• Kadish: Is It Puppeteers Or Puppets In Control In Washington?
  Kadish: Is It Puppeteers Or Puppets In Control In Washington?

  Authored by Lawrence Kadish via The Gatestone Institute,

  It must be the best of times and the worst of times for our nation’s enemies.

  

  On one hand they have a President in the White House whose actions are reducing America into some befuddled and diminished world power.

  On the other hand our foes are trying to figure out, as are all Americans, who is actually in charge in Washington?

  Is it a shadow government of consultants, lobbyists, and Obama retreads?

  Or is it really a president who counts success as getting to the presidential helicopter unassisted?

  One can envision the intelligence chiefs of our sworn enemies being sternly lectured by their supreme leaders to get to the bottom of it because they can’t believe their good fortune that American leadership has fallen so far so fast. It must be a devious trap.

  If only that were true.

  It is understandable our foes sense a unique moment in history. Under Biden, America now has a national debt that rivals a Black Hole. Our unemployment numbers refuse to go down, suggesting deep fissures in our economy. Our southern border remains more a suggestion than a checkpoint. And our allies see a nation that has casually condemned to death untold numbers of Afghans who fervently believed in America until they saw our last C-17 depart Kabul.

  What all of this might suggest is that there are individuals in Washington who are wielding enormous power without worrying about what Joe Biden might think or do because whatever they decide, it is Biden who will take the fall. If true, it has the makings of a nightmare situation.

  And yet there is another scenario that is equally chilling.

  What if Biden is not the tool of those behind the throne? What if he has cut the cord of puppet strings and is “dancing” freely? What if he is pursuing policies and initiatives far removed from those who thought they could direct the actions of a President whose cognitive behavior has been seriously questioned?

  So pity our poor enemies. They do not know who to bribe, intimidate, or co-opt.

  And then pity America — for whether we tell Joe “it’s time to go” or “straighten up and fly right,” we appear to be trapped by a Washington power elite intent on consigning our future to oblivion.

  In the end, it will be up to the American electorate to halt this slide as they consider who to send to Congress in the next election cycle.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 23:30

• Forget 5G, China Leads The 6G Charge
  Forget 5G, China Leads The 6G Charge

  While the world is still very much in the transition phase with 5G, research is already well underway for the next iteration of the technology standard for mobile broadband networks – 6G.

  Statista’s Martin Armstrong notes that, according to a whitepaper by Samsung it takes an average of ten years for a new standard to become ready for commercialization, with 5G taking eight years. The tech giant suggested a potential rollout date of 2028-2030 for 6G, highlighting the urgent need for progress to be made.

  As this infographic shows, the country at the front of this new charge is China.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Data from the Cyber Creative Institute as covered by Nikkei Asia shows that of around 20,000 6G-related patent applications as of August 2021, 40.3 percent originated from the Asian superpower. The United States isn’t far behind, however, claiming 35.2 percent of the applications. The home of Samsung, South Korea, is in fifth place (when combining applications for European countries) with 4.2 percent.

  The source assessed patent applications for nine core 6G technologies including communications, quantum technology, base stations and artificial intelligence. 6G is expected to be about ten times faster than 5G.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 23:00

• Wokeness: An Evil Of Our Age
  Wokeness: An Evil Of Our Age

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

  History is replete with examples of nations, successful and not-so-successful alike, that abruptly committed suicide. 

  The ancient polis of Corcyra devoured itself in a bloody conflict as a collective madness took hold of the island city-state during the Peloponnesian War. 

  The Jacobins in 1793 hijacked the French Revolution and turned a movement toward a constitutional republic into a totalitarian, year-zero effort to destroy the past and ensure equity for all—or else. The Reign of Terror—and eventually Napoleon—followed. 

  The effort to force war-weary Czarist Russia to reform into a constitutional monarchy ended up being kidnapped by a small but lethal clique of Leninist Bolsheviks. What ensued was the destruction of Russian life—and millions of corpses—over the next 70 years. Ditto Mao Zedong’s various murderous resets culminating in the cannibalistic “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s final tab was 60-70 million deaths of his fellow Chinese. 

  French, Russian, and Chinese wokists all toppled statues, canceled out the nonbelievers, wiped away history, tore down monuments, and declared themselves the purest of all generations in their year zero—before getting down to the business of dividing up the spoils and settling scores.

  Most of these bloodbaths started out with the supposedly noble idea of delivering social justice, equity, and fairness before they inevitably went deadly and feral. We should be just as worried about our own woke pandemic.

  Mythological

  Start with the idea that “wokeness” is an ideology divorced from reality. Nearly all of its premises are complete distortions.

  

  Between 2017 and 2020, minorities had made the greatest gains in employment in U.S. history. Women currently represent about 60 percent of all college students. 

  Recent wage gains for minority middle-class Americans outpaced those of the white working- and middle class. The latter were underrepresented in college enrollments and as graduates—but vastly overrepresented (at twice their percentage of the general population) in the toll of combat dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asian-Americans and a dozen other ethnic groups outpace so-called whites in per capita and household income. “White privilege” is usually a sloppy term that applies mostly to the white elites who use it to smear others.

  America was in our sixth decade of “affirmative action,” the euphemism of ensuring equity of result by calibrating race and gender—but not class—in hiring and admissions. Proportional representation and disparate impact continued or were even enhanced. But they became increasingly selective as entire fields from the Postal Service to professional sports were somehow exempt from racial set-asides applied to others. Quotas disappeared when the marginalized were “overrepresented” in a field.

  The historical reparatory effort of the massive programs born out of the Great Society continued to address the baleful legacy of slavery that had ended over 150 years ago, as well as Southern Jim Crow laws that had largely disappeared 40-50 years ago, and the fumes of such racial toxicity. So, Martin Luther King’s “content of our character” rather than the “color of our skin” was still embraced as the melting-pot ideal of the Civil Rights movement that had fought for integration and full assimilation into American society. Meanwhile, intermarriage has never been more common. 

  The desperate Left had therefore been forced to invent adjectives and phraseology like “systemic racism” and “microaggression” and “whiteness” given the vast majority of Americans did not feel or express or act out on “racism.”

  In other words, wokeness created the mythology that the nonwhite were worse off than ever before—a typical revolutionary fabrication to evoke the sort of hysteria necessary for an otherwise unpopular agenda. But then again, we live in an age where we were assured Hunter Biden’s lost laptop was “Russian disinformation”, the Steele dossier was iron-clad proof of something, and a pangolin or a bat birthed COVID-19.

  The wrongful death of George Floyd in police custody—despite his later angelic deification, Floyd was in fact a felon with a history of violence toward women, arrested in the act of passing counterfeit U.S. currency—was the work of a cruel rogue cop and his incompetent enablers. Otherwise, data and statistics did not show that African American males were dying while in police custody in numbers greater than their proportions of those yearly arrested. Nor were they the victims of some pandemic of interracial hate crimes. Indeed, blacks statistically were more likely to commit rare violent interracial crimes than were others, including targeted hate crimes against other ethnic and racial groups.

  Elite-Driven

  Another great lie was the propaganda that the woke movement was a grass-roots movement. Yet statue-toppling, vandalism, Trotskyism, and cancel culture remain largely the work of college students, upper-middle class white coastal elites, celebrities, and privileged minorities in the media, academia, law, the corporate world, entertainment, and professional sports. 

  In a reductionist sense, much of the woke movement became a battle among elites to leverage diversity czars in universities, reparational quotas in administrative hiring and college admissions, and a sort of racialized intramural reseating among first-class passengers on the corporate and government Lido deck. 

  While wokeists harangued New York and Hollywood for more nonwhites in TV commercials, thousands of young African American males continued to be slaughtered in the inner-cities, as schools in those places resisted reform and remained indifferent to the poor quality of education offered residents. Because the culpable municipal officials—hard-Left diversity mayors, neo-Marxist district attorneys, and “reformist” police chiefs—were themselves woke, no one cared about derelict governance. And so, the killing continues unabated, surrealistically unremarked upon by the wokest. 

  Class considerations were suppressed, given that the beneficiaries of wokeness were not necessarily previously poor and oppressed. In our racialized madness, billionaires like LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, and Beyonce, multimillionaires like the Obamas and Colin Kaepernick, and moneyed political, corporate, entertainment, military, and sports grandees—play-acted oppression and victimization from their villas and privileged perches, in perfect Marie Antoinette fashion. All they lacked was fake peasant garb and a village at Versailles. 

  The architects themselves of wokeness mostly cashed in on the supposedly toxic capitalist system that they had so harangued as the ground zero of “systemic racism.” So, BLM cofounder and self-described “cultural Marxist” Patrisse Cullors is now “retired”—and the savvy owner of four new homes, residing in nearly all-white tony Topanga Canyon, with a new $35,000 security gate. How else could she best use her black privilege to direct her multimillion-dollar war against “white privilege”?

  Professor Ibram X. Kendi (neé Henry Rogers), whose “antiracist” new industry calls for racism to stop racism and discrimination to end discrimination, now charges his corporate and university clients a reportedly $20,000 penance fee for a phoned-in Zoom chat. (He apparently has no discount rate for the poorer of his clients). Kendi no doubt took Lenin to heart (“Capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them with.”) when he hawks his video indulgences at $333 a minute. 

  The cultural revolutionary Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates was customarily already one step ahead and has moved on from the woke movement to a multimillion-dollar career writing black-themed comic books or adapting them to the big screen. Barack and Michelle Obama, long ago known for their cinematic creativity, leveraged a $50 million “consulting” movie deal with Netflix, whose founder is best known in California for his efforts to fund the campaign against Larry Elder, including commercials starring . . . Barack Obama.

  Racist

  Wokeness took the Obama-era mantra of diversity and simply shed any pretense that it was not racist. Remember, after 2009 our elites institutionalized the new-old idea that anyone claiming not to be white was suddenly part of a new inclusive oppressed class, one at war with the racial oppressors.  

  “Diversity” was a clever update of the previously failed Jesse Jackson idea of a victimized rainbow coalition that would aggregate, and force-multiply collective grievances against white male victimizers. 

  Suddenly, ethnic groups with higher per capita incomes than so-called whites were victims. There were no requisites to being “diverse” other than claiming nonwhite status. Wealthy Punjabi immigrants, Chilean aristocrats, illegal aliens fleeing racist Mexico, Nigerian doctors—anyone rich or poor, resident or citizen, victimized or not—was presto! “diverse” and thereby eligible for reparatory claims in hiring and admissions.

  Many liberal whites wished to get in on it and got caught at it—whether Ward Churchill with this entire Native American tribal garb, or, on the cheaper side, Elizabeth Warren with her “high” cheek bones or racial fabulists Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King. After all, if gender is “constructed,” then naturally race, too, could become a construct. 

  All this is dangerous because we are now logically headed to DNA-categorized ID badges reminiscent of yellow Star of David patches. Here once again Elizabeth Warren had been in the lead—claiming that her boomeranged DNA results showing a tiny drop of Native American lineage were thus proof that she was an indigenous victim after all—and so in her troubled mind truly had been deserving as the first Native American law professor at Harvard. Given this nonsense, one would think a distracted America has no real debt and is in possession of a secure border, a thriving economy, a brilliantly educated youth, and only friends abroad.

  Why is Wokeism Deadly?

  Wokeism is a lethal distraction. As General Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday lectured the nation on the various nefarious strains of white rage, whiteness, and white supremacy, the Taliban was systematically gobbling up Afghanistan. Meanwhile their boss in the White House quoted his woke military experts in order to lie there was no danger of a general collapse. No general objected. Apparently, Biden even phoned the Afghan president in a sordid attempt to leverage him likewise to lie that all was well. The ubiquitous Alexander Vindman was not listening in this time around.

  In a traditional Islamic society, what were woke Americans doing bragging about gender studies programs at an Afghan university, flying pride flags at the U.S. embassy, and encouraging honorific George Floyd street murals? All that is usually the haughty cultural imperialism of would-be winners, not the virtue signaling of a defeated and humiliated diplomatic and military cohort fleeing toward the exits. 

  Think of this for a second: as the U.S. bureaucracy invested trillions in Afghanistan to virtue-signal against supposed George-Floyd type racism, its media appendages said nothing back home as the black candidate for the California governorship was the target of an egg-throwing woman wearing a gorilla mask. What a grotesque reminder that empires flounder abroad as they rot at home.

  So these distractions never sleep, even amid the greatest defeat and loss of global deterrence in U.S. military history since Vietnam. True ideologues that they are, even our defeated on the battlefield are unfazed in their wokeist creed. 

  As Kabul suffered its end of days, our bemedaled wokists were still lecturing the country about the gender ratios of the Afghan refugees on U.S. flights out, the culturally sensitive food awaiting them, and a new idea of a soft Taliban—or the notion that the medieval gangsters who had defeated the Pentagon were not really all that bad, but more likely “partners” in a shared agenda of seeing us skedaddle by August 31. Will they say that in six months?

  Woke indemnity blinds us to racism and classism. Gavin Newsom, of French Laundry repute, is the epitome of a white-male mediocrity leveraging his rich family friends to elevate himself by quid pro quo favoritism. Joe Biden has voiced the most racist rants of any presidential candidate or president in the last 50 years (just recently he referred to his own senior black official as “boy”). Both bought woke insurance that inoculates them against their hypocrisy—or perhaps further fuels their own class and racial biases with an efficacy rate much more impressive than COVID vaccinations. 

  The creation of the blanket term “whiteness” is racist to the core. It imputes to anyone considered not sufficiently pigmented some sort of conspiratorial evil, regardless of individual character, beliefs, family history, or ideological outlook. It is incoherent since it blames the United States, and everything in it, for whiteness, and then demands that the nonwhite south of the equator from Africa to Asia be given instant access to this supposedly failed white contaminated miasma. Scarier still for the wokist, whiteness is just the new face of the old racist “blackness,” in which racists imputed to individual blacks supposedly collective pathologies in order to justify discrimination against a single individual. 

  Once the neo-Confederate idea of color triumphs, then there is no logical reason why “blackness,” “brownness,” “yellowness,” “redness” and every sort of pigmentary category should not be used to condemn individuals for their supposed membership in a taboo racial tribe, massaged and negatively stereotyped for contemporary advantage. We are headed back to 1840 not ahead to 2040.

  If Something Can’t Go On Forever, It Will Stop

  Finally, wokeism is unsustainable. We are already seeing large numbers of the supposedly “nonwhite” pushback against the wokeist trajectory, knowing that such a racialist monster may soon devour them, too. Drawing artificial racial Mason-Dixon lines inside millions of multiracial families, after the initial grifting subsides, will only incur anger at those who drew them. When Confederates embraced the one-drop, one-sixteenth rule, there was unanimous later agreement that it was not just abjectly racist, but lunatic; when the woke borrow such racial distillery it too will eventually be rejected as the crackpot hatred that it is. 

  There are probably some 100 million white males of the lower- and middle classes. Most feel little if any identity with the woke upper-middle class and wealthy bicoastal white male elite of some 20-30 million. If anything, a trucker from Boise has more in common with a Mexican-American sheriff in Modesto than he does with a woke techie in Menlo Park. 

  So, what is truly evil is the current woke trademark of loud privileged whites who scapegoat the losers in the globalist game as racist (or in the Obama-Hillary Clinton-Biden patois of “clingers,” “deplorables,” “irredeemables,” “dregs,” “chumps”), mostly out of elite condescension, virtue-signaling guilt, and pathetic contextualizing their own privilege by projecting their unearned status onto supposedly distant cultural losers. 

  There will be a substantial political correction to the madness, mostly because without one there is no longer a confident America abroad that advances and protects the interest of a free world challenged by nightmarish Chinese Communism. 

  Such racist selectivity would destroy a meritocratic and productive free market economy at home that fuels the Left’s massive government redistribution. 

  The victory of woke would guarantee that as Americans went full pre-modern and pre-civilizational, we would look in the mirror, straining to redefine and recategorize ourselves, and then search out which particular tribal band offers us the best protection from the roving mobs—and each other. 

  Even the Chinese apparat could not invent a more evil, more macabre way to destroy the United States.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 22:30

• France Still Seething, Warns Australia Over "Huge Mistake" In Defense Deal With US
  France Still Seething, Warns Australia Over “Huge Mistake” In Defense Deal With US

  Still seething, French diplomats continue to harangue Washington and Australia over the new landmark defense pact which will center on the US sharing nuclear submarine technology with Australia, which led to the immediate cancelation by Canberra of a major contract for submarines worth over $60 billion (with some estimates putting the total deal struck in 2016 at $90BN). 

  As we detailed earlier, on Friday France recalled its ambassadors to both countries in protest, in a move widely being described as the first time in history Paris pulled its ambassador to Washington in anger. Meanwhile on Saturday France’s ambassador to Australia rebuked the country for its “huge mistake”.

  

   Ambassador Jean-Pierre Thebault said trust and integrity have been broken. “This has been a huge mistake, a very, very bad handling of the partnership,” The Associated Press reports.

  “I would like to be able to run into a time machine and be in a situation where we don’t end up in such an incredible, clumsy, inadequate, un-Australian situation,” Thebault added.

  The initial French sub contract with Australia, which had been first agreed to in 2016, was for France to build 12 conventionally powered submarines modelled on Barracuda nuclear-powered subs. Negotiations had long been tense, particularly after rising costs and significant production delays on the French side. 

  The new ‘AUKUS’ deal with the United States officially announced Thursday will see Australia acquire at least eight nuclear submarines, allowing it to join a tiny number of countries globally who deploy nuclear-powered subs, in a moved being seen as aimed at countering China’s growing power in the Indo-Pacific.

  If this happened under Trump, the liberal media would have been up in arms. Imagine. https://t.co/e4j2Oj3ept

  — asad abukhalil أسعد أبو خليل (@asadabukhalil) September 18, 2021

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

  Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne said at the end of this week of which has seen France continue to lash out: “Australia understands France’s deep disappointment with our decision, which was taken in accordance with our clear and communicated national security interests.”

  French FM Le Drian earlier described Australia’s scrapping deal “a stab in the back” and warned that trust has been broken between the two trading partners.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 22:00

• The Rise And Fall Of 9MM Ammo Prices During COVID; What's Next?
  The Rise And Fall Of 9MM Ammo Prices During COVID; What’s Next?

  Op-Ed via The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).

  The Machine Gun Nest has been open since 2015, but we’ve been in the firearms industry since 2013. Earlier than that, Rob (one of the owners) has been collecting guns since the early 2000s. We’ve seen panic buys, ammo prices fluctuate, and firearms banned and unbanned.

  March of 2020. The COVID19 pandemic hits the United States. Many people (like myself) were aware of the situation in China and had time to prepare for the worst adequately. Many people were caught completely off guard.

  Many things led to the recent panic buy, but most of it is related to COVID. Many people thought that the world was going to end. So many people “woke up” to the idea that they may have to fend for themselves and that no one was coming to save them. This change of mentality led to an explosion in firearms and ammo sales.

  Weirdly enough, the price of ammo didn’t have an immediate rise at the beginning of the pandemic. It was summertime before we started to see a real spike in price. Prices averaged $0.20 a round for 9mm until July. Then we began to see prices rise to an average of about $0.30/per round.

  

  The price rise could be attributed to the BLM protests, counter and subsequent riots that followed, which were viewed widely across the internet and traditional media. There were depictions of innocent people getting hurt or worse, swarmed by protestors, with no police anywhere to help.

  This led to a panic buy on top of a panic buy. Whereas previously, shelves had been scarce, they became empty. People started to hoard ammunition like they had been hoarding toilet paper. Since manufacturing companies were set up to meet the average demand of the “Trump Slump” of the previous years, where gun and ammo sales had been low, there started to be bottlenecks in ammunition production. Ammo manufacturers were not prepared for the sharp increase in buying.

  In August 2020, we started to see prices increase even more as ammo became harder to come by. 9mm saw an average of $0.50/ per round. Major manufacturing companies started to report that they had accumulated millions of dollars in backorders. We tried to place a substantial order for ammo and were straight up told that there was no way that we’d get it within the year or next.  

  Speaking to some of our friends, we gathered that there was a shortage of primers. Primers are the component within ammunition that ignites the gunpowder to expel the projectile from the bullet & firearm when struck by the firing pin. For those that don’t know, primers are incredibly dangerous to produce. The manufacturing process sometimes results in death. Primers are typically the bottleneck in the production process for ammunition. A shortage of primers caused by high demand and supply chain disruption continued to help drive up the cost of ammo.

  We luckily found an importer who had bought 1M rounds of Turkish 9mm. We were able to work with him to import the ammo, and that saw us through the worst of the shortages. Unfortunately, we were victims of circumstance (like everyone else) and had to pay a high cost per round to acquire the ammo.

  After the 2020 election, we saw prices rise again to an average of $0.60 per round. To give you an idea of what that means- a box of ammo is 50 rounds typically. That’s about 3-5 magazines, depending on how many bullets you load. 9mm is meant to be an inexpensive round. It’s relatively cheap to produce, and its popularity has a lot to do with that fact. When you have people paying $30 ($0.60 per round) for a box of 9mm, as opposed to $12 (0.24 per round) eight months prior, shooting starts to get expensive, especially since the average range trip equates to about 2-300 rounds per caliber.

  Consider this as well; statistics show that in 2020 alone, 23 million firearms were sold, with 6 million of those guns being bought by first-time gun owners. Suppose each of those new gun owners wants to buy enough ammo for an average range trip, 200 rounds. In that case, those people would need 1,200,000,000 rounds of ammo to satisfy the demand, and that’s not even including the 32% of Americans that own guns (According to Gallup polling.) That would be about 104,960,000 people if you were wondering.

  So, to satisfy that market, if each of those 104.9 Million people wanted only 200 rounds of ammo for one firearm, the amount of ammo needed would be serious. (and we know that people, in reality, want thousands of rounds per firearm). That’s not including law enforcement contracts and military contracts, which usually take precedence over the civilian market.

  Finally, in Jan. of 2021, we seem to reach the peak. With the Jan. 6th protests and Biden’s inauguration, gun and ammo buying hit new highs. 9mm prices on average hit $0.71 per round. During this time, we regularly heard from customers that other spots were selling 9mm at $1/round.

  At the time of writing this (September 2021), we’re just now starting to see a drop in ammo prices and gun sales slowing down. 9mm is sitting at $0.31 per round for steel case and $0.34 per round for brass on the low end. Any well-known brand names are sitting at around $0.39 per round. Even with Biden’s new “Russian Ammo Ban,” prices seem to have steadily fallen, at least on 9mm.

  The real question is, will the prices keep dropping? It’s anyone’s guess.

  There’s a ton of factors affecting the market right now, from unrest around the world. For example, earlier this month, a coup in Guinea sent Aluminum prices to a ten-year high. If you’re unfamiliar, Guinea holds a quarter of the world’s bauxite supply, a raw material that can be refined into alumina, which can then be smelted into aluminum.  

  This price change can affect the cost of firearms, as manufacturers will have to pay a higher price to acquire raw materials.

  Shipping and transporting are another problem now, with sea containers fetching record-high prices because of a shortage and supply chains still seeing significant disruptions.

  Since the panic buy for firearms has at least subsided a little bit, people have stopped hoarding ammo and are choosier. We’re seeing this in gun sales right now where customers aren’t coming in and just buying anything on the wall. People are starting to do their research and are becoming pickier about their buying. I think this is the same for ammo as well. The demand has subsided a bit. If supply continues to meet demand, I think we’ll continue to see a drop in prices. Barring some mutation in covid that gives the virus a 50% CFR, more supply chain disruptions, or the Biden administration passing some severe gun control legislation, I think we will continue to see the price of ammo dropping slowly.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 21:30

• California Policymakers Suddenly Agree With Trump That Controlled Burns Make Forests More Resilient
  California Policymakers Suddenly Agree With Trump That Controlled Burns Make Forests More Resilient

  California lawmakers are apparently just now discovering that controlled burns to prevent future wildfires might be the new prescription as decades-old policies of progressive-driven ‘conservation’ and reactive fire suppression have failed.

  Democratic state lawmakers are suddenly in agreement with former President Trump who said in August 2020 that the state needs “to clean its forest floors more than anything else.” 

  At a rally in Pennsylvania last August, Trump told supporters: 

  “I see again the forest fires are starting. They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.“

  And now, Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, praised a new $20 million controlled burn pilot program that won legislative approval and could soon be signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, according to local Napa County news East County Today.  

  “If we want to reduce the frequency and destructiveness of wildfires, we must remove combustible fuels from our tinder-dry forests and woodlands,” Sen. Dodd said.

  “Prescribed burning is a time-tested solution to this worsening problem. I am thrilled to see this come to fruition and thank my legislative colleagues for supporting this worthwhile investment.”

  By starting controlled fires, forest managers can eliminate fuels, such as thickets, brush, branches, and young trees that supercharge fast-moving blazes. This allows older trees to survive and keeps forest floors free and clear of fuels for the next season of wildfires. 

  Decades of progressive (and reactive) policies (not global warming) have made California’s woodlands overgrown, and when hot temperatures and drought arrive, the forests are tinder boxes ready to ignite. 

  Today’s reactive wildfire response to deploy thousands of firefighters, helicopters, planes, drones, bulldozers, and firetrucks to suppress fires is a failed policy, and lawmakers are quickly learning the hard way with more than three million acres burned in the state this fire season, displacing thousands of households and pushing first responders onto the brink of exhaustion. 

  *CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR NEWSOM SAYS OVER 3M ACRES HAVE BURNED

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 14, 2021

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  President Biden visited California on Monday and said: “These fires are blinking code red for our nation.” He promoted two spending bills in Congress that would fund forest management and more resilient infrastructure. 

  So Trump was right when he criticized California for mismanaging its wildfire management program that has been the culprit of these mega-fires. Meanwhile, liberal media continues to toe the establishment line that climate change is at fault, not just bad policymaking.

  As H.Sterling Burnett recently noted,in late July, President Joe Biden held a virtual joint planning meeting and press conference with the governors of various Western states to discuss how to handle 2021’s wildfire season.

  Every leader blamed catastrophic human climate change for the severity of recent wildfire seasons.

  The New York Times allowed Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Kate Brown to follow up that event with an editorial titled “The West Is on Fire, It’s Past Time to Act on Climate Change.”

  Biden and the governors are wrong.

  

  Wildfires have been common throughout the West historically, often burning more acres than they’ve burned in recent years. To the extent that wildfires have increased in intensity recently, it isn’t due to modest warming, but rather to decades of federal and state mismanagement of publicly owned forests throughout the Western United States, leaving those forests in tinderbox conditions.

  …

  So, for political reasons, Biden and the governors want to blame modest recent warming for the scope and intensity of wildfires in Western states in 2020 and 2021. The true culprit is more than 30 years of forest mismanagement.

  Contrary to Biden and the governors’ assertions, state and federal efforts to address racial disparities, increase electric vehicle usage, and stop using fossil fuels to generate electricity will do nothing to prevent wildfires.

  Wildfires are natural. They can’t be stopped. They can be managed. The damage they cause to the forests and the people living near them can be dramatically reduced.

  Wise management of forests is required, either through regular, widespread, low-intensity burning, as the Native Americans did, or through active forest management, including intensive logging and brush clearing and firefighting efforts, as governments did prior to 1990. These tools, not massive, misdirected spending on climate change, are the best hope of preventing Westerners’ lives and livelihoods from being consumed by flames.

  It appears California Democrats are maybe finally willing to accept that truth… of course with the knowledge that no mainstream media outlet will point out their hypocrisy.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 21:00

• Debunking Biden's Claim We Must "Protect The Vaccinated From The Unvaccinated"
  Debunking Biden’s Claim We Must “Protect The Vaccinated From The Unvaccinated”

  Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

  The official line on vaccines is that they are extremely effective at protecting against serious illness. And yet, these same people are also claiming that the unvaccinated are a major threat to the vaccinated.

  More specifically, President Biden claimed on September 10 that vaccine mandates were to “protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.”

  In other words, it is claimed that vaccines are remarkably effective, and that the vaccinated must also be protected from the unvaccinated. How can both claims be true at the same time? They can’t. The idea that vaccinated people are being frequently harmed by the unvaccinated is a complete fabrication, based on the pro-mandate crowd’s own mainstream data.

  

  As Robert Fellner points out, according to the official data,

  The odds of a vaccinated person dying from COVID are 1 in 137,000.

  The fatality rate for seasonal flu, meanwhile, is at least 100 times greater than that. The chance of dying in an automobile accident is over 1,000 times greater. Dog attacks, bee stings, sunstroke, cataclysmic storms, and a variety of other background risks we accept as a normal part of life are all more deadly than the risk COVID poses to the vaccinated.

  Moreover, the risk of death to vaccinated people is similar to the risk of having an adverse side effect to the vaccine. And as the spokesmen for Big Pharma and the regime never tire of telling us, you shouldn’t care about having an adverse reaction, because it is so very rare and inconsequential.

  So by that reasoning, vaccinated people shouldn’t worry about getting very ill from covid. Those cases are just as rare as the so, so rare cases of adverse reaction.

  And yet, even after all of this, the backers of vaccine mandates are trying to whip up hysteria about how we must “protect the vaccinated” who are in grave danger thanks to the unvaccinated.

  The level of mental and logical incoherence necessary to come to this conclusion is quite a feat.

  It Doesn’t Stop the Spread

  It must also be remembered that vaccination does not stop the spread of covid. 

  Fellner continues:

  But as [the CDC’s] Dr. Walensky explained last month, while the COVID vaccines remain incredibly effective at preventing serious illness and death, “what they cannot do anymore is prevent transmission.” This reflects the official position of the agency as well, which is why the CDC now requires vaccinated people to mask indoors and follow the same type of social distancing practices as unvaccinated people.

  The official confirmation that COVID is endemic, and vaccination cannot stop transmission and thereby eliminate it in the way it could for things like polio and smallpox, makes mandates intolerable to a free society. The entire argument for mandatory vaccination originally rested on the claim that the vaccines could reliably stop transmission.

  Moreover, those who are vaccinated often experience a mild form of covid when they are re-infected, which means they often spread the disease without even knowing they have it. The vaccinated also carry the same viral load as the unvaccinated, as noted last month by the UK’s Evening Standard:

  While evidence demonstrates that vaccines significantly reduce hospitalisations and deaths, scientists now believe those infected by the Delta variant can still harbour similar levels of virus to those who are unvaccinated.

  Previous thinking was that vaccinations would stop the spread, but now,

  [T]his has been thrown into doubt and raises questions about vaccine passports … which work on the assumption that double-jabbed people are less likely to spread the virus.

  Yet again, we see the notion that the vaccinated are being endangered by the unvaccinated is a fantasy of the mandate activists.

  At least the CDC is being logical when it says the vaccinated should keep wearing masks. Indeed, every time we hear this from the CDC we should remind ourselves: vaccination does not stop the spread.

  They’re Filling Up the Hospitals! 

  There is a secondary fallback position the mandate pushers also use: that the unvaccinated are taking up all the intensive care beds and therefore denying people with other conditions the hospital beds that are allegedly more deserved by others.

  As I pointed out here, this is also an inconsistent argument since this arguments rests on the idea that people who make unhealthy choices (like not taking a vaccine) ought to be treated as pariahs.

  This only applies to one single “unhealthy choice.” These mandate pushers are apparently perfectly fine with drug abusers, smokers, and morbidly obese victims of Type-2 diabetes—the numbers of whom have been multiplying— filling up all the ICU beds. No, those people deserve their hospital beds even though they made the choice to destroy their own health. In fact if one suggests people lay off the meth pipe, the Big Gulps, or the Marlboros—in an effort to improve health—one is an intolerable “fat shamer” or someone who blames the victims. 

  In any case, recent data has also emerged questioning whether or not the data on hospitalizations is very useful in identifying the load imposed on ICUs by covid patients. 

  A recent study showed that nearly half (i.e., 48 percent) of covid hospitalizations in 2020 were mild cases. According to The Atlantic (not exactly a hotbed of anti-vaccine rhetoric): 

  The study found that from March 2020 through early January 2021—before vaccination was widespread, and before the Delta variant had arrived—the proportion of patients with mild or asymptomatic disease was 36 percent. From mid-January through the end of June 2021, however, that number rose to 48 percent. In other words, the study suggests that roughly half of all the hospitalized patients showing up on COVID-data dashboards in 2021 may have been admitted for another reason entirely, or had only a mild presentation of disease.

  And why are there fewer severe cases now? It may be because “unvaccinated patients in the vaccine era tend to be a younger cohort who are less vulnerable to COVID and may be more likely to have been infected in the past.” 

  Get Vaccinated Even If You Already Had Covid!

  But no matter! All that matters is getting people vaccinated, and it’s all for your own good, and governments ought to be able to force medications on you. The cynical refrain of the pro-abortion Left, “get your laws off my body” only applies to one single case. In every other case, the state owns you.

  This drive for vaccination no matter what can also be seen in the effort to vaccinate even those who have already recovered from covid. The claim here is that those who natural immunity should get jabbed because they have a higher incidence of reinfection—although it is admitted cases of reinfection tend to be far milder than the initial case.

  Specifically, those pushing vaccination in this case may point to a study suggesting the unvaccinated are 2.34 times more likely to be reinfected than the vaccinated.

  Yet, according to the pro-mandate crowd, this is 2.34 times larger than an extremely small number. After all, we’re frequently told that cases of reinfection for the vaccinated are “extremely rare” and inconsequential. So, that means for the unvaccinated, the odds of reinfection are a little more than double an inconsequential number. Now, I don’t have a degree in mathematics, but I have taken enough calculus and statistics classes to know that 2.3 times “basically zero” is also “basically zero.”

  But that is the math being used by those who insist that the risk of reinfection for the vaccinated is negligible, while the risk of reinfection for the already-recovered is an enormous public health crisis.

  According to the mandate pushers’ own data, the drive to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated makes no sense at all. But I suspect they’ll stick with the slogan, or even double down on it. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 20:30

• Taibbi: Does America Hate The "Poorly Educated"?
  Taibbi: Does America Hate The “Poorly Educated”?

  Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

  

  It was impossible to mistake the tone of Joe Biden’s announcement of a vaccine mandate last week. It was an angry speech, which started by explaining that “many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated,” and went on to announce that “our patience is wearing thin,” and “your refusal has cost all of us.” Biden, not normally one for oratorial effects, even conveyed a sense of barely contained rage by muttering, “Get vaccinated!” as he walked off the stage.

  “Enjoying the angry Dad vibes from this Biden speech,” came the cheerful comment of former Justice Department spokesman and MSNBC analyst Matthew Miller:

  Enjoying the angry dad vibes from this Biden speech. He is turning the damn car around.

  — Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) September 9, 2021

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

  Who’d attracted Biden’s anger — the unvaccinated — was clear. The why was more confusing. The president decried how “the unvaccinated overcrowd our hospitals… leaving no room for someone with a heart attack or pancreatitis or cancer,” a legitimate enough point. But after reassuring those who’d “done their part” that just “one out of every 160,000 fully vaccinated Americans was hospitalized” this summer, Biden nonetheless explained that “a distinct minority of Americans” is “causing unvaccinated people to die.” He added: “We’re going to protect the vaccinated from unvaccinated co-workers.”

