EU with Ukraine could lead to a competing Warsaw-Kyiv axis:

    “Despite the supranational ambitions of the EU and its most ardent supporters, national interests still dominate the political calculations of member states. For Paris and Berlin the Ukraine crisis isn’t only a security issue, it could also determine the EU’s future power distribution.

    “The most prestigious positions in the EU are held by Western European politicians, reflecting a power imbalance between Eastern and Western Europe, from Ms. von der Leyen (Germany) and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde (France) to the high representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell (Spain) and the president of the European Council, Charles Michel (Belgium). Eastern European governments have made clear that this status quo is increasingly unacceptable to them, and the war in Ukraine has given them additional confidence to change it.

    “The EU is built around Germany and France, and both states have jealously guarded their position as the ultimate decision makers in Europe. Policy makers in both countries are aware that an EU with Ukraine could lead to a competing Warsaw-Kyiv axis, something neither France nor Germany wants. Ukraine is politically and culturally closer to Poland than Germany, meaning that German power in the EU could be diminished significantly and replaced by growing Eastern European influence.

    “These thoughts might seem cynical in light of the heroic struggle of Ukraine and its people, but it would be a mistake to believe that power politics has been replaced by universally held ideals.”

    Europe expert Stefan Auer, in an opinion essay — “Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom Exposes ‘Sovereign Europe’ as a Delusion” — published by the Financial Times, wrote that Central Europeans understand better than France or Germany the connection between national independence and security:

    “The shared outrage over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine initially strengthened European unity. But the challenges that the war has generated appear to be reinforcing European disunion. Central and eastern European states, with the notable exception of Hungary, strongly support Ukraine’s fight for territorial integrity, while Germany, France and Italy seek ways to accommodate Russia.

    “For the EU, the return of sovereignty is unexpected. European integration supposedly made nation states increasingly obsolete. Dialogue, not threats of violence, would uphold peace….

    “Rather than enemies, Europeans thought they had partners, competitors or at worst rivals. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced an abrupt re-evaluation of this view….

    “It was once a truism that France needed the EU to conceal its weakness, while Germany needed it to hide its strength. In relation to Russia, one could argue that Germany uses the EU’s relative weakness to justify its own inaction….

    “But when it comes to assisting Ukraine in the war itself, it is national capitals that matter, not Brussels. What Moscow wants and many of Putin’s western supporters appear willing to accept is the division of Europe into spheres of influence. This is redolent of the Grossraum thinking articulated by the crown jurist of Nazi Germany, Carl Schmitt: a theory of large economic spaces controlled by major powers….

    “German chancellor Olaf Scholz echoes such arguments when he declares that ‘Russia must not win this war,’ rather than unambiguously advocating a Ukrainian victory. This is as logical as it is misguided. Where there are no enemies, there can be no victors.

    “By contrast, leaders in central and eastern Europe are not afraid to combine the language of values with power politics. The French and German visions for peace imply Ukrainian territorial concessions. Such ideas are foolhardy and will not ensure security for Europe or Ukraine. A sovereign Europe must not be pursued at the expense of Ukrainian sovereignty….

    “In fact, for Europe to have a future in freedom, Ukraine must win this defining battle of our times. The losers will include not just Putin’s Russia. The defeat of Russian imperialism should finally put to rest Franco-German delusions, whether they aim at a sovereign or a post-national Europe.”

    German analyst Ulrich Speck, in an essay — “The Ukraine War and the Rebirth of NATO” — published by the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, concluded that the actions of Macron and Scholz has cemented NATO, not the EU, as the cornerstone of European security:

    “Three developments have catapulted NATO back into the center of events.

    “First: Russia’s open attack on Ukraine in February 2022. This time, not only East Central Europeans, but also West Europeans and North Americans were shocked by the breach of all norms on which the European peace order is based: an open war of aggression and conquest with countless atrocities and war crimes. It is therefore clear that Putin is ready to implement his project of a new Russian empire, even at great expense. It is also clear that if he is successful, he will probably not stop at Ukraine.

    “The second reason for the renaissance of NATO is that the United States is fulfilling its classic leadership role in the Western alliance. For the Biden administration, the revival of alliances is at the center of foreign policy: close cooperation with allies is seen as providing a decisive advantage over China and Russia, which allows it to deal with the autocratic challengers from a ‘position of strength.’

    “The third reason is that the EU leaders, France and Germany, have been very reluctant to react to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. While the United States made decisive progress on arms deliveries and sanctions, flanked by a resolutely acting Great Britain, it seemed that Paris and Berlin were hoping to the last to be able to change the mind of the Russian President. Both are reluctant to supply arms to Ukraine, and they are more likely to play along than lead when it comes to sanctions. The fact that Macron and Scholz have not been in Kyiv since the beginning of the war underscores the distance they maintain from Ukraine.

    “With this attitude, Berlin and Paris have discredited themselves in the eyes of East Central Europeans and Scandinavians as reliable partners in the event of a Russian threat. More than ever, Eastern and Northern Europe will rely on the United States and Great Britain — ​​that is, on NATO — for security policy.

    “This means that there is no alternative to NATO — at least as long as Russia takes a revisionist stance, does not respect borders and does not recognize the reorganization of the region after the end of the Cold War. The lesson of current experience is that only the United States is capable of holding Russia in check. The vehicle for this remains NATO, which has not outlived itself, but is more important as the security policy core of a free West than it has been for decades.“

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 02:00

  • Shanghai Tech Expert And Fiancée Detained By CCP Over Allegedly Helping Develop Firewall Circumvention Tool
    Shanghai Tech Expert And Fiancée Detained By CCP Over Allegedly Helping Develop Firewall Circumvention Tool

    Authored by Kelly Song via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    He Binggang, 46, is the owner of a computer and electronics firm in Shanghai. Since October last year, He and his fiancée, Zhang Yibo, a former business manager at Siemens Shanghai, have been detained for allegedly helping the Chinese public gain access to uncensored information by circumventing the communist regime’s internet firewall.

    Protesters march against China’s censorship of the internet in Pasadena, Calif., in this file photo. (Jose Gil/Shutterstock)

    Their alleged crime, Article 300 of Chinese Criminal Law barring “using a heretical organization to undermine the implementation of the law” has been used excessively by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the adherents of a spiritual practice called Falun Gong. Both He and Zhang are Falun Gong practitioners.

    Shanghai Tech expert He Binggang and fiancée Zhang Yibo have been detained in Shanghai since October 2021 for helping Chinese people gain access to uncensored information by circumventing the regime’s internet firewall. (The Epoch Times)

    Falun Gong is a spiritual discipline including five meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. Its popularity peaked in the late 1990s in China, with estimates putting the number of practitioners at 70 million to 100 million.

    Perceiving this popularity to be a threat, the CCP launched a brutal campaign against Falun Gong in 1999. Since then, millions of adherents have been detained in jails, labor camps, and detention centers across the country, where they are subjected to torture, slave labor, indoctrination, and forced organ harvesting.

    Circumventing the Firewall

    The Epoch Times has confirmed with sources close to the case that the CCP police had been monitoring He and Zhang for some time. By sniffing internet traffic, they traced some packets to a firewall circumvention tool called oGate.

    The Chinese regime runs the world’s most sprawling and sophisticated online censorship and surveillance apparatus, known as the Great Firewall, blocking internet traffic in and out of China.

    Many Chinese inside the country thus use circumvention tools to bypass the CCP’s firewall to access uncensored information from the outside world, such as virtual private networks (VPNs).

    Over the years, Falun Gong practitioners have developed a suite of firewall circumvention tools, which are free to use. oGate is the latest such tool. It does not require the user to install any software. Because of its ease of use, oGate enables millions of page views per month.

    Held in Isolation

    At around 9 p.m. on Oct. 9, 2021, two dozen officers from Shanghai’s Changning District Police Station arrested He and ransacked his home, without an arrest warrant or search warrant. Neither did they provide the list of confiscated items, which included He’s personal computers and cell phone, according to a friend of Zhang’s.

    Zhang was also taken by police, and the couple have been held in Changning District Detention Center since then.

    Shanghai Changning District Detention Center where He Binggang and Zhang Yibo have been detained since October 2021. (The Epoch Times)

    During their first five months in detention, He and Zhang’s only way to communicate with the outside world—through their lawyers—was denied by Changning District Detention Center stating it was an order “from the above,” Zhang’s friend told The Epoch Times.

    In early March, the lawyers were finally allowed to talk to their clients over the phone, without video.

    He Binggang

    He Binggang displayed exceptional technical acumen since he was a teenager. His invention of a voice-activated system that helped blind people to use the computer won him a top prize at the age of 15. He passed the programmer’s certificate exam when he was 16, according to Minghui.org, a U.S.-based website that serves as a clearinghouse for the persecution of Falun Gong in China.

    At 18, He was accepted, without having to do an exam, to the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai. Four years later, he was again accepted without an exam to graduate school at the university.

    The Shanghai-based Fudan University logo, on Dec. 18, 2019. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)

    However, everything changed for He after the persecution of Falun Gong started. Fudan University forced him to drop out of graduate school in 2000 because he wouldn’t give up the spiritual practice.

    Since then, He has been arrested, detained, and tortured many times to the point he was almost paralyzed. But whenever he could, he tried to keep abreast of the developing internet technology and became a self-taught computer expert.

    In 2007, He opened a computer and electronics firm after a 6-year prison term.

    He once said, “I was very much into philosophy, searching for the purpose of life until I found my belief [Falun Gong]. I do business honestly, and I don’t fight with others for profit. My heart is at peace, and I made a lot of friends.”

    His business grew rapidly, although He and his company were under police surveillance. The CCP police would not tolerate He’s success in business and in April 2010 planted “illegal items” in his business, to use a pretext to raid his company and put him in detention, according to Zhang’s friend.

    While in detention, He was beaten so badly that he developed spinal compression. He suffered excruciating pain but received no medical care for nine months from July 2010 to March 2011.

    Zhang Yibo

    Zhang Yibo, 43, started practicing Falun Gong soon after the persecution started in 1999, Minghui reported.

    On June 4, 2009, Zhang and her mother Li Yaohua, also a practitioner, were taken from their home by police for distributing information on Falun Gong. Despite rescue efforts by Zhang’s older brother, who is in the United States, and her grandfather, who lives in Taiwan, Zhang and Li were both given prison terms.

    Zhang was sentenced to 18 months. This ended Zhang’s career as a business manager at Siemens Shanghai.

    The postcard from 2009 that Zhang Yibo’s older brother used to rescue Zhang Yibo and their mother Li Yaohua. They were sentenced to 18 months and 3.5 years respectively by a district court in Shanghai. (The Epoch Times)

    Zhang’s mother was given a three-and-a-half-year sentence. She became very ill in prison with sciatic nerve and cervical spine disease, and vomited when she ate. She also had high blood pressure and angina. In March 2010, she was sent to the hospital, but the prison refused to release her on medical parole.

    Li to this day has not recovered her health.

    Continued Persecution

    Now, He Binggang’s health has been deteriorating inside the detention center. He told his lawyer in March that he was suffering from continuous headaches, abnormal digestion, abnormal clotting, and urinary incontinence, the friend told The Epoch Times. At times, he could not move his limbs and could only lie in bed.

    The cases of Zhang and He were forwarded to the Changning District Court on March 15, 2022. Their wait for a court date has been three months and counting.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/23/2022 – 00:05

  • Global 5G Adoption To Hit One Billion In 2022
    Global 5G Adoption To Hit One Billion In 2022

    While mobile internet connections on 4G networks are quick enough for most average users, enabling them to stream HD video or download music, apps and games on the go, 5G, the next evolution of wireless networks, has really taken over in the last year.

    While Samsung and several other smartphone makers released their first 5G handsets in 2019, Apple jumped on the 5G bandwagon in the fall of 2020, bringing the new standard to the entire iPhone 12 product line. As Statista’s Felix Richter reports, having sold more smartphones in the last three months of 2020 than any company ever before in a single quarter, Apple’s 5G debut definitely provided a major boost to the new technology.

    Infographic: Global 5G Adoption to Hit One Billion in 2022 | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    According to estimates from Ericsson’s latest Mobility Report, the number of 5G smartphone subscriptions worldwide will blow past one billion this year, almost doubling from 2021. That would mean 5G reaching that milestone two years earlier than 4G did after its introduction, and, according to Ericsson’s estimates, subscriptions will double once again by 2024.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 23:45

  • California Border Patrol Finds 27 Pounds Of Meth In Booster Seat
    California Border Patrol Finds 27 Pounds Of Meth In Booster Seat

    Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

    U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents in Murrieta, California, arrested the driver of a car carrying 27 pounds of methamphetamine hidden in child booster seats, authorities announced June 17.

    Border Patrol K9 team alert agents to children booster seats, and with further inspection agents found several packages of methamphetamine in Murrieta, Calif., on June 20, 2022. (Courtesy of U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

    The suspect, a U.S. citizen, was driving on Interstate 15, north of a Border Patrol station, on June 15.

    “Drug smugglers will use any means necessary to get their poison onto our streets. Nothing is sacred to them, not even family,” Aaron M. Heitke, Chief Patrol Agent at the San Diego Sector said in a release.

    A man was driving with his wife and four of their children when agents stopped the car. A K9 team was dispatched and located the narcotics in three booster seats inside the car. Several packages were found containing methamphetamine, U.S. Border Patrol reported.

    The estimated street value is $60,000, agents said.

    Agents turned the driver over to the Inland Crackdown Allied Taskforce for prosecution. The vehicle was seized by Border Patrol. The four children and their mother were released.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 23:25

  • China Just Achieved A "Brain Scale" AI Computer
    China Just Achieved A “Brain Scale” AI Computer

    Today in “Skynet does Asia” news, Chinese scientists are boasting about a new supercomputer that is so fast, it can run AI at the speed of a human brain.

    The computer, referred to as the Newest Generation Sunway supercomputer, is now on a par with the latest machine built by the US Department of Energy, called Frontier, according to The Star and the South China Morning Post.

    Earlier this month, Frontier had been named the world’s most powerful computer.

    The Chinese scientists named their AI model ‘bagualu’, which means “alchemist’s pot”. It was trained by the Sunway machine to have 174 trillion parameters, on a par with that of a human brain for the first time, the report says. 

    The Sunway “has a speed of a billion billion operations per second, expressed as 5.3 floating-point operations per second (exaflops), and more than 37 million CPU cores,” the report says. This is four times as many as the Frontier machine.

    It also has nine petabytes of memory, which is enough to hold 2 million different DVD quality movies. Communication between “brain” nodes is so quick it rivals a human changing his or her mind. 

    Potential uses for the AI could be in facial recognition and autonomous driving, the report says. It could also be used for life sciences, chemistry and language processing. (The article left out eventual machine-run world domination, for some reason…)

    The technology debuted at a virtual meeting of Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming 2022, an international conference put together by the Association for Computing Machinery, a U.S. based organization. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 23:05

  • 'Such Courage': Trump Praises Texas GOP For Disavowing Result Of 2020 Presidential Election
    ‘Such Courage’: Trump Praises Texas GOP For Disavowing Result Of 2020 Presidential Election

    Authored by Gary Bai via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Former President Donald Trump has praised the Texas GOP for adopting a platform on June 18 that rejected the results of the 2020 presidential election.

    “Wow! Look at the Great State of Texas and their powerful Republican Party Platform on the 2020 Presidential Election Fraud,” said Trump on Truth Social on June 21.

    “After much research and study, they disavow the national result for President. Such courage, but that’s why Texas is Texas!!! They know that a Country cannot survive without Free and Fair Elections (and STRONG BORDERS!),” he added.

    Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Casper, Wyoming, on May 28, 2022. (Chet Strange/Getty Images)

    The former president’s comments came days after Texas Republicans passed a resolution stating that President Joe Biden was “not legitimately elected,” and that “substantial” election fraud in key metropolitan areas influenced the results of the 2020 presidential election in favor of Biden.

    “We believe that the 2020 election violated Article 1 and 2 of the US Constitution, that various secretaries of state illegally circumvented their state legislatures in conducting their elections in multiple ways, including by allowing ballots to be received after November 3, 2020,” states the GOP’s resolution passed on June 18, the last day of a three-day biennial Texas Republican convention held in Houston, Texas.

    “We believe that substantial election fraud in key metropolitan areas significantly affected the results in five key states in favor of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. We reject the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States.”

    James Wesolek, communications director for the Republican Party of Texas, previously told The Epoch Times that 5,500 delegates attended the convention, which offers Republicans an opportunity to set priorities for the next legislative session in 2023 and elect party leaders.

    The state GOP’s position on the 2020 election results formed part of a new party platform adopted at the convention that also recommends numerous measures to bolster election integrity, including implementing voter photo ID and in-person voting, and tightening the voter registration process.

    The declaration by the nation’s largest GOP has since drawn attracted heavy criticism from media and political figures. The lone star state Republicans, however, have been undeterred.

    “Texas Republicans rightly have no faith in the 2020 election results and we don’t care how many times the elites tell us we have to,” said Matt Rinaldi, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, in a statement published on the Texas GOP’s website on June 20.

    “The Texas Republican Party is raising record funds for election integrity, and we’ve made election integrity a top priority to ensure Texas never goes the way of Pennsylvania, Georgia, or Arizona. We refuse to let Democrats rig the elections in 2022 or 2024.”

    According to the U.S. National Archives, Joe Biden received 306 electoral votes in the 2020 election and Donald Trump received 232 electoral votes. Trump and conservative figures across the country immediately challenged the results, alleging that substantial fraud influenced the 2020 election. Democrats and mainstream media have vociferously denied such allegations, claiming them to be unfounded.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 22:45

  • NASA's Moon Rocket Halted At T-29 Seconds During Countdown Rehearsal 
    NASA’s Moon Rocket Halted At T-29 Seconds During Countdown Rehearsal 

    It only took the fourth attempt for NASA to complete a partial countdown for its huge new moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), scheduled to launch later this year. 

    SLS wrapped up a 50-hour launch simulation known as a “wet dress rehearsal” on Monday evening at the launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after several failed attempts in April, according to NYTimes. 

    SLS has never flown and is the rocket that will power NASA’s Artemis program to send astronauts back to the moon. 

    Monday’s rehearsal concentrated on filling SLS’ fuel tanks. Multiple attempts to fuel the rocket in April ended wet dress rehearsals early. Problems that occurred during the last countdown rehearsals were resolved, but a new leak emerged in a quick disconnect point connecting cables from the mobile launch platform to the SLS. 

    Besides the new leak, the launch countdown for the 322-foot tall rocket stopped at T-29 seconds, just shy of the nine seconds typically before engines ignite. 

    “I think it was a very successful day and again accomplished a majority of the objectives,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the launch director, told reporters on Tuesday. 

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

    Thomas Whitmeyer, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for common exploration systems development, said filling the fuel tanks with propellant and counting down near zero were significant milestones. 

    “We’re looking at the pieces of the puzzle to decide what are the pieces that we didn’t get. 

    “But we also got an awful lot of pieces to the puzzle put together, and we have a pretty good idea of what the puzzle looks like at this point,” Whitmeyer said.

    Here’s the final countdown as the wet dress was halted at T-29 seconds. 

    Now NASA will examine the leak to determine if this wet dress is suitable for the next — a T-9 second target for wet dress launch abort. It will be in preparation to launch the Artemis 1 mission and send an uncrewed Orion spacecraft around the moon. 

    Testing delays might push Artemis 1’s launch to the end of August. The second Artemis flight is a crewed mission around the moon in 2024. In 2025, the third launch will be a crewed lunar landing. 

    Even though NASA plans to put the first ‘woman’ on the moon in 2025, with how woke culture is going, what’s to say the first gender-non-binary astronaut will beat a woman to the lunar surface? 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 22:25

  • TikTok An 'Invasive Tool' For Beijing: Lawmakers Warn Of Threat After Report Shows US Data Accessed In China
    TikTok An ‘Invasive Tool’ For Beijing: Lawmakers Warn Of Threat After Report Shows US Data Accessed In China

    Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The hugely popular short-video app TikTok is but “another invasive tool” for Beijing’s espionage campaign on America, U.S. lawmakers said after news of leaked internal recordings allegedly showing the app’s private U.S. user data being repeatedly accessed in China.

    Signage is displayed at the TikTok Creator’s Lab 2019 event hosted by Bytedance Ltd. in Tokyo on Feb. 16, 2019. (Shiho Fukada/Bloomberg)

    Between at least September 2021 and January, engineers in China had access to the app’s U.S. data, according to leaked recordings of 80 internal meetings cited by BuzzFeed News. In addition, TikTok employees at times had to turn to their colleagues in China to determine how U.S. data was flowing, which the U.S. staff weren’t authorized to independently access, the report said.

    TikTok is owned by Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance and has drawn concern in the United States and elsewhere over whether its data can be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), given that its laws compel companies to cooperate with security agencies when asked.

    “Everything is seen in China,” a member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety department said in a September 2021 meeting, according to the report. The same month, a director addressed a Beijing-based engineer as a “Master Admin” with “access to everything.”

    “No surprise there, TikTok is just another invasive tool for communist China to infiltrate Americans’ personal and proprietary information,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) told The Epoch Times. “This app presents a very real threat to our national security, and the United States should take strong action to stop the CCP’s espionage campaign.”

    The popular China-owned platform has for years sought to minimize its links with Beijing—concerns that triggered efforts from the Trump administration to ban TikTok from operating in the United States. In a number of public statements, the company has maintained that it stores U.S. user data locally and wouldn’t share them with Chinese authorities if asked.

    The Chinese national intelligence law requires all organizations and citizens to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law” and “protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.” Because of that, Chinese firms have no option but to hand over whatever data the authorities demand and to deny doing so publicly, experts have said.

    In August 2021, a state-backed firm linked to the country’s top internet watchdog also took a 1 percent stake in one of ByteDance’s subsidiaries, heightening worries of potential influence Beijing could exercise over the platform.

    People walk past the headquarters of ByteDance, the parent company of video-sharing app TikTok, in Beijing on Sept. 16, 2020. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

    “Any U.S. user data that can be accessed by a ‘private’ company in China can undoubtedly also be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party,” Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) told The Epoch Times.

    In a congressional hearing in October 2021, Michael Beckerman, vice president and head of public policy in the Americas for TikTok, denied that ByteDance employees have access to TikTok user data. He told lawmakers that “a world-renowned U.S.-based security team” handles access to U.S. user data, and it stores backups in Singapore.

    The leaked recordings, Zeldin said, suggest that Beckerman “possibly lied to Congress, which is a felony.”

    “Even the possibility that the private data of millions of Americans, many of them only teenagers, was accessed by the Chinese government and could have been used for any number of the CCP’s nefarious activities should set off alarm bells in our government and private sector, and for anyone who uses this app,” he said.

    “The U.S. government needs to urgently determine what data was collected, what the Chinese government had access to, and how the data has been used.”

    Shortly before the June 17 Buzzfeed article, TikTok announced that it was migrating all U.S. user traffic to Oracle servers in the United States. It added that it would continue to use its U.S. and Singapore data centers for backup storage, but it expects to delete U.S. users’ data from those sites over time.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 22:05

  • American Airlines Ending Service In These Three US Cities Amid Pilot Shortage 
    American Airlines Ending Service In These Three US Cities Amid Pilot Shortage 

    Right before the Memorial Day holiday — the start of the busiest US travel season — we outlined major airlines were axing flights from their schedules. Now carriers are at it again, with American Airlines saying it’ll eliminate service to three cities (Islip and Ithaca, New York, and Toledo, Ohio) after the Labor Day holiday weekend due to staffing shortages. 

    “We’re extremely grateful for the care and service our team members provided to our customers in Islip, Ithaca, and Toledo, and are working closely with them during this time,” American Airlines said in a statement to Fox Business.

    The airline blamed the “difficult” decision to slash service because of a shortage of pilots that has plagued the industry at a time when travel demand is robust. 

    We recently noted Delta Air Lines, JetBlue, and Alaska Airlines removed flights to minimize disruptions and bounce back faster when challenges arise, though, as of last weekend, more than 10,000 flights were canceled due to staffing woes, and airlines were paralyzed to resolve issues that left some travelers stuck at airports for more than 24 hours. 

    United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby warned last month that the “pilot shortage for the industry is real” and said airlines are short more than 12,000 pilots. He said training new pilots take years, and “there’s no quick fix.” 

    Meanwhile, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned airlines that the federal government might take action if disruptions continue:

    “That is happening to a lot of people, and that is exactly why we are paying close attention here to what can be done and how to make sure that the airlines are delivering,” Buttigieg said on Saturday.

    TSA checkpoint data traveler throughput shows no signs of demand destruction, meaning travel chaos because of pilot shortages could be a weekly occurrence this summer. 

    All this comes as ticket prices are sky-high, and reduced flights make it harder and harder to catch flights to small metro areas. And forget traveling by car. The national average for regular gas is still priced at around $5 a gallon. 

    What a mess… 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 21:45

  • Logistics Giant DB Schenker Announces Layoffs In Texas
    Logistics Giant DB Schenker Announces Layoffs In Texas

    By Noi Mahoney of Freightwaves

    DB Schenker said it’s laying off 130 employees from a Kraft Heinz distribution center near Fort Worth, Texas, according to a notice sent to state officials Tuesday.

    “Kraft has notified us that they will be closing in Fort Worth, effective June 26,” according to a notice filed with the Texas Workforce Commission.

    “The layoffs are permanent. [DB Schenker] has no plans at this time to operate at the Fort Worth site.”

    Kraft Heinz said it’s not closing the distribution center, which will remain open and employs almost 200 workers.

    “Recent reports related to closing our product distribution facility located near Fort Worth are inaccurate,” Kraft said in an email to FreightWaves.

    “The Kraft Heinz distribution center will remain open and we will continue to ship Kraft Heinz products to customers in the region.”

    Kraft operates a 747,528-square-foot regional distribution center in Haslett, just north of Fort Worth. The company uses the facility as product storage for its logistics operations for all of the southwestern U.S., according to a 2011 article in the Dallas Morning News.

    Pittsburgh-based Kraft Heinz said it’s ending its relationship with DB Schenker as the third party logistics provider for the facility.

    “DHL will serve as the new logistics provider, effective June 26,” Kraft Foods said.

    DHL is a German logistics company providing global transportation services. Germany-based DB Schenker is the logistics division of German rail operator Deutsche Bahn.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 21:25

  • Sri Lanka’s Economy Has 'Completely Collapsed': PM
    Sri Lanka’s Economy Has ‘Completely Collapsed’: PM

    Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Sri Lanka’s prime minister is increasing efforts to revive the country’s “completely collapsed” economy amid a lack of foreign exchange reserves and severe shortages of essential items.

    “We are now facing a far more serious situation beyond the mere shortages of fuel, gas, electricity, and food. Our economy has faced a complete collapse,” Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe told parliament on June 22.

    “It is no easy task to revive a country with a completely collapsed economy, especially one that is dangerously low on foreign reserves,” he said.

    Sri Lanka’s new Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe (C) visits a Buddhist temple after his swearing in ceremony in Colombo on May 12, 2022. (Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images)

    Sri Lanka will hold a credit aid conference with India, China, and Japan for loan packages. Wickremesinghe said the goal is to reach a “general consensus” on the lending processes as each country has its own system for granting loans.

    “However, there have been some conflicts and disagreements between us in the recent past. We are working towards resolving these and fostering friendly relations once again,” he added.

    The government will also seek help from the United States, with representatives from the U.S. Treasury Department visiting Sri Lanka next week.

    Australia said it would provide Sri Lanka with a $50 million development-assistance package following Wickremesinghe’s meeting with Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil on Monday.

    Wickremesinghe said that Sri Lanka has received a $4 billion credit line from India and requested additional loan assistance from the neighboring country.

    A top-level Indian delegation is expected to meet with Sri Lankan leaders on June 23 to discuss extending an additional $500 million credit line to Sri Lanka for the purchase of oil, local media Daily Mirror reported.

    “But even India will not be able to continuously support us in this manner. Even their assistance has its limits. On the other hand, we too must have a plan to repay these loans. These are not charitable donations,” he added.

    Wickremesinghe said that negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had made progress, with the government expecting to reach an official level agreement with the IMF by the end of July.

    “If we receive the IMF seal of approval, the world will once again trust us. It will help us to secure loan assistance as well as low-interest loans from other countries in the world,” he said.

    “The Ceylon Petroleum Corporation is $700 million in debt. As a result, no country or organization in the world is willing to provide fuel to us. They are even reluctant to provide fuel for cash,” Wickremesinghe said.

    Sri Lanka had also requested China to amend the terms of a $1.5 billion yuan-denominated swap facility that it signed last year, which stipulates that the fund can only be used provided that Sri Lanka has enough foreign reserves to last three months.

    Men on a scooter ride past the burnt buses near Sri Lanka’s former prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s official residence “Temple Trees,” a day after they were torched by protesters in Colombo on May 10, 2022. (Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images)

    The country is on the verge of bankruptcy, with its foreign exchange reserves plummeting by 70 percent in the past two years. The government stated on April 12 that it was suspending foreign debt repayments.

    About 10 percent of Sri Lanka’s $51 billion external debt is owed to China, and the government had requested help from China to restructure its debt obligations.

    Wickremesinghe said that Sri Lanka would not be experiencing its worst economic crisis in decades if the government had acted sooner.

    “If steps had at least been taken to slow down the collapse of the economy at the beginning, we would not be facing this difficult situation today. But we lost out on this opportunity. We are now seeing signs of a possible fall into the very bottom,” he said.

    Sri Lankans during a protest outside the president’s office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on April 11, 2022. (Eranga Jayawardena/AP Photo)

    Thousands of Sri Lankans have taken to the streets to protest the government’s mishandling of the country’s economic crisis, leading to the resignation of then-Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa on May 9.

    The country’s unprecedented economic crisis has left millions of its people in need of life-saving aid, with the severe shortages of essential medicines and frequent power cuts jeopardizing the country’s health care system.

    The United Nations launched a worldwide public appeal on June 9 to provide $47.2 million of aid between June and September to 1.7 million people whose livelihoods and food security are most at risk.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 20:45

  • Uvalde Police Chief Put On Administrative Leave "Effective Immediately"
    Uvalde Police Chief Put On Administrative Leave “Effective Immediately”

    Uvalde police chief Pete Arredondo was put on administrative leave Wednesday – just one day after the the Austin American Statesman and KVUE released a bombshell report which revealed that officers were well equipped to neutralize Robb Elementary mass shooter Salvador Ramos – yet were ordered not to engage for most of the 77 minutes they were on scene.

    Ramos, 18, killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers while police – who we now know had semiautomatic rifles and ballistic shields – waited outside until a member of the Border Patrol’s tactical unit (BORTAC) ignored orders and entered the classroom, killing Ramos.

    Arredondo’s suspension is effective immediately according to Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District superintendent Hal Harrell, and is due to “the lack of clarity that remains,” as well as the “unknown timing of when I will receive the results of the investigations.” Harrell had initially said he would wait to make any personnel decisions until after the investigation was complete.

    More via the Texas Tribune:

    In the weeks since the tragedy in Uvalde, questions have swirled around the actions of police and whether some lives could have been saved if officers confronted the barricaded gunman sooner. Authorities have shared conflicting information about who was in charge, who confronted the shooter and when. A debate over whether the locked classroom doors could be breached gave way to the discovery that they may never have been locked at all.

    Revelations have trickled out in the press: The New York Times has described officers’ doubts about the decision to wait; breakdowns in communications and tactics; and the fact that officers held off from the confrontation even though they knew people were injured, and possibly dying, inside. The San Antonio Express-News reported that there is no evidence that officers tried the doors on rooms 111 and 112 — contradicting a key assertion by the Uvalde schools police chief, Pete Arredondo, who told The Texas Tribune that officers tried the doors, found them locked and had to wait for a master key to unlock them. On Monday evening, the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE-TV revealed that the officers, in effect, had more than enough firepower, equipment and motivation to breach the classrooms.

    According to Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Arredondo made “the wrong decision” by not breaching the classrooms during the incident. Arredondo’s excuse? He thought the shooter was barricaded inside and that it was not an active-shooter situation. Arredondo’s lawyer, George Hyde, said his client didn’t think he was the incident commander on the scene, since he was acting as a first responder to the shooting.

    Meanwhile, Arredondo was sworn in as a city council member at the end of last month, and was accused of ignoring state investigators’ requests for comment during their initial probe into the shooting. The police chief hit back, saying that he was open to cooperation as long as he can see his previous transcripts first, according to Axios.

    Lieutenant Mike Hernandez will assume the duties of the police chief.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 20:25

  • Half Of Americans Didn't Save During Pandemic, Leaving No "Savings Cushion" Amid Recession Fears
    Half Of Americans Didn’t Save During Pandemic, Leaving No “Savings Cushion” Amid Recession Fears

    Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

    Roughly half of Americans did not build up savings during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new survey by YouGov, as fears mount that a recession could be looming on the horizon.

    YouGov’s survey covered 20,000 adults across 18 major economies including Sweden, Spain, Australia, China, and India, and challenges the idea that households within the world’s major economies have a savings cushion that could bolster spending amid a potential economic downturn.

    According to the survey, shared exclusively with Bloomberg, 51 percent of respondents stated that they had not added to their savings during the global pandemic, with Germany seeing the lowest rate of savings at 39 percent, while Italy stood at 40 percent.

    The United States, United Kingdom, and Canada also saw results below 50 percent when respondents were asked if they had added to their savings.

    Elsewhere, the survey showed that of those who did manage to build up their savings during the pandemic, just 53 percent have managed to hold onto them, while 26 percent have spent the savings on bills or other essential purchases.

    Another 13 percent said they spent the cash on holidays and social events after lockdown restrictions were lifted, while 19 percent used their savings on home improvements or to move into a new house.

    The latest survey comes as U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said June 19 that she expects the U.S. economy to slow in the months ahead, but remained optimistic that a recession is “not at all inevitable,” despite concerns among economists that a downturn is on the horizon.

    In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Yellen said that consumer spending remains strong, in spite of increased prices for everything from fuel to food, and that bank balances among Americans remain “high,” allowing for them to weather increased inflation.

    “It’s clear that most consumers, even lower-income households, continue to have buffer stocks of savings that will enable them to maintain spending,” Yellen said.

    “So I don’t see a drop-off in consumer spending as a likely cause of the recession in the months ahead, and the labor market is very strong, arguably the strongest of the postwar period.”

    The national saving rate was about 4.4 percent in April 2022, the lowest since September 2008, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published on May 27.

    Separate data from Northwestern Mutual’s 2022 Planning & Progress Study showed that the average amount of personal savings dropped 15 percent from $73,100 in 2021 to $62,086 in 2022, although year-over-year numbers show that savings levels remain high, with 60 percent of those surveyed stating that they’d been able to build up their personal savings over the past two years.

    However, inflation has reached a 40-year-high, surging to 8.6 percent in May, leaving Americans splashing out more for everyday essentials.

    In an effort to bring down those inflation figures, the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate three-quarters of a percentage point on June 15 and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said he expects “either a 50-basis-point or a 75-basis-point increase” at the July meeting.

    “Overall economic activity appears to have picked up after edging down in the first quarter,” the Federal Open Market Committee said on June 15. “Job gains have been robust in recent months, and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation remains elevated, reflecting supply and demand imbalances related to the pandemic, higher energy prices, and broader price pressures.”

    “The Committee is strongly committed to returning inflation to its 2 percent objective,” the statement added.

    Despite the concerns that lay ahead, Northwestern Mutual’s report found that 73 percent of American adults say they’ve adopted better financial habits due to the COVID-19 pandemic and all 73 percent expect to continue with those habits going forward, while 35 percent believe inflation will subside this year.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 20:05

  • Digital Afterlife Program: Alexa Will Soon Read Stories As Your Dead Grandma 
    Digital Afterlife Program: Alexa Will Soon Read Stories As Your Dead Grandma 

    Amazon’s global AI event for machine learning, automation, robotics, and space is underway at ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. One of the top scientists in charge of the smart assistant “Alexa” revealed to the audience that it would soon be able to learn the voice of a deceased loved one.

    TechCrunch reports Amazon’s Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, Rohit Prasad, spoke at the Amazon re:MARS 2022 this week and said an upcoming Alexa feature would synthesize short audio of a loved one into longer speech. He used a scenario of Alexa learning the voice of a dead grandmother that can then be used to read a bedtime story to a grandson. 

    Prasad said the new technology is awe-inspiring and can achieve high-quality audio output with just one minute of learning speech. 

    “This required inventions where we had to learn to produce a high-quality voice with less than a minute of recording versus hours of recording the studio.

    “The way we made it happen is by framing the problem as a voice conversion task and not a speech generation path. We are on questionably, living in the golden era of AI, where our dreams and science,” he said. 

    TechCrunch points out that details about the upcoming feature are limited, and there’s no timeline on when it will be released. 

    The technology sounds like the beginning of a “digital afterlife program,” made famous by the Amazon Prime Video show “Upload.”  

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 19:45

  • Texas Woman Pleads Guilty To 26 Counts Of Voter Fraud In 'Vote-Harvesting' Operation
    Texas Woman Pleads Guilty To 26 Counts Of Voter Fraud In ‘Vote-Harvesting’ Operation

    Authored by Gary Bai via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A Texas woman pleaded guilty on June 16 to 26 counts of voter fraud committed during a local water board election in 2018.

    A poll worker sorts ballots inside the Maricopa County Election Department in Phoenix, on Nov. 5, 2020. (Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty Images)

    Monica Mendez, 36, of Port Lavaca, Texas, ran a “vote-harvesting operation on behalf of a subsidized housing corporation in order to influence the outcome of a utility board election,” the Texas Attorney General’s (AG) Office said in a June 17 statement. The election in question was the 2018 Victoria County Water Control and Improvement District 1 Election in Bloomington, Texas.

    Mendez pleaded guilty to 26 felony counts of voter fraud, including three counts of illegal voting, eight counts of election fraud, seven counts of assisting a voter to submit a ballot by mail, and eight counts of unlawful possession of a mail ballot, the office stated.

    Victoria County District Judge Eli Garza sentenced Mendez to five years of deferred adjudication probation.

    Victoria County Elections Administrator Margetta Hill told The Epoch Times on June 20 that Mendez worked as a volunteer deputy registrar voter and assisted residents to register to vote during Bloomington’s 2018 water board election.

    Mendez was signing applications to register to vote and also applications to vote by mail, Hill said.

    According to a local media outlet, the Victoria Advocate, the 2018 water board election appeared on the radar of the AG’s office after about 275 of the 2,500 people who registered to vote used the same mailing address, which is associated with rental properties linked to a local housing nonprofit called ALMS. The nonprofit operates as La Raza Unidos, the outlet reported.

    According to the nonprofit’s 2018 tax filings, La Raza Unidos described its mission as distributing “new and gently used clothing to men, women, and children, free of charge.”

    Catherine Engelbrecht, founder and president of Texas election integrity group True the Vote, told The Epoch Times that this case is just the tip of the iceberg.

    “This is not about one renegade person harvesting ballots,” Engelbrecht said. “It’s happening in hundreds of communities all over the country.

    “And this is just one front of a thousand-front war on our elections.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 19:25

  • Watch: Over 1,300 Southwest Pilots Picket Outside Love Field
    Watch: Over 1,300 Southwest Pilots Picket Outside Love Field

    Over 1,300 pissed off Southwest Airlines pilots picketed outside of Dallas Love Field on Tuesday, demanding better treatment from the airline for both passengers and employees.

    The protest, led by the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association – the union representing the pilots – called the demonstration an “informal picket” to raise awareness over pilot fatigue, stress, the pilot shortage and other issues that have caused chaos across the country, according to NBCDFW.

    “Our pilots have had to address the fatigue issue with management publicly, which is something that we never want to do, but ultimately, our pilots have been tired and have been trying to do everything they can,” said Capt. Casey Murray, a pilot and president of the SWA Pilots Association. “Our contract is going to provide a framework to correct some of these inefficiencies we are actually seeing on a day-to-day basis and that our guests feel every day.”

    “I think all of our guests have seen where pilots aren’t in position. They are taking delays, cancellations at times.“

    According to Fox4, pilots are sick of having to tell passengers “I’m sorry” over delays and cancellations on just about every flight.