  As many noted, the statements were contradictory. If the vaccine really is that effective, the overwhelming consequences of of any failure to get vaccinated will be borne by the unvaccinated themselves. But Biden’s speech was as much about directing anger as policy. The mandate was an extraordinary step, but Biden’s unique — and uniquely strange — rhetorical setup, which framed the decision as a way to stop “them” from doing “damage” and killing “us,” was just as big a story.

  The arrival of Covid-19 has exacerbated a troubling divide that’s been growing in America for decades, and is elucidated at length in Michael Sandel’s recent The Tyranny of Merit. The book tells a politically unsettling story about meritocracy in America, one that runs counter to prevailing narratives on both the left and the right. Though mention of Covid-19 is limited to a few paragraphs in a new prologue, the pandemic in many ways has become the ultimate test case of Sandel’s thesis: that we Americans have been so conditioned to believe that winners deserve to win that we’ve found ways to hate losers of any kind as moral failures, even when life is at stake, and especially when lack of education is seen as a factor.

  

  It’s not remotely the same kind of book, but The Tyranny of Merit does follow up on themes in Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch’s late seventies premise described American society devolved into a ceaseless all-against-all competition on all fronts, from the professional to the physical to the social and sexual and beyond. Moreover, Lasch wrote, if the original “American dream” was imbued with at least some vague ideas that success should be tied to virtues like thrift, discipline, and wisdom, by the disco age “the pursuit of wealth lost the few shreds of moral meaning.”

  In the time since Lasch’s iconic treatise, though, relentless messaging campaigns emanating from both sides of the political aisle re-emphasized the idea that material success was tied to moral character. Ronald Reagan evangelized the idea that poverty was mostly a deserved state, and government at most owed those who weren’t to blame for their own problems. When Bill Clinton came along, he took Reagan’s finger-wagging moralizing and re-cast it in the cheery new technocratic language of global capitalism. “We must do what America does best,” Clinton said at his inauguration. “Offer more opportunity to all and demand more responsibility from all.”

  Clinton’s formula was really Yin to Reagan’s Yang: in a world that offered more “opportunity,” there was now even less excuse for failure. We forget, because the pre-9/11 world seems so long ago, but Clinton-era editorialists spent much of the late nineties hyping the opportunity gospel. We were told a combination of the Internet and an increasingly integrated international economy created vast new worlds of material possibility, for those willing to “fill the unforgiving minute” and run the race. “If globalization were a sport,” wrote an exultant Thomas Friedman in 1999, “it would be the 100-yard dash, over and over and over. And no matter how many times you win, you have to race again the next day.”

  Onetime labor parties paradoxically were the biggest boosters of the new hyper-competitive global economy, whose central feature was forcing Western workers to face off against masses of laborers in China, South Asia, Mexico, and other places where political rights were, shall we say, less of a priority. As the stress on former blue-collar workers intensified, politicians often sold the public on the idea that higher learning was their Golden Ticket out of the miseries of debt, higher medical costs, and especially social immobility.

  By the time Barack Obama came along, it was axiomatic among the cosmopolitan set that anyone with enough ingenuity and entrepreneurial energy should be able to get ahead. Sandel amusingly points out that Obama often culled from a Sly and the Family Stone song in describing his vision of modern American capitalism, using the phrase “You can make it if you try” 140 times during his presidency:

  The explosive and uncomfortable message at the heart of The Tyranny of Meritocracy is the idea that the resulting political divide is now less about ideology than education. Sandel deserves credit for taking on a subject that almost no one in high society wants to hear about, let alone those in the academic world. Forget red versus blue: he shows the real gulf is between those who have diplomas, and those who don’t. The subtext is that people with the right degrees deserve to be rich, and have health insurance, and good schooling for their kids, and dignified work, while those who threw away their books after high school deserve failure, in the same way smokers deserve lung disease — especially if they make unsanctioned political choices.

  This is an excerpt from today’s subscriber-only post. To read the entire article and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 19:30

• Hospital Staff That Decline COVID Vaccine For Religious Reasons Must Attest To Also Swearing Off Tylenol, Tums, & Other Common Meds
  Hospital Staff That Decline COVID Vaccine For Religious Reasons Must Attest To Also Swearing Off Tylenol, Tums, & Other Common Meds

  In order to obtain a religious exemption from the Covid-19 vaccine at a hospital system in Arkansas, staff  are also required to “swear off” common medicines like Tylenol, Tums and Preparation H. 

  Conway Regional Health System said it noticed an uptick in vaccine exemption requests that “cited the use of fetal cell lines in the development and testing of the vaccines,” according to ARS Technica.

  Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, said: “This was significantly disproportionate to what we’ve seen with the influenza vaccine.”

  He continued: “Thus, we provided a religious attestation form for those individuals requesting a religious exemption.” This attestation includes a list of about 30 common medicines that “fall into the same category as the COVID-19 vaccine in their use of fetal cell lines.”

  

  ARS Technica reported that some of the common medicines on the list include Tylenol, Pepto Bismol, aspirin, Tums, Lipitor, Senokot, Motrin, ibuprofen, Maalox, Ex-Lax, Benadryl, Sudafed, albuterol, Preparation H, MMR vaccine, Claritin, Zoloft, Prilosec OTC, and azithromycin.

  Employees then must attest they “truthfully acknowledge and affirm that my sincerely held religious belief is consistent and true”. 

  Troup said that the hospital wants to make sure that staff are “sincere” in their beliefs and that the hospital wants to “educate staff who might have requested an exemption without understanding the full scope of how fetal cells are used in testing and development in common medicines.”

  Employees that don’t sign the form are only granted provisional exemptions. Troup said 5% of the hospital’s staff has filed for such an exemption. 

  “A lot of this, I believe, is a hesitancy about the vaccine, and so that’s a separate issue than a religious exemption,” he concluded.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 19:00

• US Will Push More Arab States To Normalize With Israel
  US Will Push More Arab States To Normalize With Israel

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday that the US would continue to push Arab states to normalize relations with Israel. This month marked the one-year anniversary of the signing of Trump administration-brokered agreements that normalized relations with Israel and the UAE, and Bahrain, known as the Abraham Accords.

  Following the UAE, Morocco also normalized with Israel. Sudan agreed with Israel to open relations, but Khartoum has been slow to establish diplomatic ties. “We will encourage more countries to follow the lead of the Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco,” Blinken said during a virtual meeting with the countries’ ministers.

  

  While touted as peace deals, the Abraham Accords will lead to an influx of more US arms in the region and have failed to slow Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank through settlements and Israel’s brutality against the people of Gaza.

  For agreeing to normalize with Israel, the UAE was awarded a $23 billion weapons deal that includes F-35 fighter jets that the Biden administration briefly paused but then decided to proceed with. For Morrocco, the US recognized Muskat’s sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara region, another move President Biden will not reverse.

  The Trump administration pressured Khartoum into normalizing with Israel by adding it as a condition to get Sudan removed from the US terror list. To be removed from the list, the US made Sudan pay $335 million in compensation to victims of the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that were carried out by al-Qaeda, even though Osama bin Laden was kicked out of Sudan in 1996.

  The Clinton administration bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in response to the embassy attacks, something the US never even apologized for.

  A major aspect of the Abraham Accords is to isolate Iran. According to Israeli media, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett floated the idea to President Biden of an anti-Iran NATO-style alliance in the Middle East that includes Israel and Arab states opposed to Iran. Earlier this year, there were reports that Israel was in talks with Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia about the idea of an anti-Iran alliance.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 18:30

• JPMorgan: DeFi Adoption By Institutional Investors Surges
  JPMorgan: DeFi Adoption By Institutional Investors Surges

  It was a busy week for crypto, with many updates in JPMorgan’s weekly Crypto Weekly note. Here are the highlights:

  • Bitcoin and ether prices rise in the week. The price of bitcoin and ether rose by about 4% w/w and 6% w/w to $48.1K and $3.6K, respectively. This recovery follows the price decline across major cryptocurrencies after a selloff in the last week. The price of ether gained following the news of its co-founder Vitalik Buterin making it to the TIME’s ‘Most Influential’ List.
  • Trading volume of major cryptocurrencies decline w/w. The average daily volume (ADV) of Bitcoin and Ether declined by 18% and 21% w/w, respectively, as did volatility. The ADV of Litecoin, Dogecoin and Uniswap also declined during the week.
  • At the Senate hearing, SEC Chair Gary Gensler reiterated that most cryptocurrencies, including stablecoins, qualify as securities, which should not be sold without proper risk disclosures. He also said that crypto lending and staking services are likely to fall under SEC’s jurisdiction as lending products come under the securities laws.

  The size of the global market increased in the past week, with the global crypto sector’s market cap increasing 2.2% w/w from $2.1 trillion to $2.2 trillion as of 9/16.

  

  A snapshot of the key regulatory updates this week:

  

  It continues to be a busy time for crypto adoption by financial institutions. Among the notable developments:

  • Interactive Brokers will start offering cryptocurrency trading and custody services for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.
  • Fidelity Digital Assets plans to increase its headcount by up to 70% between April and year-end. It also plans to offer yield funds and other products related to stablecoins or decentralized finance (DeFi) coins.
  • The Fairfax County pension funds will invest a total of $50 million in a fund which invests in digital tokens and cryptocurrency derivatives. Earlier this year, the pension funds also invested in a crypto venture capital fund.
  • Franklin Templeton is raising $20 million for the firm’s first blockchain VC fund. The fund was already raised $10 million from a single sale. The firm is also recruiting engineers in “tokenized asset development department.”

  There was also a flurry of news on the adoption by non-financial services companies, including AMC Theaters accepting most cryptos, Googles announcing the development of an NBA-linked blockchain, Square joining the open invention network, and Paris Saint Germain announcing crypto.com as its official cryptocurrency partner.

  

  Which brings us to the main story: according to JPMorgan, the second quarter of 2021 saw an increase in DeFi adoption by institutional investors as more than 60% of all DeFi transactions were over $10 million versus less than half in the broader crypto market. Institutions in major economies are driving the DeFi activity as emerging markets are still adopting traditional crypto assets.

  Huobi Ventures announces a $10mm GameFi fund (9/14) to invest in projects developing blockchain based games with “play-to-earn” features such as those in Axie Infinity. Huobi also set up a $100mm DeFi fund and a $10mm NFT fund in May.

  

  Total Value Locked (TVL) Across DeFi Projects is rising. Total value locked (TVL) refers to the total dollar amount of assets that is staked or “locked” up across all DeFi protocols. Put differently, TVL does not refer to transaction volumes or market cap of cryptocurrencies but rather the value of reserves that are “locked” into smart contracts. TVL can help assess the health of the entire DeFi ecosystem or a specific DeFi project or app. This value does not represent any leverage created by the underlying crypto assets. In traditional finance, this could be thought of as deposits in the banking system. Examples of assets included in total value locked include crypto assets staked in yield protocols (ex. depositors earn yield on staked crypto), lending protocols (ex. borrowers post collateral for loans), staked in automated market maker exchanges (ex. liquidity pools for decentralized exchanges), and underlying synthetic assets. As of 9/16/2021, total value locked in DeFi protocols stands at $90.6B.

  

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 18:00

• Antibody Treatments For COVID Work. Why Aren't They Being Promoted?
  Antibody Treatments For COVID Work. Why Aren’t They Being Promoted?

  Authored by Mark Glennon via Wirepoints.org,

  It’s perhaps the most effective way to save your life if you are infected with COVID-19, but probably the least known. It reduces the risk of even being hospitalized by 70% to 85%, though it must be administered early to be effective – within four days of infection. Lives probably are being lost unnecessarily because people don’t know about it.

  It’s monoclonal antibody treatment, abbreviated as mAb. To the extent the public has any familiarity with it they, may know it as Regeneron, though that’s actually the name of the company that makes the leading treatment, REGEN-COV2, and there are several other mAbs from other makers.

  Health authorities for months back should have been issuing this message constantly: “Immediately after being exposed or you have COVID symptoms, get tested and ask if an antibody treatment is right for you.”

  

  But they didn’t. They still aren’t. At least not in Illinois and most of the nation.

  Why not?

  No reasonable explanation is evident and a significant number of lives may have been lost because of the failure to inform the public properly. And now, with antibody treatments getting more attention, the treatments must be rationed, adding to the tragedy. At least in part, the explanation is a sad one – politics, and politicized media.

  The effectiveness of REGEN and other antibody treatments has been known since at least November when the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for REGEN and another mAb. Earlier tests had found REGEN to be over 70% effective in heading off serious illness and multiple subsequent tests have confirmed it.

  “Many of us were talking about this as early as March [2020]” wrote Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner.

  “Regeneron did extraordinary work to secure their own manufacturing, but we needed a concerted industrial effort to get the supply we needed.”

  Only over the last month have antibody treatments started to gain more attention. That’s probably because Dr. Anthony Fauci finally – belatedly – spoke up, saying that the treatments can reduce the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization or death by 70% to 85%. That seems to have been a signal to the establishment herd that it was permissible to talk about the treatments positively. The Biden Administration thereafter announced it would be stepping up purchases of the treatments.

  But the increased attention has now caused a shortage of the treatments. What was in oversupply only a couple months ago is now being rationed. The Biden Administration just announced restrictions on how much of the treatments may be shipped to each state. From the Washington Post: “Soaring demand for the therapy represents a sharp turn from just two months ago, when monoclonal antibodies were widely available and awareness of them was low. With little promotion by the government, consumers, doctors and states were using just a tiny fraction of the available supply.”

  Here in Illinois, health authorities and the media are completely behind the curve. It’s difficult to find even a word that has been said on the subject. The message isn’t being given that you should get tested fast if you think you are infected and see if antibody treatment is available to you.

  Intensive care units in some parts of downstate Illinois are now full of COVID patients. How many of those hospitalizations would have been avoided if the victims had been aware of the treatment and acted quickly to get it?

  That goes for most of the nation as well. Florida is one of six states among the exceptions. Those six states have been using the treatments aggressively, consuming 70% of the supply in recent weeks. That’s partly due to high, recent infection rates in most of those states, but also because they have seen the value of antibody treatment that other states have ignored, and they’ve told their people about it. That’s especially true of Florida, which I’ll get to.

  Why haven’t health authorities and supposed experts been making a life-saving treatment better known?

  One benign but irrational answer is that they don’t want to distract from the importance of vaccinations because they view prevention as better than treatment. For example, CNN’s expert, Dr. Leana Wen, said, “It’s totally backwards to say that we should be focused on treatment instead of emphasizing prevention, and the steps that we know work to stop Covid-19 in the first place.” And Dr. Christian Ramers, an infectious-disease specialist, told the Daily Beast. “It’s so much better to prevent a disease than to use an expensive, cumbersome and difficult-to-use therapy,” Ramers submitted. “It does not make any medical sense to lean into monoclonals to the detriment of vaccines. It’s like playing defense with no offense.”

  That seems irrational on its face. Preventative vaccines and therapeutics like antibody treatment are not alternatives. Promote vaccines all you want, but when somebody is facing possible death, treat them.

  But another explanation at least partially accounts for why mAbs have been shunned: The establishment doesn’t like the politics of who championed antibody therapy, particularly Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a leading, likely, Republican candidate for president.

  Since at least November, DeSantis has been encouraging Floridians to seek the treatment if they get infected.

  “And the good thing about this is millions of doses are ready to ship as we speak,” he said then.

  “Soon as the FDA approves they will then go out within the next 24 hours and we expect our hospitals hopefully to receive these within the next three to six weeks. He later set up clinics specifically for providing the treatment.

  Well, we certainly can’t be agreeing with anything he says, as MSM sees things, so the Associated Press led the charge. They did it by trying to implicate two others the left doesn’t like, Ken Griffin and his hedge fund, Citadel. Griffin is a Chicago billionaire who frequently supports Republicans and conservative causes.

  So, in a column reprinted almost universally in the national and Illinois media, the AP linked DeSantis’ support for antibody treatments to a Citadel investment in Regeneron and Griffin’s campaign contributions to DeSantis.

  It was a smear job, creating the impression that Regeneron’s product is snake oil peddled by DeSantis as a return favor. DeSantis responded appropriately, saying the column was a blatant political attack.

  The AP wasn’t alone. A Bloomberg columnist on Twitter mocked DeSantis and the Regeneron product because of what he claimed it costs – $1,250 per dose – though vaccines are free. That’s false. DeSantis made the treatment free.

  As you would expect, the press had another reason for dismissing the value of antibody treatments – Trump. He credited Regeneron’s product for helping with his recovery when he was infected. But that was because Regeneron’s CEO was a member of Trump’s golf club, said the Daily Mail. And Trump owned shares of Regeneron and Gilead, another mAb maker, so that must explain his claim, as USA Today would have you believe. “No, Regeneron did not cure Donald Trump of COVID,” The New Republic flatly told us in a headline, as if they had any idea.

  The facts on antibody treatment have now overrun that political hype. Still today, however, the public remains mostly unaware of the efficacy and availability of the treatment, except in a few states like Florida. Although treatments are now being rationed, they are available to people in high risk groups everywhere.

  Too bad the federal government didn’t ramp up its purchases of the product earlier.

  Too bad every state didn’t promote it as heavily as Florida did.

  Too bad states like Illinois still aren’t talking about it.

  Too bad governors in states like Illinois aren’t saying what DeSantis is now saying, which is that he will “fight like hell” to get what he can of the available treatments now being rationed.

  Too bad because we will never know how many lives might have been saved.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 17:30

• Actually, It All Makes Sense
  Actually, It All Makes Sense

  Back in June, we explained that the reason behind the market’s shocking response to the Fed’s hawkish policy announcement when yields plunged instead of spiking higher, had little to do with what the Fed would actually do (as every Fed action is now in direct response to the market, which the FOMC is compelled to prop up no matter the cost) and everything to do with the market’s read of r-star, and we quoted DB’s head of FX strategy George Saravelos who said that everything that is going on “boils down to a very pessimistic market view on r*” or in other words, the same argument we made 6 years ago when we predicted – correctly – that the Fed’s hiking cycle would end in tears (as it did first in November 2018 when the Fed capitulated on its hiking strategy after stocks plunged, and then again in Sept 2019 when the Repo crisis forced the Fed to resume QE).

  The bottom line, for those who missed our lengthy take on this complex topic is that the equilibrium growth rate in the US, or r* (or r-star), was far far lower than where most economists thought it was. In fact, as the sensitivity table below which we first constructed in 2015 showed, the equilibrium US growth rate was right around 0%. This means that each and every attempt by the Fed to tighten financial condition will end in disaster, the only question is how long it would take before this happens.

  

  Today, we won’t recap the profound implications from Powell’s huge policy error which we laid out previously (we suggest readers familiarize themselves with our recent work on the topic published in “Powell Just Made A Huge Error: What The Market’s Shocking Response Means For The Fed’s Endgame“), but we will touch on a recent blog by Deutsche Bank’s Saravelos – who unlike most of his peers on Wal Street, has a clear and correct read on what is currently going on in the market – and to help clients comprehend what’s actually going on, he has penned a simple framework to understand current market behavior. As Saravelos puts it, “there is no “puzzle” in the way global bond markets are behaving and it is entirely possible for yields to fall as inflation pressures rise.”

  As Saravelos explains, the starting point is that over the last six months the global economy has been experiencing a negative supply shock due to COVID. This can be most clearly seen in the incredibly sharp run-up in inflation surprises against the equally incredible sharp run-down in growth surprises.

  

  In simple Econ 101 terms, we are  experiencing a leftward shift in the global economy’s supply curve. A negative supply shock (permanent or not) does two things: it lowers growth and increases inflation.

  

  This is exactly what markets have been doing: inflation expectations are close to the year’s highs, but real rates (the closest market equivalent to a measure of real growth) are at the year’s lows.

  

  The moves in the two variables are therefore entirely consistent with the incoming data.

  Now what is most notable is that real yields have dropped more than inflation expectations have risen. The combined effect has been to lower nominal yields.

  As Saravelos puts it, “there is nothing surprising about this, because there is nothing automatic about which effect dominates” and it ultimately depends on consumer sensitivity to rising prices, or in wonkish terms the slope of the demand curve: the greater the demand destruction from price rises, the bigger the negative effect on growth relative to inflation pushing yields down and vice versa. So, what the market is effectively doing, is pricing in substantial demand destruction from the supply shock.

  Is this the correct thing to be pricing? Perhaps it is, we have been highlighting this unfolding demand destruction since May, and consumer confidence in the US is collapsing.

  

  What about central bank reaction functions? There is an automatic belief in the market that higher inflation should mean more hawkish central banks. But as the DB strategist notes, “this belief rests on 30 years of demand shock management, where inflation has always and everywhere been positively correlated to growth.” And as an interesting aside, according to Saravelos, Larry Summers was right about inflation risks this year but wrong about the cause: lower supply has dominated over stronger demand. A supply shock similar to the one we are currently experiencing means the central bank response is not obvious, and as a result “raising rates will only make the growth shock worse.” By implication, tapering – which is tightening no matter what you read to the contrary – will similarly be a policy mistake and compound the economic slowdown, leading to an even more powerful easing reaction in the coming quarters.

  Which brings us to central banks’ characterization of the current inflation shock as transitory; as DB explains, it is another way of saying that they currently prefer to accommodate rather than respond to the supply shock. In terms of capital markets, ss long as the Fed looks through the shock, risk appetite will likely stay resilient, the dollar weak and volatility low. However, the moment the Fed does respond, all bets are off.

  Bottom line, current market pricing is fully in line with a supply side shock with very strong demand destruction effects. A low r*, as we have been arguing since 2015 and again since June, is likely to prevail post-COVID only flattens consumer demand curves further. Saravelos concludes that “he continues to believe that it is the behavior of the consumer, including the desired level of precautionary savings as well as the response to the unfolding supply shock that is the most important macro variable for the market this year and beyond.” As such, the latest UMich survey which showed that Americans are panicking over soaring inflation, and whose buying intentions have plunged to the lowest levels on record…

  

  … is extremely alarming.

   

   

   

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 17:00

• General Milley Downplayed BLM Riots To Prevent Trump From Invoking Insurrection Act
  General Milley Downplayed BLM Riots To Prevent Trump From Invoking Insurrection Act

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, tried to downplay the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots in an effort to prevent Donald Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act, arguing that they were mainly centered around the use of “spray paint.”

  

  That’s according to the new book, ‘Peril’, written by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

  Despite the violent demonstrations quickly spreading across the country, Milley continued to insist that they had only impacted two cities and were relatively sedate, echoing CNN’s ludicrous “fiery, but most peaceful” description of the riots.

  “They used spray paint, Mr President, that’s not an insurrection. […] We’re a country of 330 million people. You’ve got these penny packet protests,” Milley allegedly told Trump.

  Milley apparently told Trump that most of the riots only involved around 300 people and that they paled in significance to the 1968 Washington riots caused by the assassination of MLK and the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1861, which started the Civil War.

  The riots took mere days to spread to virtually every major city in the country, with looting, arson and violent attacks becoming commonplace, eventually causing around $2 billion dollars in property damage as well as at least 19 deaths and over 17,000 arrests.

  At one point, demonstrators took over an entire area of downtown Seattle, completely obliterating official law and order for a number of weeks.

  Trump’s failure to act strongly and decisively led to him looking weak, derailing a lot of momentum he would have had going into the election.

  According to other reports, Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and put Milley in charge of National Guard troops to end the unrest, leading the two to have a shouting match where Milley refused to take charge.

  Back in June, Milley appeared to side with the kind of ‘woke’ rhetoric spewed by far-left groups like BLM when he told the House Armed Services Committee that he was concerned about “white rage” in the United States.

  As we highlighted earlier this week, Milley was also accused of treason by Trump after it emerged that he had promised to warn China ahead of any military operations.

  Fox News host Tucker Carlson labeled the revelation, “One of the scariest things that has ever happened in this country.”

  *  *  *

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

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

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 16:30

• Taliban Changes Ministry Of Women's Affairs To Islamic 'Morality Police'
  Taliban Changes Ministry Of Women’s Affairs To Islamic ‘Morality Police’

  So much for prior declarations heard among Western officials of a more “moderate” Taliban… On Friday Reuters has confirmed that what was formerly the “Ministry of Women’s Affairs” in Kabul has now been changed to “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” – according to a new sign that’s gone up over the ministry.

  The full lengthy name of what formerly under the US-backed national government served to protect women’s rights is now the “Ministries of Prayer and Guidance and the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” Reuters reports.

  

  It appears to be the reestablishment of the ‘morality police’ that the Taliban had in place prior to the 2001 invasion, which was tasked with ensuring strict enforcement of sharia law in all aspects of public life, including that women wear the burka, no alcohol is possessed or consumed, and that there’s a strict segregation of the sexes with the exception of family. 

  The virtue and vice arm of the ministry was also responsible for carrying out punishments ranging from public flogging to executions. 

  Reuters further notes that women had been for weeks attempting to enter the Women’s Affairs ministry building but that they were consistently turned away. According to further details:

  • The Taliban has said that women will not be allowed to work in government ministries alongside men.

  • Though the group said women in Afghanistan can continue with their university studies, classes must now be segregated and head coverings are mandatory. The Taliban has ordered secondary school classes for boys to resume on Saturday, but made no mention of the future of girls’ education in the notice, according to The Guardian.

  Ironically this reestablishment of what’s essentially the Islamic moral police comes days after on Monday a United Nations donor conference in Geneva resulted in $1.2 billion in aid being pledged to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

  Absent so far has been aid from Washington, with the White House earlier saying this would be dependent on the Taliban’s behavior and actions. This hasn’t stopped Europe, however, form letting the aid flow – which the Taliban has promised to deliver to the people.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 16:00

• DeSantis Office: Over Half Of Those Seeking Lifesaving COVID-19 Treatment In South Florida Fully Vaccinated
  DeSantis Office: Over Half Of Those Seeking Lifesaving COVID-19 Treatment In South Florida Fully Vaccinated

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  A spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office said that more than half of those who are seeking monoclonal antibody treatment in the south of Florida are “fully vaccinated” individuals amid supply issues.

  “More than half the patients getting the monoclonal antibody treatment in south Florida are fully vaccinated,” DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw wrote in response to a comment on Twitter that suggested that only unvaccinated people are the reason why there is a significant demand for monoclonal antibodies.

  Florida, she wrote hours earlier, “is above average in vaccination rate” and that “more than half of the patients in south Florida getting monoclonal antibody treatment are vaccinated and have breakthrough infections. Vaccinated or unvaccinated – Denying treatment to Covid patients is wrong.”

  Monoclonal antibodies are engineered immune system proteins that boost an immune response against an infection.

  

  Earlier this week, the White House and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced plans to control the U.S. monoclonal antibody supply due to distribution issues. According to HHS’s website in a Sept. 13 update, the agency “will determine the weekly amount of mAb products each state and territory receives based on COVID-19 case burden and [monoclonal antibody treatment] utilization.”

  A spokesperson for HHS told CNN that Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana are using 70 percent of the supply of the drug.

  “Given this reality, we must work to ensure our supply of these life-saving therapies remains available for all states and territories, not just some,” the HHS spokesperson said, adding that a new system “will help maintain equitable distribution, both geographically and temporally, across the country … providing states and territories with consistent, fairly-distributed supply over the coming weeks.”

  Before the change, states and hospitals could purchase the antibodies on their own without going through the federal government.

  “More than 50 percent of the monoclonal antibodies that had been used in Florida were going to be reduced,” DeSantis said on Thursday, adding that “there’s going to be a huge disruption, and patients are going to suffer as a result of this.”

  On Thursday, DeSantis’s office said the state would deal directly with GlaxoSmithKline, a maker of monoclonal antibody infusion treatments.

  “The Biden administration and their allies in media have claimed that Florida is using too much monoclonal treatment because of a low vaccination rate,” Pushaw told The Epoch Times on Thursday, “and Biden has lashed out at Governor DeSantis for opposing the tyrannical federal vaccine mandate.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 15:30

• How "Boring" Erin O'Toole Has Come Within A Hair's Breadth Of Unseating "Entitled" Justin Trudeau
  How “Boring” Erin O’Toole Has Come Within A Hair’s Breadth Of Unseating “Entitled” Justin Trudeau

  Over the summer when he first called Monday’s snap election, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expected to trample the Conservative opposition, and possibly even cement the Liberals’ first majority government since the beginning of his reign.

  

  Erin O’Toole

  Trudeau had hoped that his handling of the pandemic might help him gain a political leg up. But one month later, the picture is looking very different. The polls are extremely close, and it’s possible that thea Conservatives might upset the Liberals. At the very least, it’s looking virtually certain that the Liberals will only manage to securie another minority government in coalition with the NDP and the greens, leaving them effectively right where they started, with the public frustrated over what would then prove to have been a monumental waste of time and resources, according to Bloomberg.

  

  Source: the New Republic

  As the campaign enters its last frantic weekend, there are many seats considered a “toss-up” by various pollsters, suggesting the election could go down to the wire.

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  

  Source: The New Republic

  With Trudeau terrified of the election slipping away, he came out swinging on Thursday and Friday, attacking his main rival, Conservative leader Erin O’Toole. Trudeau has tried to pitch himself as the better leader on COVID issues, but O’Toole has generated unexpected levels of popularity by insisting that rapid testing is a preferable policy course to vaccine mandates, which Trudeau has implicitly backed.

  O’Toole has also successfully slammed Trudeau as a hypocrite for calling an election in the middle of a pandemic.

  “Mr. Trudeau called an election that’s costing us $600 million rather than keeping the Delta variant from spreading, rather than actually working together.”

  Despite his recent success in the polls, O’Toole is still a political obscurity in the US. So, in an attempt to familiarize its readers with the potential next leader of Canada, Bloomberg has published a piece on O’Toole trying to explain his appeal to voters.

  According to sources quoted in the report, one of O’Toole’s most formidable attributes is that he’s boring – unlike the flashy political scion whose boyish (and some might say, Fidel Castro-esque) looks have made him a darling of the international press (while enduring constant criticisms of being all surface and little substance), O’Toole is basically the anti-Trudeau. A stolid public servant who achieved his position via hard work, not via birthright.

  O’Toole has used this rhetoric as an effective cudgel.

  “Every Canadian has met a Justin Trudeau in their lives – privileged, entitled and always looking out for number one,” O’Toole said this week near Ottawa, summing up his campaign message. “He was looking out for number one when he called this expensive and unnecessary election in the middle of a pandemic. That’s not leadership, that’s self-interest. And it’s Justin Trudeau through and through.”

  […]

  “The one big positive thing about Erin O’Toole is what you see is what you get, privately and publicly,” said Ashton Arsenault, vice president at Crestview Strategy in Ottawa. “There’s no difference between the two and I don’t think you can say that about everybody in the political universe.”

  In six weeks, Trudeau’s lead has eroded from a 6 point lead to a statistical dead heat.

  One of the most bizarre contrasts between O’Toole and Trudeau is their appearance. O’Toole is actually a year younger than the PM. But his thinning white hair give him the air of a dad, not a man-boy.

  The suburbs around Canada’s biggest city, known by their area code, 905, are the main electoral battleground. It’s also O’Toole home turf. Although he was born in Montreal, O’Toole grew up near Toronto and has served as the member of parliament for Durham since 2012.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 15:00

• North Carolina Judges Strike Down Voter ID Law, Claiming It's Racist
  North Carolina Judges Strike Down Voter ID Law, Claiming It’s Racist

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  Two North Carolina judges on Friday struck down a law that required identification to vote, alleging it “was enacted with the unconstitutional intent to discriminate against African American voters.”

  

  North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore gavels in a session in Raleigh, N.C., on April 30, 2020. (Gerry Broome/AP Photo)

  The law was enacted in violation of the Equal Protection Clause in North Carolina’s Constitution, the majority of the panel said. The clause says that nobody shall be denied equal protection of the laws nor shall anybody be subjected to discrimination by the state due to race.

  Defendants, including North Carolina House Speaker Timothy Moore, failed to show that racial discrimination was not a substantial or motivating factor behind enactment of the law, Superior Court Judges Michael O’Foghludha and Vince Rozier Jr., both Democrats, wrote in a 102-page ruling permanently blocking the measure.

  “Other, less restrictive voter ID laws would have sufficed to achieve the legitimate nonracial purposes of implementing the constitutional amendment requiring voter ID, deterring fraud, or enhancing voter confidence,” they said.

  The law in question, Senate Bill 824, was enacted after a majority of voters in North Carolina approved it as a constitutional amendment in 2018. Before that, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed the bill and overrode a veto from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.

  According to previous court rulings, plaintiffs challenging a law in the state must show that discrimination was a “motivating factor” in passing a law, the pair of judges said in their majority decision. That puts the burden on defendants to prove that the law “would have been enacted without this factor,” they added, quoting from a North Carolina Court of Appeals ruling from last year, Holmes v. Moore.

  Jabari Holmes and five other voters in the state sued over the law on the same day the legislature overrode Cooper’s veto, noting that a previous voter identification requirement was invalidated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit because it was alleged to be intentionally racially discriminatory, in a decision upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

  The bill “unconstitutionally and unjustifiably burdens the right to vote of Plaintiffs and similarly situated registered, qualified North Carolina voters who lack acceptable photo ID when they go to the polls and are subject to a complex process to vote,” the group of voters said in their complaint.

  Moore and other defendants charged that the suit should be dismissed because, they said, the law did not violate the state Constitution.

  Judge Nathaniel Poovey, third judge on the panel, offered a dissenting opinion in which he highlighted how the law was approved by the voters of the state.

  “Presenting some form of identification is a task we must perform quite frequently in everyday life. Adding more familiarity to the process of casting a vote increases the level of certainty in the electoral process. And doing so by requiring the presentation of photographic identification ensures each person offering to vote is who they proclaim to be, thereby increasing confidence in the outcome of each election,” Poovey, a Republican, said.

  

  Voters are seen during the North Carolina primary elections at the Pullen Community Center in Raleigh, N.C., on March 15, 2016. (Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)

   

  The evidence showed that “no registered voter in this State will be precluded from voting by the identification requirements in this law,” he added.

  The Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which represents the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement that the ruling “Is a testament to the overwhelming evidence, including compelling stories of disenfranchisement from voters themselves, which highlighted how the state’s Republican-controlled legislature undeniably implemented this legislation to maintain its power by targeting voters of color.”

  Sam Hayes, general counsel for Moore, the North Carolina House speaker, said in a statement that “Once again, liberal judges have defied the will of North Carolinians on election integrity.”

  “This fight is far from over. We look forward to appealing this partisan ruling on behalf of the people of North Carolina,” he added.

  Two other lawsuits against the bill are also being considered by courts. A federal suit brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is set to go on trial in January 2022; a separate suit brought on the state level by the association is awaiting a decision on appeal to the North Carolina Supreme Court.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 14:30

• Biden Admin Starts Deporting Haitians From Under Texas Bridge, Fox Foils FAA Drone Ban
  Biden Admin Starts Deporting Haitians From Under Texas Bridge, Fox Foils FAA Drone Ban

  For a month and a half, we’ve been keeping an eye on the developments of thousands of migrants gathering under the Anzalduas Bridge in Mission, Texas. On Aug. 2, we first reported stunning drone footage from Fox News’ Bill Melugin, who captured 1,000 migrants under the bridge surrounded by US Border Patrol agents. Now the number of migrants has increased to more than 11,000, and the federal government imposed a no-fly zone for unmanned aircraft systems.

  The Biden administration’s attempt to cover up the border disaster by blocking drones didn’t stop Melugin and his team who hitched a ride on a Texas Department of Public Safety’s helicopter to capture an aerial view of the migrant crisis, mostly Haitians, crossing the Mexico–US border with ease and gathering under the bridge as they wait to be processed by Border Patrol agents. 

  BREAKING: I am absolutely stunned by what I’m witnessing right now. We are on a boat in the Rio Grande near the Del Rio international bridge and we are watching as masses of hundreds of migrants walk across the river from Mexico and stream into the US illegally. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/xXE4pDkpIe

  — Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) September 18, 2021

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

  BREAKING: Our @FoxNews drone is back over the international bridge in Del Rio, where it appears the mass of migrants has expanded once again.
  Stunning visuals. More than 11,000 under the bridge as of yesterday w/ more streaming in. Expect that number to be bigger today. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/phnep2MWz8

  — Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) September 18, 2021

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

  Melugin took shocking videos of thousands of migrants not just crossing the border but gathered underneath the bridge, a testament to the Biden administration’s mishandling of the migration crisis. 

  AMAZING — Since the Biden administration has kicked @BillFoxLA and his team out from flying Fox News’s drones along the U.S./Mexico border in Del Rio, TX, *local* law enforcement decided to get him a helicopter to hop in and go check things out to continue reporting. pic.twitter.com/pZ54my6E7o

  — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 17, 2021

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

  Melugin thanked the Texas Department of Public Safety for allowing his team to fly with them while the FAA grounded his drone. He said, “the true scope of the situation in Del Rio is seen best from the air,” adding the FAA has now “cleared us to fly our drone again after FOX submitted a waiver.”

  Thank you to @TxDPS for taking us up in the chopper today while our drone was grounded by the Feds. The true scope of the situation in Del Rio is seen best from the air.
  Also happy to report the FAA has cleared us to fly our drone again after FOX submitted a waiver. pic.twitter.com/ACG6IGxryL

  — Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) September 17, 2021

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

  On Saturday morning, the Texas Department of Public Safety released more footage from the bridge. 

  At the direction of Governor @GregAbbott_TX, DPS continues to maintain an increased presence at the bridge where a growing number of migrants are gathering in the Del Rio Sector. pic.twitter.com/yFxlvmfOrW

  — Texas DPS (@TxDPS) September 18, 2021

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

  Aerial footage from DPS Aircraft Operations Division 🚁 pic.twitter.com/AdWwrdUSSr

  — Texas DPS (@TxDPS) September 18, 2021

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

  DPS stands ready to protect the people and property of this great state. pic.twitter.com/0d816Z57D1

  — Texas DPS (@TxDPS) September 18, 2021

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

  Meanwhile, the Biden Administration fails to see the border crisis as they completely ignore the growing problem.  

  House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) requested the president to deploy National Guard along the southern border. He stated Friday that thousands of illegal immigrants, mainly from Haiti, are assembling under the bridge. 

  “The Biden Administration must recognize this for what it is: A National Security Crisis. As such he must fully deploy the National Guard to the southern border to help our Border Patrol agents with more resources to control the situation.

  “Recently, over 10,000 migrants have surged to the border in Del Rio. It is no coincidence this is happening as Democrats in Congress are moving to pass legislation that would grant immediate citizenship for up to 10 million illegal immigrants. This is a wakeup call to Democrats that their policies are putting American lives in danger and must be abandoned,” McCarthy said.

  Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who traveled to the bridge on Thursday, called it “the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “There are right now, as we’re speaking, there are 10,503 people under that bridge. It is packed in as a mass of humanity,” Cruz said. “They take your breath away because it just goes on and on and on—infants, little children, people struggling enormously.”

  Cruz criticized the Biden administration for the situation and called for deportation flights of the migrants.

  “It’s a political decision that Joe Biden could end tonight by simply following the law and saying we’re going to send people back to Haiti, which is what federal immigration law requires,” Cruz said.

  The Biden administration paused deportation flights to Haiti after a powerful earthquake devastated the country last month. There’s talk the administration may restart “widescale expulsion of Haitian migrants from a small Texas border city by putting them on flights to Haiti starting Sunday,” according to AP News. 

  Biden’s rollback of Trump-era border policies has created an utter mess that mainstream leftist media chooses to ignore. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/18/2021 – 14:00

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• Deep State, Deep Trouble
  Deep State, Deep Trouble

  Authored by Josiah Lippincott via AmericanMind.org,

  America’s woke generals and the Military-Industrial Complex must be purged to save the nation…

  

  Revelations from a new book, Peril, by Bob Woodward and Rob Costa, reveal just how deep the spiritual rot in the military goes. In the days after the January 6 protest, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, promised, in the event of a war, to give aid and comfort to China. According to the Washington Post, after the Capitol protest, Milley sent secret communiques to the head of the People’s Liberation Army, promising that “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

  In a decent country such a brazen act of collusion with a foreign power by one of the most prominent leaders of the armed forces would be met with immediate and unrelenting backlash. Instead, this betrayer of the Constitution and the principle of civilian leadership of the military is a liberal darling. At the inauguration, Joe Biden thanked Milley for undermining President Trump in the final weeks of his presidency.

  Milley, before reaching out to China, sat down with the service’s top officers and demanded from them what amounted to an oath—none of them would launch a nuclear weapon without his approval. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff went behind the President’s back to secure control over the nation’s most important weapons.

  Our generals are losers abroad, and grifters at home. They parrot MSNBC talking points on Twitter and grovel before Fauci. This is bad enough. But Milley’s actions show that America’s top military officers have reached another level of delusion. They fancy themselves a new praetorian guard to protect the nation—as construed by elite editorial boards—from the people’s elected representatives.

  This deep state is in control. It is clear that no populist elected leader can trust America’s security establishment. As Senator Chuck Schumer warned President Trump on Rachel Maddow’s show in 2017, the intelligence community has “six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.”

  The military establishment is gloating now and flexing its muscle. After the election, outgoing Syria envoy Jim Jeffrey admitted that the Pentagon and State Department had consistently lied to Trump about troop levels in Syria. Before he left office, Trump’s order to have troops out of Afghanistan by January 15 was overruled by the establishment. Trump, far from trying to start a war on his way out of office, sought to end one.

  White House spokesperson Jen Psaki claims that Milley was following “constitutional orders to prevent unlawful military actions.” According to her, Trump “was implementing an insurrection.” The claim that Trump wished to start a war to distract from the election, upon which Milley based his collusion with the Chinese government, was an utter lie. Nor was Trump implementing an insurrection; the FBI has dispensed with this myth, finding that there was no coordinated plot associated with the Capitol riot.

  There will be no hearings, serious journalistic investigations, or outcry from the establishment.

  Milley will go unpunished.

  He will retire with full honors and full pension.

  The Pentagon will never reform itself from the inside.

  The entire military-industrial complex (MIC) must be dismantled if we are ever to have again an armed forces consistent with the Founders’ republican virtues.

  The American Right must be willing to starve the Pentagon of its lifeblood. The most important asset the people have is their bodies.  American mothers and fathers need to stop feeding their children into the machine. Heartland American boys and girls have better things to do and better leaders to serve under. The American people must go on strike until the generals once again learn to subordinate themselves to the people.

  GOP politicians must assist their constituents in this noble task. They must find real courage and demand radical institutional change. This starts with deep and abiding budget cuts for the Pentagon and the rest of the MIC. The Founders’ distrust of permanent standing armies must be restored.

  America should once again rely on true citizen soldiers for national defense.

  The world has changed. America’s grand strategy must change with it. Our current conventional force cannot defeat insurgencies anyway. The proliferation of nuclear weapons, on the other hand, means that “Great Power conflict” is virtually impossible. There is no need to keep buying weapons systems designed to fight a redux of WWII. Our bases overseas are a relic of the liberal humanitarian world order. Having 20,000 troops in Okinawa didn’t prevent the Chinese Communist Party from using Twitter bots to stir up hysteria over Covid. Our dozen aircraft carriers didn’t stop our politicians from implementing lockdowns and vaccine passports. America’s air bases in Turkey, Germany, and Diego Garcia didn’t keep the Taliban from retaking control of their country.

  America was never the world’s policeman. An empire in the name of democracy and freedom was always an idiotic idea.

  Widespread gun ownership is a much better guarantor of American liberty than any SEAL team or aircraft carrier. The Militia Act of 1792 is a much better model for national defense than our current setup. The act enrolled every able-bodied male citizen between the ages of 18 and 45 into the militia. It also demanded that each of these men provide themselves with a “good musket or firelock” and “a sufficient bayonet.” Far from trying to take away firearms, the Founders demanded every American male citizen possess one.

  Self-sufficiency in arms is the foundation of liberty, national sovereignty, and independence. Tyrannies never arm their citizens; republics always do. Our security as a nation should not depend on over-hyped “super soldiers.” The “silent professionals” with their podcasts, book deals, and TV appearances play, in the grand scheme of things, only a very minor role in protecting the life, liberty, and property of the American people.

  The unmitigated corruption in the leadership of the armed forces is a sign of deep cultural rot. The patriotic flag-waving of the post-9/11 response has been used to great harm against the American people. An unwillingness by the political class to criticize and hold accountable those charged with defending the nation has led to our current spiritual crisis. America can’t win overseas, her generals sell out her leaders to foreign powers, and the retired members of this elite class do nothing but gobble up fat checks from the corporations they once purchased from. This is an untenable state of affairs.

  It is time to restore republican virtue, to sweep clean our military establishment.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 23:40

• How Genetically Similar Are We To Other Life Forms
  How Genetically Similar Are We To Other Life Forms

  Of the three billion genetic building blocks that make us living things, only a handful are uniquely ours. In fact, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang notes, despite our differences on the outside, humans are 99.9% genetically similar to one another.

  But how alike are we to other, non-human life forms? Turns out, we’re a lot more similar than you might think.

  

  Comparative Genomics 101

  First, how do scientists compare the genetic makeup of various life forms?

  Comparative genomics is a branch of biology that compares genome sequences across different species to identify their similarities and differences.

  This field of research is important because it:

  • Helps us better understand evolution, and how living things have adapted over time.

  • Builds knowledge around genes and how they influence various systems in our bodies.

  • Has wider applications in agriculture, especially in conservation efforts among endangered species.

  According to the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), scientists have already sequenced the genomes of more than 250 animal species, as well as 50 bird species.

  Human Genetic Makeup vs. Other Life Forms

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, chimps are one of our closest genetic relatives in the animal kingdom.

  Because of our similarities, chimpanzees have a similar immune system to humans, which means they’re susceptible to viruses such as AIDS and hepatitis.

  Though chimps are one of our closest relatives, other species are strongly linked to humans as well—and not necessarily the ones you’d think.

  

  For instance, according to NHGRI, fruit flies are 60% genetically similar to humans.

  This may sound confusing at first, since humans and insects couldn’t be more physically different. However, because we share many of the same essential needs to sustain life, such as the need for oxygen, these similarities are reflected in our genetics.

  DNA vs Genes

  It’s important to note that being genetically similar to something is different than sharing the same DNA. That’s because genes (the part of DNA responsible for making protein) only account for up to 2% of your DNA, while the rest of your genome is made up of what scientists call “non-coding DNA.”

  So while a banana is 60% genetically similar to humans, only 1.2% of our DNA is shared.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 23:20

• San Diego City Council Bans Ghost Guns
  San Diego City Council Bans Ghost Guns

  Authored by Yudi Hu via The Epoch Times,

  San Diego City Council passed an ordinance on Tuesday that bans the sale and possession of “ghost guns” in an attempt to combat the rising gun crime in San Diego.

  

  Ghost guns are privately made firearms that lack serial numbers, making them hard to be traced by law enforcement agencies. Under federal law, it is legal for private individuals to make their own firearms, but a license is required for the manufacture of firearms that are for sale or distribution.

  The Eliminate Non-Serialized Untraceable Firearm (ENUF) ordinance was introduced by Councilwoman Marni von Wilpert after a deadly shooting in April in downtown San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter in which a ghost gun was used. San Diego Police Chief David Nisleit told FOX 5 reporters after the shooting that there has been a 169 percent increase in ghost guns from 2020.

  The first reading of the ENUF ordinance passed 8-1 in August. At the city council meeting on Tuesday, citizens voiced their opinions regarding the ordinance.

  Stephan Abrams is a member of Team Enough, a youth-led organization aiming to educate young people about gun violence. Abrams said he was able to purchase a ghost gun kit and build his own firearm as a minor.

  “The idea [that building a gun] is a complicated process is not true. We need to pass legislation because ghost guns bypass all gun violence prevention laws,” said Abrams.

  Debbie McDaniel-Lindsey, an attendee of the council meeting, said that the ENUF ordinance would enable a safe culture of sale and possession of firearms. “We are simply asking makers of ghost guns to follow the same rules they would use if they went to a dealer to buy a firearm,” said McDaniel-Lindsey.

  Tim Taylor, president of District 3 representing San Diegans For Gun Violence Prevention, said one of the main arguments against the ENUF ordinance was that it is a violation of the second amendment right.

  “I strongly disagree,” said Taylor. “Ghost Gun technology created an unintended loophole in the existing laws that are supported by the vast majority of Californians … Closing the loophole gets us back to where we were before the technology existed, where the overwhelming majority of adults can legally possess various types of firearms.”

  

  A man load .223 bullets into an AR-15 assault rifle at FT3 tactical shooting range in Stanton, Calif., on May 3, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

  However, other people spoke out against the ENUF ordinance.

  Wendy Hauffen, CEO of the San Diego Country Gun Owners, urged a “no” vote on the ordinance. She said the ordinance would only put restrictions on law-abiding gun owners but not criminals.

  “The serialization comes before the purchase [of] the raw materials the builder uses to make a firearm. This step is not required for criminals and criminals will continue to break firearm laws. This will only result in the punishment and charges against people who are not career criminals because criminals do not care [about] the serialization of guns,” said Hauffen.

  Another attendee, Max, also objected to the ENUF ordinance. He said with the rising gun price passing, the ordinance will add more pressure to low-income residents of San Diego who can not afford a manufactured gun. He added even the ordinance is passed, criminals can always obtain guns from black markets with the serial numbers scratched off.

  “No matter what, this is something that can always happen and it’s going to affect only low-income residents … because we can’t build our own,” said Max.

  Council members voted after attendees commented on the ordinance. The ENUF ordinance passed 8-1 with only Councilmember Chris Cate from District 6 voting against it.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 23:00

• Survey: 40% Of People Would Have Sex With Humanoid Robot
  Survey: 40% Of People Would Have Sex With Humanoid Robot

  We continue to ponder artificial intelligence and robots and their role in the sex industry. For the last half-decade, we’ve covered the proliferation of sexbots and how they could screw the human race. 

  For more on the screwing and a pretty shocking poll by data company Tido, out of 1,200 people surveyed, 42% of respondents said they would have sex with a robot. Males are more open to bonking a silicon robot- at least 48% of them said they would have sexual intercourse with a humanoid bot. Only 33% of females said they would. 

  “About 42% of our survey respondents would have sexual intercourse with a robot. Yet, only 39% believe they could have a romantic relationship with an AI. There is also a large discrepancy between men and women. Men are more open to both the idea of sleeping with a robot (48%) and falling in love with an AI (43% of male respondents),” Tido said. 

  What’s troubling is that we outlined in 2016 that “if humans begin spending the majority of their intimate hours with sex androids, they will reduce both the energy and biological resources needed to perpetuate the human race.” 

  

  This poll couldn’t come at the worst time. The US population has declined for the first time in this nation’s existence as a demographic timebomb awaits. The younger generation needs to make more children not consider future sexual relations with a silicon robot from China. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 22:40

• Victor Davis Hanson: The Death Of Science
  Victor Davis Hanson: The Death Of Science

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

  The scientific method used to govern much of popular American thinking.

  In empirical fashion, scientists advised us to examine evidence and data, and then by induction come to rational hypotheses. The enemies of “science” were politics, superstition, bias and deduction.

  Yet we are now returning to our version of medieval alchemy and astrology in rejecting a millennium of the scientific method.

  Take the superstitions that now surround COVID-19.

  We now know from data that a prior case of COVID-19 offers immunity as robust as vaccination. Why, then, are Joe Biden’s proposed vaccination mandates ignoring that scientific fact? Dr. Anthony Fauci, when asked, seemed at a loss for words.

  Is this yet another of the scientific community’s Platonic “noble lies,” as when Fauci assured the public last year that there was no need for masks?

  He later claimed he had lied so that medical professionals would not run out of needed supplies.

  

  Fauci also threw out mythical percentages needed for herd immunity, apparently in an attempt to convince the public that it will never be safe until every American is protected from COVID-19 by vaccination only.

  And why was it that hard for the scientific community to postulate a likely origin of COVID-19 Some of the very scientists engaged in gain-of-function research oversaw an investigation with Chinese authorities. They confirmed the predetermined conclusion that the virus likely had little to do with gain-of-function engineering. And they saw little proof it was birthed in a Wuhan virology lab. Yet scientific opinion, emerging evidence and basic logic have suggested the opposite.

  How can the government hector citizens that they have a moral duty — and soon a legal obligation — to be vaccinated when it does not mandate vaccinations for unvetted refugees flying in from Afghanistan?

  How can the government medical community remain largely silent when an anticipated 2 million foreign nationals will cross into the United States in the current fiscal year — almost none of whom are vaccinated or tested for COVID-19?

  Why do the media and government blame particular races for the delta variant outbreak on grounds that they were insufficiently vaccinated?

  Why wouldn’t officials simply urge the Latino and Black communities to be vaccinated as quickly as possible?

  Data shows that both groups have lower vaccination rates than white and Asian populations.

  Are woke political agendas discrediting science and losing public health?

  We saw just that in June 2020, when more than 1,200 “health care professionals” signed a petition demanding exemptions from lockdowns and quarantines for Black Lives Matter protesters marching en masse. And they concocted medical excuses such as “vital to the national public health” to insist that violating quarantines was less unhealthy than not pouring into the streets.

  Why did presidential candidate Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, warn the American people on the eve of vaccination rollouts that an inoculation under the Trump administration could be unsafe, thereby undermining confidence in vaccines?

  Why was the medical community largely silent about such dangerous sabotaging of new vaccines, but months later became vociferous in warning the public that any doubts about the safety of these Operation Warp Speed vaccinations were scientifically misplaced? Was there a medical breakthrough on Jan. 20, 2020, to alter their consensus?

  From rewarding wokeness in medical school admissions to the peer reviewing of scientific papers, the anti-scientific mania has polluted scientific endeavors.

  “Critical race theory” would preposterously tell us that we need racism to fight racism.

  “Critical legal theory” ludicrously claims that laws have no rational basis but simply reflect power inequities.

  “Modern monetary theory” defies millennia of evidence and basic logic in stating that governments can simply print money without worrying about balancing expenditures with revenues or inflating the currency to ruination.

  Corporations are now asked to substitute a new woke agenda theory — “Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG)” — in lieu of market realities, rules of investment and economic data.

  Science is dying; superstition disguised as morality is returning. And we’ll all soon become poorer, angrier and more divided.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 22:20

• Restaurants Remove Crab From Menus Due To Skyrocketing Prices
  Restaurants Remove Crab From Menus Due To Skyrocketing Prices

  Restaurants have suffered throughout the virus pandemic, and the shortage of everything doesn’t seem to be waning anytime soon. We told readers in June about a worsening crabmeat shortage that sent prices soaring. Heading into September, crabmeat prices soared to record highs forcing restaurants to either pass along the costs to consumers or remove crab products from menus. 

  One of the top crab restaurants in Baltimore, Maryland, called Jimmy’s Famous Seafood, serves customers Maryland crab cakes, steamed crabs, crab soup, and other types of seafood. The restaurant ships crab cakes to customers all over the country and recently warned about “menu prices have recently increased due to the international crabmeat shortage which has decimated our industry.” 

  

  Gail Furman is one of the owners of Max’s Taphouse in the Inner Harbor region of Baltimore. She told ABC News crabmeat prices are at “astronomical” levels that are forcing her to “remove crab products off our menus.” 

  “Everyone knows about crab cakes and crab meat in Maryland. The price per pound has gone up from $21 a pound. Yesterday, it was $52 a pound, which is astronomical, so a lot of us have had to take crab products off our menus,” Furman said. “People just aren’t going to pay the prices we would need to charge to produce that product.”

  She said: 

  “Every supply chain that you look at is broken,” Furman said. “Because of the limited labor, because of the limited product out there, products and costs are dramatically increasing.”

  Adding: 

  “Chicken wings, pre-pandemic, they were roughly $45 to $50 for a case. Last week, they were $196 a case,” Furman said.

  Another restaurant owner just south of Baltimore told local news WJZ that crabmeat prices continue to skyrocket, which has forced menu prices to edge higher. 

  “It does hurt, and with COVID, we’re way behind in our sales and our break-even points,” said CindyLee Floyd, the owner of Floyd’s Crossroads Pub. 

  She had to raise crab cake prices by $4, but that wasn’t enough to cover her costs.

  “Over the weekend, we changed it to $6,” she said. “We’re not losing money. We’re just barely breaking even.”

  Bill Sieling, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Seafood Industries Association, told WJZ that soaring prices are due to “just the old law of supply and demand.” He said there’s no shortage of workers in the labor market and added a lack of mature crabs is the problem. 

  “Right now, more people want to purchase crab and crab meat than there is crabs and crab meat,” said Sieling. 

  Just north of Baltimore City in a suburban area called Cockeysville, Pappas Restaurant told local news WBALTV about the shortage of crabmeat. 

  “It is in very short supply. The quantity is not there, the quality is not there, and they’re asking for enormous prices,” Pappas Restaurant Group CEO Steve Pappas said.

  Pappas said he can no longer keep crab cake prices low due to soaring wholesale costs. He had to raise crab cake dishes by $3 and expects to go up even more. 

  “If we raise the price the same amount that crab meat has gone up, it would be $60 a crab cake. Right now, it’s $25.99 for two sides and for one crab cake,” Pappas said.

  Pappas said crabmeat costs between $50 to $60 a pound. He said he couldn’t get colossal blue crab and jumbo lump due to supply woes. 

  “I think there is a shortage of workers, a shortage of transportation and just like many other industries right now, it’s hard to find products of any sort,” Pappas said.

  Year-to-date, blue crab meat prices are at record highs. As per individual restaurant reports above, there’s reason to believe crabmeat prices per pound are currently between $50-$60.

  

  By the pound, some websites are selling the meat for up to $121 per pound, shockingly high, consider prices were in the $19 to $30 range for the past half-decade. 

  

  It’s not just blue crabs that have soared in price. According to Sea Food News, king crab prices are well above seasonal averages as the market is tight and demand remains robust. 

  

  … and prices for Asian blue crabs are surging. 

  

  For US importers, buying crabs overseas means paying record-high shipping rates and delays. 

  

  Some on social media are pointing out the crabmeat crisis at Maryland restaurants. 

  I had lunch at Pappas in Cockeysville – prices on #crabmeat are on the rise! There’s a surcharge on anything made with crabmeat (still worth it and good though!) pic.twitter.com/RdzjTGqzf8

  — Phil Yacuboski (@WBALPhil) June 21, 2021

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

  .@neelkashkari, any plans to address food inflation? pic.twitter.com/CgDOEd92Cb

  — Alastair Williamson (@StockBoardAsset) September 12, 2021

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

  For crab processors, their costs have doubled since the pandemic and are being pushed to restaurants, who in return raise menu prices. 

  

  The ripple effect of this all is crushing the low- and middle-classes the most as hyperinflationary food prices shows no signs of stopping. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 22:00

• More US Troops & Aircraft Will Deploy To Australia After New 'Counter China' Pact Unveiled
  More US Troops & Aircraft Will Deploy To Australia After New ‘Counter China’ Pact Unveiled

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  A day after the US, UK, and Australia announced a new military pact to counter China, Australia’s defense minister said more US military aircraft and troops will deploy to the country.

  Australian Defence Minister Peter Dutton said Canberra made the comments in Washington after a meeting with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Dutton said the US and Australia agreed to enhance “our force posture cooperation.”

  

  “This will include greater air cooperation through rotational deployments of all types of US military aircraft to Australia,” he said.

  When asked about more US troops deploying to Australia, Dutton said, “So I do have an aspiration to make sure that we can increase the numbers of troops through the rotations.”

  He also hinted that Australia might host US medium-range missiles that were previously banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which the Trump administration withdrew from in 2019. Dutton signaled Australia is open to basing “different ordinances,” which he said was in “Australia’s best interest.”

  With the Pentagon focused on China, Australia will play a significant role in Washington’s strategy in the Pacific. The nuclear-powered submarines Canberra gains from this new pact will give Australia more abilities to patrol sensitive areas like the South China Sea.

  Australia is a member of the Quad, a security dialogue that also includes the US, India, and Japan, and is seen as a foundation for a possible anti-China NATO-style alliance in Asia. Biden is trying to strengthen the group and will host the first in-person summit between Quad leaders later this month.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 21:40

• Watch: Tourist Attacks NYC Restaurant Hostess Over Vaccination Proof To Dine
  Watch: Tourist Attacks NYC Restaurant Hostess Over Vaccination Proof To Dine

  A hostess at a well-known Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan was brutally attacked by a group of tourists from Texas after she asked to see proof of COVID vaccination, a new requirement for indoor diners, according to CBS New York.

  A disturbing cellphone video shows an altercation outside Carmine’s Italian Restaurant around 1550 ET Thursday when three tourists beat the living daylights out of the 24-year old hostess. 

  

  The tourists, who were identified as Sally Rechelle Lewis, 49, Keita Nkeenge Rankin, 44, and Tyonnie Keshay Rankin, 21, of Texas, got into a heated argument with the hostess about COVID requirements before it quickly escalated into a brawl. The three tourists punched and slapped the young girl, who was sent to the hospital with injuries.  

  “This turned into a mess. And from there, it’s inexcusable, ridiculous,” Carmine’s owner Jeff Banks told CBS New York.

  Carmine’s on the UWS says a hostess was assaulted after asking a group for proof of Covid vaccine to eat inside. “It’s a shocking and tragic situation when one of our valued employees is assaulted for doing their job – as required by city policies…” @NBCNewYork after football. pic.twitter.com/xrqZoNm74R

  — Adam Harding (@HardingReports) September 17, 2021

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

  “Our employee, thankfully, is safe right now. She’s extremely shaken up,” Banks said. “Two other people had minor issues.”

  All three of the tourist were arrested and charged with assault before being released from police custody. 

  Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer spoke out against the assault and the need for harsher punishments: 

  “Do not assault restaurant workers who are doing their job to keep us safe. I can’t believe this happened here,” Brewer said. “We have to increase the fines, if that’s what it takes.”

  The New York City Hospitality Alliance was appalled by the incident and issued this statement: 

  “It’s a shocking and tragic situation when one of our valued employees is assaulted for doing their job – as required by city policies – and trying to make a living. Our focus right now is caring for our employee and the rest of our restaurant family. We are a family-style restaurant, and this is the absolute last experience any of our employees should ever endure and any customers witness.”

  Last month, New York City required patrons of restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and outdoor music festivals to carry a COVID vaccine card or a digital copy for entry. The enforcement policy began on Monday.

  If the tourist had any sense, they could’ve cooled their jets and asked for a table outside, an area that doesn’t need COVID passes. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 21:20

• How Bitcoin Fixes The Money, Saves The World
  How Bitcoin Fixes The Money, Saves The World

  Authored by Bruce Fenton via BitcoinMagazine.com,

  Two things are undeniable: We are living in times of massive change, and Bitcoin is a part of it.

  

  We are living in times of massive change, a “fourth turning.” The book “The Fourth Turning” by Strauss and Howe covers centuries of history and shows that demographics and other factors lead to massive change in societies every 100 years or so.

  Generations change distinctly: the ’60s were different from the ’50s and the ’80s. But a fourth turning is a different level of change. If history is any indication, in this fourth turning we will see changes in maps, society, religion, belief systems and we may see the very nature of economics and money itself change.

  Bitcoin came into the world at the right time.

  Any earlier, and Bitcoin could not have practically been used due to internet usage rates. It is interesting that Bitcoin is here just as the global economy faces such massive change to the old-school fiat system that has been running for the last half century and driving our world into the ground. The old fiat system is unsustainable. Bitcoin presents the ultimate hedge against the failed monetary policies of central banks.

  It’s key to remember that central banks don’t just devalue the money of citizens, their very existence causes some of the greatest evils that we see in modern society. In a world of sound money, people would value their hard-earned coins more. People would also have custody and control over their own money. If politicians had to convince people to voluntarily pay for wars, for-profit prisons, and heavy regulations. citizens would exercise much more scrutiny over where their money is spent.

  Whether you believe the narrative of bitcoin as better money or not doesn’t matter. It would be hard to deny that we are in a fourth turning right now. The last year and a half has seen some of the most dramatic change that people have seen in the last 50 years or more. So, there is no question that we are in times of massive change. The only question is what role Bitcoin will play in this.

  Bitcoin has been around for 12 years now and has created wealth and built an entire industry around itself. Bitcoin is now held by tens of millions of people and has become a global phenomenon. Bitcoin is on the radar of everyone in the world, from the poorest to the richest, from the vaunted halls of power to the streetside corner store.

  We will never know how Bitcoin would’ve done without the extraordinary economic events of the last several years. The massive spending which began more than 20 years ago and started reaching unsustainable levels around 2008 with government bailouts has been thought to be unsustainable by many for several years. This last year we have seen more money printing than what we’ve seen ever before in history.

  This massive money printing increases Bitcoin’s appeal. Bitcoin is a more major part of the global financial system than most realize. This is not reflected in the market capitalization right now. Bitcoin is still smaller than Apple, but its impact, importance and its message is much greater. We have a country adopting bitcoin as legal tender. We see major banks and brokerages offering bitcoin exposure and bitcoin-related products. We have an entire industry with varying degrees of quality which has cropped up around and adjacent to Bitcoin.

  When you think about Bitcoin relative to the current world and the backdrop of the weaknesses in the central banking system, it’s not so lofty to say that Bitcoin just might save humanity. Remember that the problem with central banking only begins at the debasement of the money of the people. The true problem is that it centralizes power and creates these massive money honeypots which contractors vie for. The Afghanistan war alone cost taxpayers — specifically children who will be paying this debt for years — $2 trillion. The most effective way for government contractors to receive handouts in the deca-billion range is to promote fear. So, now we have companies that have a vested interest in promoting fear so that taxpayers will support giving their own money back to those companies. This is the end of an empire with broken thinking — it leads to death and it’s evil. And Bitcoin fixes this.

  There is so much broken in the current system that it is very difficult to fight. An alternative way to fight is through peaceful use of another form of money.

  If you deny the politicians their money, then you deny the tyrants their money. Money of the people is more peaceful. Money of the people is free of coercion. It’s voluntary. It can be one of the most meaningful revolutions the world has ever seen without anyone needing to fire a shot.

  The good news is that we have Bitcoin. The good news is that we can see light at the end of the tunnel. We can starve the beast of war and aggression which is fueled by fake fiat money printing processes. We can build a society based on voluntary exchange of trade and with the foundation of solid, sound money. The kind of money people measure wealth in. Like gold of centuries past. Sound money inspires savings, it inspires wise investment, it inspires people to avoid risks and it fosters innovation.

  Some fourth turnings see even more significant epoch shifts in the world, such as the creation of the printing press. The technological revolution that we are in right now and that Bitcoin is a central part of will see our global economic system and monetary systems radically change.

  Overall, this change will be for the better. Just as we saw a separation of church and state centuries ago, we can see a just separation of money and state today. People using voluntary decentralized money would be a freer people and centralized powers will have their significance reduced.

  The old saying “money is the root of all evil” is wrong. Indeed, this is an easy mistake to make — for money and economics has been at the center of much of our world struggle. Great evils such as slavery, wars and great things like trading routes, art, languages and culture have all been influenced by money. Money has been one of the most crucial tools for the growth of humanity. Money is a way for people to share value based on goods and services provided to them.

  We cannot only reduce the power of tyrants and evil, we can increase the power of the people with sound money. Fix the money, fix the world.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 21:00

• Here Are The States Receiving Bulk Of Afghan Refugees (With D.C. So Far Taking In Zero)
  Here Are The States Receiving Bulk Of Afghan Refugees (With D.C. So Far Taking In Zero)

  “I strongly oppose the resettlement of these Afghan nationals in Montana,” Republican representative Matt Rosendale said in a Thursday statement after it was revealed Montana is due to resettle 75 Afghan refugees who fled on US evacuation flights in August.

  According to recent New York Times estimates, a minimum of 50,000 Afghans are expected to be resettled in the United States over the course of the next month, while some 31,000 have already arrived, many still undergoing DHS processing. Over the next year it’s expected this number will reach nearly 100,000 – based on White House estimates of how many the administration hopes to admit to the country.

  

  This would end up being more than all Afghan refugees resettled in the US since the war began in 2001, according to prior State Dept. data.

  While many of these are said to include translators and their families or other Afghans who over the past two decade long US occupation assisted US and NATO forces in some way, it’s as yet unclear how many were simply Afghans who crowded into military transport planes without any level of vetting. Others who are to be admitted were reportedly deemed “at risk” by the US government – essentially a declaration of asylum.

  Fresh State Department data suggests most of the first wave of Afghan resettlement will go to California and Texas, after the majority were initially flown into Virginia and Washington D.C. Fox News breaks down the numbers as follows:

  California (5,255) and Texas (4,481) will receive the largest numbers of the first wave, while smaller populated states like Oklahoma and Missouri will receive 1,800 and 1,200 respectively. Michigan, Florida and Georgia will both receive more than 1,000 Afghans each. New York will receive 1,143 and Arizona will receive 1,610.

  A number of mid-west and western states will begin receiving smaller numbers, but as Fox points out the irony is that despite Washington officials and pundits at times being the loudest in their calls for resettling Afghan allies, it remains that D.C. is not actually slated so far to receive any.

  The report points out that “Washington D.C., along with Hawaii, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming, will not receive any refugees in the initial wave.” But it remains that Virginia, for example, in prior years of the war already took in a huge amount compared to its population size.

  Since 2001 a mere ten states have received the bulk of all Afghan refugees given asylum due to the war…

  

  A handful of Republican leaders, including South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, are among those fighting back against their states being pressured to receive the refugees. Close to a dozen other governors are still said to be undecided on the issue. 

  A DHS memo that emerged this month said that homeland security “anticipates processing tens of thousands more” Afghan evacuees and refugees in the coming months. Most were initially taken to Qatar, and others further going to US bases in Europe, before arriving at Dulles airport for further processing in Virginia.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 20:40

• 7 Signs Your Friend Or Family Member Has Fallen Victim To The Woke Mind Virus
  7 Signs Your Friend Or Family Member Has Fallen Victim To The Woke Mind Virus

  Authored by Brett Sinclair via TheFreeThoughtProject.com,

  COVID is not the only virus sweeping the West, obsessively woke politics is running rampant with the most virulent variants emerging in newsrooms and colleges.

  

  As an acquaintance of mine slowly succumbed, here’s what I observed.