    The union has warned that this will be a challenging travel season as the industry grapples with pilot shortages, poor scheduling, pressure to work overtime, and insufficient downtime between flights.

    According to SMU economist Mike Davis, there’s no easy fix.

    “There’s an awful lot of forces of nature that the airlines have to deal with. The pilot shortage… the airlines can’t automatically create people who are good pilots. It takes a long time and at the end of the day the cost of all this mess is going to be born by the consumer,” he said.

    Southwest Airlines picketing on Mockingbird land in February 2016 amid contract negotiations with the Dallas-based carrier. The Southwest Airlines Pilots Association said more than 800 pilots have already signed up to demonstrate at Dallas Love Field and along Mockingbird Lane on June 21.(Jae S. Lee / Dallas Morning News)

    Meanwhile, American Airlines announced earlier this week that it’s terminating service to three cities due to staffing shortages – Islip and Ithaca, NY and Toledo, Ohio.

    “The airlines, if they do cut back on their schedules it’s going to make it much more difficult to book a flight and when you can find a flight it’s going to be more expensive,” said Davis.

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 19:05

  • Iran's Oil Exports Surge In June
    Iran’s Oil Exports Surge In June

    By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

    Iran’s crude oil exports are estimated to have jumped to an average of 961,000 barrels per day (bpd) between June 1 and June 19, according to data from seaborne oil trade analytics company Petro-Logistics cited by commodity analyst Giovanni Staunovo.

    To compare, the average crude oil exports out of Iran stood at 461,000 bpd for the entire month of May, per Petro-Logistics data. 

    Despite the diplomatic impasse over the nuclear deal, Iran has been preparing to rejoin the global oil market. The country has boosted production, as well as exports to its main market, China. If a new deal is reached between Iran and the world powers, the flow of Iranian oil abroad could increase by between 500,000 bpd and 1 million bpd, according to analysts.  

    China has been the main outlet for Iranian crude oil exports since the U.S. re-imposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic’s oil industry in 2018 when then-President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the so-called Iranian nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

    Most recently, Iran on Monday blamed the U.S. for the stalled talks on the revival of the nuclear deal.

    China has never stopped importing Iranian crude since 2018, and even the Chinese General Administration of Customs officially reported earlier this week that China did indeed import Iranian crude in May.

    Last week, China received 2 million barrels of Iranian crude, most likely with the purpose of sending the oil to state reserves, tanker-tracking firms told Reuters on Wednesday.

    According to Reuters, the crude cargo, delivered by a tanker owned by the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC), would be the fourth cargo to go to state reserves that China has imported since the end of last year. The shipment is also likely to be reported in the Chinese crude import data for June when figures are released in July.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 18:45

  • JPMorgan Fires Hundreds Of Mortgage Bankers As Housing Market Breaks
    JPMorgan Fires Hundreds Of Mortgage Bankers As Housing Market Breaks

    Late last week we warned that according to real-time indicators, such as soaring mortgage rates and collapsing demand, a housing market crash appeared inevitable. Today we got the clearest sign that the banks agree when out of the blue – or rather out of the “hurricane” –  JPMorgan announced it was cutting over a thousand home-lending employees and reassigning hundreds more after soaring interest rates dried up mortgage demand. 

    Jamie Dimon pulled off his best Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg impression when the bank decided that more than 1,000 workers will be affected by the slowdown in housing, with roughly half fired and the other half moved to other (less paying) divisions within the bank, Bloomberg reports.

    “Our staffing decision this week was a result of cyclical changes in the mortgage market,” a JPM spokesperson said while probably eyeing the record move in the 30Y mortgage which has doubled from just over 3% at the start of the year to a stunning 6.13%, a move which has unleashed an affordability crisis. 

    JPM spokesperson continued: “We were able to proactively move many impacted employees to new roles within the firm, and are working to help the remaining affected employees find new employment within Chase and externally.”

    Translation: we made the remaining mortgage bankers serve dessert in the cafeteria, and in a few weeks they will all be quietly fired for gross incompetence.

    It’s not just JPM: Wells Fargo, recently the biggest mortgage lender among US banks (nobody knows anymore what Wells really does any more with all the rampant crime and corruption at the bank), has also been laying off and reassigning employees in its home-lending division, Bloomberg also reported. And earlier this month, real-estate giants such as  Compass and Redfin also announced plans to trim their workforces amid the cooling US housing market. Compass said in a regulatory filing that it will cut about 10% of its workforce, or about 450 employees, while Redfin plans to layoff about 6%, amounting to roughly 470 workers.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 18:25

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jun 22

Today’s News 22nd June 2022

  • European Power Prices Spike As Heat Dome Strains Grid 
    European Power Prices Spike As Heat Dome Strains Grid 

    European day-ahead power prices continue to soar for the third day due to an early-season heat wave driving up cooling demand, lack of renewable energy generation, declining nuclear power, and soaring natural gas costs. 

    Large swaths of Europe over the weekend experienced temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius). The hottest temperatures were from Spain to Germany to France. 

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    Bloomberg notes power grids were under stress as wind generation in Germany and Italy plunged, forcing the need to increase the capacity of fossil fuel power generators to make up for the lost power. This placed a bid under electricity prices as the cost to generate power soars because of tightening supplies due to declining Russian flows. 

    “Already high gas prices, combined with low wind output will require less efficient, higher cost gas plants to fire up, pushing up prices,” BloombergNEF’s Andreas Gandolfo said. 

    Day-ahead power prices in France traded at 383.14 euros ($404.08) a megawatt-hour, up more than 64% from last week. 

    Besides tight fossil fuel supplies and a lack of renewable power from Germany and Italy, half of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are offline. France was the biggest net exporter of power last year, supplying many European countries. 

    French nuclear power is needed when renewable energy is lacking. Also, Brussels’ drive for net-zero carbon emissions and weening off Russian fossil fuels has made the energy crisis on the continent worse. 

    To avert a more profound crisis, German Vice-Chancellor and Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Sunday that the country is increasing coal generation to increase power output. 

    The decision comes just days after Russian gas company Gazprom announced that it was reducing supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for “technical reasons.”

    Meanwhile, the Netherlands is following Germany to increase coal-fired power station output to prevent an energy crisis (Greta Thunberg isn’t going to be happy about this). 

    A perfect storm of factors shows Europe’s power grid is vulnerable to blackouts this summer unless more energy generating capacity can be restored. So far, the continent is desperately trying to restart fossil fuel power units after retiring them for the failed green transition. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/22/2022 – 02:45

  • Zuesse: How Did America Become Ruled By Its Military-Industrial Complex?
    Zuesse: How Did America Become Ruled By Its Military-Industrial Complex?

    Authored by Eric Zuesse,

    The U.S. Government spends on its military, annually, in not just its ‘Defense’ Department, but all of its departments taken together, around $1.5 trillion dollars.  (Much of that money is hidden in the Treasury Department and others, in order to convey to the public the false idea that ‘only’ around 800 billion dollars annually is now being spent for the U.S. military.)

    On 25 April 2022, the Stockholm Internal Peace Research Foundation (SIPRI) headlined “World military expenditure passes $2 trillion for first time”, and reported that, “US military spending amounted to $801 billion in 2021, a drop of 1.4 per cent from 2020. The US military burden decreased slightly from 3.7 per cent of GDP in 2020 to 3.5 per cent in 2021.” However, they did not include the full U.S. figure, but only the portions of it that are being paid out by the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department. Consequently, a more realistic global total would have been around $2.8 trillion, which is around twice the approximately $1.5T U.S. annual military expenditure. All of the world’s other 172 calculated countries, together, had spent an amount approximately equivalent to that.

    Prior to the creation by U.S. President Harry S. Truman of the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department, on 18 September 1947, replacing the U.S. War Department that had been created on 7 August 1789 by America’s Founders (shortly after the U.S. Constitution had become effective on 4 March 1789), the U.S. was a democracy — however flawed, but a real one, nevertheless.

    The U.S. actually began its transformation into a dictatorship (serving the owners of the military corporations and of their extraction-corporate dependencies such as Chevron) when, on 25 July 1945, Truman decided that if the U.S. wouldn’t conquer the Soviet Union, then the Soviet Union would conquer the U.S., and, so, he started the Cold War, on that date, determined that his top priority as the U.S. President, would be to place the U.S. Government onto a virtually permanent war-footing, even though World War II against imperialistic fascisms (the “Axis” powers) was just about to end at that time, and would clearly be a victory for the U.S. allies — mainly, the Soviet Union, and the UK empire.

    Truman, very much unlike his immediate predecessor, FDR, who had been a passionately committed anti-imperialist, had previously been on the fence about empires; but, going forward after that date, he would be totally committed to making the entire world into the first-ever single global empire, which would be in control over the entire planet by the U.S. Government and shared only by its ‘allies’ (vassal nations). That was Truman’s American dream, and it contrasted starkly against FDR’s dream of a future United Nations that would possess a global monopoly on all strategic weaponry and serve as a democratic global federal republic of all nations, each of which nation would have its own legal system for internal affairs, but all of which nations would be subject to the sole authority of the United Nations regarding all international matters. Truman despised FDR and got rid of FDR’s entire Cabinet and close advisors, within less than two years.

    Truman enormously admired General Dwight Eisenhower, whose advice to him had clinched in Truman’s mind on 25 July 1945 that Winston Churchill was right that if the U.S. would not conquer the Soviet Union, then the Soviet Union would conquer the United States.

    (Eisenhower, at the very end of his own Presidency, warned Americans against the military-industrial complex that Truman and he himself had jointly created. He was one of history’s slickest liars, and wanted history to remember him as having been a man of peace. He was actually just as much of an imperialist as Truman had been.)

    And that decision, by Truman, on that date, is what placed the U.S. Government inexorably onto the path toward future rule by a military-industrial complex that would rape the U.S. Constitution — undo the most important achievement of America’s Founders.

    The U.S. Constitution had been written by people who loathed the very concept of “standing armies” — any permanent-war government. They had rebelled against an empire, and condemned all empires. This is the reason why they did everything within their power to design a Government that would prohibit any such thing here. And their Government, designed in this way, served the nation well throughout the years from 1789-1947, after which their Constitution gradually became practically abandoned.

    A document dated 21 January 1946 from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and titled “STATEMENT OF EFFECT OF ATOMIC WEAPONS ON NATIONAL SECURITY AND MILITARY ORGANIZATION”, opened with a “Memorandum by the Chief of Staff, U.S. Army,” which itself opened:

    Upon reading the Joint Strategic Survey Committee’s statement on the above subject (J.C.S. 1477/5), I obtained a somewhat unfavorable over-all impression. While most of the specific statements made seem reasonable, the over-all tone seems to depreciate the importance of of the development of atomic weapons and to insist unnecessarily strongly that the conventional armed services will not be eliminated. While I agree entirely, so far as the immediate future is concerned, with the latter concept, I have not felt that there is strong public demand at the present that the services be in fact eliminated. The general tone of the statement might therefore be misconstrued by Congress and the public, and be looked upon as an indication of reactionism on the part of the military and an unwillingness under any circumstances to reduce the size of the military establishment.

    That was at a time when the widespread American assumption was that there would continue to be no standing army in this country.

    Within less than two years of FDR’s death on 12 April 1945, such a permanent-war U.S. Government became officially created. FDR’s plan for a U.N. that would internationally outlaw all empires became replaced by Truman’s plan for an America that would itself become what Hitler, himself, had only aspired to create: the world’s very first all-encompassing global empire. Truman’s dream is today’s American dream, in today’s Washington DC; and here was how the Nobel Peace-Prize-winning U.S. President, Barack Obama (the other of history’s slickest liars), stated it to graduating West Point cadets, on 28 May 2014:

    The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

    It’s endlessly onward and upward, for the U.S. All other nations are “dispensable.” And that objective is backed-up now, by half of the world’s military expenditures.

    This is how it happened. It happened by deceit, at every step of the way.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 23:40

  • Mapping The Migration Of The World's Millionaires
    Mapping The Migration Of The World’s Millionaires

    Throughout 2022, a projected 88,000 millionaires will move to a new country, according to the latest Henley Global Citizens Report.

    Which countries are these millionaires moving to, and where in the world are they coming from?

    This graphic below, created by Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang and Nick Routley, maps the migration of high net worth individuals (HNWIs)—people with a net worth of over US$1 million—showing where rich people are flocking, and where they’re fleeing.

    Migration of Millionaires is Back

    Before diving into the country-specific data, it’s worth taking a step back to look at overall millionaire migration trends, and how things are changing this year.

    2020 saw a drastic drop in the number of millionaire migrants, as pandemic-induced lockdowns kept people from leaving their home countries—and at times, their homes in general.

    But as restrictions ease and countries begin to open up their borders again, the migration of millionaires is beginning to gather steam once again:

    Below, we’ll dive into which countries are seeing the highest number of HNWI migrants, and which ones are losing the most HNWIs.

    Which Countries Are Millionaires Leaving?

    There are a plethora of reasons why the ultra-rich move countries. Escaping conflict is one of them, which is why it’s no surprise to see Russia and Ukraine are projected to see some of the biggest emigration numbers by the end of 2022.

     

    Figures rounded to the nearest 100.

     

    While Russia is expected to see 15,000 millionaires leaving the country, Ukraine is projected to experience the highest loss in percentage terms—a whopping 42% of its HNWIs could leave the country by the end of 2022.

    China could also see a big loss in its millionaire population, with a projected loss of 10,000.
    According to Andrew Amoils, Head of Research at New World Wealth, this could be more damaging to the country than in previous years, since general wealth growth in China has declined recently.

    Where Are The Ultra-Rich Moving?

    The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has become a millionaire magnet, with a projected 4,000 HNWIs flowing into the country by the end of 2022. This influx of ultra-wealthy people is partly because of the country’s accommodating immigration policies that are specially tailored to attract private wealth and international talent.

     

    Australia continues to attract HNWIs, coming in second behind the UAE. According to New World Wealth, approximately 80,000 millionaires have moved to the Land Down Under in the last two decades.

     

    A few things that attract migrants to Australia are the country’s low costs of healthcare, its lack of inheritance tax, and its generally prosperous economy.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 23:20

  • US Investors Continue To Fund The Chinese Military
    US Investors Continue To Fund The Chinese Military

    Op-Ed authored by Antonio Graceffo via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The U.S. Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued an online FAQ allowing Americans to continue funding China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

    American flags fly outside the New York Stock Exchange in the Financial District in New York, on Jan. 14, 2022. (Mary Altaffer/AP Photo)

    The PLA is on the verge of launching its third aircraft carrier as part of its $9 billion dollar carrier program. This hefty price tag represents a small fraction of money the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has received from U.S. investors.

    China “exploits United States investors to finance the development and modernization of its military” wrote then-U.S. President Donald Trump on Nov. 12, 2020, in an executive order banning investment in Chinese stocks linked to the PLA. In the order, Trump accurately said that the key to the CCP’s military and intelligence development is the funding it receives from the U.S. private economy.

    According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, there were 261 Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges with a combined value of $1.4 trillion as of March 2022.

    Nina Xiang of China Money Network confirmed Trump’s statement that China depends on the United States to fund its development. The BBC also reported Xiang saying that losing access to U.S. markets would have a “devastating impact on China’s innovation ecosystem and future development.”

    The pockets of U.S. investors are deep and the CCP would have difficulty covering China’s $229 billion defense budget if state-linked firms were kicked off of U.S. exchanges. The two major exchanges in New York, the NYSE and the NASDAQ, are four times the size of the combined Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges.

    In a continuation of Trump’s 2020 executive order, President Joe Biden issued an executive order this month adding 59 PLA-linked Chinese companies to the U.S. blacklist. Biden’s executive order also mandated a one-year deadline for Americans to divest themselves from the blacklisted stocks.

    On June 1, just two days before the deadline, the OFAC issued an online FAQ regarding blacklisted entities, which caused a great deal of confusion.

    The FAQ states: “No. E.O. 13959, as amended, does not require U.S. financial institutions to block transactions. However, transactions that would be prohibited under E.O. 13959, as amended (including an attempted sale of covered securities by a U.S. person made to effect the divestment of CMIC securities after the 365-day divestment period), must be rejected and reported to OFAC within 10 business days.”

    From this statement, it is unclear if Americans must adhere to the 365-day deadline to divest themselves of blacklisted stocks.

    The FAQ goes on to say, “Consistent with FAQ 863, U.S. financial institutions may continue to intermediate purchases or sales by or from non-U.S. persons to or for non-U.S. persons.” It also says that U.S. entities may continue to receive dividends from these investments.

    The ambiguity of the FAQ has been understood differently by various law firms. Ropes & Gray, a global law firm, interpreted the order as meaning that U.S. investors had to divest of the blacklisted securities by June 3, although it is unclear what the penalty would be should they fail to do so.

    In contrast, Norton Rose Fulbright told its clients that the deadline is no longer in force. And this seems consistent with part of the FAQ stating, “U.S. persons are not required to divest their holdings of CMIC securities during the relevant 365-day divestment period and may continue to hold such securities after the divestment period.”

    Investment banks also had differing reactions to the executive orders. Morgan Stanley sold off a large number of shares in one of the blacklisted firms, Zhonghang Electronic Measuring, dropping from being the eight largest shareholder to no longer being in the top 10 as of March 31.

    A DJI Mavic 2 Pro and DJi Mavic Mini made by the Chinese drone maker fly near each other in Miami, Fla, on Dec. 15, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

    Other investment banks and investors have chosen to hold their positions, waiting and seeing how the rules and enforcement play out. However, it is apparent that many investors have decided to divest themselves of the stocks as the shares of Zhonghang and many other blacklisted firms have dropped significantly in value since last June.

    While it is unclear when, if ever, Americans must divest themselves of existing shares of blacklisted firms, U.S. entities are barred from purchasing new investments in the CCP’s military-industrial complex under the executive orders. And this prohibition extends to firms working in research with applications for military, intelligence, and security.

    As for divestment, Derek Scissors, a Republican appointee to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, told Nikkei on June 7 that those who are still holding the blacklisted securities are in a wait-and-see mode.

    But some investors were not in a hurry to sell shares that are losing value. Perhaps the holdouts may wind up the winners. Meanwhile, the CCP continues using U.S. money to fund its military modernization. Leading global agency for open-source defense intelligence Janes estimates that the CCP’s defense budget may actually be $58 billion more than the official number, bringing the total to $287.8 billion. And for at least the immediate future, they can rely on U.S. investors to keep footing the bill.

    Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or Zero Hedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 23:00

  • The State Of Global War (And Peace)
    The State Of Global War (And Peace)

    The 2022 edition of the Global Peace Index released by The Institute for Economics and Peace has found that global peacefulness has declined for the eleventh time in the last 14 years. It ranks peace levels using 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators across 163 independent states and territories, covering 99.7 percent of the world’s population.

    This time around, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, peace has deteriorated in 71 countries while the situation has improved in 90.

    Infographic: The State of Global Peace | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Iceland was once again the top-ranked country for peace in 2022, a position it has held since 2008. It is joined at the top of the index by New Zeland, Ireland, Denmark, Austria and Portugal. By contrast, the United States only managed to land in spot 129. Afghanistan was at the very bottom of the index, preceded by Yemen and Syria.

    The current conflict in Ukraine had the country fall 17 spots into rank 153 out of 163. Other countries deteriorated more, however, as the situation in Ukraine had already been ranked poorly due to the conflict in Eastern Ukraine that preceeded the Russian invasion.

    The countries falling the most on the index in 2022 compared to one year earlier were Eswatini, Kazakhstan, Guinea and Kyrgyzstan.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 22:40

  • Fentanyl Entering US Through Southern Border at "Unprecedented Levels": Rep. Higgins
    Fentanyl Entering US Through Southern Border at “Unprecedented Levels”: Rep. Higgins

    By J.M Phelps of The Epoch Times

    Implementing a new law to punish traffickers of fentanyl and declaring deaths from the drug as a health crisis could curb the damage it is doing to the country.

    Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) speaks during a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing on gun violence on Capitol Hill in Washington on June 8, 2022. (Andrew Harnik/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

    The Epoch Times spoke to Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) about the growing fentanyl crisis in the United States. The Republican lawmaker represents Louisiana’s 3rd congressional district, which includes Lafayette Parish. According to the local coroner, there were 32 drug-related deaths in 2015, and fentanyl was not associated with any of them. However, by 2021, the number of deaths rose to 136 and fentanyl was responsible for 101.