  There are certain traits that appear to be extremely common among people who are ‘woke’. Woke being now a common term for those among us who become righteously incensed with progressive social justice issues (typical of mainstream Western media imbibers or recent university graduates). Often, we can see this obsession manifesting in the form of aggressive protest activism – not just as a hobby, but at every social, private, and professional level of their lives. That is a ‘woke’ personality.

  While there are well-known physical markers indicating a woke person (blue or purple hair, obesity, androgyny, wispy beards in men, annoying spectacles) I have for some time been a curious student of their habits and psychological mannerisms, which I have also noted, along with the physical traits, to have universal qualities.

  I had until recently assumed that these universal personality traits were evidence of a condition existing in the person first (i.e smug over-confidence) which left them susceptible to ‘woke ideas’. But more and more anecdotal experience is teaching me that becoming woke, or contracting the ‘woke virus’, creates its own type of human psyche in the unsuspecting host, which is recognizable across many observable cases. It is my opinion that this psyche is the result of the mind-virus, and not necessarily a pre-existing quality. Thus, if true, this means wokeness itself reshapes the mind.

  These qualities are:

  1. Smugness. An absolute, unwavering, and arrogantly condescending attitude toward all non-woke opinions. While a trait in itself, it is related to number 2.

  2. Lack of introspection. No trace of self-questioning or apparent inner monologue. No sense of fairness or understanding of relative opinion.

  3. Quickness to anger. Willingness to not only voice their opinion on any occasion, with anyone, even when outnumbered, but to do so angrily. A willingness to cut off any friend or family member who won’t comply with woke belief.

  4. Nihilist atheism. They will rant a lot about science, while at the same time ignoring science that doesn’t comply with their beliefs. They tend to assume you are dogmatically religious if you don’t agree with them. They will cling to a strongly negative nihilism believing that everything is ultimately hopeless, and that it is sardonic hubris to do or believe in anything (which ties into number 6).

  5. Dishonesty. They are willing to be openly dishonest to further their viral ideas. If they lose a point in an argument, they move on to a new point, never acknowledging or acquiescing that a point was lost. When all attack points are used, personal attacks begin. The past is a blank slate open to revision.

  6. Self-absorbed. This one took me a while to notice, but it seems a give-away idiosyncrasy that you are dealing with a woke-infection if the person has become abnormally self-centered, and in conversation, does not so much reciprocate, as talk about themselves, always positive or self-aggrandizing, often unrealistically. They may also insert self-pity, it seems to generally exacerbate a need for attention-seeking.

  7. Depression, low self-worth, anxiety. This one I also only noticed recently, it is likely the subconscious result of numbers 4 and 6 in particular. Any genuine personal questioning of the subject usually reveals deep worries and angst, and often mental health issues.

  A recent experience with an acquaintance, a middle-aged woman who, through a new circle of friends, went from normal and apolitical to fully woke, permitted me to study changes (with a detached horror) as they occurred. Firstly, she began to exhibit extreme self-centeredness, as this new social peer group became important to her (I believe it was a ‘book club’). It began with her seemingly becoming incapable of talking about anything but herself. I had noticed that quality in other woke friends, and in many I could recall they were not previously like that, but this was the first adult person to transition slowly before my eyes, so I got out my clipboard and took notes.

  She became somewhat manic, high-anxiety, more worrisome, and less healthy-seeming. Along with this came casual smug political remarks in polite conversation. It goes without saying there were constant, needy Facebook posts about woke politics, or herself, or the ideal combination: posts about herself woke-crusading. Now none of this was part of her personality previously, at all, despite woke politics being with us many years now. It began for her with a new circle of peers that she obviously wished to impress and is culminating currently in her friends and family seriously considering an intervention of psychological help, not because of the constant virtue-signaling, but for the other more self-destructive personality changes.

  It reminds me of the science of psychopathy. I was very interested to learn in my youth, not just that psychopaths essentially have little or no emotional feeling, and certainly no empathy, but that they exist among us in high numbers. They don’t all become serial killers, but there are people you know who are psychopaths that you would never have guessed because they learn to mimic human behavior. Severe trauma in youth can appear to create psychopathy, so it can be an environmental condition.

  I’m not saying woke people are psychos (though they both share the narcissism), I am saying psychological conditions can be created, and that the modern world, with its rampant materialist consumerism, dogmatic atheism and self-hating education system, is perhaps manufacturing a new human psyche, one both frail and fraught and in its own perverse way, merciless.

  Watch as the virus spreads, watch and study and hope you have immunity.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 20:20

• Visualizing What's Made From A Barrel Of Oil
  Visualizing What’s Made From A Barrel Of Oil

  From the gasoline in our cars to the plastic in countless everyday items, crude oil is an essential raw material that shows up everywhere in our lives.

  With around 18 million barrels of crude oil consumed every day just in America, Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte notes that this commodity powers transport, utilities, and is a vital ingredient in many of the things we use on a daily basis.

  This graphic visualizes how much crude oil is refined into various finished products, using a barrel of oil to represent the proportional breakdown.

  

  Barrel of Oil to Functional Fuel and More

  Crude oil is primarily refined into various types of fuels to power transport and vital utilities. More than 85% of crude oil is refined into fuels like gasoline, diesel, and hydrocarbon gas liquids (HGLs) like propane and butane.

  Along with being fuels for transportation, heating, and cooking, HGLs are used as feedstock for the production of chemicals, plastics, and synthetic rubber, and as additives for motor gasoline production.

  

  Source: Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers

  Crude oil not only powers our vehicles, but it also helps pave the roads we drive on. About 4% of refined crude oil becomes asphalt, which is used to make concrete and different kinds of sealing and insulation products.

  Although transportation and utility fuels dominate a large proportion of refined products, essential everyday materials like wax and plastic are also dependent on crude oil. With about 10% of refined products used to make plastics, cosmetics, and textiles, a barrel of crude oil can produce a variety of unexpected everyday products.

  Personal care products like cosmetics and shampoo are made using petroleum products, as are medical supplies like IV bags and pharmaceuticals. Modern life would look very different without crude oil.

  The Process of Refining Crude Oil

  You might have noticed that while a barrel of oil contains 42 gallons, it ends up producing 45 gallons of refined products. This is because the majority of refined products have a lower density than crude oil, resulting in an increase in volume that is called processing gain.

  Along with this, there are other inputs aside from crude oil that are used in the refining process. While crude oil is the primary input, fuel ethanol, hydrocarbon gas liquids, and other blending liquids are also used.

  

  Source: EIA

  The process of refining a 30,000-barrel batch of crude oil typically takes between 12-24 hours, with refineries operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Although the proportions of individual refined products can vary depending on market demand and other factors, the majority of crude oil will continue to become fuel for the world’s transport and utilities.

  The Difficulty of Cutting Down on Crude Oil

  From the burning of heavy fuels that tarnish icebergs found in Arctic waters to the mounds of plastic made with petrochemicals that end up in our rivers, each barrel of oil and its refined products impact our environment in many different ways.

  But even as the world works to reduce its consumption of fossil fuels in order to reach climate goals, a world without crude oil seems unfathomable.

  Skyrocketing sales of EVs still haven’t managed to curb petroleum consumption in places like Norway, California, and China, and the steady reopening of travel and the economy will only result in increased petroleum consumption.

  Completely replacing the multi-faceted “black gold” that’s in a barrel of oil isn’t possible right now, but as electrification continues and we find alternatives to petrochemical materials, humanity might at least manage to reduce its dependence on burning fossil fuels.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 20:00

• Almost Half Of Americans Disapprove Of Biden Vaccine Mandates, New Poll Finds
  Almost Half Of Americans Disapprove Of Biden Vaccine Mandates, New Poll Finds

  Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

  A Quinnipiac poll has found that almost half of Americans (48%) believe that Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates “go too far,” and that a slight majority are in opposition to it.

  

  Quinnipiac noted that a “slight majority of Americans (51 – 48 percent) disapprove of President Biden’s plan to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for millions of Americans in the public and private sectors. Republicans disapprove 84 – 13 percent, independents disapprove 56 – 44 percent, and Democrats approve 89 – 10 percent.”

  The survey found that 10 percent think the mandate does not go far enough, while 39 percent think it’s about right.

  Obviously, however, this means that around half of Americans are fully on board with the mandates.

  As we noted earlier this week, a OnePoll survey found that vaccinated Americans are far more likely to permanently sever relationships with friends over their opinion on the COVID-19 jab than those who haven’t been vaccinated.

  America now faces that reckoning with Biden’s plan to impose federal vaccine mandates on every company that employs over 100 people.

  As we previously reported, Police and firefighters are among the groups who are resisting, bringing lawsuits against the mandates.

  There has also been significant resistance among military service members, who will be mandated to take the shots.

  Republican attorneys general from 24 states, almost half the country, have threatened lawsuits against Biden if the mandate takes effect.

  Earlier this week, Joe Biden’s Commerce Secretary claimed that “nobody is being forced” to get vaccinated, despite last week’s announcement that millions of Americans will be mandated to take the shot in order to go to work.

  “We are not being forced,” Raimondo again claimed, stating “You can work from home, get tested on a weekly basis,” and adding “I think this is smart public policy and great leadership by the president.”

  *  *  *

  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. We need you to sign up for our free newsletter here. Support our sponsor – Turbo Force – a supercharged boost of clean energy without the comedown. Also, we urgently need your financial support here.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 19:40

• China's War Against Crypto Is Officially Ramping Up (Again)
  China’s War Against Crypto Is Officially Ramping Up (Again)

  Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: China’s war against crypto is officially ramping up.

  The state has intensified its aggressive pursuit of crypto miners, some of whom have tried to “disguise themselves as data researchers and storage facilities to stay in business” according to a Bloomberg report.

  In several Chinese provinces, inspections of companies have “intensified”, with an eye toward targeting illegal mining at places like colleges, research instiutions and data centers, according to the report. 

  

  One reason China is taking such drastic steps is that there is concern over the country’s power supplies heading into the upcoming winter.

  Crypto mining has already slowed in China, which was formerly the dominant mining country in the world. The country had a 46% share of the global hash rate as recently as April, Bloomberg notes. 

  But as the country cracked down on crypto earlier this year, so did its global hash rate. Some miners wound up leaving the country while others took their chances in staying and trying to skirt the government’s regulation.

  One miner in China told Bloomberg that his operations “remain intact” because he “regularly switches to new facilities to house his equipment” which is made up of “no more than 100 machines at one location”. 

  

  Hebei province has asked companies for a self-compliance check to ensure they are not mining by September 30. 

  China has said that crypto mining would “seriously affect economic and social development and directly threaten national security.” The statement says it would “disrupt” financial order.

  Beginning in October, the government plans on implementing tools to monitor and follow computing activities to ensure that mining isn’t taking place.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 19:20

• World Economic Forum Tells US Colleges To "Re-Educate The Racists Among Us"
  World Economic Forum Tells US Colleges To “Re-Educate The Racists Among Us”

  Authored by Ben Zeisloft via CampusReform.org,

  The World Economic Forum published an article last week arguing that colleges “re-educate the racists among us” to end “racism on university campuses.”

  “Fighting racism demands confrontation at all levels on college campuses by uprooting racist institutional designs inherent in campus-wide admissions systems, recruitment, scholarships, cultures, and histories,” researchers from KAIST-Korea Policy Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution wrote.

  The World Economic Forum is an organization that advocates for cooperation among the world’s largest governments and corporations. It is also known for its “The Great Reset” series, a provocation to redesign the global economy following COVID-19 and the lockdown-induced global recession.

  

  The article calls for using “data-driven methods” to measure racial “climates,” as well as “promoting anti-racist culture and policies” through projects such as Centers for Racial Justice.

  Additionally, universities must “support affected minorities at various levels,” which — includes “educating people to eradicate their hate” through mandatory diversity training, according to the researchers.

  Aiming to solve underrepresentation among faculty and the student body, the researchers also propose a “diversity barometer” that can “track such progress and hold university leadership accountable” through periodical reviews.

  The World Economic Forum is not the first prominent international organization to weigh in on alleged systemic racism in the United States.

  Earlier this year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken invited the United Nations to examine American police brutality.

  “As the President has repeatedly made clear, great nations such as ours do not hide from our shortcomings; they acknowledge them openly and strive to improve with transparency,” Blinken wrote after the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report about global police brutality against people of African descent.

  Campus Reform reached out to the World Economic Forum for comment; this article will be updated accordingly.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 19:00

• Obama Publicly Endorses Justin Trudeau Ahead Of Canada's Upcoming Election
  Obama Publicly Endorses Justin Trudeau Ahead Of Canada’s Upcoming Election

  For all the hustle and bustle about interfering in foreign elections we have heard over the last 5 years, no one seemed to notice or care that Former President Barack Obama publicly endorsed Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ahead of the country’s upcoming election.

  Calling Trudeau his “friend”, Obama said that the Prime Minister has been an effective leader and strong voice for democratic values, and I’m proud of the work we did together.”

  Wishing my friend @JustinTrudeau the best in Canada’s upcoming election. Justin has been an effective leader and strong voice for democratic values, and I’m proud of the work we did together.

  — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) September 16, 2021

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

  Obama wished him the “best in Canada’s upcoming election”.

  It marks the second time that Obama has endorsed Trudeau: he also made a similar endorsement in 2019. 

  “I was proud to work with Justin Trudeau as President,” Obama said in 2019. “He’s a hard-working, effective leader who takes on big issues like climate change. The world needs his progressive leadership now, and I hope our neighbors to the north support him for another term.”

  

  Obama also publicly endorsed President of France Emmanuel Macron during his campaign against Marine Le Pen.

  Obama said in 2017: “I’m not planning on getting involved in too many elections now that I don’t have to run for office again.”

  

  Canada’s election is less than a week away.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 18:40

• Doug Casey On The Next "Crisis" The Global Elite Have 'Planned'
  Doug Casey On The Next “Crisis” The Global Elite Have ‘Planned’

  Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

  International Man: Every year, the international ruling class—the most influential world leaders, CEOs of big corporations, top academics, and even celebrities—come together at Davos. They discuss topics that interest them and prescribe their preferred policies.

  What’s your take on the Davos crowd and what they are doing?

  

  Doug Casey: The Davos crowd has become the most visible element of the ruling class. Although, they overlap with lots of other groups who are pushing the same agenda—Bilderberg, CFR, and Bohemian Grove among them.

  A couple of years ago, I wrote an article after I attended the Concordia, which is very similar, with exactly the same people. I don’t plan on going back. It was disturbing and depressing listening to soulless bigshots natter about the best way to rule the plebs.

  These people are all part of what you might call the “World Deep State.” They all know each other. They go to the same conferences, and more often than not, they’ve attended the same universities, belong to the same social clubs, and have kids in the same schools.

  But most importantly, they share the same worldview. They live in their own little silo, where the rest of 7.9 billion people in the world are outsiders. So it’s only natural that people in such a relatively close-knit—albeit informal—group conspire.

  Adam Smith famously observed that whenever two men from the same occupation get together, they always conspire against the interests of the public. It’s a perfectly normal and natural thing.

  But these people aren’t just merchants contriving to make a few extra shekels. These people are the top dogs in all of the world’s governments, NGOs, corporations, universities, and media organizations. They have contempt for the little people, whom they treat as either useful idiots or useless mouths. They’re interested in power more than anything else.

  As they’ve recently shown in this COVID exercise, they pretty much control the world. They’re very dangerous; I despise them.

  International Man: In 2019, well before the first case of COVID was reported, the World Economic Forum (WEF), which hosts the annual Davos conferences, held an event to discuss the possibility of a worldwide pandemic.

  In fact, they ran a simulation exercise for how the scenario could play out and how governments, large corporations, and the media should handle the situation.

  What do you make of this? Was it a coincidence?

  Doug Casey: These people are quite bold. They believe—correctly—that 90% of the public will basically eat whatever they’re fed and accept whatever they’re told.

  I have no doubt that these people have an informal understanding with each other as to how the world ought to reset to their benefit. It’s not a formal conspiracy, per se, just a natural consequence of what inevitably happens when people of the same class, worldview, and philosophy are in a position of power.

  The problem is that worldwide conflagrations over the last century have gotten much more serious each time around. World War 1 was unbelievably nasty. World War 2 was even nastier. We dodged the bullet of a global thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. But that doesn’t mean that World War 3 isn’t going to occur. It’ll just be different than it would have been 40 or 50 years ago.

  So, based on the trend in motion, if World War 1 killed 20 million people and World War 2 killed 60 or 80 million people, anything could happen in whatever turns out to be World War 3. Maybe 500 million or a billion. Think big, like the people who put together the Deagel report.

  As I’ve said before, this war will have little to do with obsolescent junk like Abrams tanks, F-35s, and Ford-class carriers. Those toys serve little purpose beyond bankrupting the US while enriching the Deep State. This will be primarily a cyber and biological war.

  I’m just surprised that more people aren’t watching and referring to the movie V for Vendetta, which also revolves around a virus called the St. Mary’s virus. The world desperately needs a real V.

  There are really a lot of parallels today. I wonder if the “little people” know that the elite have been planning or playing with the idea of a virus for years. Probably not—it’s hard to imagine anyone could be as evil as the Nazis, Soviets, or Chicoms because that was ancient history and human nature has obviously changed. A great virus to smite humanity has been the subject of lots of sci-fi novels and movies over the years. And now, as usual, life is imitating art.

  Let’s fantasize for a moment. Perhaps the elite, who mostly masquerade as philanthropists, will rationalize their plan as a way to cleanse the gene pool, reducing the population by 80 or 90%. I have no doubt these people could justify a viral plague as a way to save Gaia from a human plague. Perhaps the vaccine will actually be the real vector, killing some after a time and sterilizing the rest. Perhaps it will serve as a catalyst for the vaccinated, the obedient 80%, to put the independent unvaccinated 20% in camps. Perhaps the current virus is just the first gambit, and after the Delta and Mu strains a genuinely serious Zeta variant will present itself.

  Anything is possible. We’re living in a science-fiction world at this point.

  Even if things just go along more or less as they are, there are lots of advantages to the COVID-19 virus from their point of view. The collapse of the economy, the Greater Depression, won’t be blamed on central banking, inflation, and the State. They’ll be sold as heroes in the fight against the virus. The depression will be blamed on COVID—a Deus ex machina device—as opposed to the real causes. It’s really quite perverse.

  International Man: Earlier this year, the WEF started making a lot of noise about cyberattacks disrupting global supply chains.

  Klaus Schwab, the WEF founder, has been calling for the internet to be vaccinated preemptively—presumably meaning more controls, regulations, and less freedom and privacy.

  Are they foreshadowing the next real or manufactured crisis? How could it play out?

  Doug Casey: There’s no question in my mind at this point that the US, and in fact many countries, are turning into genuine police states. It’s happening right before our eyes with Australia—the entire country is locked down. People, masked at all times, of course, can’t go more than a couple of miles from their homes without suffering draconian penalties. No one can enter Australia, and—this is really shocking—no one can leave. And it’s not even questioned. If it can happen in Australia, New Zealand, and in parts of Canada, it can happen anywhere.

  Apparently, it’s starting to happen here in the US with Biden having laid down not-so-subtly veiled threats against people that don’t get vaccinated. It was ominous to hear the senile old scumbag say that he, and the righteous vaccinated, were starting to “lose patience” with Americans who think they control their own bodies.

  I have no plans to get vaccinated. At best, the vaccine is unproven—and possibly, we won’t know how risky it is for several years. Which is why in the past, radical new therapies have always had to be tested for years. But that hasn’t happened in this case.

  But the vaccine psychosis is just one aspect of this war. As much as the elite want to sell the January 6th event in Washington, DC as the equivalent of the Reichstag fire, I don’t think the average American buys it. Therefore, perhaps something real or imagined will transpire to allow them to designate a whole class of American citizens as domestic terrorists.

  We now have genuinely crazy people in control of the apparatus of the state. They’re exactly the same psychological and philosophical profile as the Bolsheviks or the Jacobins. They’re not going to let go of power voluntarily. Anything is possible at this point; we’re still in the early days.

  As we enter the trailing edge of the Greater Depression, there’s actually something much more serious to consider in looking at the world situation. Things are similar to 1914 or 1939. Who knows exactly what happens next?

  International Man: The COVID hysteria worked out exceptionally well for power-hungry politicians around the world. The public has now accepted an unprecedented level of government control over their everyday lives.

  If there is a so-called “cyber pandemic” as the elites are hinting at, what would the consequences be for personal freedom?

  Doug Casey: As I said earlier, World War 3 won’t be about nuclear weapons or conventional armies, but biology and computers. The cyber war aspect will be huge because the entire world now runs on computers. In fact, the world is starting to run on artificial intelligence. I don’t doubt that robotics will come into its own soon.

  As far as a cyber pandemic and closing down the Internet is concerned, I’d say that’s a near certainty. They definitely want to do that, because the fact of the matter is that you’re only as alive as you can communicate with others.

  If you can’t get your thoughts or news of what’s going on out to other people, you might as well be sealed in a tomb. It makes sense that people who want to control other people want to cut down on popular means of communication. They’ll find excuses to keep what they consider to be unsound views off the internet. It’s already happened in regard to the so-called pandemic. Contrary views, no matter how well-reasoned and factual, even from renowned sources, are quashed. Dissent, or even discussion, isn’t tolerated. You’ll find that spread to all other areas of intellectual and political discourse.

  We already can’t travel easily; domestic flights are inconvenient, and international flights are down about 85%. Vaccine passports are on the way. In many places, we can’t gather, even in small groups. And of course, the next big thing—the big thing—is a heavily controlled internet.

  At that point, all you’ll have is what you’re told officially and what you can see in your own little local area. These people are all about quashing communication. It’s a great formula, critical, really, for control. They don’t want people organizing to challenge them.

  In Biden’s recent speech, he several times made out the unvaxxed as a potential enemy—a domestic danger.

  It’s no coincidence that the people who don’t want to take the jab correlate strongly with people with conventional right-wing views, Trump voters, and cultural conservatives. The battle lines are drawn. It’s really turned into a class and ideological war.

  They’re playing the health card with this COVID nonsense. They’re playing the race card and domestic terror card. They’re succeeding in delegitimizing American values and history, as well as masculinity in general and white males in particular. Next will be a reemphasis on the Global Warming scam. You plebs won’t be allowed to do anything, and most will go along with it because they’ve been indoctrinated over several generations to believe it’s right. The elite are doing everything in their power to ramp up fear. Fear for your health, fear of domestic terror, fear of the non-compliant, and fear of the climate destroying the planet.

  As I discussed previously, fear is the most powerful tool that governments have to control the people. That’s what governments are all about. They thrive on fear. Fear is the health of the State.

  International Man: What can the average person do to protect themselves from these disturbing trends?

  Doug Casey: In Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, he talks about how, when they’re all together in the Gulag under the worst possible conditions, they said, “If we had only known, when they came to round us up as individuals… if we’d only grabbed a frying pan, or a pipe, or a rock and attacked these criminals…” But they were afraid. And they didn’t think that things could possibly be as bad as they turned out to be.

  It’s understandable that they were hesitant to attack the state apparatchiks when going off to the Gulag, just as the Jews rarely attacked the Gestapo when they were rounding them up to take them off to camps.

  You naturally might think, “These people can’t be that serious. These people can’t be that bad….” And you’d be wrong.

  It takes a lot of physical courage to even think about these things.

  Why didn’t any of the nomenklatura around Stalin simply kill him? They all knew the odds were good he was going to kill them eventually. You’d think that any of the rats around him would have cut his throat.

  But everybody’s afraid to take physical action because we tend to be optimists. We tend to hope for the best, as we do right now. We hope that this will blow over, and maybe it will. But it boils down to what will you do, maybe five minutes from now, when you’re confronted one-on-one with an apparatchik from the State who gives you an order.

  What will you do?

  It’s too dangerous to take physical action against the guy because it may bring down the whole weight of the State organization on you.

  So how do you resist? Well, unless you want to be a hero, the only thing I can think of is to have enough assets to insulate yourself from the bad guys or to move yourself physically to a different location.

  We’re headed into a very rough patch in US history, especially for the next three or four years.

  *  *  *

  In the months and years ahead the financial, economic, and social conditions will be scary and unpleasant. And it will be very tough to navigate for most people. That’s precisely why NY Times bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released this urgent report on how you to survive and thrive what comes next. Click here to download the free PDF now.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 18:20

• Putin: US Exit From Afghanistan More Like "A Downright Escape" – Others Left Cleaning Up Mess
  Putin: US Exit From Afghanistan More Like “A Downright Escape” – Others Left Cleaning Up Mess

  Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday weighed in on America’s Afghan withdraw and evacuation fiasco which involved the deaths of 13 US troops and well over 60 Afghan civilians. He issued unusually blunt words while addressing a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which includes eight countries, foremost among them China and India.

  Putin said the US exit looked much more like an “escape” than any kind of planned and coordinated maneuver, despite months in preparation. He described the August events as a “hasty withdrawal – or more like a downright escape – by US and NATO troops from the country.”

  

  “The urgent task facing our organization is to pursue a single and coordinated policy based on the assessment of serious risks related to the mounting tensions in Afghanistan following the hasty withdrawal – or more like a downright escape – by US and NATO troops from the country,” Putin said.

  The scathing and sarcastic words of criticism come as the Eurasian allies discussed the deteriorating security situation at the borders of SCO members Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The latter two countries Russia has been cooperating with militarily to ensure secured borders after both civilians and Afghan national forces abandoning their posts fled toward Tajikistan in particular. Additionally there were widespread reports that dozens of US-trained pilots flew their aircraft into Uzbekistan – and the US will reportedly given them asylum. 

  Putin also said in the same statements that the US and NATO can’t shirk responsibility in providing reconstruction aid. He essentially said the West broke Afghanistan, and now must step up in terms of assisting in reconstruction (which would mean sending aid to the Taliban, ironically enough).

  “The reconstruction of #Afghanistan should be funded by #US and other #NATO countries, they bare direct responsibilities for the horrible situation in the country after the conclusion of a long military occupation” – President #Putin pic.twitter.com/HFWHwq8a2j

  — The Eurasianist 🧱 (@Russ_Warrior) September 17, 2021

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

  Putin’s Friday words weren’t the first such criticisms of US and Western action in central Asia. Earlier this month while addressing BRICS leaders he issued the following: 

  I have said many times that the current crisis in Afghanistan is a direct consequence of irresponsible attempts to impose alien values from outside and the desire to build so-called democratic structures by political engineering, which takes into account neither historical nor national characteristics of other nations.

  He had further charged the Americans with “ignoring the traditions that other countries live by” – in continuation of his attacks on Washington efforts at nation-building abroad.

  “The authors of these experiments then hastily retreat, leaving their subjects to fend for themselves as well. The whole international community has to deal with the consequences,” he had said before the earlier BRICS representatives. 

  Both Russia and China have been capitalizing off the botched US retreat of late, both in official statements and in state media headlines. At the same time China in particular is said to be poised to be Taliban-controlled Afghanistan’s number one investor, as Xi eyes a huge expansions of his Belt and Road Initiative projects inside the country. Taliban leaders’ comments have appeared openly welcoming of this possibility.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 18:00

• What They Really Mean When They Say "Do The Right Thing"
  What They Really Mean When They Say “Do The Right Thing”

  Authored by Casey Carlisle via The Mises Institute,

  As a senior in high school, I ran for class president with “Do the right thing” as my campaign slogan.

  Though I realized years ago how utterly pretentious that message is, I’m often reminded that it’s good politics, which proves the point that politics is poison.

  To vote for someone else is to “do the wrong thing,” and you don’t want to be a bad person, do you? It’s a sinister trick that comes in many phrases—all of which are highly effective in duping the majority—yet democracy is still deified. Just as “the science” insults the scientific method, “the right thing” has the capacity to reduce peaceful interactions. How can “the right thing” be peaceful if it isn’t consensual? If the “right” thing is imposed, the thing is wrong.

  Why would “the right thing” require blind obedience? If the thing were right, dissenters wouldn’t be punished. Accepting that I was arrogant to tell my senior class what is or isn’t right, imagine the hubris required to dictate morality to a third of a billion Americans.

  The US president recently chastised certain governors who “aren’t willing to do the right thing to beat this pandemic,” but why does the Biden regime presume to know what’s right for, say, Texans? First of all, pandemics are “beaten” only when they become endemic. Yes, involuntary (read: “political”) action can hasten that process, but at what cost? Those who answer that question with “at any cost” are the same people who would be mortified if vaccines were banned. These people see the horrors of depriving choice only when the choice is their own, illustrating why politics brings out the worst in people. Their childish and violent aspirations, if acted upon, are punishable by imprisonment, but through politics, “the right thing” is legal and enforced. Democracy tends to legalize immorality, which is bolstered by the inability to discuss tradeoffs—the best indicator of mass hysteria.

  When I “served” in Afghanistan, my boss would occasionally invite the religious to pray with him prior to executing a mission. He would ask God to help his men and to hinder the enemy—whom he deemed “pure evil”—without ever appearing to think that the Taliban were likely saying the same prayer and calling us evil. It’s as if both sides were begging God to do the right thing, and over a decade later, the absurdity still bemuses me. Who can argue that twenty years of imposing democracy on a country that doesn’t want it was the right thing to do, especially after twenty years’ worth of resources were nullified in a week? War crimes or crimes against humanity began with those committing them first rationalizing them. Though the murderers might not have deemed their actions “right,” they acted anyway, because they were “just following orders.” But what of those issuing the orders, the sociopaths who believe they can define “the greater good” without the knowledge of the greater population? History repeats itself, and that too many have dismissed that fact as “pessimistic” is one of the reasons why we can’t wake from this dystopian nightmare. Is it not reasonable to expect something catastrophic to unfold when the demagogue defines the right thing?

  I argued in April and November of last year that top-down edicts render useless the levels of government between the rulers and the individual. Due to proximity alone, the governor can better “serve” the individual than can the president, the county commissioner than can the governor, and the mayor than can the commissioner. Has the Biden regime forgotten that this country was founded by people who didn’t take kindly to distant rulers? American defiance is a thing of the past, but isn’t it in the parasites’ best interest to keep it there? Consenting individuals can best agree on the right thing, and the politicians lording over them are supposed to prohibit others from interfering; however, as the ongoing (and worsening) mass psychosis makes clear, each level of government only partitions, persecutes, and parasitizes individuals. It’s as if the Biden regime and every governor and bureaucrat suffering from the same delusions are doing all they can to foment violence. In October of 2020, one political party thought that the right thing to do was to refuse the then upcoming vaccine, but today, that same political party openly and sometimes joyously declare their disdain for anyone who decides what’s right for themselves so long as “right” counters the prevailing ideology. If that won’t convince you that politics is poison, I don’t know what will.

  Here’s what doing the right thing actually entails: do whatever makes you feel comfortable so long as you aren’t imposing your will (or cowardice) on others. And for fans of brevity, I’ve heard that “mind your own business” is tried and true. Every American who wants to be vaccinated has the opportunity to be. The vaccinated have no moral authority to protect the unvaccinated from themselves. Every parent who wishes to abuse their child by forcing them to wear a mask has that right, but no one will force me to muzzle my three-year-old. If masks are as effective as the staunch covidians claim, why does the sight of an uncovered smile enrage the masked? That it does is the problem of those who obsequiously muzzle themselves, not of anyone else. Labeling the unmasked and unvaccinated “selfish” is nothing but pure projection. Have you noticed that those who might as well have “inclusion” tattooed on their foreheads are the same people who wish to exclude anyone who doesn’t buy into the hype?

  “Conform to the insanity or else!”

  After all, “the right thing” is “for your own good.”

  

  That’s not compassion; that’s totalitarianism. Bullies don’t grow tired of bullying; they stop bullying only when shown that ceasing their antisocial behavior is in their best interest. It’ll get uncomfortable, but if you hope to ever pursue what you deem right, it’s well past time to stand up to the vicious mob.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 17:40

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• Fire At UK-France Subsea Power Cable Could Trigger Winter Blackouts
  Fire At UK-France Subsea Power Cable Could Trigger Winter Blackouts

  A fire in a subsea cable has dramatically reduced power imports from France until March, U.K.’s National Grid Plc said, deepening the energy crisis that threatens winter blackouts for millions. 

  

  The timing couldn’t be worse. Before the fire, the U.K. was already experiencing a five-year low in spare winter capacity. Compound this with gas shortages and the lack of renewable energy sources, sending power prices on a record-breaking run. The country may experience grid chaos in the coming months. 

  

  “If we don’t start to remedy the situation, we are going to be facing blackouts this winter,” Catherine Newman, chief executive officer of Limejump Ltd., a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, told Bloomberg on Thursday. “If things don’t start to reverse soon, we will see the industry getting turned off across the board.”

  “If anything goes wrong, we might not have anything left in the back pocket,” said Tom Edwards, a consultant at Cornwall Insight Ltd., an adviser to the government and utilities. “If a nuke trips offline or something else big, that could cause issues because we might not have anything to replace it.”

  Britain receives power via six subsea cables, and two of them are connected to France’s power grids of more than 56 nuclear power plants. 

  

  The cable’s total capacity will be shut off until March 2022. The shortage is expected to exacerbate power price volatility when peak demand is seen in the winter months. 

  “The outage is going to lift the potential for price volatility as long as its offline,” said Glenn Rickson, head of power analysis at S&P Global Platts. 

  The compounding energy crunch is fueling concerns about inflation when the economy is still recovering from the pandemic. 

  The subsea cable interruption doesn’t mean blackouts will be seen in the immediate future. Still, as power demand increases as temperatures turn cooler, demand will spike and strain the grid. 

  

  The energy crunch has already forced two fertilizer plants in the country to shutter operations on Wednesday. C.F. Industries Holdings Inc halted its Billingham and Ince manufacturing facilities “due to high natural gas prices.

  The broader issue is that economic impacts due to an unstable power grid could hinder economic development this winter. 

  It’s only a matter of time before U.K. politicians take action to shield consumers from high energy prices. 

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 02:45

• The Major Beneficiary Of The Afghanistan Crisis
  The Major Beneficiary Of The Afghanistan Crisis

  Via Global Risk Insights,

  Assertive Foreign Policy proves Costly 

  It is clear that the post-Cold War order is shifting. The costly wars of Afghanistan and Iraq are calling into question the pre-eminence of the United States in international security affairs. Russia shows no fear to act outside its borders and China is in a good position to become the world’s largest economy. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, eyes an opportunity to cement his grip on power by transforming Turkey into a key regional player in the emerging multipolar system.

  

  The instability following the Arab Spring in 2011 provided Erdogan with a regional environment where he could tap into Turkish nationalist sentiments and shore up his domestic political standing. Following his intervention in northeastern Syria, Erdogan successfully negotiated an agreement with Russia on removing Kurdish fighters along the southern Turkish border. Similarly, in Libya, Ankara became a key mediator by facilitating a long-term peace settlement with Moscow. Turning to the issue of Cypriot energy resources, the Turkish backing of the UN-sanctioned Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli placed Ankara in a strong position to determine maritime boundary demarcation.

  However, while securing geopolitical gains, Turkey’s assertive maneuvers have put it at risk of isolation. A regional group led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has also been competing for influence since the 2011 uprisings. With Turkey breaking off diplomatic relations with Egypt after Abdel Fattah el-Sisi removed Mohammed Morsi in 2013, Ankara and the Saudi-Emirati-led bloc have been locked in a rivalry. Tensions have since escalated following Turkey’s backing of Qatar in the Gulf dispute and its intervention in Libya. As for the West, Turkish involvement in the conflict in Syria led to a deterioration in relations with the US while the issue over Cyprus resulted in EU sanctions.

  Afghanistan Crisis offers a New Strategic Opportunity for Erdogan

  Despite the risk of isolation causing problems for Erdogan, the crisis in Afghanistan adds a new regional dynamic where Ankara may acquire leverage.

  The decision to maintain Turkey’s diplomatic presence in Afghanistan enables Erdogan to address US security concerns. Following the NATO summit this year, the respective Turkish and US defense ministries held positive talks on securing Hamid Karzai International Airport following the US withdrawal. Erdogan’s initiative to discuss with the Taliban the future security of the airport represents a significant step towards mending Turkish-US relations. In holding such talks, Turkey is in a position to facilitate the objective of the Biden administration to ensure that the supply of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan remains.

  Turkey’s continued commitment in Afghanistan also allows Ankara the chance to revive the important role it plays with the European Union. Ankara has been a key partner for Brussels in the management of irregular migration into Europe. Despite recent tensions, the risk of a refugee influx as a result of the Afghan crisis means that Brussels is under pressure to revisit its 2016 agreement on migration with Ankara. Taking full advantage of this, Erdogan warned the EU in a televised address that his country has ‘no duty, responsibility, or obligation to be Europe’s refugee house.’

  In the Middle East, Iran’s influence puts Ankara in a good position to reduce tensions. Tehran made moves to step up its presence in Afghanistan prior to the NATO withdrawal in August. This comes amid the Gulf states’ efforts to alleviate tensions with the Islamic Republic. The Gulf Cooperation Council lifted the blockade on Qatar, which served to heal the rift in relations as a result of the UAE-Israel agreement. Since the Biden administration plans to restore the Iran nuclear deal, Saudi Arabia hopes that this soft stance will fuel positive relations with Washington. Meanwhile, Riyadh may have to look to Turkey to counter Iran in Afghanistan.  

  Can Turkey Maintain Regional Influence without Causing Tensions? 

  Turkey is facing the risk of isolation. Relations between Ankara and the regional bloc under Saudi Arabia and the UAE have struggled to advance positively since the Arab Spring. Although Erdogan’s assertive foreign policy in Libya and in Syria shored up his domestic political standing, it has alienated Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Turkish unilateralism abroad has also led to a rift in its relationships with Washington and Brussels.

  Nonetheless, the crisis in Afghanistan has forced a geopolitical recalculation that heightens Turkey’s strategic regional importance. The continuation of a Turkish diplomatic presence in Afghanistan means that it would be in EU and US interests to work with Ankara to stabilize the region. Despite the purchase of an S-400 missile system from Russia remaining a source of tension in US-Turkey relations, Washington may welcome Turkey’s stabilizing role in Afghanistan. Moreover, Turkish coordination of efforts on the crisis with Pakistan means that Ankara plays a key role in responding to Chinese influence in Central Asia. The EU, for its part, views the involvement of third countries, primarily Turkey, as key to regional security.

  As for the Gulf states, the challenge Iran poses in Afghanistan means that Turkey is well-placed to improve its relationship with Saudi Arabia. Despite the risk of further isolation as a result of Turkish engagement with the Taliban, the current political environment in the region favors a reset. The end to the blockade on Qatar removes a key barrier to rebuilding Turkish-Saudi relations. Riyadh’s ally, Egypt, has also expressed a willingness to reach a compromise with Turkey over gas quotas in the Eastern Mediterranean. Lastly, in the summer, the UAE made moves to re-engage with Turkey after its economy took a hit as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

  The question is whether Erdogan can build on these efforts to normalize relations with the West and the Gulf. With the situation in Afghanistan deteriorating, the Turkish president is in a strong position to do so.

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 09/17/2021 – 02:00

• The New Federalist Party: Biden Move Forward With The Greatest Federalization Push Since Adams
  The New Federalist Party: Biden Move Forward With The Greatest Federalization Push Since Adams

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  President Joe Biden has long pledged to “build back better” but in the last few months it has become clear that his transformative plans go beyond mere infrastructure and extend to our very structure of government.

  

  From abortions to elections to rents, Biden is seeking to federalize huge areas to displace state law.

  Not since John Adams and his Federalist Party has the country faced such a fundamental challenge to our system of federalism.

  Some of the claims made by Biden recently would make even Adams blush.

  What is most striking about these claims is that Biden and his aides have indicated that they know they are operating outside of constitutional limits.

  Take the recent controversy over the vaccine mandate. Biden and aides like chief of staff Ronald Klain claimed before the inauguration that he would impose national mandates in the pandemic, only to be told that a president lacks such authority over the states. Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other Democratic leaders then denied that they would impose such mandates, often acknowledging the constitutional limits placed on presidents.

  Then came last week, when Biden suddenly announced that he would impose a national vaccine mandate through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Klain admitted that the OSHA rule was a mere “workaround” of the constitutional limit imposed on the federal government. White House press secretary Jen Psaki preferred to call it a “pathway” after admitting “we do not have the power to inform each American you need to be vaccinated.” 

  Whether a “workaround” or a “pathway,” the move would allow the federal government to dictate public health measures in every state – a claim that will face major federalism challenges in court.

  Under this interpretation, OSHA could impose a federal mandate for any measure that impacts workers, including public health measures not directly linked to a given workplace or job. That may be more of a sticker shock for some on the federal bench, including some justices.

  The move came on the same day Attorney General Merrick Garland announced an equally sweeping claim of federal jurisdiction over abortion rights in challenging the Texas law.

  Garland announced that the federal government would appear in court not as an amicus (or friend of the court), as has been its practice in past cases. Instead, it will sue directly as a party in interest because the law is viewed as countermanding a constitutional right. Indeed, Garland claimed such authority in defense of any constitutional right that could be abridged by any state law.

  In his remarks, Garland indicated that the government would claim federal preemption in whole or in part over the abortion area. That is another sweeping claim that could make many judges uneasy. The Supreme Court has always recognized state authority in this area. The question is where to draw the line. The filing will add a new basis for pro-life challenges based on federalization.

  The filing against the Texas law followed a call from Biden for a “whole of government response” that was obviously directed at the Justice Department. It is not the first pressure exerted by the White House on agencies for such legal claims.

  The Democratic Party has now emerged as the new Federalist Party and Biden is seeking to outdo John Adams in supplanting state authority.

  Previously, Biden called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to impose a nationwide moratorium on the eviction of renters. Biden admitted that his White House counsel and their preferred legal experts told him that the move was likely unconstitutional. Despite that overwhelming opinion, he listened to Professor Laurence Tribe at the urging of Pelosi. Despite the pledge to return to a respect for the “rule of law,” Biden openly suggested that they could use the litigation to get as much money out of the door as possible before being barred by the courts. They lost in court, as many of us predicted, but Biden wanted this small agency to effectively dictate rental payments across the country.

  These moves follow new evidence that the Biden administration had concluded that a farm debt law was unconstitutional before putting it into the pandemic relief bill.

  There has been little media attention to the impressive litany of losses of the Biden administration in court or the open pressure by the White House on these agencies. The media covered such pressure extensively during the Trump administration and legal experts objected that the Trump White House was attacking the independence of the Justice Department and other agencies.

  In these measures, Biden is demanding dubious federal actions that are being promptly taken by his agency heads with poor outcomes for the executive branch.

  The move on abortion is particularly reckless.

  The Texas law is already being challenged so there is no need for a federal action. However, the White House wanted such a filing for political reasons and Garland relented. In so doing, he risked potentially damaging new precedent on federal jurisdiction in a lawsuit that is redundant and unnecessary.

  Roughly 200 years ago, the Federalist Party faded from political dominance in the United States and, with it, his vision for a dominant federal government. The Democratic Party has now emerged as the new Federalist Party and Biden is seeking to outdo Adams in supplanting state authority. It is not an act of building back as much as breaking down a system designed to protect liberty by preventing the concentration of authority in our government.

  The question now is whether this “workaround” the Constitution will actually work with the courts.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 23:50

• Climate-Crusading Billionaires To Take Their Private Jets To Davos Again Next Year
  Climate-Crusading Billionaires To Take Their Private Jets To Davos Again Next Year

  There is light at the end of the covid tunnel, at least according to the Davos billionaire crowd who after two years of missing their favorite World Economic Forum conclave where they get to bash things like wealth inequality and climate change shortly after landing in their private jets, are set to return to the ritzy Swiss ski resort in 2022. The 2021 WEF edition was envisioned for August in Singapore, but a resurgence of the pandemic forced the organization to call off the event.

  The in-person event is scheduled for Jan. 17-21 and designed “to address economic, environmental, political and social fault lines exacerbated by the pandemic,” the group said on Thursday. It is working with the Swiss government and health experts to establish the appropriate safety measures, however the mere fact that the meeting is already scheduled means that the world’s most important decisionmakers have already decided that Covid will not be a “thing” going into 2022.

  The @wef Annual Meeting in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, will take place next year from 17-21 January 2022.

  Read more here: https://t.co/qssaPX9lHw#wef22 pic.twitter.com/UGmCw4vSzG

  — World Economic Forum (@wef) September 16, 2021

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

  The exclusive Alpine ski resort of Davos, in southeastern Switzerland, had hosted every annual event bar one since the first edition in 1971. It was held in New York in 2002 to show solidarity for the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack. The annual meeting netted the Swiss economy around CHF80 million ($87 million) in 2020, with businesses and hotels taking in some CHF63 million in revenues, according to Swissinfo.ch.

  “The pandemic has brought far-reaching changes. In a world full of uncertainty and tension, personal dialogue is more important than ever. Leaders have an obligation to work together and rebuild trust, increase global cooperation and work towards sustainable, bold solutions,” WEF founder Klaus Schwab stated.

  

  As a reminder, Klaus Schwab is best known for recently officially coining the “Great Reset” term as a description of the current, fourth industrial revolution would “lead to a fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity,” which in his book he clarifies is implantable microchips that can read your thoughts.

  Schwab has said that his book, ‘Shaping the Future of The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, was particularly popular in China, South Korea and Japan, with the South Korean military alone purchasing 16,000 copies.

  In the book, Schwab explains with excitement how upcoming technology will allow authorities to “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior.”

  He goes on to predict that this will provide an incentive for law enforcement to implement Minority Report-style pre-crime programs.

  “As capabilities in this area improve, the temptation for law enforcement agencies and courts to use techniques to determine the likelihood of criminal activity, assess guilt or even possibly retrieve memories directly from people’s brains will increase,” writes Schwab. “Even crossing a national border might one day involve a detailed brain scan to assess an individual’s security risk.”

  Schwab also waxes lyrical about the transhumanist utopian dream shared by all elitists which will ultimately lead to the creation of human cyborgs.

  “Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies will not stop at becoming part of the physical world around us—they will become part of us,” writes Schwab.

  “Indeed, some of us already feel that our smartphones have become an extension of ourselves. Today’s external devices—from wearable computers to virtual reality headsets—will almost certainly become implantable in our bodies and brains.”

  Schwab also openly endorses something the media still claims is solely a domain of discussion for conspiracy theorists, namely “active implantable microchips that break the skin barrier of our bodies.”

  The globalist hails the arrival of “implanted devices (that) will likely also help to communicate thoughts normally expressed verbally through a ‘built-in’ smartphone, and potentially unexpressed thoughts or moods by reading brain waves and other signals.”

  So in other words, the “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity” relates to the transhumanist singularity and a future where people have their every movement tracked and every thought read by an implantable microchip.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 23:30

• Bin Laden's Former Right-Hand Man Has Resurfaced. Does It Matter?
  Bin Laden’s Former Right-Hand Man Has Resurfaced. Does It Matter?

  Authored by Ken Silva via The Epoch Times,

  A recently released video suggests that al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri may still be alive.

  

  Some national security experts have downplayed that development due to Zawahiri’s apparent lack of charisma and leadership abilities; others have pointed out that al-Qaeda has flourished – even garnering U.S. support in some conflicts – over the past decade under Osama bin Laden’s former chief lieutenant.

  Following bin Laden’s death in 2011, many celebrated the occasion as a win on two fronts: Not only did the United States bring bin Laden to justice, it also delivered al-Qaeda to the seemingly less effective Zawahiri.

  A Rand Corporation analysis from Sept. 11, 2001, explains that line of thinking, positing that U.S. officials have made Zawahiri a low priority due to his ineptitude.

  “The U.S. government has been relatively blasé about al-Qaeda since Zawahiri took over in 2011,” analysts Colin P. Clarke and Asfandyar Mir wrote for Rand in 2020.

  “Some terrorism analysts even claim a living Zawahiri has done more harm to al-Qaeda than a dead one ever could.”

  Similar sentiments were expressed following the Sept. 11 release of a video featuring Zawahiri—a video that disproves reports from 2020 that the al-Qaeda chief was dead.

  “I bet you a large sum of money that Zawahiri’s outdated recording has been watched and engaged by more Jihadism watchers than by jihadis and sympathizers,” said journalist Hassan I. Hassan, who inaccurately reported Zawahiri’s death in November 2020.

  “Takeaways from al-Qaeda’s al-Sahab release today: … Zawahiri is still deadly boring,” Middle East Institute senior fellow Charles Lister wrote.

  “Beyond that, not much else of note—AQC remains peripheral to AQ globally.”

  But despite Zawahiri’s seeming lack of charisma, others have argued that he has been an effective killer with the blood of thousands—including the victims of 9/11—on his hands. In their analysis for Rand in September 2020, Clarke and Mir also explained how the 70-year-old Egyptian helped al-Qaeda survive throughout the past decade, as the United States focused on other groups such as ISIS.

  “Zawahiri, for example, is averse to state-building—a stance that shielded al-Qaeda and provided the group with relative respite as the Islamic State became a more immediate target of U.S. counterterrorism efforts,” they wrote.

  “As U.S. strikes against the Islamic State intensified, the cohesion of al-Qaeda’s affiliates and its allies improved.”

  Not only has Zawahiri’s relatively low profile helped al-Qaeda evade destruction, but the United States has even lent help to so-called moderate Zawahiri loyalists in Syria and Yemen.

  In Syria, the Obama administration funneled arms starting in 2012 to al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra in support of the failed attempt to oust the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad.

  That support prompted then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ponder during a 2012 interview with a CBS News reporter: “We know al-Qaeda—Zawahiri—is supporting the opposition in Syria. Are we supporting al-Qaeda in Syria?”

  

  A Somali security soldier points his weapon at a poster bearing a photo of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri during an anti-al-Shabab rally in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Feb. 23, 2014. (Abdifitah Hashi Nor/AFP via Getty Images)

  A 2015 article in Foreign Affairs—the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations—made the case for why the United States should back al-Qaeda.

  “The instability in the Middle East following the Arab revolutions and the meteoric rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) require that Washington rethink its policy toward al-Qaeda, particularly its targeting of Zawahiri,” the Foreign Affairs article “Accepting al-Qaeda” reads.

  “Destabilizing al-Qaeda at this time may in fact work against U.S. efforts to defeat ISIS.”

  However, AntiWar.com editorial director Scott Horton argues that support for Zawahiri loyalists is treasonous, and has contributed toward the continued instability in the region.

  “Many of these same [Zawahiri loyalists] had helped the Sunni-based insurgency kill 4,000 out of the 4,500 U.S. troops who died in Iraq War II,” Horton wrote in his 2021 book “Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.”

  Horton also dismissed the argument that al-Qaeda is preferable to ISIS.

  “Tell that to the survivors of the thousands of American civilian and military victims murdered by these terrorists in the last 30 years,” he wrote.

  Horton noted that U.S. support for al-Qaeda fighters continues to this day because the country is selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, which, in turn, is arming al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) in the ongoing Yemeni civil war.

  “In a very real sense, Presidents Obama and Trump [and now Biden] have again put the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and special operations forces at war in the service of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri,” Horton wrote in “Enough Already.”

  Officials are speculating where Zawahiri may be now.

  George McMillan, a security contractor who worked on intelligence and surveillance issues in Afghanistan, told The Epoch Times that Zawahiri is likely hiding in western Pakistan—an assessment shared by many national security experts. McMillan explained that Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI, has long provided refuge to jihadists in an attempt to court them as allies against India.

  “Zawahiri probably still plays a figurehead role in that,” McMillan said.

  In recent weeks, Zawahiri may have slipped into Afghanistan in the wake of the United States’ withdrawal, according to former CIA Acting Director Michael Morrell.

  “We think so, which means that the Taliban is harboring Zawahiri today,” Morrell said on Sept. 12 in response to a question on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

  “The Taliban is harboring al-Qaeda today. And I think that’s a very important point.”

  Horton said he thinks it’s disingenuous that U.S. officials are lamenting the Taliban’s tolerance of al-Qaeda veterans when they still support Zawahiri loyalists in Yemen.

  “I don’t [want to] hear about ‘safe havens’ [in Afghanistan] from people who back al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen and Syria,” Horton told The Epoch Times in a July interview.

  The FBI has had Zawahiri on its most-wanted list since he was indicted for his alleged role in the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya—offering up to $25 million for information that leads to the terrorist leader’s apprehension.

  The FBI declined to comment when contacted by The Epoch Times about Zawahiri’s apparent reemergence.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 23:10

• China Applies To Join CPTPP Trade Pact – Boasts Its Leadership Will Leave US "Increasingly Isolated"
  China Applies To Join CPTPP Trade Pact – Boasts Its Leadership Will Leave US “Increasingly Isolated”

  In a hugely symbolic move sure to have lasting consequences for any future Washington efforts to isolate Beijing, China has filed an application to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the country’s commerce ministry announced Thursday. 

  The Pacific trade pact involves Japan, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and others among 11 total countries, which began in 2018 – though previous to that it was known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and ironically was long deemed a crucial economic counterweight to China’s regional influence. Britain is currently also in negotiations to joint by the end of 2022, London confirmed this summer.

  

  During the Obama administration, the US had framed it as a trade bloc for countering China’s influence, arguing that the US should be the spearhead of regional rules of trade. Trump had later pulled out of the deal in 2017. The CPTPP subsequently replaced the TPP, with Japan leading the revised pact.

  Without doubt some US officials and Congressional China hawks are expected to push back with regional allies against the prospect of China’s joining. Reuters and Bloomberg confirmed the application on Thursday, detailing that “China submitted the formal application letter to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) to New Zealand, according to a statement late on Thursday (Spet 16) in Beijing.” 

  China state-run media hailed the application as affirming China’s leading role in global trade and success in resisting Washington pressures. For example Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times had this to say in a Thursday op-ed just hours after the announcement:

  The late-night announcement aims to cement China’s leadership role in global trade, while piling pressure on the US that has thus far stayed away from rejoining the revised version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a regional trade pact initiated by the US under former President Barack Obama that was widely believed to be aimed at containing China’s rise, experts said. 

  GT took further swipes, suggesting China represents multilateralism in the face of Washington bullying as follows:

  China is hoping for the CPTPP to put global trade and economic cooperation back on track, underscoring the need for multilateralism, thereby reviving both the Chinese economy and the global economy in the post-COVID-19 era.

  More importantly, watchers of international affairs stressed that China’s latest step that is set to steady its partnership with CPTPP members, would inevitably subject the US to what could be overwhelming pressure.

  Meanwhile, Beijing continues to denounce those in the West who seek “ideological confrontation”…

  All strategies for the Asia-Pacific region should be open and inclusive, while any action stressing ideological confrontation or forming cliques is doomed to fail, China’s mission to the EU replied on Thu to EU’s newly released Indo-Pacific strategy. pic.twitter.com/lkcC57rkLP

  — Global Times (@globaltimesnews) September 16, 2021

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

  Further the official publication said, “The US’ changed course on trade policy has remained in place even after Trump’s successor Joe Biden broke with Trump’s unruly go-it-alone mentality in foreign policy, rejoining the Paris climate change agreement and becoming a member of the World Health Organization once again.”

  Among the major hurdles in entry negotiations will include the ongoing China-Australia trade dispute which has seen aggressive China-leveled tariffs effectively block billions of dollars in Aussie exports to its number one trading partner, a devastating blow to Australian industries including wine-producers, meat, barely and other commodities. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 22:50

• Could Biden Nominate Anti-Gun Activist David Chipman As "Gun Czar"?
  Could Biden Nominate Anti-Gun Activist David Chipman As “Gun Czar”?

  Op-Ed via The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN).

  After months of languishing in congressional limbo, the Biden Administration rescinded David Chipman’s nomination to head the ATF. Gun Rights groups jumped to claim victory, and rightly so. David Chipman was a particularly divisive nominee, one with explicit biases. It was clear that given the position to head the ATF, he would do everything in his power to strip Americans of their 2nd amendment right to own a firearm.

  The Anti-gun lobby responded with their usual callout of average American gun owners as a “vocal minority” (untrue). The corporate media printed headlines, declaring that Biden had suffered the most high-profile defeat of his presidency so far with David Chipman’s nomination.

  

  Gun owners have reason to celebrate. But they should not get complacent. We have most certainly not seen the last of David Chipman. If Angus King and other moderate Democrats’ latest statements on the issue are anything to go by, we may have another ATF nominee from the Biden Admin coming shortly.

  King said that he “unequivocally” wants to see a permanent head lead the agency.

  Jon Tester of Montana also was quoted recently as saying there “absolutely” needs to be an ATF director.

  Several other Democrats have also said they’d like to see the White House put forth another nominee.

  On top of that, David Chipman will likely land a position in the White House. Biden may create a “Gun Czar” or “Office of Gun Violence Prevention” job for him.

  Earlier this year, we saw a similar situation where Neera Tanden was nominated to become Biden’s budget director (a cabinet position). Still, hostile tweets directed at members of congress killed her nomination. After the dust settled, she landed a senior advisor position in the White House two months later.

  Gun owners should expect to see a similar situation with Chipman. It’s unlikely that the Biden admin will just let this defeat go. Anti-gun activists are upset and will likely start to put pressure on Biden to bypass congress, create a position for David Chipman, and nominate another ATF director.

  Expect Chipman to receive his appointment during a holiday, or when some major event has happened that captures media attention.

  We could potentially see a situation where an associate of Chipman (someone less controversial) is nominated, and Chipman is given a position in the White House setting policy. 

  Sound crazy? I wouldn’t put it past the Biden Administration to find a way to get Chipman in position. Their gun control policies have been pulled from the David Chipman playbook, which you can read here. 

  

  Don’t forget, the goal of the Anti-Gun lobby is to disarm all American citizens. This is just a bump in the road for them. Gun owners should continue to be vigilant and prepare for the battles to come.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 22:30

• F-35 Stealth Jet At Risk Of Falling Behind China And Russia Defenses, Panel Says
  F-35 Stealth Jet At Risk Of Falling Behind China And Russia Defenses, Panel Says

  The House Armed Services Committee warned that Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jet, the world’s most expensive weapons system, may underperform against Chinese and Russian air defense systems, according to Bloomberg. The panel also pointed out the fighter’s exorbitant program costs. 

  

  The defense committee called into question “overly aggressive development and production schedules” that for more than two decades have resulted “in longer schedules and much higher costs than planned to realize less than full warfighting capabilities required by the Department of Defense.”

  It said adversaries pose “near-peer” challenges that could threaten the F-35s existence on the modern battlefield. It warned it’s “uncertain as to whether or not the F-35 aircraft can sufficiently evolve to meet the future expected threat in certain geographical areas of operations in which combat operations could occur.” 

  No adversaries were named, but we’re assuming the committee is pointing to China and Russia as they quickly advance radar systems, fifth-generation fighter jets, and hypersonic weapons. 

  The committee also expressed that the F-35 has yet to prove dominance against simulated Russian and Chinese air defense systems. The simulation has yet to be completed and was delayed last December, initially planned for 2017. 

  We pointed out the stealth jet has 871 software and hardware flaws that could affect combat operations. Ten out of those issues are considered potentially serious issues. 

  Even though the F-35 is wired with problems, the committee continues to support the nearly $400 billion acquisition program in its latest version of the fiscal 2022 defense policy bill. Taxpayers can expect to pay upwards of $1.5 trillion over the plane’s total lifetime (through 2070). 

  Norm Singleton via The Mises Institute called the F-35 program a terrible investment as it makes “America less safe by spending us into bankruptcy:” 

  The F-35 program is expected to cost well over $1 trillion when it is fully operational and deployed. That massive investment will serve to enrich government contractors while giving interventionist politicians an offensive weapon of war. This program was created as a “too big to fail” scheme where once the government starts the process of making these fighter jets, they will have spent so much money that they can’t back away. The F-35 program is a bad deal for the taxpayer while promoting a policy that will make these same taxpayers less safe.

  The main takeaway is that America’s global air dominance is whittling away due to bad investments.  

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 22:10

• Enraged Evergrande Investors Go Full Pitchfork, Hold Management Hostage In Company Offices
  Enraged Evergrande Investors Go Full Pitchfork, Hold Management Hostage In Company Offices

  As the collapse of Evergrande reverberates throughout the Chinese economy, pissed off retail investors have gone from storming the company’s headquarters to taking management hostage, according to the Straits Times, citing posts ‘making the rounds’ on social media.

  What we know so far: over 70,000 retail investors forked over vast sums of money, in some cases their entire life savings, after the country’s second largest, ‘too big to fail’ property developer wooed them with promises of 10%+ annual returns. And while the company most likely is TBTF (as you can read in gory detail here, although Beijing has yet to make an official proclamation), these anxious retail investors may be in more of an “Alive” situation than a Sully Sullenberger landing when it comes to resolving this mess.

  

  After accumulating some 1.97 trillion yuan (US$410 billion) in liabilities, the company – which became the country’s largest high-yield dollar bond issuer (16% of all outstanding notes) – sparked protests across the country earlier this week after announcing they were forced to delay payments on up to 40 billion yuan in wealth management products.

  As we noted earlier Thursday, in an effort to appease its angry (and very soon, poor) stakeholders, Evergrande plans to let consumers and staff bid on discounted apartments this month as compensation for billions in overdue investment products as the embattled developer seeks to preserve cash, according to people familiar with the matter.

  According to Bloomberg, the company will organize an online property event by Sept. 30 for investors who opt for  real estate in lieu of cash. The world’s most-indebted property developer is pushing the discounted real estate as the preferred of three options for angry investors seeking repayments.

  The plan, it would appear, did not go off quite as planned: in response, nearly 100 investors stormed Evergrande’s headquarters to demand their money back.

  

  And while we believe Evergrande’s chaotic, freefall default poses such a catastrophic risk to the Chinese economy (a nightmare scenario echoed in graphic detail by Bloomberg) that a rescue will materialize, enraged retail investors now squatting at the company’s headquarters claim to be holding management hostage in their offices, according to the Straits Times.

  “I have with me Nanchang’s top Evergrande representative surnamed Chen,” said WeChat user Yang Qiwen, referring to the city in Jiangxi province in south-eastern China, in a post accompanied by a photo of a man lying on the floor.

  “He can’t leave the office. There are more than 300 of us (investors) stopping him,” Yang added on one of at least three WeChat groups discussing the company’s dire straits.

  

  Evergrande has more than 700 projects across 223 cities – most of which lie in the country’s less developed regions – and has committed to complete some 1.4 million properties by the end of June, according to the Times. Last week, over 100 people who had bought homes with Evergrande staged a protest in Guangzhou after construction stalled on the projects.

  On Wednesday, state media Global Times sought to restore investor confidence, calling the company’s liquidity problems an “isolated incident,” and insisting that Evergrande’s debt crisis will “not affect China’s efforts to strengthen regulation of the housing market to prevent major financial risks and ensure sustainable development.”

  As the Times further notes, however, Beijing has yet to make an official statement on what actions will be taken.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 21:50

• Aussie Uranium Stocks Soar After Australia Decides It Wants Nuclear Industry To Go With New Nuclear Subs
  Aussie Uranium Stocks Soar After Australia Decides It Wants Nuclear Industry To Go With New Nuclear Subs

  Following last night “historic” AUKUS deal, which officially pitted US and UK with Australia against China, in the process supplying the aussies with nuclear-powered subs (while enraging the French whose $50 billion contract to build diesel-electric submarines was scrapped as a result), Australia has a revelation: the deal would see Australia become the only country in the world with nuclear-powered submarines to not have its own domestic nuclear industry. This in turn immediately led to further calls to reverse a longstanding ban on developing local uranium resources.

  “Getting nuclear subs makes sense for our national defense,” said Queensland Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, who has been leading a push in parliament to develop Australia’s nuclear industry. “But no country in the world has nuclear subs without having nuclear power,” he said.

  “I thought before the subs deal we should have nuclear power — it makes even more sense now.”

  As Australia’s Daily Telegraph poignantly observes, France, which was previously to supply Australia with diesel subs assembled in Adelaide, has its own fleet of 10 nuclear attack and nuclear ballistic missile submarines, and derives more than 70% of its domestic energy needs from nuclear power. Of course, Russia and the US both have large nuclear-powered naval fleets, and derive about 20% of their respective domestic electricity from nuclear.

  China, meanwhile, is continuing to develop its own nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed navy but only relies on atomic energy for 5% cent of its power, thanks to its lax environmental standards and reliance on coal-fired power.

  As a result, local mining industry figures, said that this was the perfect time to reignite the discussion about nuclear.

  “This is a perfect opportunity to update our approach to nuclear energy by removing the cold-war era ban on uranium mining in NSW. It’s a real chance to develop a new industry here in NSW that could provide local uranium to meet our domestic energy and national security needs,” NSW Mining CEO Stephen Galilee said.

  Galilee’s thoughts were echoed by the Minerals Council of Australia’s Tania Constable, who said of the deal, “This is an incredible opportunity for Australia’s economy — not only will we develop the skills and infrastructure to support this naval technology, but it connects us to the growing global nuclear power industry and its supply chains.

  But, she added, “Outdated regulations at the federal and state levels that prohibit nuclear power — and in some cases exploration and mining of uranium — contribute to Australia being unable to properly even consider, let alone develop, this important industry.”

  Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, however, kiboshed any thought of leveraging a domestic nuclear industry off the deal, saying that a condition for the ALP’s support was that “there be no requirement of a domestic civil nuclear industry”.

  His objection, however, fell on deaf ears and overnight Australia’s uranium stocks soared on hopes that Australia was indeed set to finally enter the nuclear era. As a result Deep Yellow jumped as much as 10%, Paladin Energy soared as much as 9.3%, Defense contractor Austal shares climbs as much as 7.4%; the most since March and Peninsula Energy jumped at much as 17%.

  Meanwhile, back in the US uranium stocks have continued their ascent as more investors focus on Sprott’s attempt to go “Hunt Brothers” on uranium with his Sprott Physical Uranium Trust  which has been on a buying spree, bolstering its stockpile by 45% in four weeks after snapping up 8.1 million pounds of the commodity while prices soared. Uranium has surged 40% this month, putting pressure on utility owners and other users when supplies are dwindling and demand is set to take off thanks to more reactors being built around the world.

  

  Discussing its strategy with Bloomberg, the Canadian firm behind the world’s only physical uranium fund said it wasn’t solely responsible for the move, but that hedge funds and family offices are driving up demand for the radioactive metal used to fuel nuclear reactors.

  “I don’t think we’re crowding them out,” said John Ciampaglia, chief executive officer of Sprott Asset Management, which oversees the trust. “You’ve got end users that are trying to buy materials, you’ve got speculators and financial intermediaries in the market as well.”

  Investment demand from non-utility buyers such as hedge funds and family offices has been strong this year, even before Sprott’s asset-management unit launched its trust on July 19, according to Ciampaglia. A few uranium development companies bought the physical commodity after raising equity in the capital markets rather than parking the proceeds into cash, he said.

  Still, according to the latest data, Sprott’s trust holds about 26 million pounds of uranium, equal to about 14% of the annual consumption from the world’s nuclear reactors. The closed-end fund was formed out of an April takeover of Uranium Participation Corp., which held 18 million pounds of uranium, and its trust units trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The fund invests and holds substantially all of its assets in uranium, which is stored in highly secured facilities in Canada, France and the U.S.

  Units of Sprott Physical Uranium Trust have soared 42% in September since our post “A Bitcoin-Like Opportunity In Uranium?”

  Historically low prices and pandemic-driven mine disruptions have prompted uranium producers including Cameco to buy from the spot market to fulfill their long-term contracts with consumers. That means stockpiling by the Sprott fund may have the potential for tightening the market and boosting prices, in the process as prices rise, the value of the fund will rise as well, attracting more inflows, leading to even more uranium purchases, even higher prices and so on until we have another Hunt Brothers situation on our hands, only with uranium this time instead of silver.

  The robust investment demand is built on a growing realization that nuclear power is becoming more accepted by policymakers worldwide as a way to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, Ciampaglia said Wednesday in an interview. Australia’s reaction was merely confirmation of this.

  “That’s something that’s just recent, and you’re seeing this from the Biden administration acknowledging and providing support for nuclear,” he said. “And the European Union clearly identifies nuclear as part of the taxonomy.”

  As Bloomberg adds, Uranium is also getting a boost from generalist investors who are seeking investments that meet environmental, social and governance criteria or support the energy shift away from fossil fuels, he said.

  Then there’s the recent buzz from retail investors, with uranium becoming a recent target of the meme-stock frenzy that share tips on Reddit message boards. Cameco, the world’s second-largest uranium miner, was the most searched stock symbol on Monday, according to WallStreetBets Ticker Sentiment.

  Reddit day-traders “seem to be into it,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas said in an interview. “When you have something that’s starting to surge that’s been beaten for 10 years and there’s some more room to run potentially, I think that’s what they’re trying to do.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 21:30

• Taiwan FM Says The Island Is A "Sea Fortress" Blocking Chinese Expansion
  Taiwan FM Says The Island Is A “Sea Fortress” Blocking Chinese Expansion

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com, 

  On Wednesday, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told an online forum on US-Taiwan relations that Taiwan is a “sea fortress” blocking Chinese expansion in the region.

  The forum was organized by the Global Taiwan Institute, and according to Reuters, several former US officials were in attendance. Wu said that Taiwan played a “significant role” in ensuring freedom of navigation in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, two areas where the US military has stepped up its activity.

  

  “A democratic Taiwan serves as a sea fortress to block China’s expansionism into the wider Pacific,” Wu said. Boosting ties with “democracies” is something the Biden administration has touted as a way to counter China, something Wu said Taiwan plays a role in.

  “Taiwan has learned valuable lessons and developed various means to tackle the threat to democracy, and we are more than willing to share this knowledge with fellow democracies,” he said.

  Wu’s comments come as Taiwan is holding military exercises simulating a Chinese invasion. The drills are simulating an attack that took out Taiwan’s airfields, so fighter jets are practicing landing on stretches of highway.

  Taiwanese Air Force fighter jets park on a highway that is converted as a runway during the take-off and landing drill as part of the annual Han Kuang drill in Pingtung, Taiwan, 15 September 2021. pic.twitter.com/HvWtKk0d9r

  — e-Αmyna (@e_amyna) September 15, 2021

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

  The Biden administration has continued the tradition of selling weapons to Taiwan and has been sailing warships through the sensitive Taiwan Strait just about every month. The latest US transit through the sensitive waterway was carried out by a US Navy warship and a US Coast Guard cutter.