    According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), fentanyl is the driving force of a deadly nationwide epidemic. Preliminary data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that fentanyl was involved in 77 percent of overdose deaths in the United States in 2021, accounting for about 71,000 deaths.

    “The fentanyl crisis the country is facing right now must be confronted at the local, state, and federal level,” Higgins said.

    The country has to start working together, he said, adding that the nation needs to confront the border crisis and influx of fentanyl “without abusing law enforcement jurisdictional authority, without abusing sovereignty, [and] without abusing rights.”

    “It all has to be done while operating within the parameters of the law and the Constitution,” said Higgins. Fentanyl trafficking, in particular, must be “attacked passionately and aggressively,” he added.

    Title 42 Reinterpreted

    The Biden administration had hoped to end Title 42 by the end of May. Title 42 was the Trump-era initiative put in place in March 2020 to slow the spread of COVID-19, allowing illegal immigrants to be quickly turned away at the southern U.S. border rather than processed at immigration detention facilities under Title 8 immigration law.

    However, a Texas judge recently blocked the cancellation of the public health order that has been used to expel illegal migrants.

    While Higgins is pleased with the extension, he said it is time for a “reinterpretation of Title 42 within the parameters of the Constitution.” According to the lawmaker, “the fentanyl crisis can now be more effectively defined as a health crisis than the COVID pandemic.”

    “With regard to Title 42 enforcement,” Higgins said, “the definition of health crisis needs to be expanded to include the fentanyl crisis, [because] overdoes are certainly a threat to the health of tens of thousands of people.”

    Stop the Flood

    Higgins said, “Something has to be done to fight against the fentanyl entering [the United States] through the southern border.”

    “We have lost operational control of the southern border months ago, and fentanyl is entering the country at unprecedented levels—and there’s no end in sight,” he added.

    Continue reading at Epoch Times

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 22:20

  • Ukraine Unveils Mini "Terminator" Ground Robot Equipped With Machine Gun
    Ukraine Unveils Mini “Terminator” Ground Robot Equipped With Machine Gun

    The latest war machine headed to Ukraine’s front lines isn’t a flying drone but a miniature 4×4 ground-based robot — equipped with a machine gun. 

    According to Forbes, Ukrainian forces are set to receive an uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV) called “GNOM” that is no bigger than a standard microwave and weighs around 110lbs. 

    GNOM isn’t radio-controlled and has a 2,000 meter (1.25 mile) spool of fiber-optic cable mounted on the rear that offers operators a jam-proof way to control it on the modern battlefield without being detected or signal jammed by Russian electronic warfare equipment. 

    “Control of GNOM is possible in the most aggressive environment during the operation of the enemy’s electronic warfare equipment.

    “The operator doesn’t deploy a control station with an antenna, and does not unmask his position. The cable is not visible, and it also does not create thermal radiation that could be seen by a thermal imager,” said Eduard Trotsenko, CEO and owner of Temerland, the maker of the GNOM.

    “While it is usually operated by remote control, GNOM clearly has some onboard intelligence and is capable of autonomous navigation. Previous Temerland designs have included advanced neural network and machine learning hardware and software providing a high degree of autonomy, so the company seems to have experience,” Forbes said.

    The 7.62mm machinegun mounted on top of the “Terminator-style” robot will provide fire support for Ukrainian forces in dangerous areas. The UGV can also transport ammunition or other supplies to the front lines and even evacuate wounded soldiers with a special trailer. 

    Temerland said the GNOMs would be deployed near term. The highly sophisticated UGV could help the Ukrainians become more stealthy and lethal on the modern battlefield as they have also been utilizing Western drones. 

    Killer robots with machine guns appear to be entering the battlefield, and this one seems as if it was “WALL-E” that went to war. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 22:00

  • China's Lockdowns And Heavy Rains Ease Coal Shortage
    China’s Lockdowns And Heavy Rains Ease Coal Shortage

    By John Kemp, senior energy analyst at Reuters

    China’s electricity generation experienced rare declines in April and May compared with the same months a year earlier as lockdowns imposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus curbed consumption.

    But slower consumption growth coupled with heavy rains across southern provinces, which has boosted hydro generation to a record high, has accelerated replenishment of coal inventories after shortages in 2021.

    As a result, the coal supply situation is likely to be much more comfortable heading into the winter of 2022/23 than it was ahead of winter 2021/22. Generation from all sources was down 3%-4% in April and May compared with the same months in 2021, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed.

    Generation has declined year-on-year in only 12 of the last 131 months; this was the first back-to-back decline since the first wave of the epidemic in 2020, illustrating the impact lockdowns have had on the economy.

    Output in the first five months as a whole totalled 3,248 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), an increase of just 71 billion kWh (2.2%) from the same period in 2021. Nearly all of the increase came from hydro-electric generators, which boosted output by 66 billion kWh compared with 2021.

    There were also increases in generation from wind farms (+49 billion kWh), solar farms (+19 billion kWh) and nuclear units (+7 billion kWh). By contrast, output from thermal units, nearly all of which burn coal, declined by 71 billion kWh compared with the same period in 2021.

    Southern Rainfall

    Hydro output in the first five months totalled 435 billion kWh, up from 368 billion kWh in 2021, surpassing the previous seasonal record of 400 billion kWh in 2019.

    The surge in hydro generation has been driven by the unusually heavy rainfall which has lashed southern China since the start of the year.

    In some parts of southern China, rainfall has been the heaviest for 60 years (“Southern China hit by severe rains, floods as ‘dragon boat water’ peaks”, Reuters, June 21).

    The Ministry of Water Resources has issued flood alerts across most southern provinces since the start of June (“China launches level-IV emergency response for rain in southern areas”, MWR, June 13).

    In response, top officials from the central government have been supervising massive releases from the upstream dams to manage flood risk in the region’s major river systems.

    For example, total precipitation at Xiangjiaba on Jinsha River, at the border of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, and the site of one of the country’s mega-dams, has been more than 50% higher than the average in 2014-2021.

    Cumulative precipitation at Xiangjiaba so far this year has been 571 millimetres, up from 267 at the same point in 2021, and the highest since 2016.

    Xiangjiaba’s massive generating station has installed capacity of more than 6 Gigawatts and sends power through a high-voltage transmission link to Shanghai.

    Torrential rainfall has allowed hydro-electric generators across southern China to ramp up output earlier this year and should enable them to sustain it at a higher level for longer, saving coal.

    More output from hydro plus wind, solar and nuclear is in turn relieving pressure on thermal generators and should allow them to accumulate coal stocks faster ahead of next winter.

    Since the start of the year, the central government has pressed both coal mining companies and power generators to increase stocks at power plants to prevent a re-run of last year’s shortages.

    The slowdown in electricity consumption and boost in hydro and other alternatives has made that policy far more effective and should reduce the risk of power rationing later in the year.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 21:40

  • Visualizing The World's Most Popular Religions
    Visualizing The World’s Most Popular Religions

    According to some estimates, there are over 4,000 religions, faiths groups, and denominations that exist around the world today. Researchers and academics generally categorize the world’s religions into five major groups: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism.

    This graphic by Chit Chart visualizes the most popular religions around the world, using the latest available data from Index Mundi’s world demographics.

    As Visual Capitalist’s Trixie Pacis, in addition to the five major religious groups, the graphic includes two more categories: one for a collective of Folk religions and another for people who are unaffiliated with a religion.

    The Religions with the Most Followers

    Although the number of people who follow a religion has decreased in recent decades, 82.8% of the global population still identifies with one of the world’s major religions.

    Here’s a breakdown of the most popular religions, ranked by their following as a percentage of the world’s population:

    Christianity has the largest following with approximately 31% of the global population. Muslims make up the second-largest religious group, accounting for 23.2% of the world’s population.

    Roughly 16.4% of the global population is unaffiliated with a religion. This figure exceeds the percentage of people who identify with Hinduism (15%), Buddhism (7.1%), Folk Religions (5.9%), or Judaism (0.2%).

    The World’s Religions from Oldest to Newest

    Hinduism is considered the oldest religion in the world, originating in the Indus River Valley (modern-day Pakistan) circa 7000 BCE.

    While Judaism came after Hinduism, it is thought to be the oldest of the three monotheistic Abrahamic faiths, making it older than Christianity and Islam.

    It began circa 2000 BCE in the Southern Levant (modern-day Israel, Palestine, and Jordan). By contrast, Christianity was founded in the 1st century and began as a movement within Judaism.

    Scholars typically date the creation of Islam to the 7th century, making it the youngest of the world’s major religions on this list. Islam was established in Mecca (modern-day Saudi-Arabia).

    One religion that’s not included on this list is Sikhism. Founded in the late 15th century, it’s relatively new, especially compared to other religions like Hinduism or Judaism. Yet, despite being new, Sikhism has a large following—according to some estimates, there are over 25 million Sikhs worldwide.

    What are Folk Religions?

    A folk religion is defined as an ethnic or cultural practice that exists outside the theological doctrine of organized religions.

    Lacking sacred texts, Folk religions are more concerned with spirituality than rituals or rites. Examples of Folk religions include Native American traditions, Chinese folk religions, and traditional African religions.

    Since Folk religions are less institutionalized, they are especially challenging to measure and often excluded from surveys. With that said, an estimated 5.9% of the global population (approximately 430 million people) practice a Folk religion.

    The Fastest-Growing Religions

    While Islam is the newest of the big five religions, it’s currently the world’s fastest-growing one too. For context, here’s the estimated percent change among the seven religion categories, between 2015 and 2060:

    Islam’s rapid growth means it may surpass Christianity as the world’s largest religion within the next half-century. What’s causing this growth?

    According to Pew Research Center, the main reason is simply demographics—on average, Muslim women have 2.9 children, which the average of all non-Muslims is 2.2.

    Muslims are also concentrated in Africa and the Middle East, the two regions predicted to have the highest population increases in the next few decades.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 21:20

  • Watch: Jetliner Erupts In Flames At Miami Airport After Crash Landing 
    Watch: Jetliner Erupts In Flames At Miami Airport After Crash Landing 

    On Tuesday evening, a plane carrying over 100 people from the Dominican Republic crash-landed at Miami International Airport (MIA).

    Local news WSVN reports Red Air Flight 203’s landing gear collapsed upon landing at MIA around 1730 ET. Here’s the moment the plane crashed: 

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

    WSVN said 140 people and 11 crew members were on board when the plane collided with a communications/radar tower on the ground and skidded off the runway, instantly bursting into flames. 

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

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

    Miami-Dade Fire-Rescue (MDFR) tweeted they arrived at the scene and quickly “placed the fire under control.” 

    “All souls on board have been assessed for injuries. A total of 3 patients have been transported to local area hospitals,” MDFR said. 

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

    An airport spokesperson said multiple flights had been delayed, and two of the airport’s four runways were closed. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 21:02

  • Information Workers Operating Remotely Less Productive Over Long Term, Study Claims
    Information Workers Operating Remotely Less Productive Over Long Term, Study Claims

    Authored by Marina Zhang via The Epoch Times,

    Information workers doing their job remotely have been found to be less productive over the long term, according to a study on staff at Microsoft.

    Whilst the study’s authors observed a productivity increase in the short-term immediately after companies made a switch from in-office to working remotely, work hours increased over a prolonged period, which was indicative of reduced productivity.

    Communication between employees became more static, with reductions in the formation and deletion of new contacts between employees, the study found.

    Researchers noted a “siloed” network, with fewer connections between formal business units, and within informal networks, creating condensed groups with few connections. Studies have shown, that compacted networks with limited connections impede the transfer of information, and reduce the quality of output.

    Further, employees would preferentially communicate with people they knew well in the same team, rather than newly-formed contacts that serve as a “tie” between teams and departments. Staff reduced the time they spent with workers that serve as bridges between work units.

    Additionally, rather than communicating synchronously through calls and video calls, there was an increase in asynchronous communication through texts and messaging.

    “In other words,” the authors wrote in the study, “different portions of the network, which became less interconnected, also became more intraconnected.”

    “We expect that the effects we observe on workers’ collaboration and communication patterns will impact productivity and, in the long-term, innovation,” they wrote.

    Variations

    Work arrangement variations brought on by the pandemic are expected to continue despite the crisis being mostly over, the study speculated.

    The study said company and innovation investments made during the pandemic to support remote working, may lead to longer-termed remote or hybrid working arrangements in major companies for some time.

    Tesla, however, has gone the opposite direction with Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk emailing his staff to return to work in the office for at least 40 hours a week, otherwise “we will assume you have resigned,” on May 31.

    Before the Pandemic

    The pandemic has affected how companies make their workplace arrangements.

    Before the pandemic, around 6 percent of Americans worked remotely, while during the pandemic, however, over a third worked from home.

    A majority of companies may not keep the full remote work policies after the pandemic but a survey of 800 executives by Mckinsey revealed workplaces are also unlikely to return to their pre-COVID-19 work arrangements.

    Most likely they will switch to a hybrid work model with a mixture of in-office and remote work arrangements.

    Investments in Workers

    The study on Microsoft staff further highlighted concerns about how the pandemic affected working arrangements for employees, with companies such as Twitter, Facebook, Square, Box Slack, and Quora taking the shift “one step further,” by introducing longer-term and even permanent positions that will allow employees to work remotely even after the pandemic.

    The authors suggested that firms making these decisions without evidence of improved productivity “may set suboptimal policies,” with “some firms that choose a permanent remote work policy may put themselves at a disadvantage by making it more difficult for workers to collaborate and exchange information.”

    Investments in workers and firms, as well as innovations made to support remote work, make it likely that some versions of remote work will persist after the pandemic.

    “In light of this fact, the importance of deepening our understanding of remote work and its impacts has never been greater,” the authors concluded.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 21:00

  • Americans Panic-Searched Buying Guns After Biden Threatens More Gun Control
    Americans Panic-Searched Buying Guns After Biden Threatens More Gun Control

    A new report examines internet search patterns to track public interest in gun buying after the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. 

    Researchers from Lawsuit.org found Google keyword searches related to purchasing guns erupted after the Robb Elementary School shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead on May 24. Shortly after, the Biden administration talked tough on guns and threatened new restrictive measures on buying, which drove internet searches even higher. 

    “Predictably, public tragedies spark fear of new or better enforced gun laws, which then impacts demand for guns,” Lawsuit’s Kristin Tynski wrote in the report. 

    Search data was pulled from May 1 to June 14. US gun-related internet searches were low-volume (blue) before the school shooting. Immediately after, the country turned red, meaning high search volumes. This shows that the shooting most likely caused another gun-buying panic as many fear the Biden administration will clamp down on AR-15-style rifles. 

    Daily search volume shows “AR-15,” “Buy a Gun,” and “Gun Store” experienced significant spikes in activity after the shooting. 

    Daily Search Volume for “AR-15”

    AR-15 searches before the shooting hovered at about 8,000 weekly searches. Immediately after the shooting, that figure spiked to 43,000 searches per week, maintaining volumes in the 30k-50k per week range since.

    Daily Search Volume for “Buy a Gun”

    “Gun Store” searches before the shooting hovered at about 18,000 weekly searches. Immediately after the shooting, that figure spiked to nearly 80,000 searches per week, dropping off quickly, but still maintaining search volumes of 35,000-50,000 weekly searches since.

    Daily Search Volume for “Gun Store”

    “Buy a Gun” searches before the shooting hovered at about 52,000 weekly searches. Immediately after the shooting, that figure spiked to 74,000 searches per week in the week after the shooting, and maintaining significant or even growing slightly since.

    Americans are panic-searching what to buy, how to buy, and where to buy a gun because Democratic lawmakers are threatening massive new taxes, up to 1,000%, which would mean only people with lots of money could afford it. 

    “With the political debate about changing gun laws to make it more difficult to buy a gun, many Americans are looking to buy one ahead of any new laws that emerge,” Tynski said. 

    Separately, we noted how internet search trends for bulletproof backpacks soared after the school shooting. 

    With every big push for gun control on a state and federal level, there will always be panic buying among the American populace. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 20:40

  • Logistics Costs As A Percentage Of GDP Hit Highest Level In 13 Years
    Logistics Costs As A Percentage Of GDP Hit Highest Level In 13 Years

    By Mark Solomon of FreightWaves

    The 33rd annual State of Logistics Report, the year-over-year report card of the U.S. business logistics system, confirmed empirically what everyone already knew: 2021 was nirvana or a nightmare depending on what one does for a living.

    Total logistics costs, which measure how much was spent on transportation, warehousing and ancillary services such as support and administrative, soared 22.4% last year to nearly $1.85 trillion, according to the report. That was equal to 8% of the U.S. GDP, a level not seen since 2008, said the report, which was released by the trade group Council of Supply Management Professionals (CSCMP) Tuesday morning.

    Demand spiked across every mode and service. Businesses desperate for reliable motor carrier capacity powered a 39.3% jump in spending on private fleets or dedicated contract carriage to $415.2 billion. Inventory carrying costs jumped 25% to $502 billion as surging warehouse demand and supply chain congestion filled facilities to overflowing. The capital costs of carrying mountains of inventory jumped 33.4%. 

    Spending on waterborne services surged 23.6% as ocean carriers leveraged massive rate increases on international sea routes to make more money in 2021 than in the prior 20 years combined, the report said.

    Spending on parcel-delivery services jumped 15.6% and produced a five-year compounded annual growth rate of 11.4%, the highest of all the report’s cost components.

    All of this led to a fattening of carrier profits at a time when shippers felt the double whammy of shrinking margins and declining service levels, according to the report. Shippers of all types “longed for the days” when service levels that are now considered acceptable were viewed as major failures, the report said.

    Through the report’s long history, a relatively high costs-to-GDP ratio reflected network inefficiencies that forced users to spend more to get goods to market. Network inefficiencies were certainly evident in 2021, along with an unprecedented surge in goods demand that is one of the legacies of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Given the events of the first half of 2022, it is clear that next year’s report will look different than this year’s. Consumer demand has cooled off in the wake of higher inflation and the waning effects of pandemic-related government stimulus. Rising interest rates will curtail spending even more. 

    Consumers worried about cost increases and the possibility of a recession will not be spending nearly as freely this year as they did in the past two. More service-related consumption, especially in travel and entertainment, will cut into goods-spending activity.

    Some of that change is showing up in the daily logistics ebb-and-flow. Ron Marotta, vice president of supply chain solutions for the Americas division of freight forwarding and contract logistics firm Yusen Logistics, said on a conference call with reporters last Friday that ocean freight shippers are increasingly looking to negotiate their carrier contracts as more liner capacity opens up. 

    In a sign that ocean supply and demand might be returning to some form of balance, Yusen has worked off virtually all of its cargo backlogs, some of which have built up over two years, Marotta said. The overall environment, he said, has become “more favorable to shippers.”

    While the dual misery of transport delays and higher rates may abate somewhat for shippers, the report’s authors cautioned that the pendulum will not abruptly swing back to capacity abundance and lower rates. E-commerce and last-mile delivery demand will remain elevated and some supply bottlenecks will not loosen easily, they wrote.

    Higher borrowing costs will continue to push up the expense of holding the many billions of dollars of inventory sitting in warehouses and distribution centers. The already-complex task of managing a dizzying array of stock-keeping units will only be compounded by the higher interest expense, said Andy Moses, senior vice president of sales and solutions at 3PL Penske Logistics.

    The continued upward march in interest rates will “expose any inefficient process management in the warehouse trade,” Moses said last Friday.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 20:20

  • Senate Releases Text Of Gun Bill That Would Mark 'Biggest Change In Decades'
    Senate Releases Text Of Gun Bill That Would Mark ‘Biggest Change In Decades’

    A group of bipartisan Senate negotiators on Tuesday released proposed legislation to limit ownership of firearms in what would mark the biggest change to firearms laws in decades.

    Photo via Politico

    The proposed legislation, which comes after a week of negotiations following deadly mass shootings at a Buffalo, NY supermarket and an elementary school in Uvalde Texas, was endorsed by Senate leaders from both parties, raising the likelihood it will be passed in the evenly divided chamber, according to the Wall Street Journal.

    “We’ve reached agreement,” announced Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) on Tuesday, adding “We’re dotting i’s and crossing the t’s right now. I think we’re in good shape.”