  The US and Taiwan have been holding talks on coast guard cooperation that could result in future joint exercises.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 21:10

• Facebook Aided In Recruitment Of Modern Day Slaves, Cartel Hitmen Internal Documents Show
  Facebook Aided In Recruitment Of Modern Day Slaves, Cartel Hitmen Internal Documents Show

  It seems like the WSJ’s entire San Francisco bureau has been preoccupied lately with churning out a series of stories sourced from “leaked” internal Facebook documents exposing embarrassing internal reports on everything from Instagram’s deleterious impact on the mental health of its twentysomething and teenage users to political divisiveness to – today’s entry – how Facebook’s products are abused to facilitated human trafficking and terror recruitment in parts of the emerging world.

  The gist of the piece is this: Facebook has a small staff dedicated to combating human trafficking around the world, particularly in countries where the rule of law isn’t as robust as it is in the US and Europe. In the Middle East, Facebook is used to lure women into sex slavery (or some other form of exploitative labor).

  In Ethiopia, armed groups use the site to recruit and to incite violence against other ethnic minorities.

  Facebook’s monitors have also sent reports to their bosses on everything from human organ trafficking, pornography and child pornography, and government’s cracking down on political dissent.

  

  The documents leaked to WSJ show that while Facebook removes some pages, many continue to operate openly.

  While some might sympathize with Facebook’s inability to whack every mole (after all, they’re fighting a never-ending torrent of misconduct). But the sad truth is that Facebook could do more to stop its platform from being abused by traffickers, criminals and abusers – particularly in the emerging world (we all remember what happened in Myanmar).

  The reason it doesn’t is because that would be bad for business”, according to a former chief executive who resigned from the company last year. Facebook treats harm in developing countries as “simply the cost of doing business” in those places, said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president who oversaw partnerships with internet providers in Africa and Asia before resigning at the end of last year.

  Facebook has focused its safety efforts on wealthier markets (like the US) where powerful government and media institutions can help keep it accountable. But in smaller countries, Facebook answers many problems with a shrug.

  “There is very rarely a significant, concerted effort to invest in fixing those areas,” Boland said.

  The problem for Facebook is that the developing world is now it’s biggest market for growth. With user numbers in the US, Canada and Europe mostly stagnant now, 90% of the company’s user growth is coming from the developing world.

  A Facebook spokesman responded to WSJ’s inquiry by describing Facebook’s efforts to police content in the emerging world. “In countries at risk for conflict and violence, we have a comprehensive strategy, including relying on global teams with native speakers covering over 50 languages, educational resources, and partnerships with local experts and third-party fact checkers to keep people safe,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said this week.

  Others say while this might be true, it’s not enough – and Facebook’s leadership knows it. One team, led by a former cop, uncovered how the New Jalisco Cartel in Mexico was using Facebook to recruit and train aspiring cartel hitmen.

  On Jan. 13, nine days after employees circulated an internal report calling on Facebook to take down all pages publicly associated with the cartel, the first post appeared on a new CJNG Instagram account: it was a video of a person with a gold pistol shooting a young man in the head while blood spurts from his neck. The next post was a photo of a beaten man tied to a chair. The next one was a trash bag full of severed hands.

  That page, along with other Instagram and Facebook pages advertising the cartel, remained active for at least five months before being taken down. Since then, new pages have appeared under the CJNG name featuring guns and beheadings.

  In other instances, Facebook found that it simply didn’t have enough language specialists to monitor threats in certain emerging countries. One example was Ethiopia. Like years before in Myanmar, some Ethiopian users used Facebook to incite violence against the people of Tigray, attacks that have risen to the level of war crimes.

  In what was perhaps one of the most shocking shortcomings, Facebook’s lack of Arabic-language experts allowed a scheme where “employment agencies” lured women from Kenya and other African nations to work as de facto slaves in the homes of wealthy Saudis. Most of these agencies advertised on Facebook to lure workers to an airport, where they would be confronted with a bait and switch, and told that, if they backed out now, they would be on the hook to repay the employment agency.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 20:50

• China Braces For "Nightmare Scenario" As Evergrande Offers Broke Investors Discounted Apartments
  China Braces For “Nightmare Scenario” As Evergrande Offers Broke Investors Discounted Apartments

  Up until now the collapse of China’s Evergrande was very much a slow motion affair, captured perhaps best by Forte Securities trader Keith Temperton who said that “the Asian banks will get hit hard if there’s a default, but then there will be a 10-year recovery process. The market’s getting a hang of it. The way they’ve managed the news flow seems quite clever. They haven’t let a swathe of bad news at once.” But while Beijing was indeed successful in extending the period of collapse as long as possible, now that Evergrande is effectively insolvent and having suspended its bonds from trading we have finally gotten to the endgame and the realization that hundreds of billions in capital (Evergrande’s total debt was just over $300 billion) is gone for ever.

  This realization has already prompted angry protesters at China Evergrande Group offices across the country as the developer has fallen further behind on promises to more than 70,000 investors. Construction of unfinished properties with enough floor space to cover three-fourths of Manhattan grinds to a halt, leaving more than a million homebuyers in limbo.

  In an effort to appease its angry (and very soon, poor) stakeholders, Evergrande plans to let consumers and staff bid on discounted properties this month to repay them for billions in overdue investment products as the embattled developer seeks to preserve cash, according to people familiar with the matter.

  According to Bloomberg, the company will organize an online property event by Sept. 30 for investors who opt for discounted real estate in lieu of cash, said two employees who were briefed on an internal call Thursday and asked not to be identified. The world’s most-indebted property developer is pushing the discounted real estate as the preferred of three options for angry investors seeking repayments.

  The high-yield “shadow bank” products paying as much as 13% a year have become a lightning rod for cash-strapped Evergrande, with investors and staff protesting losses and delayed payments from investments that were marketed as safe. Indeed, demonstrations that are breaking out across China could sway any bailout decisions by the government, which places a high priority on social stability, although it’s likely too late for that.

  More than 70,000 people bought the products, including many Evergrande employees, Bloomberg reported earlier, citing an executive of Evergrande’s wealth division. And with about 40 billion yuan ($6.2 billion) of them are now due according to Caixin, there is about to be a whole lot of angry investors, who will not be swayed by the company’s hail mary plan to offer steep discounts on property assets. Investors can invest in residential housing units at a 28% discount, offices at a 46% discount and stores and parking units at 52%. Discounted rates can’t be lower than price floors designated by local governments. The property discounts are a voluntary repayment option, according to the briefing.

  And while we wait to see what the acceptance rate on this bizarre debt-for-apartments exchange offer will be, the reality of the absurd situation is finally seeping in and is pummeling China’s already shaky real estate market, where new land sales just crashed by 90% in August…

  

  … in the process squeezing other developers and rippling through a supply chain that accounts for more than a quarter of Chinese economic output. And as fear of contagion and exposure to Evergrande has finally emerged, credit-market stress spreads from lower-rated property companies to stronger peers and banks as global investors who bought $527 billion of Chinese stocks and bonds in the 15 months through June begin to sell.

  This, in turn, brings us to China’s nightmare scenario: an uncontrolled bankruptcy which escalates into an all out economic crash.

  As Bloomberg notes, it’s impossible to know for sure what would happen if Beijing allows Evergrande’s downward spiral to continue unabated, but China watchers are already mapping out worst-case scenarios as they contemplate how much pain the Communist Party is willing to tolerate. Pressure to intervene is growing as signs of financial contagion increase and as more and more popular anger builds.

  “As a systemically important developer, an Evergrande bankruptcy would cause problems for the entire property sector,” said Shen Meng, director at Beijing investment bank Chanson & Co. “Debt recovery efforts by creditors would lead to fire sales of assets and hit housing prices. Profit margins across the supply chain would be squeezed. It would also lead to panic selling in capital markets.”

  Evergrande had 1.3 trillion yuan ($202 billion) in presale liabilities at the end of June, equivalent to about 1.4 million individual properties that it has committed to complete, according to a Capital Economics report last week. “If Evergrande had to dump its inventory onto the market” it would “drag down property prices substantially,” said Hao Hong, chief strategist at Bocom International.

  Such an outcome would be catastrophic for China’s economy, where real estate represents 70% of household net worth, but absent a full-blown bailout by Beijing which would appear as glaring weakness coming so late into the process, it is unclear what other alternatives are viable even if Shen, and virtually all other analysts and investors discussing Evergrande say Beijing is in no mood for a Lehman moment. Instead, rather than allow a chaotic collapse into bankruptcy, they predict regulators will engineer a restructuring of Evergrande’s $300 billion pile of liabilities that keeps systemic risk to a minimum.

  While markets seem to agree with the Shanghai Composite Index less than 3% from a six-year high and the yuan is near the strongest level in three months against the dollar, it is unclear just how Beijing – which did not allow corporate debt restructurings until a few years ago – will oversee a bankruptcy process that would be substantially bigger and more complicated than that of Lehman brothers.

  Even Bloomberg agrees that “a benign outcome is far from assured” and reminds us of Beijing’s bungled stock-market rescue in 2015 which showed how difficult it can be for central planning policymakers to control financial outcomes, even in a system where the government runs most of the banks and can exert outsized pressure on creditors, suppliers and other counterparties.

  And while equities continue to exist in a world of their own where nothing can go wrong, some parts of the market are starting to crask amid the surge in contagion risk: as noted in recent days, Chinese junk-bond yields jumped to an 18-month high and shares of real estate companies plunged after Evergrande had its credit rating downgraded and requested a trading halt in its onshore bonds. Furthermore, ahead of what many fear could become a cascading liquidity crisis, banks in China are hoarding yuan at the highest cost in almost four years, a sign they may be preparing for what a Mizuho Financial Group Inc. strategist called a “liquidity squeeze in crisis mode.”

  

  With so much unclear, where Xi will ultimately draw the line to contain the fallout remains a mystery. While China’s top financial regulator has urged billionaire Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan to solve his company’s debt problems, authorities have yet to spell out how they envision him backstopping hundreds of billions in liabilities, and even whether the government would allow a major debt restructuring or bankruptcy. Adding to the China’s recent deleveraging campaign would lose credibility

  Even senior officials at state-owned banks have told Bloomberg that they’re confused and still waiting for guidance on a long-term solution from top leaders in Beijing. Evergrande’s main banks were told by China’s housing ministry this week that the developer won’t be able to make interest payments due Sept. 20.

  To be sure, China’s government isn’t averse to nationalizing failed private companies: in 2019, Beijing seized Baoshang Bank and assumed control of HNA Group, the once-sprawling conglomerate in early 2020 after the coronavirus pandemic decimated the company’s main travel business. Court-led restructurings have also become more common in recent years, with more than 700 being completed in 2020.

  Ultimately, rhe Evergrande endgame will depend largely on how Xi balances his goals of maintaining social and financial stability against his multi-year campaign to reduce moral hazard (spoiler alert: in a country of 1.4 billion people preventing social unrest will always win over moral hazard). Then again, the timing is particularly tricky as China juggles an economic slowdown, a sweeping crackdown on the private sector and rising tensions with Washington – all in the runup to a once-in-five-year leadership reshuffle in 2022 at which Xi is set to extend his indefinite rule.

  So while some sort of rescue is likely, “the government has to be very, very careful in balancing support for Evergrande,” said Yu Yong, a former China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission regulator and now chief risk officer at China Agriculture Reinsurance Fund.

  “Property is the biggest bubble that everyone has been talking about in China,” Yu told Everbright Sun Hung Kai analyst Jonas Short in a recent podcast. “So if anything happens, this could clearly cause systematic risk to the whole China economy.”

  Courtesy of Bloomberg, here are some of the factors that may sway Chinese leaders:

  Social Unrest – Maintaining social order has always been a key priority for the Communist Party, which has no tolerance for protests of any kind. In Guangzhou, homebuyers surrounded a local housing bureau last week to demand Evergrande restart stalled construction. Disgruntled retail investors have gathered at the company’s Shenzhen headquarters for at least three straight days this week, and videos of protests against the developer in other parts of China have been shared widely online (see video above). Without a social safety net and with limited places to put their money, Chinese savers have for years been encouraged to buy homes whose prices were only ever supposed to go up (similar to the US before 2007 when even idiots like Ben Bernanke said that the US housing market never goes down). Today, buying a house (or two) is a cultural touchstone. While housing affordability has become a hot topic in the West, many Chinese are more likely to protest falling home prices than spiking ones.

  “Given that the bulk of people’s wealth is already in property, even a 10% correction would be a serious knock to many people,” said Fraser Howie, an independent analyst and co-author of books on Chinese finance who has been following the country’s corporate sector for decades. “It would certainly knock their hopes and dreams and expectations about what property is.”

  Shadow banks: Another potential flashpoint is whether Evergrande can repay high-yield wealth management products that it sold to thousands of retail investors, including many of its own employees. About 40 billion yuan of the WMPs are due to be repaid, according to Caixin, a Chinese financial news service. Evergrande is trying to free up cash by selling assets, including stakes in its electric-car and property-management businesses, but has so far made little progress.

  Capital Markets: Evergrande is the largest high-yield dollar bond issuer in China, accounting for 16% of outstanding notes, according to Bank of America. Should the company collapse, that alone would push the default rate on the country’s junk dollar bond market to 14% from 3%. While Beijing has become more comfortable with allowing weaker businesses to fail, an uncontrolled spike in offshore funding costs would risk derailing a key source of financing. It could also undermine global confidence in the country’s issuers at a time when Beijing is pushing for larger foreign investor ownership. Yields on China’s junk dollar bonds are nearing 14%, up from about 7.4% in February, according to a Bloomberg index, largely due to the crash in Evergrande debt.

  

  The stakes are even higher on the mainland, where the yuan-denominated credit market is about 15 times the size at $12 trillion. While Evergrande is less of a whale onshore, a collapse could force banks to cut their holdings of corporate notes and even freeze money markets, the plumbing of China’s financial system. In such a credit crunch, the government or central bank would be forced to act. Banks involved in property lending may come under pressure, leading to an increase in soured loans. Smaller banks exposed to Evergrande or other weaker developers may face “significant” increases in non-performing loans in the event of a default, according to Fitch Ratings.

  Economic Impact: Concern over Evergrande comes at a time when China’s economy is slowing sharply. Aggressive controls to curb outbreaks of Covid-19 are hurting retail spending and travel, while measures to cool property prices are taking a toll. Data this week showed home sales by value slumped 20% in August from a year earlier, the biggest drop since the onset of the coronavirus early last year. Responding to a question on Evergrande’s potential impact on the economy, National Bureau of Statistics spokesman Fu Linghui said some large property enterprises are running into difficulties and the fallout “remains to be seen.”

  

  China’s current priorities of promoting “common prosperity” and deterring excessive risk-taking mean there’s unlikely to be any easing of property curbs this year, according to Macquarie Group Ltd. The sector will be a “main growth headwind” for next year, although policy makers may loosen restrictions to defend growth goals, Macquarie analysts wrote in a Wednesday note.

  A crash in China’s property market would not only slow the domestic economy but have global consequences too.

  “A significant slowdown in property construction over the next few years appears probable already, and would become even more likely in the event of an Evergrande failure or bankruptcy,” said Logan Wright, a Hong Kong-based director at research firm Rhodium Group LLC. “A long-term slowdown in property construction, an industry that represents around a fifth or a quarter of China’s economy by most estimates, would cause a significant decline in GDP growth, commodity demand, and would likely have disinflationary effects globally.”

  * * *

  The bottom line is that while stocks stubbornly refuse to reflect the huge risks faced by China in the coming days when Evergrande’s fate will be revealed, the reality is that a nightmare scenario – one which is all but assured absent a full-scale bailout by Beijing – would lead not only to a Chinese financial crisis and economic crisis, but to a global stagflationary depression because unlike the global financial crisis when it was China that dragged the world out of the depth of the crisis, this time it will be China responsible for the collapse and as much as they may try, developed nations simply do not have the debt-creating horsepower to pull the world out of the coming chasm

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 20:35

• States See Looming Monoclonal Antibody Crunch As Biden Admin Rations Doses
  States See Looming Monoclonal Antibody Crunch As Biden Admin Rations Doses

  Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

  Some states are set to receive fewer doses of monoclonal antibody treatments after the Biden administration switched the distribution system this week.

  Demand for monoclonal antibodies, used to treat non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients, has shot up in recent weeks, leading to what some officials have described as a shortage.

  

  The Biden administration tipped off states in early September that it was limiting distribution of the treatments before abruptly switching on Monday from letting sites directly order the doses to putting the federal government in charge of allocation to states, which can then choose where to send them.

  Some state officials say they weren’t notified of the change until late Monday, and that pending orders with AmerisourceBergen, the primary distributor in the old model, were being closed out.

  The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) alerted Texas health officials “that the national supply has considerably decreased and states should expect lower amounts of therapeutics available for shipment in the coming weeks,” Douglas Loveday, press officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services, told The Epoch Times in an email.

  “The amount available to distribute is expected to be disproportionately small compared to the amounts needed,” he added.

  Other states have also been told they won’t get as many doses as they were getting before. Among them are southern states grappling with the worst COVID-19 outbreaks in the nation.

  Dr. Scott Harris, Alabama’s top medical officer, said HHS recently called to “let us know that Alabama and some other states are going to be on an allocation.”

  “We don’t think providers are going to be able to order as much as they would like,” he said during a briefing late last week. Up until the change, “there was really sort of no limit to what could be ordered,” he added.

  HHS and the federal COVID-19 response team did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

  HHS said in an update on Monday that the higher number of COVID-19 cases in the United States in recent weeks has “caused a substantial surge in the utilization of monoclonal antibody (mAb) drugs,” especially in parts of the country with low vaccination rates.

  Federal officials informed state health officials that there’s been a 20-fold increase in demand for monoclonal antibodies in just the last few weeks, James Blumenstock, the chief of health security at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, told The Epoch Times.

  “Clearly that’s outstripping the current supply even with the supply increase this month; that increase is not sufficient to meet the current demand,” he said.

  The timeline for when supplies will increase enough to meet the jump in demand isn’t clear. The new process will help ensure consistent availability for the drugs in all parts of the nation, according to HHS, which is basing its weekly shipments based on reports of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations and inventory data.

  Monoclonal antibody treatments from two companies, Regeneron and Eli Lilly, are purchased by the federal government and distributed across the nation. Patients get them for free. The treatments received emergency use authorization from drug regulators earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinical trials showed they reduced hospitalization or death by as much as 70 percent.

  

  Dr. Aldo Calvo, medical director of family medicine at Broward Health, shows a Regeneron monoclonal antibody infusion bag during a news conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla, on Aug. 19, 2021. (Joe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP)

  It takes several weeks or months to produce a batch of Regeneron’s drug, REGEN-COV, a spokesman for the New York-based company told The Epoch Times in an email. Regeneron says demand has grown since earlier this year but that it is ready to deliver new doses quickly because it “remained proactive” and has the drug in various stages of the manufacturing process.

  An Eli Lilly spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email that the Indiana-based company “continues to work with governments globally to help address the therapeutic needs of patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

  Another monoclonal antibody treatment, from GlaxoSmithKline, is not being distributed through the federal government. A spokesperson for the company, which is headquartered in the United Kingdom, told The Epoch Times in an email that there are no supply or access issues for its medicine.

  The United States has purchased or committed to purchasing nearly three million doses of REGEN-COV, including 1.4 million doses on Sept. 14. Most of the doses cost taxpayers $2,100 each, according to the Regeneron spokesman. Eli Lilly’s treatment requires two drugs, etesevimab and bamlanivimab. The company just reached an agreement to provide 388,000 additional doses of etesevimab to the U.S. government for nearly $1,000 each, building on earlier contracts to supply nearly 1 million vials of one drug or the other.

  Over 2.1 million monoclonal antibody doses were shipped to over 8,000 sites across the nation as of early September, John Redd, chief medical officer for HHS emergency preparedness and response office, told state officials in a recent call.

  Redd told officials that HHS had not returned to the allocation model that was used between November 2020 and February. A few days later, the model was switched.

  Biden’s administration also said last week in a fresh COVID-19 response plan that it would increase shipments of monoclonal antibodies to states by 50 percent in September—something critics are pointing to in questioning the change.

  “It is regrettable that the Biden administration would play politics with people’s lives during a pandemic, by withholding a life-saving treatment and providing mixed messages to Americans,” Christina Pushaw, press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, told The Epoch Times via email.

  “Today, I pressed President Biden’s team to explain the sudden rationing of these life-saving treatments—without any warning—after the administration urged us to promote them. It is yet another example of confusing and conflicting guidance coming from the federal government,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan wrote on social media.

  Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) office told The Epoch Times in an email that it’s looking into the matter to see how it can be of assistance.

  Florida has not yet seen its supply drop and some other states said they don’t expect the distribution model change to affect them.

  “We do not have any concerns about monoclonal supply at this point of time in Arkansas based on current usage patterns,” Danyelle McNeill, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Health, told The Epoch Times in an email.

  Some governors, including DeSantis, have heavily promoted monoclonal antibodies, which have a high efficacy rate against cases of COVID-19 that don’t require hospital care and are sometimes used following an exposure to a COVID-19 patient.

  COVID-19 is the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus.

  For now, officials are encouraging people to continue seeking out the antibody treatments. Some experts say the drop in supply should prompt people who haven’t received a COVID-19 vaccine to get one.

  “The public health message is, while everyone is doing their absolute best to treat and care for individuals who get sick from COVID, the best effort is to avoid that scenario in the first place, and therefore get vaccinated,” Blumenstock said.

  And of course Psaki denies any rationing… then admits it…

  She states it’s not accurate and then goes on to say why the admin is doing it. https://t.co/V5h1eEBiJe

  — Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 16, 2021

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

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 20:30

• US Pork Exports To Dominican Republic Spike Amid Pig Ebola Outbreak
  US Pork Exports To Dominican Republic Spike Amid Pig Ebola Outbreak

  The first outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in the Western Hemisphere in four decades began on July 28 in the Dominican Republic and was confirmed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). 

  The presence of ASF has led to massive hog culling on the Caribbean island that borders Haiti. Bloomberg notes the island may have to slaughter more than half a million pigs to prevent the deadly swine fever virus from spreading. 

  Pork supplies are dwindling, and Dominican importers are panic buying from U.S. slaughterhouses. The latest USDA data shows U.S. exporters shipped a whopping 3,500 metric tons of pork to the Caribbean nation earlier this month – the highest on record. 

  

  Steve Meyer, an economist at Partners For Production Agriculture based in Ames, Iowa, said during a previous ASF outbreak in the 1970s, the Dominican Republic ramped up pork supplies from the U.S. 

  “Exporting pork to there would be easier now as more companies are set up” to do it, Meyer said. 

  The U.S. has taken pre-emptive measures to suppress the outbreak by creating a “protection zone” around Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

  

  “USDA is committed to assisting the Dominican Republic in dealing with ASF, is offering continued testing support, and will consult with them on additional steps or actions to support response and mitigation measures,” USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said. “We will also offer similar help to Haiti, which borders the Dominican Republic and is at high risk for ASF detections.”

  ASF outbreaks have ravaged hog populations in parts of Asia and Europe over the last several years. There is no vaccine against the virus, and outbreaks are usually contained by culling herds. This will only push up pork prices and drive food inflation higher – thus irritating consumers. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 20:10

• This Is The Most Terrifying Map In The World… Here's What It Means For You
  This Is The Most Terrifying Map In The World… Here’s What It Means For You

  Authored by Chris Macintosh via InternationalMan.com,

  If there ever was a time when you could see a trend solidly in motion, now is it.

  

  That the Western, previously civilized world is in decline has been known to anyone with an ounce of curiosity and little analysis of data points.

  Before Xi’s ascension to power one could have argued that this trend was worrying, but not terrifying.

  

  What makes it terrifying is that Xi managed to abolish the two-term limit for his presidency with an overwhelming majority (2,959 to 2 and 3 abstaining votes – no prizes for guessing where those 5 guys are now).

  He then proceeded to have his name enshrined in the constitution. Seriously.

  You may recall Xi’s “anti-corruption” purge from a few years back.

  Well, this was Xi’s own internal secret police, designed to kill (literally) any opposition from within the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).

  Today’s China, or should I say CCP, is not the same CCP of Deng Xiaoping. Today’s CCP is an ideological global weapon of control, and it is spreading like a cancer.

  Which brings me to…

  To Tech, or Not to Tech?

  Sometimes knowing where not to be is just as important as knowing where to be since all investments are a matter of opportunity costs and probabilities.

  The implosion of Chinese tech continues.

  

  One can argue as to what the particular catalyst for this selloff was. Certainly, the CCP going after Didi (China’s clone of Uber) hasn’t helped things, though this is peculiar to me. Because, when Jack Ma fell afoul of the CCP and disappeared (still yet to be seen) with Ant financial now a wholly owned subsidiary of the CCP, it was clear that Xi was implementing his three Cs: control, consolidate, continue.

  It really is just nationalisation of resources with a carefully constructed veneer to pretend it really isn’t that at all. But that’s all it is — a veneer.

  Truth is, much of the world works like this, including Putin’s Russia. China is moving towards controlling the key industry sectors (not that they didn’t have significant control before because they did) with less pretentiousness than before. Why?

  The same reason they took Hong Kong. Because they could. And they could because the rest of the world is distracted, ironically by the Covid pantomime created by Fauci, Gates, Klaus, and their fellow technocrats.

  All of this allows the CCP to do things they had not previously been able to do without repercussions, both politically and economically.

  So now we have this gap between QQQ (US tech) and CQQQ (China tech), and the ratio between the two tech ETFs closed at another all-time low.

  

  The Chinese tech regulatory issue has been going on for months, but the big question here is what is priced in.

  What about the longer-term view? Is US tech any better?

  US tech manipulates and owns the government whereas in China the government manipulates and owns China tech.

  US investors have been buying up China tech as if it’s the same as US tech. Clearly it isn’t.

  But the other question that is worth thinking about is what the US tech investors don’t know about the US tech? Do they still or should they still trust them to the extent that they do?

  Well, you probably guessed my answer to that, but really what I think doesn’t matter because what the market thinks is what matters, at least for now.

  Right now, the debate by the dolly birds on CNBC is around whether or not to buy these now cheaper Chinese tech stocks.

  I would say a better question is if you can’t trust Chinese tech (and you clearly can’t), then pray tell, why would one trust US tech?

  Do you chase US tech (like everybody else), puke Chinese tech (like everybody else), or start looking at the contrarian spread?

  We are still a long way off buying China tech here as I don’t like putting out fires with my face… and that is what I think you’d be doing here. But buying US tech feels decidedly dicey as well.

  So what do we do with all this?

  We watch and see where these capital flows may go, and for now, we buy deep value.

  *  *  *

  The 2020s will likely to be an increasingly volatile decade. More governments are putting their money printing on overdrive. Negative interests are becoming the rule instead of the exception to it. One thing is for sure, there will be a great deal of change taking place in the years ahead. That’s precisely why legendary speculator Doug Casey and his team released an urgent new report titled Doug Casey’s Top 7 Predictions.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 19:50

• Beijing Creates New Securities "Regulator" To Fight Fraud, Reassure Investors
  Beijing Creates New Securities “Regulator” To Fight Fraud, Reassure Investors

  With China’s bankrupt real-estate behemoth Evergrande finally on the verge of its “Lehman” moment, President Xi and the Politburo’s campaign to realign the Chinese economy with their “common prosperity” values has finally arrived at a reform of Chinese financial markets – which the CCP hopes will soon be booming with more domestic IPOs as foreign offerings have now been effectively banned during the crackdown.

  According to Reuters, “China has set up a cross-agency team, led by the country’s securties watchdog, to coordinate crackdown efforts against illegal acticities in capital markets.”

  

  The China Securities Regulatory Commission said on Thursday it recently led its first meeting with representatives from the other agencies as well as people from Beijing’s propaganda department, supreme court, supreme procuratorate, police, ministry of justice and ministry of finance.

  The notion of Beijing tightening “oversight” of its financial markets is redolent of the spring and summer of 2015, when the government threatened to arrest short sellers and leaned on major securities firms to help out the official TTP with arresting a selloff in Chinese markets.

  But according to Reuters, the focus of the new multi-party regulatory commission will be to ferret out “misbehavior” like securities fraud, book cooking, market-manipulation and insider trading with a “zero tolerance” ‘approach.

  However, shortsellers might want to start thinking about the point at which selling Chinese stocks short becomes “manipulation” in the eyes of the authorities, especially as shares of major Chinese developers are getting hammered in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

  Additionally, the team will “promote better coodination between the central and local governments,” as well as between varous Chinese regions, to better regulate its domestic capital markets.

  Given Beijing’s hopes of building up its domestic capital markets (a policy President Xi has decided to impose by force), it’s not surprising that they’re beefing up “enforcement”, especially given Chinese companies’ reputation for fraud (think Luckin Coffee). Beijing has said it’s trying to channel more household savings into equities and bonds to “fund innovation and economic expansion” (even as the Evergrande debacle is creating mobs of angry home buyers and employees who lent money to Evergrande have been treated to a rude awakening).

  In fact, it’s this very reputation for misbehavior by Chinese companies listed in the US that has led Congress and the SEC to deliver an ultimatum: either submit to tighter auditing standards, or be forcibly de-listed.

  And looming over all of this is Evergrande, and the dismal prospect of contagion spreading across the Chinese economy and markets.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 19:30

• Pentagon Paid Defense Contractors At Least $4.4 Trillion Since 9/11
  Pentagon Paid Defense Contractors At Least $4.4 Trillion Since 9/11

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com, 

  Brown University’s Costs of War Project released a new report Monday detailing post-9/11 spending by the Pentagon. The study found that of the over $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since the start of the war in Afghanistan, one-third to one-half went to private military contractors.

  The report, authored by William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, said $4.4 trillion of the total spending went towards weapons procurement and research and development, a category that directly benefits corporate military contractors. Private contractors are also paid through other funds, like operations and maintenance, but those numbers are harder to determine.

  

  Out of the $4.4 trillion, the top five US weapons makers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman — received $2.2 trillion, almost half.

  To put these huge numbers into perspective, the report pointed out that in the 2020 fiscal year, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, compared to the combined $44 billion budget for the State Department and USAID that same year.

  Besides getting paid for weapons and research, US corporations profit from private contractors that are deployed to warzones. The most notorious private security contractor previously employed by the Pentagon is Blackwater, the mercenary group whose employees massacred 17 people in Iraq’s Nisour Square back in 2007.

  Besides armed mercenaries, the Pentagon employed private contractors for just about every task in US warzones. Demonstrating the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors, at the end of the Trump administration, only 2,500 US troops were left in Afghanistan, but over 18,000 Pentagon contractors were still in the country.

  Ranking of the top 20 US Department of Defense contractors in fiscal year 2019, by contract value (in billion of US dollars)…

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  The report explained how China is the new justification for military spending. “The most likely impact of the shift towards China will be to further tighten the grip of major weapons makers like Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Raytheon Technologies on the Pentagon budget,” the report reads.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 19:10

• Gangs Of LA Sheriff's Deputies Are Running Amok, Bullying Other Cops
  Gangs Of LA Sheriff’s Deputies Are Running Amok, Bullying Other Cops

  The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is a massive law enforcement agency – it’s responsible for policing 153 unincorporated communities and 42 cities across a sizable patch of southern LA County – but it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as its neighboring agency, the LAPD, which patrols the City of Los Angeles. Unfortunately for the criminals who wind up in the agency’s crosshairs, this lower profile has helped a culture of gang-like fraternities to flourish across the organization that officially are referred to as “secret cliques” or “subgroups”, but in reality, they’re just gangs.

  You know how some people say the police are just the biggest gang? Well, in this case, that’s not too far from the truth. According to a recently released report from the RAND Corporation, the county government has singled out at least four gangs with names like “the Banditos” and “the Executioners”.

  

  Of the roughly 10,000 sworn personnel in the LASD, roughly one-sixth could be members of these gangs (though the actual figure is probably higher given the source). The “subgroups” have pervasive initiation rituals, tattoos, hand signs. Oftentimes, new members are required to violently assault people in custody. Since 1990, the county has paid out nearly $55MM in “subgroup related judgments” including $21MM in the last decade alone.

  Still, it’s important to take the complaints with a grain of salt, as RAND even notes in its report that most of the “sub groups” are merely drinking organizations.

  In a comment that appears to come from a fellow deputy, the individual says that if these organizations don’t constitute criminal gangs, then they’re close to it.

  “I can’t say whether the Regulators or Vikings or Banditos are a criminal street gang, but they’re close to it,” said one survey respondent who identified obliquely as a “county stakeholder representative.” This person continued: “The reason you can’t answer that is that it’s never been investigated…The culture is so pervasive within the department. There are many people who are in places of management that may have been part of the same cliques, or precursors of them.”

  One group in particular has been singled out for its bad behavior.

  Some complained that the gangs are a threat to other deputies.

  The Banditos are a menace to their non-clique colleagues – the report describes “alleged workplace harassment, incivility, intimidation, and retaliation, leading to ‘brawls in the parking lot.'”

  Almost as troubling, the RAND report claims the Banditos have used violence against inmates in LASD custody as an initiation rite, requiring initiate deputies to use “unnecessary force” before they can receive the clique’s tattoo — a skeleton in a Sombrero holding a revolver.

  “So you have a kid who wants to be accepted, they would ask are you ready to get your ink? And that meant you had to get into a use-of-force and send an inmate to the hospital, sometimes by breaking the orbital bone.”

  Oftentimes, supervisors will cover for the deputies when it comes to documenting the use of force allegations.

  Sheriff Villanueva has claimed to have cleaned house, but the RAND report contradicts these claims.

  Members of the LA County board of supervisors responded to the report with the usual platitudes, and hollow commitments to end the “stranglehold” of the LASD’s gangs. Who knows? Maybe this time will be different?

  Read the full report below:

  Rand Rra616 1 by Joseph Adinolfi Jr. on Scribd

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 18:50

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• Emerging Market Policy Makers Scramble To Tame Soaring Food Inflation As Unrest Looms
  Emerging Market Policy Makers Scramble To Tame Soaring Food Inflation As Unrest Looms

  SocGen’s market skeptic Albert Edwards pointed out last year why he started to panic about soaring food prices and how it may cause social unrest in emerging market economies. In July, Bloomberg acknowledged the same phenomenon, and now they point out politicians are searching for policies to neuter the effect of surging costs to thwart unrest. 

  Pandemic-driven hunger is sweeping the world as global food prices jumped 33% in August from a year ago. According to United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data, vegetable oil, grains, and meat prices are surging. Extreme weather, record-high shipping costs, soaring fertilizer costs, labor shortages, and port congestion are also aiding in increasing prices. 

  

  As a reminder to readers, emerging markets are more vulnerable to food insecurity since working poor spend a far greater share of their income on food than those in the developed world. This makes it easier for large price swings to cause political pressure on elected officials to tame inflation.

  Politicians have one job and one job only: get re-elected. So amid a period of food inflation, it doesn’t come as a surprise that elected officials in India, Turkey, Europe, and other at-risk countries are requesting food wholesalers to slash prices and tweak trade rules to mitigate the impact on consumers. 

  

  “Governments can intervene and commit to supporting lower consumer prices for a while,” said Cullen Hendrix, non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank.