    What’s in the bill?

    As anticipated, it would provide incentives for states to enforce extreme protection orders, also known as red-flag laws, which would allow authorities to seize a person’s weapons if they are deemed dangerous to themselves or others.

    Another expected provision is the boyfriend loophole, which would prohibit dating partners or recent dating partners convicted of domestic violence from purchasing a gun – and which would expire after five years if they haven’t been convicted of any other violent crime, two people familiar with the bill told the Journal.

    In addition, it would establish a grant program for states to expand mental health services, as well as enhanced safety measures for schools (which, we’re guessing, won’t include arming teachers or other school staff).

    It will also include some type of crackdown on illegal sales of guns, and would require a review of juvenile records – including mental health records – for 18-21-year-old gun buyers.

    “Unless a person is convicted of a crime or is adjudicated mentally ill, their ability to purchase a firearm will not be impacted by this legislation,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the top GOP negotiator.

    The Senate is aiming to pass the legislation this week, but recent delays have put that timeline in question as leaders would need agreement from all 100 senators to waive some timing rules. President Biden and Democratic leaders in the House have said they would support the bill, though it excludes some measures they demanded, such as raising the age limit for purchasing semiautomatic weapons to 21.

    The gun legislation is expected to cost several billion dollars, though lawmakers aren’t insisting on waiting for a formal cost estimate to vote on it. One way lawmakers are discussing paying for the legislation is by further delaying the end of a Trump-era rule for rebates that drugmakers give to middlemen in Medicare. The rule never took effect, but because it was expected to cost the government money, Congress can claim a savings. -WSJ

    According to people familiar with the matter, negotiators hit a snag when Republicans wanted to include language which would ban the use of federal funds in the bill for abortions, a stumbling block that has since been resolved and removed.

    At least 60 votes will be required to advance the bill in the Senate, meaning at least 10 Republicans will need to vote for the bill which is now much more narrow than Democrats had hoped for, according to the report.

    Still, the legislation would be the most significant firearms legislation since Congress voted to ban so-called ‘assault weapons’ (aka scary-looking rifles that still shoot one bullet per trigger pull) in 1994, which lapsed a decade later.

    We imagine gun sales are going through the roof right about now.

    * * * 

    Read the full Senate gun bill below: 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 20:00

  • Tesla Cars Banned From Chinese Town For Two Months Over Spying Fears 
    Tesla Cars Banned From Chinese Town For Two Months Over Spying Fears 

    Chinese officials are set to temporarily ban all Tesla vehicles from entering a coastal resort town over fears of spying ahead of what could be a super-secretive government meeting.

    Reuters reports a police official confirmed Teslas entering Beidaihe, a coastal resort town on northeast China’s Bohai Sea, about three hours from Beijing, will be banned on July 1 from entering the city for two months. The decision comes one month after Teslas were restricted from driving in the central city of Chengdu ahead of a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping last month. 

    The Beidaihe Traffic Police Brigade official provided no details on why the American vehicles would be banned but said it concerned “national affairs.” The resort town has traditionally been where top Chinese leadership gathers to discuss policy ideas. 

    One reason Chinese officials might be concerned about Teslas is that each vehicle is equipped with eight cameras and sensors that provide 360 degrees of visibility at up to 250 meters of range to power Autopilot. The cameras likely pose a threat to national security, but that was not mentioned by the official or Reuters. 

    Last year, the People’s Liberation Army restricted Teslas from military bases over spying fears because of the multiple cameras that record and send data back to Tesla to improve its Autopilot. At the time, Tesla chief executive officer Elon Musk said the vehicles didn’t spy and had to reroute all the data each vehicle in China collects to a database within the country. 

    Despite Chinese Teslas sending their data to domestic data centers, the American vehicles still face heightened scrutiny over spying. Vice versa, Washington has fears Chinese-made drones are spying on US infrastructure and has banned the Department of Defense from purchasing them.  

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 19:20

  • 144 Million Americans Now Live In States With Legal Recreational Marijuana
    144 Million Americans Now Live In States With Legal Recreational Marijuana

    Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

    Advocates for marijuana legalization won another victory  last month when Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee signed new legislation legalizing recreational marijuana in the the state. New Hampshire—where cannabis is “only” decriminalized and legal for medical purposes—is now the only state in New England where recreational marijuana is not legal. 

    With Rhode Island now added to the legalization bloc, this means more than 144 million Americans now live in states where recreational cannabis has been legalized. That’s 43% of the US population.

    Proportion of US population by cannabis legalization status:

    Rhode Island is also one of a growing number of states where recreational cannabis has been legalized through the legislative process rather than through statewide referenda or voter initiatives. Initially, recreational legalization was only politically possibly through voter initiatives, as legislators refused to approve legalization themselves. The first successful cases of this were in Colorado and Washington State in 2012, and that was followed in 2014 by Alaska and Oregon. Since then, recreational cannabis has been legalized through a variety of methods in 15 other states for a total of 19.

    Were these states to combine to form their own country, it would be—in terms of population—the tenth largest country in the world, and only slightly smaller than Russia.

    As with gun policy, school vouchers, and apparently abortion policy, cannabis policy is increasingly dominated by state-level legislation.  With cannabis, this comes in spite of the fact that federal policy has not actually been changed in this regard. Marijuana is still formally targeted by by federal bureaucrats as an illegal substance. This continues to hamper commerce in the states in many ways. For example, it remains illegal for federally regulated financial institutions to deal directly with cannabis-related businesses. 

    Some Republican politicians have even attempted to ratchet up federal prosecutions. For example, in 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Cole memo. This was part of an effort to re-assert greater federal control of cannabis policy. Yet, Congressional delegations from states where recreation cannabis is legal—both Republican and Democrat—have shown an unwillingness to support federal efforts in this regard. As a result, in 2017, Congress voted to deny the Justice Department funds to enforce federal laws against medicinal marijuana.  Sessions’s plan received bipartisan opposition in Congress. Bipartisan efforts as federal legalization have been repeatedly introduced, such as the  “Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States (STATES) Act” which, is essentially a “states’ rights” bill supported by both parties in the name of reining in the drug war. (An anti-legalization bloc, based mostly in southern states, has been able to kill efforts to strengthen more localized control in drug policy.)

    These state-level movements to ignore or oppose federal policy are all firmly rooted in ideas of federalism, decentralization, and the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. From the prohibitionists who cling to centralized political power, however, we routinely hear the same slogans and pro-Washington legal theories about “federal supremacy” or how whatever Congress says is “the law of the land.”

    Both conservatives and the Left support these ideas when it serves their purposes. The Left, of course, wants uniform rule from Washington when it comes to guns. Conservatives have done the same on drugs. Republican Attorneys General even sued Colorado in an attempt to impose federal drug laws on Colorado. What these Republicans wanted was essentially a federal ruling rendering localism and the Tenth Amendment null and void. Fortunately they failed. 

    This centralizing impulse, of course, is very popular in Washington. We hear it frequently from those deeply mistaken constitutional scholars who want federal judges to use the “Incorporation Doctrine”  to decide what is and what is not legal in every state. These people—both conservatives and leftists—can often be found angrily declaring that federal law is essentially sacrosanct and state-level nullification “ain’t gonna happen.” The reality, however, is that it has happened as is happening.

    After all, political and ideological realities are such that state-level legalization has effectively meant marijuana has become de facto legal in nearly half of the country. The strategy has also helped to illustrate the potential for success with state-level legal efforts as weakening or nullifying federal law. Pro-immigration groups have tried similar tactics in some states, such as California. Similarly, some anti-gun-control policymakers—as in Missouri—have passed legislation in which state officials are prevented from enforcing federal law within state borders.  Those who love the Washington regime and the status quo will no doubt continue to press for reform only at the center. These people continue to cling to the long-discredited idea that Washington will be “fixed” if we “elect the right people.” Good luck with that. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 19:00

  • HKMA Is Blowing Billions To Defend Dollar Peg
    HKMA Is Blowing Billions To Defend Dollar Peg

    The Hong Kong Dollar dropped to its weakest against the US Dollar this morning since April 2018. This is a major problem for the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) because, as a reminder for some, the Hong Kong Dollar (HKD) is pegged to a tight band of between 7.75 and 7.85 versus the U.S. dollar.

    And today saw the HKD break below the lower bound of the peg, trading down to 7.8502/USD at its lows…

    The main culprit behind the local currency’s slump is the carry trade which has been reignited by The Fed hiking rates and potential capital flight out of China/HK.

    This is an arbitrage, where traders take advantage of differences in prices, selling a low-yielding product (the Hong Kong dollar) to buy a high-yielding product (the US dollar). In this case, the price difference is between the local borrowing cost known as the Hong Kong interbank offered rate (Hibor) and the US borrowing cost known as the Libor.

    Simply put, traders are borrowing against the low Hibor, selling the Hong Kong dollar to buy the US currency for investments in high-yielding US assets. The difference between the two is widest since March 2019… and that is pressuring the HKD against its lower peg bound.

    As more traders pile on to the carry, more pressure is placed on the Hong Kong dollar, causing it to weaken further against the US currency. As the chart above shows there has been some shift in the carry-trade-pressure since HKMA has stepped in.

    Nevertheless, HKMA is forced to step in and as CNBC reported, HKMA’s Chief Executive Eddie Yue said last month that as it intervenes and funds flow out of Hong Kong’s system, local rates should rise, removing the incentive for market players to conduct “carry trades”, and hence keep the Hong Kong dollar trading within its band.

    “All these are normal operations in accordance with the design of the Linked Exchange Rate System,” he said.

    However, the size of the flows are starting to become significant… and are having less impact. According to HKMA, its aggregate balance will decrease to about HK$241.9 billion on June 23 (from HK$338 billion in May before the interventions began again).

    That is almost HK$100 billion in reserves and The Fed’s plan to hike rates (as many as twelve more times this year) will do nothing to help ease the situation (especially since China will not be tightening its policy anytime soon) – meaning any USDs sold in defense of the weaker HKD will be battling global carry trade flows driven by The Fed’s tightening.

    As we have detailed previously, China currently has a dilemma because it has to pick either to hike, and avoid capital flight, or cut and remain competitive with Japan, whose collapsing JPY means chinese exports are getting priced out of global markets.

    The fund still has plenty of ammo to fight the carry trade pressure (for now) as we note the aggregate balance dropped to around HK$50 billion in 2019 after the last series of HKMA interventions to stop the currency weakening.

    In 2018, as the HKD plunged on the same carry flow, the HKMA CEO reassured the public “Stay calm on the weakening of the Hong Kong dollar.” So far no such warning has been issued this time.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 18:40

  • Michael Saylor Lists 10 Things For Bitcoin To Become A Stronger Asset
    Michael Saylor Lists 10 Things For Bitcoin To Become A Stronger Asset

    Authored by Shawn Amick via BitcoinMagazine.com,

    Michael Saylor, CEO of the software analytics and pro-bitcoin company MicroStrategy, recently appeared in an interview with Bloomberg to discuss 10 steps he believes will make bitcoin a stronger asset.

    “There’s about 10 things that have to happen over the next decade to make it [bitcoin] a better asset, and we kind of know what those 10 things are,” Saylor stated in the interview.

    The first on the CEO’s list of issues to be addressed is the absence of a no wash-trading rule, allowing traders to harvest loss and gains in a way that cannot happen with traditional equities markets.

    Then, Saylor mentioned the issues with the 520 unregistered and unregulated crypto exchanges offering 20x leverage, which often leads to unprotected investors taking massive losses.

    Next, the 19,000 cryptocurrencies being cross-collateralized and associated with bitcoin currently hold bitcoin back by comparing it to badly managed, unregistered securities.

    Moreover, the issue becomes worse as these securities are glorified by the next issue at hand, “wildcat banks,” which enable gammified practices offering unsustainable yield, such as was seen with the fall of the Terra ecosystem.

    Not least of all, Saylor listed ignorance and fear of the asset class, as a lack of technical know-how still terrifies many, as does media coverage telling of the many supposed deaths of bitcoin.

    However, the fear and uncertainty is not just for bitcoin as Saylor went on to explain that we currently do not have a real stablecoin, which he believes will be a major boon for the ecosystem once one is fully regulated and approved.

    Then, the CEO closed his list noting the absence of a spot exchange-traded fund (ETF), which would allow institutions to interact with the asset of bitcoin without needing to touch it themselves.

    Finally, the three remaining points that need to be improved on in the bitcoin ecosystem revolve around the lack of regulatory guidance and support institutions currently must overcome. These points include lack of insurance, as well as guidance in becoming involved with the space.

    Prior to revealing his list of improvements that will launch bitcoin into its next bull-cycle, Saylor spent much of the interview justifying the bitcoin strategy of MicroStrategy during this recent downturn.

    “We did a lot of backtesting and I’ve gone back and looked at the numbers,” Saylor explained.

    “On August 10, 2020 when we announced our $250 million bitcoin buy, since then, bitcoin is up 72%.”

    He went on to compare it to some traditional assets over the same time period including: the NASDAQ (-2%) , gold (-9%), S&P 500 (+9%), and single-family homes (+26%).

    “The bottom line is that the bitcoin strategy is 10x better than any other alternative,” Saylor concluded.

    “So, no. I don’t regret it.” 

    Watch the full interview below:

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 18:20

  • This Is The Worst Year On Record For Markets… So Far
    This Is The Worst Year On Record For Markets… So Far

    The latest long-awaited chartbook (titled “2022 – One of the worst years on record… so far” and available to pro subs), was just published by DB’s head of thematic research Jim Reid, and among many other things, it shows how 2022 is shaping up to be one of the worst years on record for financial markets.

    In fact, as his chart of the day demonstrates, the S&P 500 is currently on track for its worst H1 performance since 1932 at the depths of the Great Depression, having shed -22.3% so far this year in total return terms. That just edges out 1962, when the index lost -22.2% over the first six months of the year.

    But for those with a traditional 60/40 type portfolio, the news doesn’t get any better, since 10yr Treasuries are currently on track for their worst H1 since 1788.

    Globally, bond and stock markets combined have lost a stunning $36 trillion dollars from their peak.

    It’s not all bad news, and those readers looking for some positives may be comforted to learn that the 5 worst H1 performances for the S&P 500 before this year, all saw very good H2 performance.

    Indeed, on 4 of those 5 occasions, the index went on to gain at least +17%, with the other seeing a +10% gain.  In order of H1 declines, we saw:

    • 1932: H1 -45%, H2 +56%,
    • 1962: H1 -22%, H2 +17%,
    • 1970: H1 -19%, H2 +29%,
    • 1940: H1 -17%, H2 +10%,
    • 1939: H1 -15%, H2 +18%.

    Still, what happens in H2 is quite binary: if we don’t see a recession materialize over that period, Reid suggests that it might be tough for markets to continue to be as bearish as they have been, and a bounce back resembling history might be possible. However, it’s hard to see markets recovering if we see firm evidence of the recession.

    For what it’s worth, regular readers of the Deutsche Banker will know that he still favors 2023 as the starting point of the US recession (and bigger market falls) but even he now concedes – following Nomura’s forecast this weekend that the recession begins in late 2022 – that the risk of an earlier move is clearly building with declining financial conditions, and consumer and business confidence plummeting.

    The chart book has much more useful data and visualizations on asset performance, central banks still being behind the curve, the end of negative yields, a recession watch, as well as charts from Reid’s two recent big publications on asset performance in the 1970s, and the end of the ultra-low default world, all available to professional subs.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 18:00

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Jun 21

Today’s News 21st June 2022

  • UK Drivers Brace For "Big Traffic Increases" Amid "Largest Rail Strike In Modern History" 
    UK Drivers Brace For “Big Traffic Increases” Amid “Largest Rail Strike In Modern History” 

    Britain is on the cusp of a massive strike that begins Tuesday and will paralyze at least half of the country’s railway network, resulting in what could be a surge in traffic as train passengers switch to road transportation.

    The Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers union (RMT) will strike tomorrow, Thursday, and Sunday in what union bosses call the “biggest rail strike in modern history.” The Independent reports last-ditch talks between the rail union and Network Rail, and 13 train operators failed to resolve pay, jobs, and conditions disputes. As many as 40,000 unionized rail workers will participate in the walkout. 

    Chief Treasury Secretary Simon Clarke told Sky News on Monday that travelers will suffer “misery” this week: 

    “I think the public do this week need to be aware there will be very substantial disruption and it is therefore sensible to make preparations for that,” Clarke said.

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    Motoring group AA forecasted increased highway traffic as passengers switched to road transportation. AA said Scotland, Wales, and major roadways across the UK will see “a big increase in traffic.” 

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

    RAC, another motoring group, said the strike would result in more road usage: 

    “Major city routes as well as those serving the home counties are likely to see some of the biggest increases in traffic volumes as, even if rail lines are still open, there will be significantly fewer trains running.

    “With strikes like these planned it’s perhaps little wonder that so many drivers across the country are dependent on their vehicles. Traffic jams aside, using a car often turns out to be the most practical and reliable way of getting around,” RAC spokesman Rod Dennis said. 

    Network Rail posted a map of the affected service areas that span the country. 

    “Ultimately, this is a matter between the employers—the train operating companies and Network Rail—and the trade unions, and the government doesn’t sit directly as a part of those talks for a very good reason—that we don’t intervene in a specific process between an employer and the unions representing employees, but we are there to provide the support and enabling framework for those talks to succeed,” the treasury minister said. 

    Clarke said the rail union had requested a 7% pay boost to keep up with the highest inflation in four decades. All of which probably helps explain why the UK’s Misery Index is at its highest since 1992…

    Transport Secretary Grant Shapps warned the strike would “punish” millions of “innocent people” and is “a huge act of self-harm” that will “jeopardize the future of the railway itself.” 

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 02:45

  • Escobar: St. Petersburg Sets The Stage For The War Of Economic Corridors
    Escobar: St. Petersburg Sets The Stage For The War Of Economic Corridors

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Cradle,

    In St. Petersburg, the world’s new powers gather to upend the US-concocted “rules-based order” and reconnect the globe their way…

    The St. Petersburg International Economic Forum  has been configured for years now as absolutely essential to understand the evolving dynamics and the trials and tribulations of Eurasia integration.

    St. Petersburg in 2022 is even more crucial as it directly connects to three simultaneous developments I had previously outlined, in no particular order:

    • First, the coming of the “new G8” – four BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China), plus Iran, Indonesia, Turkey and Mexico, whose GDP per purchasing parity power (PPP) already dwarfs the old, western-dominated G8.

    • Second, the Chinese “Three Rings” strategy of developing geoeconomic relations with its neighbors and partners.

    • Third, the development of BRICS+, or extended BRICS, including some members of the “new G8,” to be discussed at the upcoming summit in China.

    There was hardly any doubt President Putin would be the star of St. Petersburg 2022, delivering a sharp, detailed speech to the plenary session.

    Among the highlights, Putin smashed the illusions of the so-called ‘golden billion’ who live in the industrialized west (only 12 percent of the global population) and the “irresponsible macroeconomic policies of the G7 countries.”

    The Russian president noted how “EU losses due to sanctions against Russia” could exceed $400 billion per year, and that Europe’s high energy prices – something that actually started “in the third quarter of last year” – are due to “blindly believing in renewable sources.”

    He also duly dismissed the west’s ‘Putin price hike’ propaganda, saying the food and energy crisis is linked to misguided western economic policies, i.e., “Russian grain and fertilizers are being sanctioned” to the detriment of the west.

    In a nutshell: the west misjudged Russia’s sovereignty when sanctioning it, and now is paying a very heavy price.

    Chinese President Xi Jinping, addressing the forum by video, sent a message to the whole Global South. He evoked “true multilateralism,” insisting that emerging markets must have “a say in global economic management,” and called for “improved North-South and South-South dialogue.”

    It was up to Kazakh President Tokayev, the ruler of a deeply strategic partner of both Russia and China, to deliver the punch line in person: Eurasia integration should progress hand in hand with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Here it is, full circle.

    Building a long-term strategy “in weeks”

    St. Petersburg offered several engrossing discussions on key themes and sub-themes of Eurasia integration, such as business within the scope of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); aspects of the Russia-China strategic partnership; what’s ahead for the BRICS; and prospects for the Russian financial sector.