  “But they can’t do it indefinitely.”

  Bloomberg must have read the script from Edwards’ warning last year. They said, “food inflation spurred more than two dozen riots across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, contributing to the Arab Spring uprisings ten years ago.” Already, there have been riots in Cuba and South Africa, areas that have extreme wealth inequality and soaring food inflation. 

  

  Alastair Smith, senior teaching fellow in global sustainable development at Warwick University in the U.K., said, “food is more expensive today than it has been for the vast majority of modern recorded history,” and that is a recipe for unrest. 

  Bloomberg lists some countries where politicians are preemptively adjusting policy to alleviate consumers:  

  • Tunisia: Crisis Management

  The ground zero for the Arab Spring protests, Tunisia has raw memories when it comes to food and politics. Just a few days after dismissing the government and suspending parliament in July, President Kais Saied urged producers and retailers to slash prices of selected produce.

  Red meat prices fell by about 10% almost instantly, with the nation’s main business lobby group Utica announcing unspecified cuts in prices for staples ranging from wheat flour, meat, to dairy, coffee and soft drinks. Fruit prices fell by as much as 20%, Tunisian media reported. Still, consumer prices overall rose at an annual rate of 6.2% in August.

  Then there’s the prospect of subsidy cuts. A debate is raging about a long-planned shift to focus spending on the neediest citizens as Tunisia tries to secure a new financing program from the International Monetary Fund. That will likely lead to reduced support for items likes flour and sugar as well as electricity for a substantial number of households.

  North African neighbors are also looking at subsidy cuts to help fix public finances. In Egypt, President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi called for a rise in bread prices. Algerian bakers have already hiked prices of subsidized bread in an act of defiance amid a shortage of wheat or shrunk the size of loaves. In Morocco, authorities announced in July a plan that will see cuts to subsidies on sugar and low-cost wheat flour starting next year, subject to the approval of parliament.

  • Romania: Rethinking Trade

  The cost of bread is not just political for grain-importing countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Romania is Europe’s top exporter this season, and yet prices have soared at a double-digit pace. Overall inflation is set to be the fastest in eight years in 2021.

  The former eastern bloc country also has a dark history when it comes to feeding its population. Severe shortages were a hallmark of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu before he was overthrown and executed in 1989.

  Prime Minister Florin Citu’s government wants to cut dependence on imported processed food products as a way to reduce costs and narrow the trade deficit. He is already under pressure after the collapse of his coalition and faced a backlash over his answer to a question about the cost of a loaf of bread. “I don’t eat bread,” he answered.

  Romania earmarked 760 million euros ($896 million) for investment in farm storage and processing, Agriculture Minister Adrian Oros said. “We’re one of the biggest exporters of cereals and yet we import frozen bread products,” he said. As of this month, the government is waiting for farmers to submit eligible projects to tap the money over the next two years. However, while Romania’s agricultural potential is one of the biggest in Europe, it so far failed to use EU money to improve its local production.

  • India: Cutting Duties

  With one of the largest malnourished populations, India is also dispersing more aid. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is distributing 20.4 million tons of free rice and wheat, spending 672.7 billion rupees ($9.1 billion) on extra grains subsidies to reach potentially more than 800 million people.

  The country has also implemented trade measures to shield consumers from spikes in global prices. The government has cut duties on palm, soybean and sunflower oils as well as lentils.

  India isn’t the only nation to use trade to intervene in the food market. War-torn Syria has tightened imports of items ranging from cheese to cashew nuts to safeguard its dwindling foreign currency reserves for wheat purchases. Argentina and Bolivia have curbed exports of beef to keep prices at home in check, as has drought-hit Kazakhstan, which forbade exports of oat, rye and forage and added quotas for forage wheat.

  • Turkey: Market Action

  In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s popularity has slumped because of the economy and cost of living. Food inflation accelerated for a fourth month in August, to 29%.

  The government is making another attempt to control prices through threats of fines for businesses selling at elevated prices to an investigation into higher costs. Trade ministry officials are ordered to inspect allegations of excessive price increases in food products at wholesale markets in major Turkish cities, including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

  Erdogan’s government is also working on some legislative changes to curb food inflation. From October, fresh fruit and vegetables that may have been wasted on farms will be brought to an online market, and an early weather warning system will be put in place to spot potential supply shocks. There’s also the prospect of tax incentives and more trade measures. Turkey removed import duties on grains and lentils on Sept. 8.

  • Russia: Losing Battle

  The world’s top grains exporter shows the limitation of adjusting trade rules to curb prices. Russia introduced a wheat export tax in February, but it’s also paying with a loss of market share. The nation’s wheat is no longer as competitive, derailing exports to Egypt, one of its biggest customers.

  At home, the measures haven’t helped curb food inflation, either. It’s hovering at a five-year high. Domestic wheat prices jumped in August to levels typically not seen this time of year as farmers and traders were reluctant to sell.

  If food inflation remains persistent and not “transitory,” measures to tame inflation may become exhausted, and unrest could follow. Perhaps, what happened in Cuba and South Africa is a taste for what’s to come. 
   

   

   

   

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 02:45

• A Pandemic Of Authoritarianism…
  A Pandemic Of Authoritarianism…

  Authored by Alastair Crooke via The Strategicd Culture Foundation,

  What we see is an attempt to impose an idealised technical managerialism onto a complex, rather than pursue real solutions to problems…

  

  Change happens quickly and often unpredictably.

  Yet the unpredictable part seemingly is all about physics.

  Imagine, dropping one grain of sand after another onto a table. A pile soon develops. Eventually, just one grain starts an avalanche. Most of the time, it’s a small one. But sometimes the pile just slides and disintegrates entirely.

  Well, in 1987, three physicists began to play the sand pile game in their lab, seeking an answer to what it is that triggers the typical avalanche? After a huge number of tests, they found there is no typical number of grains that does it.

  To find out why such unpredictability should show up in their sand pile game, the physicists next coloured it according to its steepness. Where it was relatively flat and stable, they coloured it green; where steep and, in avalanche terms, ‘ready to go’, they coloured it red.

  They found that at the outset, the pile looked mostly green, but that, as the pile grew, the green became infiltrated with ever more red. With more grains, the scattering of red danger fingers grew until a dense skeleton of red instability ran through the pile. Here then was a clue to its peculiar behaviour: a grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots.

  

  Afghanistan was intended to be a showcase for western technical managerialism – an empirical petri-dish in which to prove the historical inevitability of technocracy. Its doctrine held that free markets somehow obviated the need for politics; that big data and ‘expert’ managerialism in markets (in markets extended to ‘everything’, that is), were the crux to re-setting the world in a better way (i.e. the Build Back Better meme). It was, in a word, postulated on data predictability.

  Existential political and social questions in this doctrine however, were to be nuanced through ‘Third Wayism’ (i.e. left unsolved – or fudged with easy answers, and easy money).

  Or … ‘regulated’ into compliance. The answer to social problematics was Cloud Computing of mass data. With enough input on past human choices, it is believed that experts can precisely predict human behaviour, which then can be ‘nudged’ in the direction that our élites wish it to go. Nudge behavioural psychology, of course, is about control – not active thinking.

  Yet unpredictably, this ‘world class’ managerial team in Kabul, so consumed by the notion of technocracy and mass data management, produced a project so rotten and corrupt (gaming the system) that it collapsed in eleven days.

  Many Americans and Europeans have barely recovered from the shock, and remain in denial.

  So, back to the sand pile: When the red spots come to riddle the sand pile, the consequences of the next grain become fiendishly unpredictable, the physicists discovered. It might trigger only a few tumblings, or it might instead set off a cataclysmic chain reaction involving millions. The sand pile seemed to have configured itself into a hypersensitive and peculiarly unstable condition, in which the next falling grain could trigger a response of any size whatsoever.

  Physics is saying we have systemic instability at a certain point of accumulation. Our technocrats deny it, and therefore will be unable to foresee even such a possibility. Their creed is the model.

  There are many subtleties and twists in the story, but the basic message is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem to explain why our highly complex world, at large, seems so susceptible to unpredictable upheavals. So much for AI and big data’s predictions – In the end, it was the landing of the Taliban ‘red grain’ that triggered an unpredicted, lightning cascade.

  The question must be: Will this trigger any chain reaction?

  Maybe not, yet there are several other ‘fingers of instability’ in the western sand pile which should be coloured ‘grain red’, and – judged in avalanche terms – may be poised to cascade.

  One such is the ‘vaccination’ (or gene therapy): The mRNA ‘vaccine’ doesn’t stop infection, nor does it stop the spread of the virus. A fully vaccinated person can catch the virus and spread it to others. There’s new evidence that double-vaxxed individuals build up huge viral loads in their noses and sinuses, causing them to become super-spreaders, and infect others. The unvaccinated therefore, have as much to fear in terms of catching the disease from the vaccinated as the other way around.

  Israel is providing a useful case study in the effectiveness – or lack thereof – of vaccines. Israel is one of the most heavily vaxxed countries in the world, with nearly 80% of the population fully vaccinated and almost 100% of the elderly. But now Israel is experiencing a massive increase in infections (and of serious cases), mainly among the fully vaxxed.

  There are ample reasons not to receive countless millions of mRNA spike-proteins into one’s circulatory system – including being recovered from Covid, and having stronger antibody protection than the vaccinated. Yet, the latter are being treated as lepers. And governments, like that of PM Draghi in Italy, continue trying to impose ever stringent vaccine mandates and other forms of authoritarian control. ‘Pandemic authoritarianism’ will do nothing to slow the spread of the disease. It may even adversely repercuss – as it has in Israel – to create a graver problem. What it will do however, is to tear an already tense society apart – particularly when set against the background of deteriorating economies.

  It is all reminiscent of the managerialist control efforts of an earlier ‘war’ (the equally failed) Great War On Terror, launched in the wake of 9/11, when a different, yet supposedly, ‘morally justified’ form of mass public control and surveillance was instituted – with the wider, awkward facts of counter-terrorism policy simply edited out from an already anxiety-ridden and de-sensitised audience.

  Today, there is an ongoing debate about whether we are going to ‘beat’ Covid in the way the general public conceives of these things. Scientists – not the ones you hear most from – always made clear that vaccines would not stop Covid in its tracks if, like other similar such viruses, the latter mutated into something more dangerous, and transmissible.

  The latter would constitute a variant which vaccination might actually accelerate, in a process known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) (on which the jury is still out). There is a popular misconception that – at some critical threshold of vaccination – Covid just ‘goes away’. The science however, (Draghi aside) suggests that a happy outcome arguably will only happen were new variants to become milder, like a ‘flu.

  In Afghanistan, where a ‘managerialist’ Pentagon had for 20 years, until the very eleventh hour, one General after another, repeating the mantra lie that all was fine: Plenty of ‘progress’ evident in Afghanistan. ‘Progress’ always was there – until it wasn’t. Until the state’s collapse. It was in essence a defeat driven by data addiction, at the expense of the ‘real’.

  So, in this other ‘field’ of Covid, we find the similar approach: Vaccine ‘progress’ will be achieved, if not with two, then three, and now four shots (in Israel) – until it isn’t. And with that, another ‘grain’ will settle on a red finger of instability.

  This issue is doubly pertinent, because just as Covid is not ‘sorted’, neither is the economy.  Anyone with a smattering of economics, might have also seen in advance that QE would never achieve its key goals. It is the quintessence of high tech (financial) managerialism. Central banks may keep saying they have achieved their goals (like the Generals calling ‘progress’ in Afghanistan), but the slump in productivity and the rise in inflation, and the shift to a reductive gig economy, all make it abundantly clear this is wishful thinking. It seems, we are now told that only trillion-dollar fiscal spends can halt the rot … Or, like vaccines, potentially with more and more shots, though possible ADE makes infections increase. Again, real solutions are edited out.

  The Telegraph’s International Business Editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, sees another red-grain finger of instability running through the sand pile:

  “Germany’s long-simmering anger with the European Central Bank (ECB) is again coming to the boil. It is hard to justify perennial [QE] and negative rates when German inflation is near 4pc – and rising. Political realities are forcing the ECB … to prepare for bond tapering sooner than it wants … in order to head off a bust-up with Europe’s anchor power [Germany].

  “[This means] it will have to start pulling away the shield that has protected the high-debt Club Med states from market forces for almost seven years, and that has conveniently covered their entire borrowing requirements under the cloak of “monetary policy”. It is this monetary tightening in conjunction with parallel moves by the U.S. Federal Reserve that poses the chief risk to overheated global asset markets, not the virus’ Delta variant.

  What is different this time [from past German grumblings], is that inflation can be felt everywhere – gefühlte Inflation – and parts of the German economy are patently overheating … German irritation should not be underestimated: The German Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) this week published an extraordinary paper, more or less alleging that ECB governors from the high-debt states are exploiting QE in order to bail out their own insolvent governments – and doing so in violation of EU treaty law”.

  Events are nearing the point where Germany must either challenge this process, or accept that it has lost control of the Euro, and together with other northern ‘frugal’ Euro-states, pull out.

  The ramifications deriving from the paradigmatic blow given by the Taliban to the Western technocratic vision; to Europe at its sudden discovery that America does not have Europe’s back; to inflation felt everywhere; to the QE impasse (that interest rates above 2% would kill the western economy); to geopolitical rejection of the western liberal model – arguably all these run through what happens next with Covid, and the mass resort to the imposition of ‘virtuous’ authoritarianism.

  There is, in the end, nothing more than one common single thread running through all these fingers of instability: It is the attempt to impose an idealised technical managerialism onto a complex, critical-state reality, rather than pursue real solutions to problems – and the resort to behavioural control psychology to conceal the rot beneath, and compel compliance.

  So, we are now poised at a critical state of what Paul McCulley calls ‘stable disequilibrium’ – where all actors work to maximize their personal outcome, and reduce their exposure to fingers of instability. But the longer the game runs, says McCulley, the more likely it is to end in a violent avalanche, as the fingers of instability have more time to build, and, eventually, the state of stable disequilibrium goes critical.

  Which finger goes first? Unpredictability again – any grain falling on a red spot can, by domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red spots.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 09/16/2021 – 02:00

• Brandon Smith: How States And Communities Can Fight Back Against Biden's COVID Tyranny
  Brandon Smith: How States And Communities Can Fight Back Against Biden’s COVID Tyranny

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  A war is coming. I have heard it argued that this war must be avoided; that it is “exactly what the establishment wants.” I disagree. I think globalists like those at the World Economic Forum certainly want enough chaos to provide cover for the implementation of their global “Reset” agenda, but they don’t want a full blown rebellion. They only want events in which the outcome is controllable or predictable – They do not want a massive organized resistance that might surprise them.

  

  Ultimately it doesn’t matter because the war is already at our doorstep. A person has two choices: Fight or be enslaved. There is no third option. There is no walking away. There is no hiding from it and there is no passive solution to it.

  Joe Biden’s recent declaration of a federal level nationwide vaccine mandate has all but ensured that conflict is inevitable. Why?  Because it is the first major step towards a two-tier society in which the unvaxxed are cut out of the economy. The next step? Forced vaccinations under threat of fines and imprisonment, the threat of confiscation of one’s children, or vaccination at the barrel of a gun. Needless to say, this was not at all surprising to me. In December of last year I published an article titled ‘If You Thought 2020 Was Bad, Watch What Happens In 2021’, stating that:

  “There will then be a major push to require medical passports proving a person is not infected to enter into any public place. This means submission to 24/7 contact tracing or getting a new vaccine whenever ordered to. Basically, your life will be under the total control of state or federal governments if you want to have any semblance of returning to your normal life…..New mutations of COVID-19 will be conveniently found every year from now on, meaning the public will have to get new vaccinations constantly, and medical tyranny will never go away unless people take an aggressive stand.”

  I have also mentioned often in the past that Biden WOULD institute federal level vaccines mandates and possibly even Level 4 lockdowns. We are not to the point yet of lockdowns by executive order, but the Biden Administration is trying to dive headlong into the control agenda with an executive order stating that all businesses in the US with 100 employees or more must require those employees to provide proof of vaccination or demand employees show a negative covid test weekly (which will be impossible for most people). In other words, the Orwellian rise of vaccine passports has officially begun in the US.

  Not only was Biden’s announcement an utter violation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it was also condescending and vitriolic towards Americans who refuse to become guinea pigs for the experimental and untested vaccines. Biden suggested that the establishment “Has been patient, but their patience is wearing thin.”

  I have to say, Biden is in for a shock if he thinks we care.

  I can’t cover every single lie and logical fallacy in Biden’s speech because that is not the purpose of this article. I can only once again point out some very basic logical conclusions and pieces of scientific evidence which debunk most of Biden’s nonsensical blather. Since he seems to be so interested in why we are “hesitant”, let’s go through this ONE MORE TIME, shall we…

  1) The median death rate of covid according to almost every single medical study and every official government tally remains at 0.26% of the infected. Given that around 40% of all covid deaths happen among people in nursing homes with preexisting conditions, it is likely that the actual death rate is much lower. But let’s just say that it is in fact 0.26% – Why is there any need to impose draconian medical controls over a virus that 99.7% of people will easily survive? Why not create a support fund for the 0.26% of people that are truly at risk so they can stay home while the rest of us get on with regular life?

  2) Throughout the course of the pandemic in the US the largest percentage of hospital ICU beds that have been occupied by covid patients is 17%. That is the PEAK of covid in the ICUs. For the past few months the percentage has been closer to an average of 8% or less. This is according to the government’s own stats, which the CDC now buries instead of posting openly for easy viewing by the public. So, when the corporate media or Biden claims that the ICUs are “overwhelmed” by covid patients, this is a lie

  A new nationwide study of electronic hospital records on covid patients also shows nearly half of covid “hospitalizations” are actually people that are asymptomatic, not deathly sick people as the media often portrays.

  3) The experimental mRNA covid vaccines have NO long term testing to prove their safety over the long term. At least none that has ever been released to the public. The average vaccine is tested for 10-15 years before it is approved and released for use in humans. The covid vaccines were rolled out in mere months. Again, there is NO PROOF whatsoever that the covid vaccines are safe in the long term, and there are already a number of examples of lack of safety in the short term. Why would we trust an experimental protein spike vax that has nowhere near the same testing history as the majority of other normal vaccines?

  4) Multiple studies in nations with high rates of vaccination, including a recent study from Israel, prove that there is no such thing as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” In fact, 60% of infection cases in Israel are actually fully vaccinated people. Furthermore, Israel has found that vaccinated people are 13-27 times more likely to get infected than people with natural immunity, and they are 8 times more likely to end up in ICU.

  These findings reinforce data released a month ago out of Massachusetts, where 5100 covid infections were fully vaccinated people and 80 of them died. In other words, the vaccines don’t work so great, especially when compared to natural immunity.

  5) Data from the Public Health England and the NHS shows that the vaccinated and unvaccinated have almost identical rate of infectiousness. In other words, a vaccinated person is almost as likely to give you covid as an unvaxxed person.

  Now, let’s present some rational questions in the face of this irrational covid circus of fear:

  If the experimental vaccines actually work, then how are unvaccinated people a threat to vaccinated people and why should unvaccinated people be forced to take the jab?

  If the vaccines don’t work, then, again, why should ANYONE be forced to take an untested and unreliable vax?

  Slow-Joe argues that the vaccinations are “safe and effective” against covid, but only seconds later in the same breath he claims that “unvaxxed people are a threat to vaccinated people.” He promotes the lie that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, then says the vaccinated are in danger. Even a child could pick up on the inherent contradictions in Biden’s claims.

  As always, the issue of “mutations” is brought up in defense of 100% vaccination campaigns. But if “mutations” are the concern, then why isn’t the government addressing the fact that a vaccinated population is just as likely if not more likely to create mutant variants of a virus when compared to unvaccinated people? Why are the unvaxxed being singled out as the supposed menace to society?

  The biggest question is – Why should anyone submit to covid mandates at all? Mandates are not laws, they are color of law restrictions without legal merit. The bottom line? Unconstitutional orders are not to be followed. This leads us to the state and local strategies for fighting back against the federal passport mandates. Let’s get into it:

  Simply Ignore The Mandates And Carry On With Life As Normal

  How does Biden plan to enforce these mandates on businesses? If they refuse to go along to get along, what can he do about it? Who would he send to threaten or punish these businesses? Who would be dumb enough to follow that order? Does he plan to send the IRS, the FBI, the Health Department? Someone has to do it, right? And what happens when a business is threatened and a crowd of conservatives in the community come to its defense? What happens when local and state law enforcement get in the way of federal agencies? What is Biden going to do about that? Answer – Nothing, at least not anything direct.

  The Indirect Method Works Both Ways

  If Biden is confronted with solid resistance to the passports in communities and states, there is really only one path he has left, which is indirect pressure through economic penalties. Biden WILL attempt to force states to comply by cutting of federal funds and tax dollars. This idea might terrify some people because there is a percentage of the population in every state that relies on federal EBT and other programs for their survival. However, the federal government can be punished in the same way just as easily by the states. Let me explain…

  Confiscate Federal Lands And Resources

  Any state that is cut off from its rightful share of tax dollars can easily claim domain over federal lands and the resources on them. It is the EPA restrictions on these lands that have been unfairly used to kill numerous industries across the country. With proper management, these resources can be used to revitalize state economies and offset any federal funds lost.

  Offer Businesses Federal Tax Exemptions If They Relocate

  Red states can also punish the federal government by stopping IRS tax collections within their borders and turning the tables on Biden. Numerous businesses would be itching to escape Biden’s high tax rates and would bring jobs and wealth into red states, leaving the conformist blue states in the dust.

  Boot Federal Agencies Out Of The State Or County

  Local law enforcement is refusing to enforce mandates in many places, which is a good start, but eventually sheriffs and communities may have to remove federal presence entirely in order to stop violations if civil liberties.

  Offer Safe Havens For Military Personnel That Go AWOL To Avoid Forced Vaccination

  A large percentage of soldiers say they will not comply with federal vax requirements and this is completely understandable given the evidence I just presented above. It would be to the benefit of red states to offer protection for soldiers that leave the military based on the principle of health autonomy. Perhaps they could even help in forming state militias…

  Reduce Restrictions On Medical Treatment Facilities – Start Vax Free Clinics

  30% to 40% of medical professional depending on the state say they will not take the experimental vax, and they are willing to lose their jobs in the process. Why not get these people with valuable medical skills to come to red states and counties and let them set up clinics outside of suffocating federal regulations? This may even reduce the prices on medical care in many cases.

  Form Trade Relationships With Other Free States

  Conservatives and constitutionalists need to organize and unify, and the best way to do this is to start with trade. It is likely that Biden will attempt to interfere with imports and the supply chain when it comes to red states, so they will need to stick together economically in order to prevent disruptions to the availability of goods. We need to rethink how states interact with each other and build more independent production and trade instead of relying on overseas suppliers. We will also need commodity backed banks with commodity backed currencies, because the buying power of the US dollar isn’t going to last much longer anyway.

  Unify For Defense

  If Biden and the globalists continue to push for medical tyranny in states and counties that do not want it, there will eventually be calls for secession. There will also be attempts by blue states to restrict the travel of people from red states using covid passport checkpoints. We all know this is coming. All conservative counties should be organizing localized security through public militias, and state governments should be thinking along these lines as well. If there’s one thing authoritarians HATE more than anything else it is suffering the existence of free neighbors. They will try to stop us from being free, and we must be ready to answer their violence with our own.

  Finally, I would like to speak to Joe Biden directly, since Joe was so keen on personally addressing us:

  Joe, let me clarify this in the simplest terms possible so that you can grasp it – You are not important. You are not a lawmaker and you are not a ruler, you are an employee of the American people, that is all your are supposed to be. And though you may wish to be a dictator, that’s not going to happen. We will not allow it. I realize that you are a puppet and that your globalist handlers make most of your decisions and write most of your statements for you, so you can pass this message on to them as well: WE WILL NOT COMPLY. It’s not going to happen. Get used to the idea.

  We are peaceful people and always have been. Our tolerance of your trespasses thus far is proof of that. But do not mistake our peacefulness as weakness. If you keep coming after us, you will regret it. We will teach you an important lesson in humility; a lesson you and your elitist friends sorely need and will not enjoy. This is a promise.

  *  *  *

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

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 23:40

• These Will Be The 20 Fastest Growing Jobs In The Next Decade
  These Will Be The 20 Fastest Growing Jobs In The Next Decade

  The employment landscape is constantly shifting. While agricultural jobs played a big role in the 19th century, Visual Capitalist’s Jenna Ross points out that a large portion of U.S. jobs today are in administration, sales, or transportation. So how can job seekers identify the fastest growing jobs of the future?

  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects there will be 11.9 million new jobs created from 2020 to 2030, an overall growth rate of 7.7%. However, some jobs have a growth rate that far exceeds this level. In this graphic, we use BLS data to show the fastest growing jobs—and fastest declining jobs—and how much they each pay.

  

  The Top 20 Fastest Growing Jobs

  We used the dataset that excludes occupations with above average cyclical recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, jobs such as motion picture projectionists, ticket takers, and restaurant cooks were removed. Once these exclusions were made, the resulting list reflects long-term structural growth.

  Here are the fastest growing jobs from 2020 to 2030, along with the number of jobs that will be created and the median pay for the position.

  

  Wind turbine service technicians have the fastest growth rate, with solar photovoltaic (solar panel) installers taking the third slot. The rapid growth is driven by demand for renewable energy. However, because these are relatively small occupations, the two roles will account for about 11,000 new jobs collectively.

  Nine of the top 20 fastest growing jobs are in healthcare or related fields, as the baby boomer population ages and chronic conditions are on the rise. Home health and personal care aides, who assist with routine healthcare tasks such as bathing and feeding, will account for over one million new jobs in the next decade. This will be almost 10% of all new jobs created between 2020 and 2030. Unfortunately, these workers are the lowest paid on the list.

  Computer and math-related jobs are also expected to see high growth. The BLS expects strong demand for IT security and software development, partly because of the increase in people that are working from home.

  The Top 20 Fastest Declining Jobs

  Structural changes in the economy will cause some jobs to decline quite quickly. Here are the top 20 jobs where employment is expected to decline the fastest over the next decade.

  

  Eight of the top 20 declining jobs are in office and administrative support. This could be cause for concern, given this category currently makes up almost 13% of employment in the U.S.—the largest of any major category. Jobs involved in the production of goods and services, as well as sales jobs, are also seeing declines.

  In all cases, automation is likely the biggest culprit. For example, software that automatically converts audio to text will reduce the need for typists.

  While the fastest declining jobs typically fall within the lower salary range, there is one outlier. Nuclear power reactor operators, who earn a salary of over $100,000, will see employment decline at a steep rate of -33%. No new nuclear plants have opened since the 1990s, and nuclear power faces steep competition from renewable energy sources.

  Warning: Education Required

  As the composition of employment shifts, it eliminates some jobs and creates others. For instance, while production jobs are declining, new opportunities exist for “computer numerically controlled tool programmers.” These workers develop programs to control the automated equipment that processes materials.

  However, while many of the fastest growing jobs are higher paying, they typically also require advanced education.

  

  Seventeen of the top 20 fastest growing jobs have a median salary higher than $41,950, which is the median salary for all jobs in total. Most also require post-secondary schooling. These opportunities are replacing jobs that only required a high school diploma.

  With tuition costs soaring relative to inflation, this could create challenges for displaced workers or young people entering the workforce.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 23:20

• FDA Says Authorized COVID-19 Vaccines Still Effective, Boosters May Not Be Needed
  FDA Says Authorized COVID-19 Vaccines Still Effective, Boosters May Not Be Needed

  Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

  The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday said that agency-authorized COVID-19 vaccines currently provide protection against death and severe disease and may not require additional boosters, coming after vaccine maker Pfizer submitted data saying that its vaccine’s efficacy is eroding over time.

  In findings released online, the FDA analyzed data submitted by Pfizer as part of their request to authorize a booster shot, or a third dose, of the vaccine to individuals aged 16 and older in the United States.

  The agency did not make a definitive statement on whether to support booster shots at this time, adding that regulators have not reviewed the available data.

  “There are many potentially relevant studies, but FDA has not independently reviewed or verified the underlying data or their conclusions,” the FDA wrote (pdf) in a 23-page document published online.

  “Some of these studies, including data from the vaccination program in Israel, will be summarized during the September 17, 2021 [Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee] meeting.”

  Some studies, they said, have indeed shown the Pfizer mRNA vaccine has waning efficacy against the Delta variant or symptomatic infection. However, other studies have not, the FDA said.

  “Overall, data indicate that currently U.S.-licensed or authorized COVID-19 vaccines still afford protection against severe COVID-19 disease and death in the United States,” FDA researchers wrote.

  

  Biden administration officials late last month said in a news conference that they are aiming for a Sept. 20 rollout for boosters, although they cautioned that their plan is contingent on whether the doses are approved by the FDA. A panel of outside observers will review the FDA’s report on Friday and will analyze the Pfizer analysis and other information to determine whether boosters are needed for the general population.

  If the panel recommends boosters, the FDA could distribute the doses within a few days.

  In August, the FDA fully approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for people aged 16 and older. Vaccines made by Moderna, which uses mRNA technology like Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson are still being distributed under the agency’s emergency use authorization.

  During its presentation to the FDA, which was uploaded on the agency’s website, Pfizer argued that data from the United States and Israel suggests its mRNA vaccine efficacy is dropping over time, warranting the need for boosters.

  “Real-world data from Israel and the United States suggest that rates of breakthrough infections are rising faster in individuals who were vaccinated earlier in the vaccination campaigns compared to those who have been vaccinated more recently,” Pfizer said.

  For its conclusion, the German-based pharmaceutical giant cited a study from healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente that suggested protection against COVID-19 infection dropped from 88 percent in the first month of getting the second dose to 47 percent after five months of inoculation.

  Earlier this week, a study that included two departing FDA officials said they do not recommend booster shots and said that possible side effects from them could outweigh the benefits.

  “Even if boosting were eventually shown to decrease the medium-term risk of serious disease, current vaccine supplies could save more lives if used in previously unvaccinated populations,” the authors wrote.

  Pfizer has not responded yet to a request for comment.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 23:01

• Tesla Repurposes Native American Casino To Build Showroom, Skirt New Mexico Auto Sales Laws
  Tesla Repurposes Native American Casino To Build Showroom, Skirt New Mexico Auto Sales Laws

  Nothing says ESG investing and furthering humanitarian causes more than exploiting Native American land to open up a car showroom and duck local regulations. Just ask Tesla.

  The automaker reportedly has opened a sales, service, and delivery center on Native American land in New Mexico in order to get around legislation that bars automakers from selling vehicles directly to consumers, according to a new report from Insider. 

  Nambé Pueblo in Santa Fe County is exempt from the law and, as a result, consumers can test Teslas on-site and owners can bring their vehicles there for service. New Mexico has 1,846 registered Teslas, with 361 in Santa Fe County, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican. 

  

  It is the first Tesla delivery and service center in the state. Prior to it opening, residents of Santa Fe would have to take their vehicles to El Paso, Texas, which is about 300 miles away. 

  Tesla repurposed a defunct casino to open the center. 

  “We are proud to be the first tribe to have Tesla on Indian lands,” Phillip Perez, the governor of Nambé Pueblo, said. He continued: “It was a cooperative effort between Tesla and the pueblo. It didn’t take long to come to terms. We are doing our part to protect Mother Earth,” the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.  

  A New Mexico-based Tesla owners club has been clamoring for a sales and service center in the state since 2015.

  The center “changes everything for owners” and is a “gigantic thing for New Mexico,” Brian Dear, President of the club, said. He continued: “The comparison up until now is to get your car fixed, you had to think of hotel reservations and possibly a multiday stay. You didn’t get a reservation for Thursday or Friday because they may not get to your car and then you would have to stay into the next week.”

  Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino, D-Albuquerque, was critical of the current laws in place prohibiting direct sales. He told the SFNM: “These are licenses to print money. If you have the Ford dealership in Santa Fe or Albuquerque or Las Cruces, you’re guaranteed to have a nice living because [customers] have to come to you; they can’t go anywhere else. It’s not exactly a monopoly because there could be two dealerships in one community, but they limit the franchises so that they maintain highly profitable relationships with their franchisors.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 22:40

• Evergrande Suspends Trading In All Bonds
  Evergrande Suspends Trading In All Bonds

  Earlier today we pointed out that in what can (obviously) only be a remarkable coincidence, China’s largest, and most systematically important real estate developer, China Evergrande (and its $300+ billion in debt), collapsed on the 13th anniversary of Lehman’s bankruptcy filing, when Beijing told Evergrande’s creditor banks that the insolvent company, which recently hired Houlihan Lokey as bankruptcy advisor, would not pay interest on its debt next week, nor would it repay principal, in effect blessing the coming default.

  And yet there was some trace of hope, because as Forte Securities trader Keith Temperton said “The Asian banks will get hit hard if there’s a default, but then there will be a 10-year recovery process. The market’s getting a hang of it. The way they’ve managed the news flow seems quite clever. They haven’t let a swathe of bad news at once” giving investors and creditors some hope that the money could still miraculously reappear.

  Not any more: in an exchange filing on Thursday, Evergrande’s main unit (onshore real estate) said that trading in all of its onshore bonds would be suspended on Sept 16 to ensure fair information disclosure following a downgrade to A from AA (which in China is viewed as the lowest investment grade rating) by China Chengxin International, to wit:

  In order to ensure fair information disclosure and protect the interests of investors, after the company’s application, all existing corporate bonds of Evergrande Real Estate will be suspended for one trading day from the opening of the market on September 16, 2021, and will be opened on September 17, 2021.

  Since the market resumes trading, the above-mentioned bond trading methods will be adjusted from the date of resumption of trading. Among them: (1) The trading methods of “15 Evergrande 03”, “19 Evergrande 01”, and “19 Evergrande 02” have been adjusted to only adopt quotation, inquiry and agreement trading methods since the date of resumption of trading. Shanghai Branch of Registration and Settlement Co., Ltd. provides settlement by transaction; (2) “20 Evergrande 01”, “20 Evergrande 02”, “20 Evergrande 03”, “20 Evergrande 04”, “20 Evergrande 05” The trading methods of “21 Evergrande 01” and “21 Evergrande 01” have been adjusted to only adopt the negotiated block trading method since the resumption of trading, and the original net price pricing method will be maintained.

  

  The press release ends with the hilarious “Investors are kindly requested to pay attention to investment risks.” Well… we sure can be certain they are paying attention now.

  It wasn’t clear why the company would need to suspend trading in all bonds for an entire day to “ensure” that everyone was aware that the company’s bonds were no longer rated as investment grade in China (they should be rated as default but we’ll cross that bridge in time) when just a simple press release would suffice.

  Instead, what the company did say is that the bonds would resume trading on Sept. 17, and the trading method for some of the securities will change to only allow block trades even as the previous pricing method will remain.

  Despite the company’s promise that its bonds will resume trading, we somehow doubt it and instead we expect that in the coming months, the frozen bonds will be equitized as part of China’s largest ever debt for equity exchange. Come to think of it, the rest of the market doesn’t believe it either with Evergrande stock plunging another 7% (Zeno’s paradox means the company can keep falling at double digits every day in perpetuity) and as of Thursday Evergrande’s only traded security was at the lowest price since Oct 2011, on its way to 0.