    One of the most important discussions was focused on the increasing interaction between the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and ASEAN, a key example of what the Chinese would define as ‘South-South cooperation.’

    And that connected to the still long and winding road leading to deeper integration of the EAEU itself.

    This implies steps towards more self-sufficient economic development for members; establishing the priorities for import substitution; harnessing all the transport and logistical potential; developing trans-Eurasian corporations; and imprinting the EAEU ‘brand’ in a new system of global economic relations.

    Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexey Overchuk was particularly sharp on the pressing matters at hand: implementing a full free trade customs and economic union – plus a unified payment system – with simplified direct settlements using the Mir payment card to reach new markets in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Persian Gulf.

    In a new era defined by Russian business circles as “the game with no rules” – debunking the US-coined “rules-based international order” – another relevant discussion, featuring key Putin adviser Maxim Oreshkin, focused on what should be the priorities for big business and the financial sector in connection to the state’s economic and foreign policy.

    The consensus is that the current ‘rules’ have been written by the west. Russia could only connect to existing mechanisms, underpinned by international law and institutions. But then the west tried to  “squeeze us out” and even “to cancel Russia.” So it’s time to “replace the no-rules rules.” That’s a key theme underlying the concept of ‘sovereignty’ developed by Putin in his plenary address.

    In another important discussion chaired by the CEO of western-sanctioned Sberbank Herman Gref, there was much hand-wringing about the fact that the Russian “evolutionary leap forward towards 2030” should have happened sooner. Now a “long-term strategy has to be built in weeks,” with supply chains breaking down all across the spectrum.

    A question was posed to the audience – the crème de la crème of Russia’s business community: what would you recommend, increased trade with the east, or redirecting the structure of the Russian economy? A whopping 72 percent voted for the latter.

    So now we come to the crunch, as all these themes interact when we look at what happened only a few days before St. Petersburg.

    The Russia-Iran-India corridor

    A key node of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INTSC) is now in play, linking northwest Russia to the Persian Gulf via the Caspian Sea and Iran. The transportation time between St. Petersburg and Indian ports is 25 days.

    This logistical corridor with multimodal transportation carries an enormous geopolitical significance for two BRICs members and a prospective member of the “new G8” because it opens a key alternative route to the usual cargo trail from Asia to Europe via the Suez canal.

    The International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC)

    The INSTC corridor is a classic South-South integration project: a 7,200-km-long multimodal network of ship, rail, and road routes interlinking India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iran, Azerbaijan and Russia all the way to Finland in the Baltic Sea.

    Technically, picture a set of containers going overland from St. Petersburg to Astrakhan. Then the cargo sails via the Caspian to the Iranian port of Bandar Anzeli. Then it’s transported overland to the port of Bandar Abbas. And then overseas to Nava Sheva, the largest seaport in India. The key operator is Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (the IRISL group), which has branches in both Russia and India.

    And that brings us to what wars from now will be fought about: transportation corridors – and not territorial conquest.

    Beijing’s fast-paced BRI is seen as an existential threat to the ‘rules-based international order.’ It develops along six overland corridors across Eurasia, plus the Maritime Silk Road from the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean, all the way to Europe.

    One of the key targets of NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine is to interrupt BRI corridors across Russia. The Empire will go all out to interrupt not only BRI but also INSTC nodes. Afghanistan under US occupation was prevented from become a node for either BRI or INSTC.

    With full access to the Sea of Azov – now a “Russian lake” – and arguably the whole Black Sea coastline further on down the road, Moscow will hugely increase its sea trading prospects (Putin: “The Black Sea was historically Russian territory”).

    For the past two decades, energy corridors have been heavily politicized and are at the center of unforgiving global pipeline competitions – from BTC and South Stream to Nord Stream 1 and 2, and the never-ending soap operas, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) and Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipelines.

    Then there’s the Northern Sea Route alongside the Russian coastline all the way to the Barents Sea. China and India are very much focused on the Northern Sea Route, not by accident also  discussed in detail in St. Petersburg.

    The contrast between the St. Petersburg debates on a possible re-wiring of our world – and the Three Stooges Taking a Train to Nowhere to tell a mediocre Ukrainian comedian to calm down and negotiate his surrender (as confirmed by German intelligence) – could not be starker.

    Almost imperceptibly – just as it re-incorporated Crimea and entered the Syrian theater – Russia as a military-energy superpower now shows it is potentially capable of driving a great deal of the industrialized west back into the Stone Age. The western elites are just helpless. If only they could ride a corridor on the Eurasian high-speed train, they might learn something.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/21/2022 – 02:00

  • A Permanent Shortage Of Everything
    A Permanent Shortage Of Everything

    Authored by Daniel Greenfield via The Gatestone Institute,

    • The world isn’t flat, it’s all too round… That’s why Islam is once again at war with Europe, Russia is invading Ukraine, China is relaunching its empire, and the ‘flatland’ is experiencing a dimensional shift.

    • Globalization advocates had just recreated Marxist central planning with a somewhat more flexible global model in which massive corporations bridged global barriers to create the most efficient possible means of moving goods and services around the planet. Borders would come down and cultural exchanges would make us all one ushering in the great union of humanity.

    • Market consolidation due to government regulations has left a handful of companies sitting atop the market. When one of them, like Abbott for baby formula, has a hiccup, the results are catastrophic; others like Procter & Gamble, which controls about half the menstrual products market, don’t have to worry about losing market share to competition. Similar consolidation in food, paper products and supermarkets have replaced a dynamic economy with cartels.

    • Behind all the brands on the product shelves is a creaky Soviet system in which a handful of massive enterprises interconnected with the state lazily crank out low-quality products from vast supply chains that they no longer control and feel little competitive pressure to perform better. The only thing that is still American about the supermarket experience is the advertising.

    • Interdependence hasn’t even led to the world government that globalists wanted, but global chaos in which impotent western powers try to talk the rest of the world out of fighting to avoid being swamped by refugees, high energy bills and empty shelves in supermarkets.

    • After selling off American economic sovereignty, globalists proved unable to maintain global stability. Lacking the will to actually stand up to China, Iran or Russia, all they can do is hold more international conferences and build up a useless multinational bureaucracy.

    • Say what you will about the League of Nations, but it only had 700 employees in Geneva. The UN’s 44,000 employees are just the tip of the iceberg in the huge ranks of multinational organizations who all claim to be upholding the international order while running up the tab.

    First it was baby formula, now there’s a tampon shortage. Tampon prices are up 10% due to the rising price of oil affecting the cost of plastic and higher cotton prices due to mask manufacturing and the war in Ukraine. A whole lot of fertilizer comes out of Ukraine and Russia. So does neon, which is used to make semiconductor chips. The chip shortage is shutting down car plants.

    Pictured: A shopper looks at the bare shelves of the baby formula section of a supermarket in Chelsea, Massachusetts on May 20, 2022. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

    This is the thoroughly interconnected world celebrated in prose by journalists like Thomas Friedman, who marveled at how Big Data and globalization brought everything together.

    “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other,” Friedman once claimed. In his greatest paean to globalization, The World Is Flat, he argued that, “No two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.”

    McDonald’s in Russia has closed and the ones in Ukraine might be blown up any time. Russia restricted its neon exports while Ukraine’s neon exports have fallen sharply. Dell’s CEO Michael Dell has warned that the global chip shortage could last for years.

    So much for the Golden Arches and Dell theory of globalist conflict prevention.

    The world isn’t flat, it’s all too round. Much like history isn’t an ascending trend line to the right side, it’s also a circle. That’s why Islam is once again at war with Europe, Russia is invading Ukraine, China is relaunching its empire, and the ‘flatland’ is experiencing a dimensional shift.

    Globalization advocates had just recreated Marxist central planning with a somewhat more flexible global model in which massive corporations bridged global barriers to create the most efficient possible means of moving goods and services around the planet. Borders would come down and cultural exchanges would make us all one, ushering in the great union of humanity.

    What an interdependent world really means is Algerian Jihadists shooting up Paris, gang members from El Salvador beheading Americans within sight of Washington D.C., tampon and car shortages caused by a war in Ukraine, and more radicalism and extremism than ever.

    Trying to “flatten” the world just makes it pop up again.

    The technocratic new world order of megacorporations consolidating markets and then doling out products with just-in-time inventory systems now flows through a broken supply chain. Rising inflation and international disruptions makes it all but impossible for even the big companies to plan ahead, and so they produce less and shrug at the shortages.

    We’re in a wartime economy because our system has become too vast and too inflexible to adjust to chaos. Biden keeps trotting out the Defense Production Act for everything until, given time, the entire economy has been Sovietized. The more that the government tries to impose stability on the chaos, the less responsive and productive the dominant players become.

    Market consolidation due to government regulations has left a handful of companies sitting atop the market. When one of them, like Abbott for baby formula, has a hiccup, the results are catastrophic; others like Procter & Gamble, which controls about half the menstrual products market, don’t have to worry about losing market share to competition. Similar consolidation in food, paper products and supermarkets have replaced a dynamic economy with cartels.

    Behind all the brands on the product shelves is a creaky Soviet system in which a handful of massive enterprises interconnected with the state lazily crank out low-quality products from vast supply chains that they no longer control and feel little competitive pressure to perform better. The only thing that is still American about the supermarket experience is the advertising.

    The problems with the system were less noticeable when its predictive mechanisms worked and its foreign suppliers were eager for American dollars. Under stress, the failure points are all too obvious, and what is less obvious is that the system has no intention of repairing any of them.

    It doesn’t need to.

    An out-of-touch elite responds to problems with meaningless reassurances, glib jokes and wokeness. Like Soviet propaganda, the only thing corporate statements communicate is the vast distance between the lives of those running the system and those caught inside its gears.

    But despite their complicity, the massive monopolistic enterprises didn’t make this world.

    Biden and the Democrats have been eager to blame companies for “profiteering” from the inflation created by federal spending. Few companies prefer the current crisis to 2019. Hardly anyone except bottom-feeders enjoys not being unable to rationally plan for the future. Major corporations and their investors care more about a growth plan than quarterly profits.

    The Democrats were the biggest champions of globalization. Their regulations led to record market consolidation and domestic job cuts. Corporations were pressured to export dirty Republican jobs to China and keep the ‘clean’ Democrat office jobs at home. The devastation wreaked havoc on the working class and the middle class, and rebuilt our entire economy to be dependent on China and a worldwide supply chain only globalists could believe was bulletproof.

    OPEC’s impact on fuel prices under Carter became the model for the entire economy. A war anywhere impacts Americans. Dozens of countries have the power to wreck our economy, intentionally or even unintentionally. Even the environmental promises of energy independence have become a farce in which our government pleads with China for more solar panels.

    Interdependence hasn’t even led to the world government that globalists wanted, but global chaos in which impotent western powers try to talk the rest of the world out of fighting to avoid being swamped by refugees, high energy bills and empty shelves in supermarkets.

    After selling off American economic sovereignty, globalists proved unable to maintain global stability. Lacking the will to actually stand up to China, Iran or Russia, all they can do is hold more international conferences and build up a useless multinational bureaucracy.

    Say what you will about the League of Nations, but it only had 700 employees in Geneva. The UN’s 44,000 employees are just the tip of the iceberg in the huge ranks of multinational organizations who all claim to be upholding the international order while running up the tab.

    Globalization globalizes the ineptitude of the global order. Its grand plans, like those of the Soviet Union, are never a match for the chaos of human nature and its ambitions. Politicians, philanthropists and philosophers had labored to replace American dynamism with a clockwork machine. The old Babbage clockworks became servers upholding a cloud that proved to be very handy for instant communications, but ran up against the same ‘flattening’ limitations.

    America was never meant to be flat. It was a land discovered by those who understood that the world was round. Flattening America has depressed its economy and its spirit. A flat world with no room for American exceptionalism is instead becoming a playground for Chinese and Russian exceptionalism. And America’s economy is becoming one big permanent shortage.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 23:25

  • WHO's Tedros Privately Admits Lab Leak 'Most Likely Explanation' For COVID-19
    WHO’s Tedros Privately Admits Lab Leak ‘Most Likely Explanation’ For COVID-19

    The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who spent the early months of the pandemic publicly kowtowing to China, has privately admitted that he thinks Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese laboratory in a “catastrophic accident,” according to the Daily Mail, citing a senior Government source.

    Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), had recently confided to a senior European politician that the most likely explanation was a catastrophic accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, where infections first spread during late 2019.

    The Mail on Sunday first revealed concerns within Western intelligence services about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where scientists were manipulating coronaviruses sampled from bats in caves nearly 1,000 miles away – the same caves where Covid-19 is suspected to have originated – in April 2020. The worldwide death toll from the Covid pandemic is now estimated to have hit more than 18 million. -Daily Mail

    The WHO came under heavy fire early into the pandemic for praising China’s “transparent” response to the pandemic, repeating misinformation from Beijing about human-to-human transmission, and bowing to pressure from Chinese President Xi Jinping not to declare the Covid-19 outbreak an emergency.

    Yet, while initially promoting the natural origin theory, Tedros and the WHO have become far more ‘open’ to the lab leak theory – despite officially being on the fence, unlike Tedros.

    “We do not yet have the answers as to where it came from or how it entered the human population,” Tedros told EU member states this month, adding “Understanding the origins of the virus is very important scientifically to prevent future epidemics and pandemics.”

    “But morally, we also owe it to all those who have suffered and died and their families. The longer it takes, the harder it becomes. We need to speed up and act with a sense of urgency.”

    “All hypotheses must remain on the table until we have evidence that enables us to rule certain hypotheses in or out. This makes it all the more urgent that this scientific work be kept separate from politics. The way to prevent politicisation is for countries to share data and samples with transparency and without interference from any government. The only way this scientific work can progress successfully is with full collaboration from all countries, including China, where the first cases of SARS-CoV-2 were reported.” -Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

    Notably, China initially resisted a WHO probe into the origins of SARS-CoV-2 – however highly conflicted point-man and Wuhan collaborator Peter Daszak spearheaded a Beijing-friendly report that concluded the virus was likely passed to humans through animal intermediaries.

    Yet, after 14 nations criticized the report, including the UK, US, and Australia, Tedros admitted the report was flawed and ordered another investigation, sans Daszak, which the NIH funded to literally enhance bat covid to be more transmissible to humans, in the town where Covid first appeared, working with China’s “bat lady” who was doing the same types of risky experiments.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 22:50

  • Police Report Proves Plainclothes Electronic Surveillance Unit Members Were Embedded Among Jan. 6 Protesters
    Police Report Proves Plainclothes Electronic Surveillance Unit Members Were Embedded Among Jan. 6 Protesters

    Authored by Patricia Tolson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    While there is growing speculation that federal agents and Capitol Police were involved in instigating acts of violence during the Jan. 6, 2021 protests and recording responses for the purposes of entrapment, evidence now proves that “plainclothes” members of a special Electronic Surveillance Unit (ESU) were embedded among the protesters for the purposes of conducting video surveillance. Evidence also points to a day of security deficiencies and police provocation for the purpose of entrapment.

    The U.S. Capitol building in Washington is seen on May 28, 2021, behind security fencing that was put up after the Jan. 6, 2021 breach. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

    According to a report—First Amendment Demonstrations, issued Jan. 3, 2021, by Chief of Police Robert Contee of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), Homeland Security Bureau, Special Operations Division, obtained exclusively by The Epoch Times—the MPD began to activate Civil Disturbance Unit (CDU) platoons on Jan. 4, 2021. Full activation of 28 platoons was scheduled to occur on the following two days.

    Cover page for the First Amendment Demonstrations report, issued January 3, 2021, by the Metropolitan Police Department, Homeland Security Bureau, Special Operations Division. (Obtained by The Epoch Times)

    According to the Department of Justice website, “A CDU is composed of law enforcement officers who are trained to respond to protests, demonstrations, and civil disturbances for the purpose of preventing violence, destruction of property, and unlawful interference with persons exercising their rights under law.”

    The objective of MPD was “to assist with the safe execution of any First Amendment demonstration and ensure the safety of the participants, public, and the officers.” CDU personnel and Special Operations Division  (SOD) members were to “monitor for any demonstration and/or violent activity and respond accordingly,” according to the report.

    There has been speculation that federal agents and Capitol Police were involved in instigating acts of violence during the protests for the purposes of entrapment. As Red State reported in October 2021, “multiple surveillance videos show masked men opening up the doors to the U.S. Capitol Building to allow protesters to enter. In fact, one video shows them entering while Capitol Police officers simply stand around. Yet, we have no idea who those men are.”

    The ‘Covert Cadre’ of ‘Provocateurs’

    On a Dec.  7, 2021, episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the attorney for several Jan. 6 prisoners, Joseph McBride, identified a man tagged on the internet by so-called “Sedition Hunters” as “Red-Faced 45.” The man, dressed in red from head to toe—with even his face painted red—appears in a video engaging in continuous dialogue with uniformed personnel and others whom McBride insists are agents embedded in the crowd. McBride said the man is “clearly a law enforcement officer.”

    “He passes out weapons, sledgehammers, poles, mace. Some of those things come in contact with some of the other protesters who have subsequently been charged with possessing dangerous weapons and are using dangerous weapons at the Capitol. That is clearly entrapment.

    That is clearly the government creating conditions of dangerousness and entrapping members of the crowd to possess weapons and possibly use them for reasons that we cannot comprehend.”

    On Jan. 13, 2021, J. Michael Waller, senior analyst for Strategy at the Center for Security Policy, published a first-hand account of his observations. Waller is also President of Georgetown Research, a political risk and private intelligence company in Washington, D.C.; and was founding editorial board member of NATO’s peer-reviewed Defence Strategic Communications journal (2015–2018), and a senior analyst with Wikistrat. He is convinced people were embedded in the crowd to execute “an organized operation planned well in advance of the January 6 joint session of Congress.”

    According to Waller, a “covert cadre” of people were scattered throughout the crowd to encourage people toward the Capitol, including “fake Trump protesters” he suspected were ANTIFA “wearing Trump or MAGA hats backwards.”

    The Epoch Times reported on Jan. 1 that senior federal law enforcement officials refused to answer questions about an Arizona man named Ray Epps, captured on video the day before the rally wearing a Trump hat repeatedly encouraging protesters to “go into the Capitol” the next day. Many were suspicious of him. Chants of “fed, fed, fed” drown him out. On Jan. 6, he is seen telling the crowd “we are going to the Capitol, where all of our problems are.”

    Ray Epps encourages protesters to go into the Capitol the night before the breach on Jan. 6, 2021. (Villain Report/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

    Epps is also seen standing before a bike rack barricade, whispering into the ear of a protester wearing his Trump hat backwards. Moments later, that man is joined by others in tearing down the barricade. Epps is then seen running with the crowd toward the Capitol Building. Despite the evidence, Epps has not had any charges filed against him and his photo has been removed from the government’s list of most-wanted people from the event.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 22:15

  • Bank of Japan Spends A Record $81 Billion To Avert Collapse, But $10 Trillion JGB Market Is Now Completely Broken
    Bank of Japan Spends A Record $81 Billion To Avert Collapse, But $10 Trillion JGB Market Is Now Completely Broken

    Exactly one week ago, when quantifying the dizzying cost of the BOJ’s defense of its Yield Curve Control policy (at the expense of the collapsing yen), Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos calculated that the “the BOJ printer is on overdrive”, and if the current pace of buying persists, the bank will have bought approximately 10 trillion yen in June. To put that number in context, it is roughly equivalent to the Fed doing more than $300bn of QE per month when adjusting for GDP.

    Somewhat redundantly, the DB strategist said that this is a “truly extreme” level of money printing given that every other central bank in the world is tightening policy and is one of the reasons why he has been bearish on the yen. And as so many have argued, “currency intervention in this environment is simply not credible given it is the BoJ itself that is the cause of yen weakness.”

    More broadly, Saravelos echoes what we said in our preview of the end of MMT, writing that he worries that “the currency and Japanese financial markets are in the process of losing any sort of fundamental-based valuation anchor” and, as a result, “we will soon enter a phase where dramatic and unpredictable non-linearities in Japanese financial markets would kick in.”

    He was proven right the very next day, when not an insigificant part of Japan’s bond market imploded as the central bank battles to keep control of its policy goals as some of the largest hedge funds in the world pile on billions in bets that the BOJ is about to lose control, in a repeat of Soros’ dramatic crusade against the BOE (which the billionaire democrat ended up winning, and affording him the wealth to be the US government’s shadow puppetmaster to this day).

    As Bloomberg explained, a small tweak to the Bank of Japan’s bond purchase plan this week blew up an arbitrage strategy popular with overseas investors known as the basis trade (the same basis trade which blew up in 2019 in the US cash/futures market sparking the historic repo crash and the Fed’s return to QE). It also exacerbated a supply shortage of government bonds that has ramped up pressure on domestic financial institutions, leading them to turn to the BOJ for help to relieve the strain.

    One week ago we described how after four straight days of declines in Japanese bond futures, the central bank announced unlimited purchases of so-called cheapest-to-deliver 10-year notes for Thursday and Friday – securities closest linked to the contracts. That sent the spread between the futures and the bonds underlying them soaring to the widest since 2014 – a massive shock for traders with positions between the two.

    As a result, 10Y JGB futs crashed by the most since 2013 as traders bet that the BOJ will be forced to abandon its pledge to cap yields at 0.25%…

    … while the gap between JGB futs and underlying cash bonds soared the most on record.

    The chart below is another way of visualizing this historic divergence between futs and cash JGBs, clearly signaling the market’s belief that the BoJ will fold on its unlimited bond buying curve control program.

    Needless to say, arbs who were short the cheapest-to-deliver bonds and long the futures contracts suddenly faced steep losses and found it impossible to close their positions (remarkably all this was happening in the world’s 2nd largest bond markets, amounting to some 1.24 quadrillion yen or about $10 trillion, yet all everyone can talk about is crypto). As Bloomberg notes, the BOJ had effectively cornered the market in the cheapest-to-deliver bonds making it almost impossible for others to purchase them, while the futures price slumped to the brink of a trading halt as those caught out rushed to close.

    By late day Wednesday, a Bloomberg estimate of the cost to close this so-called short basis trade widened to about minus 7% from minus 0.4% the day before. It remained at distressed levels Friday — around minus 2% — suggesting some investors were still stuck on the wrong side of the trade.

    “The selloff in futures has killed arbitrage opportunities,” said Mari Iwashita, chief market economist at Daiwa Securities. “This situation will eventually end up in a total stalemate in markets.”

    By stalemate, he means “crash.”

    Speculative attacks on Japanese bonds have mounted as a growing number of funds – most notably the giant, $127 billion BlueBay – bet the BOJ will cave in to pressure and change its increasingly isolated super-easy monetary policy. The central bank confounded its critics Friday, holding firm with its rock-bottom interest rates and continuing with its fixed-rate bond purchase plan.

    Benchmark bond yields fell further below the 0.25% ceiling, after the central bank announced a fixed-rate purchase operation for the afternoon.

    But the bigger problem for the BOJ is that those purchases, which preserving the BOJ’s YCC “credibility” (for now) are also sucking up what little liquidity is available in the JGB market, piling pressure on local institutions, something which can be seen in the usage of the BOJ’s lending program — another gauge of stress in the market.

    Yes: on one hand the BOJ continues to buy billions in JGBs via QE, but on the other it is forced to lend what it has bought back into the market to avoid a terminal paralysis of what was once the second deepest bond market.

    The amount of bonds the central bank has lent “temporarily” to financial institutions to relieve supply tightness has hit a record, Bloomberg data show. The BOJ lent 3.2 trillion yen ($23.9 billion) of JGBs through its Securities Lending Facility on Thursday, well above the 2.3 trillion yen lent at the peak of coronavirus fears in March 2020.

    BOJ Governor Kuroda told reporters on Friday that the BOJ will take appropriate measures to address any decline in bond market liquidity. But he also said he isn’t thinking about raising the 10-year yield ceiling from 0.25%, which means that the liquidity situation will only get worse in the coming days.

    “Market functioning and liquidity have deteriorated sharply with the BOJ’s massive JGB purchases,” Barclays strategist Shinji Ebihara wrote in a note.

    Meanwhile, and going back to the original point brought up by DB’s Saravelos above that the BOJ is spending monstrous amounts of yen just to keep the JGB market from crashing, as traders countdown to the complete Ice-9ing of the Japanese bond market (which in recent months has seen its share of days without a single trade crossing) Bloomberg has calculated how much it cost the BOJ to preserve calm after last week’s catastrophic slide in futures, and the answer is some 10.9 trillion yen ($81 billion) of government bond purchases last week, the most on record. By way of comparison, European Central Bank asset purchases under its so-called APP program averaged about $27 billion – per month – this year through May. But fear not, once Europe’s dominoes start falling and peripheral yields explode to all time highs, Lagarde’s hedge fund will make BOJ’s purchases seems like a walk in the park by comparison.

    And while every day could be the BOJ’s last, market watchers see the temporary calm as an eye in the proverbial hurricane, as the BOJ continues to defy an intensifying global wave of central bank tightening and concentrated market pressure on the yen and government bonds. Treasuries remain a key driver as does the direction of the dollar-yen, hovering around a 24-year low.

    “If the yen weakens further as a sell-off in foreign bonds resumes, it would not be surprising were the yen rates market to start testing the BOJ again,” wrote Citigroup Inc. strategist Tomohisa Fujiki in a note.

    One place where the pressure is building up, is in implied volatility for 10-year JGBs, which however eased modestly after rising to the highest since the global financial crisis in 2008 on Friday. The BOJ said Friday its bond buying will continue for an extended period of time.

    “Since the JGB market volatility has been initiated by the global reaction to US CPI and the Federal Reserve’s tightening, the structure keeping it unstable remains quite intact,” said Mari Iwashita, chief market economist at Daiwa Securities. “Even as the BOJ steps up efforts to defend its turf, the structure behind the challenges remain the same.”

    Speculative attacks on Japan’s bond market have mounted amid bets the BOJ will cave in to pressure and tweak its increasingly isolated easy monetary policy — something it reconfirmed at its policy decision Friday. But the impact of the central bank’s bond purchases have squeezed some corners of the futures markets, putting at least some arbitrage traders under pressure.

    And yet, the most ominous sign yet for the BOJ is the recent quiet appointment of a Japanese government bond expert with experience of the market turmoil of the late 1990s to a key role in the Finance Ministry, which caught the attention of market watchers in Tokyo. Michio Saito — dubbed “Mr. JGB” — will head up a division that covers the bond market and may strengthen lines of communication with the central bank, according to some strategists.

    For the BOJ to seek a smooth exit from massive bond purchases, close cooperation with the finance ministry is essential, so the appointment of an experienced person in charge is very significant, Iwashita said. This “is positive news for the market,” she said.

    Most disagree, however, although they know better than to take the BOJ head on: after all, shorting JGBs has been a widowmaker trade for decades. Still, there is a sense of ominous capitulation vis-a-vis the Japanese bond market in recent days, almost as if we are now well past the point of no return and the final collapse of not just the JGB market, but the entire fraudulent MMT paradig, is just days if not hours away. Indeed, as Rabobank’s Michael Every put it, with every attempt to preserve the status quo, the BOJ is pulling even further on a monetary elastic band that will hurt far more when it does inevitably come snapping back the other way, and concludes that when the BOJ’s YCC peg eventually breaks, markets are going to get hit hard: “Japan is currently a source of ultra-cheap financing in a world of rising rates, and with a currency that is only going one way – down. If both reverse at once,… ouch!”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 22:03

  • The Impact Of Soros-Funded District Attorneys
    The Impact Of Soros-Funded District Attorneys

    Over the past few years we’ve noted with increasing frequency that billionaire George Soros has funded or supported far-left political candidates for office around the United States, particularly District Attorneys whose soft-on-crime policies have led to historic crime waves in major cities across the country.

    Illustration via @crabcrawler1

    It goes far beyond what we’ve reported, however.

    Twitter researcher ‘crabcrawler’ (@crabcrawler1) has assembled perhaps the most comprehensive look at Soros-funded DAs, and how their absolute miscarriages of justice led to a crisis of confidence in the US legal system.

    In an impressive Twitter thread that’s too lengthy to feature in its entirety (one can click on any of the tweets to dive in), crabcrawler illustrates how Soros DAs were supremely incompetent while operating under the guise of providing “reforms” that did nothing but create chaos.

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    Read the entire thread here.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 21:40

  • Florida To Go After Parents Who Pay Cartels To Smuggle Their Children Into the US
    Florida To Go After Parents Who Pay Cartels To Smuggle Their Children Into the US

    Authored by Charlotte Cuthbertson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is looking to investigate and prosecute parents who pay transnational criminal organizations to smuggle their children illegally across the U.S. southern border.

    Unaccompanied minors hold hands as they await transport after crossing the Rio Grande river into the United States from Mexico on a raft in Penitas, Texas, on March 12, 2021. (Adrees Latif/Reuters)

    DeSantis filed a petition with the Florida Supreme Court on June 17 requesting a statewide grand jury be impaneled for the initial duration of a year.

    “The purpose of the grand jury will be to investigate individuals and organizations that are actively working with foreign nationals, drug cartels, coyotes, to illegally smuggle minors—some as young as 2 years old—across the border and into Florida,” De Santis said during a press briefing on June 17.

    “This is just wrong what they’re doing and we are going to go after it.”

    The grand jury will also investigate the methods smugglers use to transport unaccompanied minors across the southern border and the smuggling or trafficking of other illegal aliens.

    Border Patrol agents apprehend and transport illegal immigrants who have just crossed the river into La Joya, Texas, on Nov. 17, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

    DeSantis also announced that the Florida Highway Patrol is expanding its enforcement on smuggling and trafficking corridors into the state.

    Since January 2021, the state’s Highway Patrol officers have made over 40 cases of human smuggling involving 150 illegal alien passengers, as well as seized 115 pounds of cocaine, 20 pounds of heroin, 250 pounds of meth, and 272 weapons, according to Florida Highway Patrol Director Col. Gene Spaulding.

    “And I can’t emphasize enough that it is just scratching the surface,” Spaulding said.

    The grand jury will also investigate local governments that are “aiding this smuggling scheme by intentionally violating our state law against sanctuary jurisdictions,” DeSantis said, referring to cities and counties, such as Miami-Dade, that fail to turn over criminal illegal aliens to federal immigration authorities.

    “According to reports from federal law enforcement, however, Miami-Dade County is refusing to honor federal requests to take custody of criminal aliens in Miami-Dade’s detention facilities, including aliens arrested for attempted murder, domestic violence by strangulation, assault with a deadly weapon, and lewd and lascivious behavior on a minor,” the petition states.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 21:05

  • World's Largest Cruise Ship Set For Scrapyard Without A Single Sail
    World’s Largest Cruise Ship Set For Scrapyard Without A Single Sail

    The hard-hit cruise industry has yet to recover as many cruise ship stocks tumble to their lowest levels since the early days of the virus pandemic. One sign the industry remains in deep turmoil is the potential scrapping of an unfinished cruise ship set to be the largest in the world. 

    German cruise-industry magazine An Bord reports the 9,000-passenger Global Dream II is about 80% finished. Its shipbuilder MV Werften filed for bankruptcy in January 2022, and bankruptcy administrators can’t find a buyer. 

    Christoph Morgen, an insolvency administrator at Brinkmann & Partner, said attempts are being made to sell parts of the vessel, including engines and propulsion systems. The cruise ship is located at a shipyard on Germany’s Baltic coast.

    Multiple parties expressed interest in purchasing the cruise ship. The vessel is buoyant and can be towed to another location. It was initially designed for service in Asia. Since no serious buyers have come to the table, the 1,122-foot ship could be liquidated for scrap.

    “If no buyer with a serious offer can be found in the coming weeks, the insolvency administrator will have to opt for a sale in a bidding process. Then shipbrokers with contact to shipbreaking yards can also submit their bids. The ship’s scrap value has risen due to the rise in scrap prices,” An Bord said. 

    Shipbuilding began in early 2018 and was expected to be completed in the first half of 2021. The virus pandemic sent demand for cruise ships into collapse and has been a troubled industry ever since. 

    Morgen said the cruise ship would need to be moved from the German shipyard by the end of the year because the commercial zone was sold to Thyssenkrupp’s naval unit, which will begin building submarines, corvettes, and frigates in 2024. 

    Perhaps the unfinished and unwanted 9,000-passenger cruise ship is an ominous sign of where the industry is headed… 

    The economics of operating the most massive cruise ship appears not to be there as stagflation grips the global economy, and COVID still runs wild in some countries. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 20:30

  • Facebook Removes Greitens "RINO Hunter" Campaign Ad
    Facebook Removes Greitens “RINO Hunter” Campaign Ad

    Update (1333ET): Facebook on Monday removed Greitens’ video, saying that it violated “our policies prohibiting violence and incitement.”

    In response, Greitens accused the tech giant of censorship

    “Facebook CENSORED our new ad calling out the weak RINOs. When I get to the US Senate, we are taking on Big Tech,” he wrote in a Facebook post.

    Twitter, meanwhile, has not removed the video – but has instead added a notice that reads: “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about abusive behavior. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the Tweet to remain accessible.”

    The social media giant will also limit engagement with the post, preventing users from giving it a “like” , “reply” , or retweeting it.

    *  *  *

    Missouri Republican Senate candidate and former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens has come under fire from both sides of the aisle over a campaign ad that paints Trump supporters as murderous “RINO” hunters.

    “I’m Eric Greitens Navy Seal, and today, we’re going RINO hunting,” he says, referring to so-called ‘Republicans in Name Only’ such as Mitt Romney and Evan McMullin.

    “The RINO feeds on corruption and is marked by the stripes of cowardice,” he continues, before a team of militarized police breach an empty room. Greitens then tells people to “join the MAGA crew” and “get a RINO permit.”

    “There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

    In other words, “Hello fellow violent MAGAs!”

    The ad comes as Congressional Democrats are pushing for more gun control – particularly “red flag” laws to take weapons away from anyone deemed to be an ‘unhinged gun nut,’ and one day after Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a RINO, claimed that he received a letter threatening to “execute” his family, including his 5-month-old baby.

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    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsIt didn’t take long for left-leaning websites such as the Drudge Report to jump on it:

    Meanwhile, many on the right were appalled at the ad.

    “Why then did you make the MO Capitol a gun free zone, bash the Second Amendment Preservation Act using verbatim Mom’s Demand language, and refuse to support Constitutional Carry?” tweeted former NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch.

    Others followed suit on both sides of the aisle:

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    Talk about handing out free gun control talking points.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 20:20

  • "We Now See The Fed Moving Toward An Attempted Controlled Unwind Position"
    “We Now See The Fed Moving Toward An Attempted Controlled Unwind Position”

    By Larry McDonald, author of the Bear Traps Report

    Never forget – NOT allowing price discovery for a long period of time – then forcing the process onto markets with a “bayonet in the back” – at an ever-accelerating rate – is a virgin-central bank experiment. It comes at a high price. Never happened before.

    Inflation is forcing central bankers to allow price discovery. There was always price discovery before Lehman – but for much of the last 12 years markets have been in a Fed zombie trance. We mean a real – free market – “cost of capital.”

    Light on this process is emerging through the cobwebs of “Pandora’s Box.” After leaving it closed for far too long. Indeed, the Fed ripped open the box with panicked shaking fingers. As academics – they cannot possibly measure the risk in what they are doing. They are focused on backward-looking economic data – NOT the thousands of NEW risk metrics flying out of the crypt.

    Financial conditions are tightening, at the fastest since Lehman. And even when central bankers do see the new emerging risk – they certainly will NOT tell us until the beast inside the market forces them to.

    That said, much like our weekend notes delivered near March 14 (QQQ counter trend rally +17%) and May 20 (QQQ counter-trend rally +12%), buy signals are mounting yet again.

    Central bankers are NOT idiots – they clearly see the emerging risks we see but have to stick to the stale script and bleed out the truth — one drop at a time. BUT colossal market pressures and fast economic deterioration will force them to acknowledge the new risk landscape. The greater the systemic risk pressure, the faster the clowns will react.

    It ́s all about the rate of change of information. In a bull market, under normal conditions – central bankers do NOT have to get out of their cozy recliner – for years they are conditioned to sit back and relax.

    As the bear ́s claws arrive – fresh tracks can be seen on the trail staking Powell and Co. The fierce shift in the rate of change of both economic and systemic risk data presents fresh wounds to the reputations of our brain trusts.

    For months – their pawns (sell side banks and journalists) have been talking up a 4-5% Fed funds rate – pure lunacy on today ́s stage. The beast will NOT have it.

    We love the gold and silver miners here – and see the Fed moving toward an “attempted” controlled unwind position. They have acknowledged their inflation fight, now they must come clean on the financial stability – recession front.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 19:55

  • Watch: Louisville Slugger Sucker-Punches Mayor
    Watch: Louisville Slugger Sucker-Punches Mayor

    One moment, Louisville mayor Greg Fischer is hugging someone. In the next, he’s on the receiving end of a vicious sucker punch that sends him straight to the ground.  

    That’s the scene captured on surveillance video Saturday night, as Fischer mingled at “Fourth Street Live,” an entertainment and retail complex in downtown Louisville. 

    In the video, the attacker casually strolls up to Fischer before unleashing a forceful punch on the unsuspecting third-term Democrat.

    As is increasingly the case with urban violence, the perpetrator hasn’t been identified and has thus far escaped any consequences. Video shows a man briefly confronted the attacker, but nobody made any effort to detain him—despite the fact that the mayor was accompanied by a protective detail.  

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    “The mayor does utilize a security detail, and that detail was with him at Fourth Street Live. While it’s not appropriate to comment on specifics of that detail, it is always being evaluated and adjusted as needed,” mayor spokeswoman Jessica Wethington told the Louisville Courier-Journal. 

    “We are living in strange times all across America right now…and I have the honor of being right in the middle of all of it,” a straight-faced Fischer told WLKY on Sunday when asked about the incident.  

    Louisville police released this image of the mayor’s assailant

    The security detail’s failure comes four months after Louisville Democratic mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg and his staffers came under gunfire at his campaign headquarters. No one was injured but a bullet grazed Greenberg’s clothing. Police arrested Quintez Brown, a 21-year-old Black Lives Matter activist who once appeared on MSNBC to advocate…gun control.  

    Fischer was evaluated by paramedics without need for further treatment. “The mayor says he is glad he can still take a punch,” his spokeswoman said. Earlier in the day, Fischer walked in an LGBTQ+ Pride parade. 

    Fischer is white, his assailant is black. The brazen assault has received little national media attention. 

    In 2020, Fischer said “for too many Louisvillians, racism is a fact of daily life,” as he officially proclaimed racism a “public health crisis” in Louisville. 

    On Thursday, Fischer formally apologized to Louisville’s black residents for the city’s role in fostering and perpetuating racism from the time of “the first slave ships until today.”

    Mayor Fischer walking in the Kentuckiana Pride Parade on Saturday (Scott Utterback, Louisville Courier Journal) 

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 19:20

  • Study CDC Cited In Arguing For COVID-19 Vaccines For Babies Being Updated
    Study CDC Cited In Arguing For COVID-19 Vaccines For Babies Being Updated

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A non-peer-reviewed study that U.S. government scientists cited in asserting COVID-19 is a leading cause of death for children is being updated after inaccuracies were detected.

    A general view of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Ga., on Sept. 30, 2014. (Tami Chappell/Reuters)

    The preprint paper, published in May, says that COVID-19 has been the fifth-leading cause of death during the pandemic for children aged 1 to 5. The authors, primarily British scientists, also concluded that COVID-19 has been a top cause of death for all children.

    “Our findings underscore the importance of continued vaccination campaigns for [children ≥5 years] in the US and for effective Covid-19 vaccines for under 5 year olds,” they wrote.

    But the paper has flaws, Seth Flaxman, a professor in Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science, and one of the authors, acknowledged on Twitter on June 19.

    “We have received some feedback and criticism along several dimensions. We are planning to update the preprint to take into account some of this feedback,” he said.

    The study was cited in three separate presentations across two meetings during the week of June 12 as government officials and expert advisers weighed whether to authorize and recommend vaccines for young children.

    Dr. Katherine Fleming-Dutra, a CDC official, twice cited the study while presenting data on how COVID-19 has affected children while speaking to government advisory panels.

    “COVID-19 was a leading cause of death among children and adolescents during the pandemic. Previously, we showed data to ACIP that during 2020 COVID-19 was the 11th cause of death among children ages five through 11 years. But this has changed over the course of the pandemic. And looking at data through April 2022, COVID-19 now ranks as the fourth and fifth causes of death among children zero through 19 years of age,” Fleming-Dutra said on June 17 while speaking to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which advises the CDC.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 18:45

  • Distressed Crypto Lender Gets Debt Repayment Reprieve As It Battles For Survival
    Distressed Crypto Lender Gets Debt Repayment Reprieve As It Battles For Survival

    After coming perilously close to getting margin called into oblivion on Saturday, when liquidations sparked daisy-chained liquidations leading to collateral call cascades across the entire crypto sector, bitcoin and its digital token peers have staged a solid comeback in the past two days, with bitcoin bouncing back over $20K and ether rising as much as $1100, up almost 30% in 48 hours.

    There was more good news on Monday, when Bloomberg reported that the Sequoia Capital China-backed Babel Finance – the distressed crypto lender which we previously reported had frozen withdrawals on Friday amid the relentless cascade in selling – said it won a reprieve on debt repayments.

    In a statement the company posted on its website, the Hong Kong-based Babel said it had “reached preliminary agreements on the repayment period of some debts, which has eased the company’s short-term liquidity pressure.” Co-founder Flex Yang told Bloomberg the company “will disclose to the public” once they’ve made progress.

    “Given the current context of severe market volatility, Babel Finance’s management will continue to communicate closely with customers, counterparties, and other partners, and provide updates in a timely and transparent manner,” the company said in the statement.  

    Separately, Bloomberg reported that Babel is in talks with large institutions about potential solutions that include setting up a new entity to take over some of the debt. It wasn’t clear who that entity may be.

    As discussed on Saturday, Babel’s difficulties – along with those of Celsius, a massive crypto shadowbank which similarly halted withdrawals a few days earlier – highlight the turmoil sweeping the crypto industry. Babel cited “unusual liquidity pressures” for its decision to halt withdrawals. It wasn’t clear when the company might open its platform for withdrawals or name the lenders it’s in discussions with, although it is likely that the price of biitcoin and ether will have to be notably above current prices.

    The halt on withdrawals marked a sudden reversal of fortunes for Babel, which less than a month ago announced an $80 million funding round that put its valuation at $2 billion. The company had an outstanding loan balance of more than $3 billion at the end of last year.

    And while Babel may have kicked the can briefly, attention now turns to one of the biggest crypto hedge funds Three Arrows Capital, which we learned last week has hired legal and financial advisers after the ongoing liquidation in crypto left it with massive margin calls.

    Meanwhile, as of Monday afternoon in New York, Bitcoin was holding above $20,000, a level that Bloomberg Intelligence strategist Mike McGlone described in a recent note as “akin to about $5,000 in 2018-20 as part of what we see as the great reversion of 2022.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 18:10

  • Morgan Stanley: So What Does The ECB Do Next?
    Morgan Stanley: So What Does The ECB Do Next?

    By Seth Carpenter, Chief US Economist at Morgan Stanley

    It’s tough all over. Central banks face difficult decisions as inflation keeps surprising to the upside. But as Yogi Berra’s advice suggests, they may not know where the road is taking them. The Federal Reserve hiked 75bp, 25bp more than was priced in just a week earlier. So much for forward guidance as a policy tool. At the June ECB policy meeting, President Lagarde also weighed in. She was clear that following a 25bp rate hike in July, the rate hike in September would be larger – presumably 50bp if the outlook for medium-term inflation was still above target. Put differently, if the ECB does not lower the 2024 forecast for inflation, we should expect 50bp.

    A lower inflation forecast faces long odds as commodities prices matter a lot for the euro area inflation outlook. Euro area headline inflation is 8.1%Y, with core at 3.8%Y. Compared to the US, where headline is almost the same at 8.3%Y but core is 5.9%Y, European inflation is much more noncore than core. Given the likely path for energy and food prices, a lower forecast for 2024 headline inflation does not seem to be in the cards. For core inflation, the ECB views economic growth a year earlier as the key driver. It is very hard to see what data we will get by September that will affect 2023 growth expectations to push the 2024 core forecast below 2.3%Y and back to target.

    So, the ECB has joined the ranks of central banks that are hiking more and more with the common goal of slowing inflation. The ECB’s aggressive reaction to headline inflation harkens back to the difficult arithmetic for the Fed that I discussed here in January.

    The choice is stark:

    i) either cause a recession and bring down inflation in the near term or

    ii) engineer a substantial slowdown, but one that is shy of a recession, and accept elevated inflation for years.

    Judging from the latest projections where core inflation stays above target for the entire forecast period, the ECB has chosen the latter route. Despite the lags of policy, if the ECB chose to engineer a recession now, the effects would almost surely show through before 2024.

    One way to understand the ECB’s choice is its history with inflation undershooting the target. Decisively breaking that pattern might be attractive. This more cautious approach might also reflect the overweight of noncore items in euro area inflation – noncore prices are mostly exogenous to euro area activity. The recession required to drive down noncore prices would have to be severe. And while euro area unemployment is at its lowest level since the single currency’s inception, wage inflation has not surged (as it did in the US), so the economy is not obviously red hot. Finally, reports are swirling of a new tool to ward off fragmentation in European markets. A hard landing would very likely precipitate that outcome.

    So what happens next?

    Clearly, the Governing Council is set on a hiking cycle. The path for inflation depends on commodity prices and economic growth in the euro area.

    We are more pessimistic about euro area growth, starting with the second half of this year, but with the lags in data reporting and the ECB’s focus on headline inflation, clear signs of slowing in the economy may not be evident in time to stay its hand. Although the ECB’s forecasts imply that it is choosing the more benign path, if our forecast is right, the risk of the ECB hiking into a recession – albeit inadvertently – is clearly rising.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 17:35

  • China, US Escalate Over Legal Status Of Taiwan Strait After Beijing Rejects It As "International Waters"
    China, US Escalate Over Legal Status Of Taiwan Strait After Beijing Rejects It As “International Waters”

    The White House earlier this month reaffirmed its stance that the Taiwan Strait constitutes “international waters” following the latest US warship sail-through, which had put China’s PLA Eastern Theatre Command on high alert. As Reuters reported last Tuesday, “The United States on Tuesday backed Taiwan’s assertion that the strait separating the island from China is an international waterway, a further rebuff to Beijing’s claim to exercise sovereignty over the strategic passage.”

    This prompted Beijing to issue its own statement and definition, hitting back that the strait is not “international waters” – thus placing limits on the movements of foreign military vessels in the waters – and further reasserting that it constitutes the mainland’s exclusive economic zone.

    The Strait of Taiwan, Gallo Images via Getty

    Bloomberg reports Monday that Biden administration officials are “increasingly concerned the stance could result in more frequent challenges at sea for the democratically governed island, according to people familiar with the matter.”

    And further, “Chinese officials have made such remarks repeatedly in meetings with US counterparts in recent months, Bloomberg reported last week.” The report underscores that this marks an escalation, given the international legal status of the passageway wasn’t previously center of debate as it is now:

    While China regularly protests US military moves in the Taiwan Strait, the legal status of the waters previously wasn’t a regular talking point in meetings with American officials.

    Washington is alarmed over the timing, not only given the ongoing fallout from the Russian war in Ukraine, which Beijing has refused to outright condemn, but especially because a week ago China’s President Xi Jinping has signed an order which fundamentally expands the conditions under which People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops can be deployed.

    The order introduced legal framework to deploy troops in “non-war military actions” which took effect Wednesday, according to state media. It could have significant repercussions for tensions with the US and Washington allies like Australia or Japan in places like the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, given the order loosens the conditions under which it’s possible to initiate “military operations other than war” which involves operations that do not explicitly involve direct conflict or combat.

    Depending on how far China wants to press its definition, the most extreme scenario could involve the PLA military moving to close the strait…

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    This further means that Xi is hinting he could use the PLA military to begin enforcing the newly articulated position that the Taiwan Strait is not “international waters” – however vague the Chinese position may remain.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 17:00

  • COVID Exposed The Medical-Pharmaceutical-Government Complex
    COVID Exposed The Medical-Pharmaceutical-Government Complex

    Authored by Mark Oshinskie via The Brownstone Institute,

    In college, I took a Latin American Politics and Development class. When discussing Latin American medical care, Professor Eldon Kenworthy presented a deeply countercultural idea. Echoing a journal article by the scholar, Robert Ayres, Kenworthy maintained that building hospitals there costs lives. If, instead of erecting, equipping and staffing gleaming medical centers, this same money and human effort were devoted to providing clean water, good food and sanitation, the public health yield would be much greater. 

    United States medical history bears out Ayres’s paradox. The biggest increases in US life expectancy occurred early in the Twentieth Century, when people had increasing access to calories and protein, better water and sanitation. Lives lengthened sharply decades before vaccines, antibiotics or nearly any drugs were available, and a century before hospitals merged into corporate Systems.

    Incremental American life span increases during the past fifty years reflect far less smoking, safer cars and jobs, cleaner air and less lethal wars more than they reflect medical advances. Books like Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis and Daniel Callahan’s Taming the Beloved Beast echo Ayres’s critique. But PBS, CNN, B & N, the NYT, et al. censor such views.

    The American medical landscape has changed radically in the forty years since I learned of Ayres’ observation.

    America spends three times as much, as a percentage of GDP, on medical treatments as it did in the 1960s. 

    By 2020, America devoted 18% of its GDP to medicine. (By comparison, about 5% goes to the military). Adding the mega-costs of mass testing and vaccines etc., medical expenditures might now approach 20%. Although the US spends more than twice per capita what any other nation spends on medical care, American ranks 46th in life expectancy. US life expectancy has flatlined, despite growing medical spending and broadened medical access via the vaunted Affordable Care Act. 

    Though medicine’s high-cost and relatively low yield are right in front of anyone who thinks about their medical experiences and those of people they know, most never connect the dots; more medical treatments and spending are continually advocated and applauded. There’s a regressive “if it saves—or even slightly extends—one life” medical zeitgeist/ethic.

    As most medical insurance is employer-based, most people don’t notice annual premium increases. Nor do they see the growing slice of tax revenues used to subsidize Med/Pharma. Thus, they continually demand more stuff, like IVF, extremely high-cost drugs, sex changes or psychotherapy, as if these were their right, and free. To say nothing of these treatments’ limited effectiveness. 

    As all are required to medically insure and to pay taxes, one can’t simply opt out or buy only those medical services that one thinks justify their costs. With massive, guaranteed funding sources, aggregate medical revenues will continue to climb. 

    Thus, Medical-Industrial-Government Complex has become a Black Hole for today’s wealth. With great money comes great power. The Med/Pharma juggernaut rules the airwaves. Nonexistent until the 1990s, hospital System and drug ads now dominate advertising. By being such big advertisers, Med/Pharma dictates news content. Analysts who point out that lavish medical expenditures don’t yield commensurate public health benefit have small audiences. Med/Pharma critics can’t afford ads. 

    Medicine has fed Coronamania. The TV news I’ve seen during the past 27 months painted a very skewed picture of reality. The virus has been misrepresented—by the media and government, and by MDs, like Fauci, often posing in white jackets— as a runaway train that’s indiscriminately decimating the American populace. Instead of putting into perspective the virus’s clear demographic risk profile and the very favorable survival odds—even without treatment, at all ages, or promoting various forms of contra-Covid self-care, including weight loss—the media and medical establishment incited universal panic, and promoted counterproductive mass isolation, mass masking, mass testing, and treatment with ventilators and expensive, often harmful anti-virals. 

    Later, mass injections were added to the “Covid-crushing” armamentarium. While the shots created many billionaires, and greatly enriched other Pfizer and Moderna stockholders, they failed, as Biden and many others had promised, to stop either infection or the spread. All of the many whom I know who have been infected in the past six months were vaxxed. 

    Many—whose voices are suppressed by mainstream media—observe that the shots have worsened outcomes, by driving the development of variants, weakening or confusing immune systems, and causing serious near-term injuries. 

    Further, people blindly, ardently believed in the shots simply because they were marketed as “vaccines” by bureaucrats wearing medical garb. Despite the shots’ failure and the failure of other “mitigation” measures like lockdowns, masking and testing, many refuse to concede that Med/Pharma has had much—overwhelmingly negative— influence over the society and economy and public health during Coronamania. Nonetheless, many billions of dollars have been—and are still being—spent to advertise shots that most people don’t want. 

    The Covid overreaction has to some extent also piggy-backed on TV programs that have, for decades, glorified medicine in TV shows like Dr. Kildare, Marcus Welby, M.D., Medical Center, MASH, Gray’s Anatomy and House. Wearing white coats connotes virtue, just as did wearing white hats in Western movies. 

    Given the cumulative PR onslaught of the ads and shows, medicine is widely seen as more effective than it is in real life. A few years ago, I heard some woman-in-the-street say, during a TV news clip, “If they make me change my doctor, it will be like losing my right arm.” 

    Many hold such polar views. Medicine is the new American religion. Given such fervent belief in medicine’s importance and the sense of entitlement regarding expanding medical treatments, government and insurance money is relentlessly overallocated to medicine. 

    Do these expenditures improve human outcomes? During the first Scrubs episode, resident J.D. complains to his mentor that being a doctor was different than he had envisioned; most of his patients were “old and kind of checked out.” His mentor responds, “That’s Modern Medicine: advances that keep people alive who should have died a long time ago, back when they lost what made them human.”

    This largely describes those said to have died with Covid. Most people have disregarded that nearly all who died during the pandemic were old and/or in poor health. Most deaths have always occurred among the old and ill. Occasionally, sitcoms keep it realer than real people do.

    Aside from not helping much and misspending resources, and extending misery, medicine can be iatrogenic, i.e., it can cause illness or death. Hospital errors are said to cause from 250,000 to 400,000 American deaths annually. Perhaps medical personnel try to do a good job. but when the bodies of old, sick people are cut open or dosed with strong medicine, stuff happens. Even well-executed surgeries and many medications can worsen health. 

    Further, though few know it, a brew of excreted medications and diagnostic radionuclides daily pours down drains across the US and world and ends up in streams and rivers. For example, the hormones in widely-prescribed birth control pills feminize and disrupt aquatic creatures’ reproduction. There are books about all of this, too, though such authors never appear on Good Morning America. 

    Faith in medical interventions also lessens individual and institutional efforts to maintain or improve health. If people didn’t abuse substances, ate better and moved their bodies more, there would be much less demand for medical interventions. And if people spent less time working to pay for medical insurance, they could spend more time taking care of themselves and others. Overall, America could spend a fraction of what it spends on allopathic medicine and yet, be much healthier. There are also plenty of books about this. 

    Given its place at the center of American life for 27 months, and counting, Covid has been—and will be—used to further intensify the medicalization of individual lives, the economy, and society. By exploiting and building an irrational fear of death, the Medical Industrial Complex will promote the notion that we should double—or triple—down on medical and social interventions and investments that might marginally extend the lives of a small slice of the population. Or, in many instances, shorten lives. 

    But most people who live sensibly are intrinsically healthy for many years. Given enough nutritious food, clean water and a decent place to sleep, most people will live a long time, with little or no medical treatment. While intensive medical interventions can marginally extend the lives of some old, sick people, medicine can’t reverse aging and it seldom restores vitality. 

    If the media were honest brokers, the Covid mania would never have taken hold. The media should have repeatedly pointed out that the virus only threatened a small, identifiable segment of a very large population. Instead, captive to its Med/Pharma sponsors, the media went full-frontal fearmonger and promoted intensive, society-wide intervention. Social, psychological and economic catastrophe ensued.

    Additionally, many doctors who could have spoken against the Covid craziness stayed silent so as not to jeopardize their licenses, hospital privileges or favored status with Pharma, or just because they were schooled in allopathic orthodoxy and hold fast to that faith. Props to those courageous few who broke ranks. 

    The Med/Pharma/Gov establishment, including the NIH and CDC, hasn’t saved America during 2020-22. To the contrary, Covid interventions have worsened overall societal outcomes. These net harms should have inflicted—and, depending on longer-term vaxx effects, may yet inflict—a big black eye on the Medical Industrial Complex. 

    If so, Med/Pharma will spend tens of billions of PR money to distort what’s happened for the past 27 months, and to portray well-paid medical personnel, administrators and bureaucrats as selfless heroes. Many gullible Americans will buy this slick revisionism, including its portrayals of healthy-looking people walking in slow motion on beaches or across meadows in golden light, accompanied by a contemplative solo piano soundtrack.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 16:25

  • 10,000 Flights Delayed Over Holiday Weekend As Aviation Chaos Concerns White House 
    10,000 Flights Delayed Over Holiday Weekend As Aviation Chaos Concerns White House 

    Travel chaos impacted thousands of Americans trying to catch a flight during the Father’s Day and Juneteenth holiday weekend.

    Flight tracking website FlightAware shows more than 10,000 flights were delayed or canceled nationwide between Friday and Sunday due to pilot shortages and bad weather, which comes days after top airline executives spoke with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about how to resolve flight disruptions. 

    “That is happening to a lot of people, and that is exactly why we are paying close attention here to what can be done and how to make sure that the airlines are delivering,” Buttigieg told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday. 

    Buttigieg said he could penalize airlines that fail to meet consumer-protection standards.

    According to data from the Transport Security Administration, passenger throughput at U.S. security checkpoints at airports topped nearly 2.4 million on Friday, the highest checkpoint volume since the Sunday after Thanksgiving and 100,000 more travelers than the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. 

    Constant flight disruptions are caused by staffing shortages, bad weather, and reduced flights and come at a time when airlines can barely keep up with demand.

    The origins of the shortage began in the early days of the virus pandemic when pilot hiring, training, and licensing came to a standstill. Then airlines forced thousands of pilots into early retirement to reduce labor costs as travel demand cratered. 

    Recently, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told investors that the shortage could last for years. 

    “The pilot shortage for the industry is real, and most airlines are simply not going to be able to realize their capacity plans because there simply aren’t enough pilots, at least not for the next five-plus years,” Kirby said.

    Kit Darby, a pilot pay consultant and a retired United captain, warned that “there is no quick fix” for the pilot shortage. 

    This weekend, videos posted on social media show long lines and frustrated passengers. 

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    The combination of reduced flights, pilot shortage, soaring jet fuel costs, and robust flying demand have sent ticket prices sky-high. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 15:50

  • Russian Central Bank: Bitcoin Payments For International Settlements Is "Possible"
    Russian Central Bank: Bitcoin Payments For International Settlements Is “Possible”

    Authored by Shawn Amick via BitcoinMagazine.com,

    • The Central Bank of Russian Federation recently discussed using bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for international settlement.

    • Currently, the central bank holds that Russia should only use the assets for international settlement, not within Russia.

    • The comments were made by the head of the central bank and oppose previous positions held by the monetary authority.

    Elvira Nabiullina, head of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, recently attended the St. Petersburg Economic Forum (SPIEF) where she commented on Russia’s use of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for international trade, per a report from state-media outlet Kommersant.

    “Our position is that cryptocurrency should not be used as a means of calculation within the country…

    …As for use in international settlements, if it does not penetrate the Russian financial system, it is possible,” Nabiullina told reporters during the event.

    Earlier in the event, before the remarks made by Nabiullina, First Deputy Chairman of the Central Bank Ksenia Yudaeva also stated that Russia did not object to the use of payments like bitcoin “in international transactions and international financial infrastructure.”

    Previously, the central bank proposed a ban on the mining and trading of cryptocurrencies this past January.

    Following this announcement, Russian President Vladimir Putin openly challenged the central bank’s opinion stating the country had a “competitive advantage” in the mining sector and asked them to reconsider.

    In response to Putin’s request for reconsideration, a bill was submitted to regulate bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem by the Russian government.

    Within the same month, the Ministry of Finance released its amended version of the bill seeking to properly regulate the ecosystem.

    Consequently, as the Russian government and monetary authorities have been divided on the matter, so too have individuals stationed within those authoritative positions. In fact, Denis Manturov, Minister of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation recently stated “The question is when it will happen, how it will happen and how it will be regulated [cryptocurrencies]. Now both the Central Bank and the government are actively engaged in this.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/20/2022 – 15:15

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