  

  Meanwhile, as the book on Evergrande’s story closes, the company’s imminent default and the sudden collapse in China’s property market which as we noted last night saw a 90% crash in land sales values in August…

  

  … have led to a dire outlook for the nation’s developers and their creditors. As Bloomberg’s Richard Frost writes, Country Garden, the nation’s largest developer by sales, plunged 16% in the past two days, while Gemdale slumped 12% as a  gauge of property shares in Shanghai tumbled almost 5% in the period, with valuations firmly below book value. Following the news, Guangzhou R&F Properties drops 10.8% to the lowest since Dec. 2008 while Greentown China -9.1%. At this point, one can safely call it a crisis.

  As contagion spread, risk is also hitting banks whose shares are suffering their fastest selloff in seven weeks. Furthermore, as discussed yesterday ahead of the coming Evergrande debt crisis, lenders in China are accepting the highest rates in four years to swap their dollars for yuan, a sign they may be preparing for what Mizuho calls a “liquidity squeeze in crisis mode.”

  

  The pain will only get worse. China’s government is unlikely to ease up on its tough curbs toward the property market given its current priorities of promoting common prosperity and deterring excessive risk-taking, according to Macquarie. The property sector will be a “main growth headwind” for next year, although policy makers may loosen restrictions to defend 5% GDP expansion, Macquarie analysts wrote in a Wednesday note.

  Adding to the pain, contagion concerns from Evergrande is making it more difficult for Chinese developers to refinance, despite a “critical” need to do so, according to Citigroup. Bond issuance is trickier onshore due to lower demand, and offshore due to increasing costs, they wrote in a Wednesday note. As we showed earlier this week, yields on China’s high-yield dollar have exploded rose to 13.7%, the highest since last year’s March market meltdown.

  

  Finally, always last to the party, the rating agencies chimed in, with Fitch saying that smaller banks exposed to Evergrande or other weaker developers may face “significant” increases in non-performing loans in the event of a default, while S&P downgraded Evergrande deeper into junk, saying the developer’s liquidity and funding access “are shrinking severely.”  

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 22:20

• Canada's Conservatives Are Using Soaring Inflation To Help Defeat Trudeau
  Canada’s Conservatives Are Using Soaring Inflation To Help Defeat Trudeau

  As Liberal PM Justin Trudeau sees his chances of winning another term during the upcoming snap election dwindle, his opponents, the Conservatives, have successfully used Canada’s runaway inflation as a cudgel to slam Trudeau and his Liberals for mismanaging the economy. They’re calling it “Liberal inflation”, and it looks like the term is sticking.

  

  According to Bloomberg, affordability has been one of the top issues ahead of the snap vote which is set for Sept. 20. Rising costs for housing, cars and gasoline have greatly benefited conservatives while accusing the incumbent Liberal government of stoking inflation with its debt-financed spending.

  

  Trudeau’s campaign won’t be helped by a 4.1% inflation reading for August, the highest since 2003. The Conservatives pounced on the number as soon as it hit Wednesday morning.

  “The numbers released today make it clear that under Justin Trudeau, Canadians are experiencing an affordability crisis,” Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said in a statement.

  While cost-of-living issues are a regular of feature of Conservative election campaigns, it’s become a central part of the narrative this year as the party seeks to take advantage of polls showing the issue is on voters’ minds. A recent survey by Abacus Data showed 38% of Canadians believe reducing their cost of living was a key factor impacting their vote, making it the top issue by far.

  For many Canadians, inflation concerns are closely linked to housing affordability, which has worsened substantially over the last decade, but particularly since the start of the pandemic. Buying a home has gotten harder and more expensive almost everywhere in the country, not unlike the US.

  To be sure, much of the criticism is hype – O’Toole’s party isn’t offering up many concrete solutions to ease price pressures. An obvious way to curtail inflation, for example, would be to curb government spending but the Conservative platform’s fiscal projections don’t differ that much from those put forward by the Liberals.

  Many aspects of the inflationary pressures facing Canadians are part of a global trend. Choked up supply chains have led to shortages, while a lack of new supply has led to an explosion in housing prices.

  Like their counterparts in the US, Canada’s Liberals continue to insist that the inflationary pressures are “transitory”.

  And while they have tried to avoid talking about the issue, Trudeau was finally forced to mention it during a speech earlier this week.

  “We recognize that families are concerned about affordability,” Trudeau said Wednesday when asked about the latest inflation reading at a campaign stop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He added that his government would continue to support Canadians through the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.

  There’s no question that this is making Trudeau politically vulnerable. The governing Liberals have been polling in low 30%-support levels for most of the campaign, well short of what would be required to gain majority control of the House of Commons, which was Trudeau’s goal when he called the “snap” election.

  Instead, not unlike David Cameron’s Brexit gambit, we could see the decision backfire, restoring power to the Conservatives while shunting the Liberals back into the opposition.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 22:00

• An ESG Backfire Conundrum Is Triggering A Global Energy Crisis
  An ESG Backfire Conundrum Is Triggering A Global Energy Crisis

  By Larry McDonald, author of the Bear Traps Report

  Ladies and Gentlemen, the VIX is up 20% since August 31 with stocks 2% off the highs and only 37 new highs on the NYSE Tuesday. 

  One thing is for sure: markets have stopped, at least for 2 weeks, going up on good news. Think CPI, soft in September (stocks sell-off), HOT CPI in June (stocks rip higher). This is meaningful. The market is pricing in two Bank of England rate hikes in 2022, 70+ hikes across Emerging Markets are expected over the next year and the Fed is still buying $120B a month of Treasuries and Mortgage-Backed Securities – all while promising no planned hikes until well into 2023-2024? The market is telling us the Fed will have a very hard time keeping up this sales pitch – especially with an ESG Backfire conundrum triggering a global energy crisis.

  Dollar at Key Level

  

  As we stressed last year in our commodity bull case, it is a Highly Orchestrated US Dollar Containment Strategy – let the other central banks lead this time. The fastest-growing emerging market countries – looking at the current rate hike path – see their expectations below. While the Fed still endlessly searches for “substantial progress” on inflation / jobs data: Looking out 12 Months – it is seventy-three 25bp hikes from EM central banks, twenty-four months: 101 hikes globally. Inflation risk is driving other central banks into pulling back accommodation, NOT the Fed so far. Unsustainable, the market is sending a message. We MUST listen.

  Risk – Reward is Extremely Poor Short Term

  

  With trouble on the way in Washington, pay-fors, debt ceiling, fiscal cliff – you are supposed to sell the S&P 500 here with a stop. The colossal divergence between Fed and RoW (rest of the world) central banks is unsustainable. The Fed desperately needs a fiscal boost, cannot afford a $1.5 to $2T fiscal cliff.

  US Fiscal Deficits

  • 2020: $3T
  • 2021: $3T
  • 2022: $1T???

  “Pay-Fors” Piling Up

  Ways and Means Committee – Pay Fors Piling Up – House Democrats this week are advancing through committee the tax provisions to pay for President Joe Biden’s economic agenda with the intention of completing work by Wednesday on “revenue raisers” worth some $2 trillion (Bloomberg), the media used to call these taxes. 

  S&P 500 New Highs – Smell to High Heaven

  

  New 52 Week Highs – one of the lowest marks since May. It makes little sense to chase stocks near the highs with smelly data like this, risk-reward is poor.

  Gas Black Swan in Europe 

  

  Dirt cheap natural gas has powered global manufacturing for a decade – NO more- ESG Backfire (see “Why One Bank Thinks ESG Could Trigger Hyperinflation”), colossal profit margin pressures – we count warnings from over 22 companies – GS now recommending gas consumers in Europe “protect themselves” from a winter black swan via buying out of the money calls – all after a 140% up move in gas prices.

  S&P 500: 20 and 50 Day Moving Averages – 20 Day Break

  

  When the S&P 500 has closed below the 20 day moving average, it has commonly led to tests of the 50 day moving average. The pattern worked once again on Tuesday, as the S&P 500 closed just above its 50 day after a selling-off throughout the day

  Buy High – Do NOT Buy Low

  Off 2% since August 20 – MSFT announced another $60b via buybacks, of course, they passed on the buybacks in Q2-Q3 last year with the stock at $180 in May 2020 ($303 today). Microsoft made its first corporate bond sale 12 years ago, now has $82B in debt, much issued in recent years, 10yrs ago MSFT (AAA at S&P) generated $24b in FCF, today it generates $56b/yr. over that period BBB yield went from 4.4% to 2.2%. net debt/equity negative every year. SPX companies repurchased close to $180B billion of shares in Q1 2021, +37% from Q4, and 2x the $90B in Q2 2020.. S&P 500 Buybacks are on pace $730B in 2021 vs $520B 2020 year-end.

  S&P 500 Covid Wedge

  

  The S&P 500 has been consolidating inside of a large wedge since the March 2020 bottom. Last week we broke below support and this week we have thus far failed at the same trend from below. 50 day support looks extra important, a gap-down below the 50 day overnight would be very bearish…

  US 10 Year Yield

  

  Pricing in a $2T fiscal cliff, bond investors are nervous – once the bill is passed in November, they will be sellers, uncertainty high next 45 days – US 10 year yields failed to break above the 1.38% level 3 times over the past months and are now falling below trend support after CPI inflation came-in relatively soft. In our view, inflation beneath the surface is more sustainable than the consensus believes.

  Median Inflation Creeping Higher 

  

  “I like to look at inflation data in a median sense (so rather than having one crazy category drive it all, we look at the center of the distribution, across 82 categories, equally weighted). On this metric, this CPI number was not low (here shown in 12-month space). The broadening is really quite a bit more important than what used car etc prices do month to month.” – with Jens Nordvig

  CPI Inflation Contribution

  

  Delta Cooling Hot CPI Sectors: “Larry – So we have a CPI miss driven by drop in used cars, air fares, and hotels likely due to delta.  Still gives enough room for Fed to delay rate hikes while talking up tapering, so delta normalization, global cases rolling over fairly hard, gets you a higher cpi trend looking forward.” CIO in CT.

  We agree here.

  Travel Impact on Soft CPI 

  “Global cases are plunging, nearly 6 billion jabs, if team Biden solves the covid problem, they have a colossal CPI problem.”

  Large CPI miss drivers, travel, and services – Airline fares down 9.1% MoM due to Delta-v (Covid).  The White House and the Transitory Message

  The White House will sell transitory very hard, they need large fiscal.

  “August CPI, most benign headline reading since January… but in a reversal from previous months the underlying trends were somewhat worse than the headline. The underlying trend many have focused on was about the same as previous months.”

  “Larry, What’s the deal with OER only rising 0.25%?  Moratoriums?” PM in NYC

  OER Owners Equivalent Rent Lags Housing Prices

  

  Although some expected a much larger jump in OER (Owners Equivalent Rent), the CPI component tends to lag housing prices. We see much higher OER (over 20% of CPI) in the coming months. The impact of the massive rise in US house prices has only just started to show up…

  Watch the $10T

  • Apple AAPL $2.5T
  • Microsoft MSFT $2.3T
  • Google GOOGL $1.9T
  • Amazon AMZN $1.8T
  • Facebook FB $1.1T
  • Tesla TSLA $0.75T

  *As of Q1 2021, 401(k) plans held an est $6.9T in assets, represented 1/5 of the $35T US retirement market. The Nasdaq 100 is worth $17-$18T vs. $1.5T in the XME Metals and Mining, XLE Energy ETFs combined. 

  Capital is Long Deflation Winners

  In our view, once inflation PCE normalizes off insane YoY base effects at a HIGHER plain than prior decades, $2 to $4T will come out of the NDX, into inflation hedges such as commodity exposed equities. Core CPI is close to 4.30% vs 2.00% from 2016-2019, if the new level is 2.7% to 3.7% 2021-2014, there are trillions of dollars in the wrong place.

  Bloomberg Commodity Index Surge

  

  To put the current commodity price rally into some context: in more than 50 years of data, the Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index has only settled above the current level during 20 torrid days between April and May 2011. One big difference between today and 2008 in commodity markets: policymakers and lawmakers have not (as yet) blamed hedge funds, speculators, and long-only funds for the price rally. And the CFTC hasn’t launched (yet) a nationwide investigation. And $6T in 2020-2021, 18% of GDP of fiscal deficits vs. $2T in 2009-2010 of 8% of GDP. Covid > Lehman.

  Bloomberg Dollar Index

  

  The soft CPI print means the Fed is less likely to be hawkish at the September meeting. The US Dollar is now falling below recent trend support. This is supportive for non-US risk assets and commodities.

  The Fed continues to run QE at $120B per month with PPI at 8.3% and CPI at 5.3%. In 2019, the Fed cuts rates 3 times with unemployment at 3.5%. USD containment.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 21:40

• Propane Prices Soar As Inventory Concerns Mount Ahead Of Winter
  Propane Prices Soar As Inventory Concerns Mount Ahead Of Winter

  Spot propane prices at Mont Belvieu, Texas, have reached their highest levels since 2014 ahead of the winter season on fears of low inventory. Energy inflation could be problematic for commercial and residential users of the fuel that heats building structures and powers vehicles, gas grills, patio heaters, generators, among many other uses. 

  Propane is set up for a volatile ride this fall/winter season as supplies are about 20% below the five-year average for this time of year. The most recent U.S. Energy Department data shows inventories of around 70.8 million barrels.

  

  The propane surge also comes from the rise in natural gas and crude prices. Propane is a byproduct of natgas production and petroleum-refining processes. About 80% of U.S. propane is a byproduct from natgas. 

  

  At Mont Belvieu, Texas, spot propane prices are up more than 60% this year, reaching levels not seen since 2014. Energy inflation will cause headaches for the 5% of U.S. households that heavily rely on the fuel that heats their homes. 

  

  Propane prices are coming to an inflection point in terms of seasonality. 

  

  Taking all of this into account, one can only hope the energy crisis in Europe of low natural gas supplies and record-high prices doesn’t spread to the U.S.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 21:20

• Rebutting Paul Krugman On The "Austrian" Pandemic
  Rebutting Paul Krugman On The “Austrian” Pandemic

  Authored by Robert Murphy via The Mises Institute,

  In a recent column for the New York Times, the world’s most famous Keynesian, Paul Krugman, attacked Austrian business cycle theory (ABCT). In addition to repeating his decades-old claim that ABCT suffers from an internal contradiction, as well as his charge that the Austrians misdiagnosed the 2008 financial crisis, in his latest piece Krugman argued that the 2020 pandemic really was a “reallocation shock” along Austrian lines. Yet even here, Krugman claims, the Austrian prescription of laissez-faire is dead wrong: as a new paper presented at the Jackson Hole monetary conference allegedly demonstrates, we need easy money from the Fed in order to rearrange labor without causing needless unemployment.

  It won’t surprise mises.org readers to learn that I disagree strongly with Krugman’s column. He makes some casual remarks that mislead his readers on the history of the 1930s, but more seriously, he misunderstands what ABCT actually says. This confusion leads him to reject the Austrian view as illogical, when in fact it is perfectly consistent and explains the data better than a Keynesian approach.

  

  Krugman’s Faulty History

  Krugman begins his discussion of the Austrian theory by reference to its place in the 1930s:

  [T]he idea that there was a titanic intellectual battle in the 1930s between Hayek and John Maynard Keynes is basically fan fiction; Hayek’s views on the Great Depression didn’t get much intellectual traction at the time, and his fame came later, with the publication of his 1944 political tract “The Road to Serfdom.”

  Already Krugman is making stuff up. (As I’ve written elsewhere, when Krugman uses the caveat “basically,” what he means is “This statement is literally false.”) Although the clash may not have involved dueling rap lyrics, Hayek really was the chief rival of Keynes in the early 1930s. As Bruce Caldwell explains:

  In 1929 [Lionel] Robbins had begun what was to become his long tenure as head of the Economics Department at the London School of Economics (LSE). Robbins invited Hayek to London in January 1931, and the next month the young Austrian delivered a series of lectures on the business cycle. The lectures were published later that year (with an effusive foreword by Robbins) under the title, Prices and Production. Hayek’s lectures, though at times opaque, caused quite a stir. By the fall of 1931, Hayek had been appointed the Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics at the University of London. He was thirty-two years old.

  Sir John Hicks was at the LSE from 1926 to 1935 and remembers well the impact of Hayek’s arrival. Indeed, he divides his own stay at the University of London into a pre-Hayekian and a Hayekian period…. In his article, “The Hayek story,” Hicks reflects on the importance of Hayek’s early work.

  “When the definitive history of economic analysis during the nineteen-thirties comes to be written, a leading character in the drama (it was quite a drama) will be Professor Hayek. Hayek’s economic writings—I am not concerned with his later work in political theory and sociology—are almost unknown to the modern student; it is hardly remembered that there was a time when the new theories of Hayek were the principle rivals of the new theories of Keynes. Which was right, Keynes or Hayek?”

  Ludwig Lachmann writes of Hayek’s “triumphal entry on the London stage with his lectures on Prices and Production,” and recalls that when he (Lachmann) arrived at the LSE two years later, “all important economists there were Hayekians” …

  It’s undeniably true that in the eyes of the profession, Hayek lost the debate to Keynes. But Krugman is wrong to claim that Hayek was a minor player who was only known for his political writings.

  Krugman Oversimplifies Austrian Business Cycle Theory

  After downplaying its importance at the time, Krugman admits that there was an Austrian analysis of the Great Depression, and summarizes it in this way:

  Nonetheless, there was an identifiable Austrian analysis of the Depression, shared by Hayek and other economists, including Joseph Schumpeter. Where Keynes argued that the Depression was caused by a general shortfall in demand, Hayek and Schumpeter argued that we were looking at the inevitable difficulties of adjusting to the aftermath of a boom. In their view, excessive optimism had led to the allocation of too much labor and other resources to the production of investment goods, and a depression was just the economy’s way of getting those resources back where they belonged. (bold added)

  In the above excerpt, Krugman makes a subtle but important misstatement of the Austrian explanation of the boom-bust cycle. Specifically, Krugman is casting ABCT as a theory of overinvestment in capital goods and underinvestment in consumer goods.1

  Yet in reality, the sophisticated version of ABCT—especially in the writings of Mises—is more properly described as one of malinvestment among various types of capital goods coupled with too much consumption.

  It is this simple confusion that drives most of the erroneous objections to ABCT coming from professional economists. In a 2012 Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics article, Joe Salerno quotes extensively from such economists (including Krugman) and then clarifies:

  Had the critics seriously studied the original sources in which ABCT is expounded, they would have learned that it is not an “overinvestment” theory at all. In fact, Mises, Rothbard and, somewhat less emphatically, Hayek argued explicitly that “overconsumption” and “malinvestment” were the essential features of the inflationary boom. In their view, the divergence between the loan and natural rates of interest caused by bank credit expansion systematically falsifies the monetary calculations of entrepreneurs choosing among investment projects of different durations and in different stages varying in temporal remoteness from consumers. But it also distorts the income and wealth calculations and therefore the consumption/saving choices of the recipients of wages, rents, profits and capital gains. In other words, while the artificially reduced loan rate encourages business firms to overestimate the present and future availability of investible resources and to malinvest in lengthening the structure of production, at the same time it misleads households into a falsely optimistic appraisal of their real income and net worth that stimulates consumption and depresses saving. (bold added)

  In the remainder of the current article, I’ll continue to quote from Krugman’s recent column and then show why his initial confusion about ABCT drives all of his problems with it.

  But to repeat: Krugman views ABCT as a simple theory of overinvestment in capital goods and underinvestment in consumption goods (as do other ABCT critics). But in reality, the Misesian theory is that credit expansion leads to artificially low interest rates, which in turn cause entrepreneurs to invest in the wrong lines and cause consumers to believe they are wealthier than they really are and hence consume too much.

  Let us see how this confusion leads Krugman astray.

  Krugman Alleges Problems with ABCT, Both Theoretical and Empirical

  Returning to his recent column, below we reproduce two of Krugman’s long-running objections to ABCT, namely that it fails on both a theoretical and empirical level:

  [The Hayek/Schumpeter] view had logical problems: If transferring resources out of investment goods causes mass unemployment, why didn’t the same thing happen when resources were being transferred in and away from other industries? It was also clearly at odds with experience: During the Depression and, for that matter[,] after the 2008 crisis, there was excess capacity and unemployment in just about every industry—not slack in some and shortages in others.

  In the quote above, Krugman’s “logical problem” with ABCT derives entirely from his superficial understanding of the theory. Yes, if Mises had actually argued that the boom period is merely a switch of preferences one way, while the bust is a switch back—sort of like consumers deciding to try Mountain Dew for a few years, only to revert to Coke—then it would be weird to associate the first change with prosperity and the latter with privation.

  This is why Salerno emphasized the overconsumption during the boom period, when individuals falsely believe they are richer than they really are. The boom is unsustainable in physical terms; the members of society are not saving enough out of total income in order to complete all of the long-term production processes initiated during the boom. Armed with cheap credit, the entrepreneurs use the injections of new money to bid workers away from their original jobs and into new lines. This necessarily involves higher (real) wages and thus induces a feeling of good times.

  But when reality reasserts itself—typically when banks chicken out and stop injecting new credit into the system—many entrepreneurs realize their projects must be terminated. They lay off workers and halt their purchases of other inputs. Wages and other prices must fall (at least in real terms) to reflect the new reality. It is painful to be laid off; workers are poorer than they thought, and must search for a new job that doesn’t pay as well as their employer during the boom time.

  For a systematic exposition of the Austrian narrative, showing how it is logically consistent and can explain the asymmetry between the boom and bust, see my 2008 “sushi article” here at mises.org (which many readers have told me is one of their all-time favorites, for what that’s worth). In fact, Krugman himself praised my article at the time, and retreated from saying the ABCT had logical problems to merely alleging that it didn’t fit the data.

  Space constraints prevent me from rehashing the arguments here, but on the issue of empirical validity, once again the Austrians triumph over the Keynesians. In this article, I summarized some of the “tests” Krugman had thrown against an Austrian-type explanation of the housing bubble and 2008 crisis. As it turned out, using Krugman’s own rules for the test, the Austrian explanation made more sense. (For example, percentage declines in employment were larger in construction than in manufacturing, and higher in durable goods than nondurable goods, and unemployment was highest in the states that had the biggest swings in home prices. These outcomes are to be expected in a “sectoral readjustment” Austrian story, as opposed to an “everybody panicked and stopped spending” Keynesian story.)

  Hilarious: Krugman Resolves the “Logical Problem” When It Justifies Inflation

  Before closing the present article, I want to highlight a hilarious aspect of Krugman’s latest commentary. The specific news hook for his discussion of ABCT was a formal paper presented by elite economists at the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole conference, held in August. Here is Krugman’s summary of the paper and its relevance to the Austrians:

  Although we aren’t hearing much about Austrian economics these days, the pandemic really did produce an Austrian-style reallocation shock, with demand for some things surging while demand for other things slumped….

  So we’re finally having the kind of economic crisis that people like Hayek and Schumpeter wrongly believed we were having in the 1930s. Does this mean that we should follow the policy advice they gave back then?

  No.

  That’s the message of a paper by Veronica Guerrieri, Guido Lorenzoni, Ludwig Straub and Iván Werning that was prepared for this year’s Jackson Hole meeting…. Guerrieri et al. never explicitly mention the Austrians, but their paper can nonetheless be construed as a refutation of their policy prescriptions.

  Hayek and Schumpeter were adamantly against any attempt to fight the Great Depression with monetary and fiscal stimulus. Hayek decried the use of “artificial stimulants,” insisting that we should instead “leave it to time to effect a permanent cure by the slow process of adapting the structure of production.”…

  But these conclusions didn’t follow even if you accepted their incorrect analysis of what the Depression was all about. Why should the need to move workers out of a sector lead to unemployment? Why shouldn’t it simply lead to lower wages?

  The answer in practice is downward nominal wage rigidity: Employers are really reluctant to cut wages, because of the effects on worker morale….

  Guerrieri et al. argue, with a formal model to back them up, that the optimal response to a reallocation shock is indeed a very expansionary monetary policy that causes a temporary spike in inflation. Workers would still have an incentive to change jobs, because real wages would fall in their old jobs but rise elsewhere. But there wouldn’t have to be large-scale unemployment….

  … Now that we’ve finally had the shock Austrian economists kept imagining, we can see that they were still giving very bad advice.

  And in case you’re wondering, the Fed, by accepting transitory inflation, is getting it right. (bold added)

  To summarize, the new paper by Guerrieri et al. argues that if accommodated by a burst of inflation, we can transfer workers from one sector to another without the need for large-scale unemployment. However, if the Fed doesn’t inflate, then the need to reallocate workers will lead to large-scale unemployment.

  Does the reader see the irony? That asymmetry has been Krugman’s chief objection (“logical problem”) to ABCT for decades. No matter how many times Austrians explained it to him, he just couldn’t wrap his head around the notion that monetary inflation might move workers around without causing an initial surge in unemployment.

  Yet when that same exact mechanism is invoked in order to justify the inflation—rather than to condemn it, as the Austrians do—then all of a sudden Krugman is able to understand the process. Incentives really do matter.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 21:00

• Fukushima Plant Operator Admits It "Neglected To Investigate" Faulty Exhaust Filters Used To Contain Radioactive Pollution
  Fukushima Plant Operator Admits It “Neglected To Investigate” Faulty Exhaust Filters Used To Contain Radioactive Pollution

  Fukushima officials have admitted that they have “neglected to investigate” faulty exhaust filters that have been put in place to prevent radioactive pollution from the premises. 

  Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, who operates the plant, disclosed the revelation on Monday of this week during a meeting with regulatory authorities, AP reported. 24 of the 25 filters attached to the water treatment equipment had already been found to be damaged last month. Alarms went over as workers were “moving sludge”, the report says.

  Last week, operations partially resume. 

  The purpose of the filters is to “prevent particles from escaping into the air from a contaminated water treatment system”, the report noted. 

  TEPCO has been accused of coverups and delayed disclosures at the plant since the meltdown. The operator said it had found “similar damage” to the filters two years ago never never investigated the cause and didn’t take any preventative steps.

  

  Nuclear Regulation Authority commissioner Nobuhiko Ban told AP: “At the core of this problem is TEPCO’s attitude.”

  Regulatory commissioner Satoru Tanaka added that TEPCO should have acted sooner, despite TEPCO claiming that dust monitors didn’t indicate radiation leaks or exposure to plant workers. 

  Akira Ono, head of TEPCO’s decommissioning unit, said he “regretted” the operator’s failure to address the problem. 

  Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency is working with Japanese officials to prepare a planned discharge of cooling water into the ocean in a fashion that keeps radioactivity levels below legal limits. 

  Three reactors at the plant melted down in 2011 as the result of an earthquake and the ensuing tsunami. A decommissioning of the plant is expected to take decades.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 20:40

• World's Biggest Battery In California Overheats, Shuts Down
  World’s Biggest Battery In California Overheats, Shuts Down

  Authored by Daniel Khmelev via The Epoch Times,

  An “overheating incident” at the world’s biggest grid battery in California on Sept. 4 forced three quarters of the station to power down until further notice.

  

  South of San Francisco, the largest-of-its-kind Moss Landing energy storage facility recently grew from 300 to 400 megawatts (MW), with the ability to output for four hours.

  But after a limited number of modules reached operationally unsafe temperatures on Sept. 4, safety mechanisms triggered sprinklers that targeted the affected modules, resulting in the facility’s primary 300-MW section to shut off entirely.

  The overheating came as the state experienced a sweltering 100 degrees Fahrenheit heatwave over the Labor Day weekend.

  The North County Fire Protection District of Monterey County was called to the scene as a precaution. No injuries were sustained.

  The newly built 100-MW portion of the power station located in a separate building remained functional.

  On Sept. 7, Vistro, the owner, and battery manufacturer LG Energy Solution began investigations into the root cause of the incident.

  “The teams are in the early stages of this investigation and expect that it will take some time to fully assess the extent of the damage before developing a plan to safely repair and return the battery system to operation,” Vistro said in a media statement.

  Difficulties in managing battery fires mean that big battery facilities require obsequious temperature monitoring and management.

  This was illustrated last month in Australia after firefighters were unable to control a fire at the country’s largest grid battery, which burnt for close to four days.

  

  A fire at the Victoria Big Battery in Moorabool near Melbourne in Victoria, Australia, on July 30, 2021. (Fire Rescue Victoria)

  Local fire authorities said at the time that the nature of the fire meant it was extremely difficult to extinguish using conventional methods.

  “They are difficult to fight because you can’t put water on the megapacks … all that does is extend the length of time that the fire burns for,” the spokesman said.

  “The recommended process is you cool everything around it so the fire can’t spread, and you let it burn out.”

  The 400 MW capacity of the Moss Landing grid battery is part of state efforts to meet the energy storage legislation AB 2514 passed in 2013, which requires utilities to build 1,325 MW of operational energy storage capacity by 2024.

  The state’s transition toward greater renewable energy capacity had previously led California’s energy officials to ask for additional power capacity due to reliability concerns for the months of July and August.

  “California is using all available tools to increase electricity reliability this summer,” officials said, citing “unprecedented heat events, which are occurring throughout the West in combination with drought conditions that reduce hydroelectric capacity.”

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 20:20

• SpaceX Launches First-Ever Private Crew To Space For Three Day Mission
  SpaceX Launches First-Ever Private Crew To Space For Three Day Mission

  Update (2023ET): The Crew Dragon capsule separated from the second stage, and the Inspiration4 mission is now circling Earth with the first-ever private space crew. 

  Inspiration4 is expected to orbit around Earth for three days at an altitude of 360 miles, or about 150 miles higher than the International Space Station.

  Dragon and the @inspiration4x crew will orbit Earth for three days at an altitude of ~575 km, flying farther than any other human spaceflight since the Hubble missions pic.twitter.com/NZu2OM09zZ

  — SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 15, 2021

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

  Here are some of the views from inside the capsule. 

  

  

  * * * 

  SpaceX is preparing to launch the Inspiration4 mission on Wednesday evening from NASA’s facility in Florida. This mission is the first private crew of astronauts. 

  Watch Live:

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 20:06

• Collapse In Retail Investor Euphoria Points To "Imminent Correction", Vanda Warns
  Collapse In Retail Investor Euphoria Points To “Imminent Correction”, Vanda Warns

  The last time retail participation in the market dried up, was back in May when three months after retail investors took the stock market by storm sparking a series of historic short squeezes in meme stonks such as GME and AMC, the money from various stimmies dried up and retail enthusiasm for stocks suddenly faded.

  We discussed this on May 9 when we said “Retail Participation In Stock Trading Has Collapsed“, and pointed to the plunge in call option volumes, which had emerged as the preferred investment vehicle for millions of GenZ and Millennial investors.

  

  Perhaps coincidentally, our warning that day marked the top for the market for the next few weeks, with the S&P sliding some 200 points in just the next four days.

  

  We bring this up because at a time when retail investors have become instrumental in propping up the market and buying each and every dip, this time around retail enthusiasm is once again fading.

  Maybe it is because the S&P is at all time highs, or because retail euphoria has shifted to cryptos which have vastly outperformed even the most perky meme stonks, but as Vanda Research which tracks traffic on retail trading platforms and industry-wide order flows, the scale of retail interventions is getting smaller. This, according to the firms strategists, raises the chances of more serious declines if big investors continue to retreat.

  “While we have seen a pick-up in ETF buying this week, the magnitude has been a little underwhelming relative to previous selloffs,” Ben Onatibia and Giacomo Pierantoni wrote. “This diminishing appetite to support the equity rally raises the odds of a larger selloff if institutional investors continue to sell.”

  While this is especially bad news for apps like Robinhood whose entire business model depends on continued retail main, it is also bad news for bulls overall, as the army of retail traders has reliably shown up to buy broad ETFs at various points in 2021. And while they did so again in the five days through Tuesday, with $657 million of purchases, as Vanda’s Onatibia and Pierantoni note in the chart below, such buying was between 35% and 100% larger during similar-sized drawdowns in July and August.

  

  Here Bloomberg adds that while seasonal factors could be at play – as vacations end and a new school year begins – there’s another worrying sign according to Vanda: Retail investors have been concentrating their buying in tech stocks.

  “There are two distinct phases in the outperformance of technology shares,” the strategists wrote. “The first one is usually driven by institutional investors, who enter the trade when valuations are attractive. The second leg of the outperformance happens when FOMO-driven retail investors join the trade.” And since we are currently in the FOMO leg, it hints at “an imminent reversal” in market leadership, they said.

  Incidentally, the fate of retail dip-buying was cited by JPM quant Nick Panigirtzoglou last week as a potential counterweight to the growing bearish sentiment among major Wall Street banks. As we discussed in “The Six Largest Wall Street Banks Issue Market Red Alerts” in which we noted that the most popular sellside strategists had turned somewhat – or very – bearish, expecting an imminent correction anywhere between 5% and 20%, the JPM quant said that one possible saving grace was that retail investors have been buying stocks and equity funds at such a steady and strong pace “that makes an equity correction looking rather unlikely.”

  

  “So far this year retail investors have been buying stocks and equity funds at such a steady and strong pace that makes an equity correction looking rather unlikely” Panigirtzoglou wrote, adding that “whether the coming Fed policy change changes retail investors attitude towards equities remains to be seen.”

  At the same time, he also conceded the counter argument, namely “that the strength of the retail flow has pushed equities up by so much and has made investors globally more overweight equities, many of them unwilling, that the risk of profit taking should be naturally high. Indeed, in support of this counter argument, updating our most holistic of our equity position indicators, i.e. the implied equity allocation of non-bank investors globally, points to an equity allocation of 46% currently, only slightly below the post Lehman crisis high of 47.6% seen in 2018”

  

  And while the JPM quant admits that he is sympathetic to this counter  argument, “in the absence of a material slowing in the retail flow into equities, the risk of an equity correction remains low.” As such, we concluded last week, in his view monitoring this retail flow on a daily and weekly basis going forward “is key to the equity market outlook.”

  Considering that the latest retail trading data shows to an continued decline in the pace of purchases, it is merely the latest risk to consider when buying stocks some 2% away from their all time high.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 20:00

• 5-Minute-Plus Wait-Time For 911 Calls In Portland Amid Staff Shortages, Efforts To Defund Police
  5-Minute-Plus Wait-Time For 911 Calls In Portland Amid Staff Shortages, Efforts To Defund Police

  Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

  Portland residents calling 911 to report emergencies are facing a “dramatic increase” in hold times, with officials saying that the system has become “unmanageable” and is “broken.”

  

  According to The Oregonian, people dialing 911 are often left waiting over two minutes for their call to be answered, far longer than the national standard of 15 to 20 seconds.

  People calling 911 to report a Sept. 4 shootout at a Pearl District restaurant and other emergencies in the following half-hour waited an average of more than 7.5 minutes before a dispatcher answered, The Oregonian reported, adding that this was just “the latest example of serious problems plaguing the city’s emergency dispatch system.”

  Portland has dealt with unrest amid continuous riots that first broke out in the spring of 2020. Some of the people who have committed crimes are members of the far-left, anarcho-communist Antifa network. Others have identified as Black Lives Matter activists.

  Bob Cozzie, director of Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications, said his bureau answers about a million 911 calls a year, of which about 550,000 are emergency calls and 450,000 non-emergency calls.

  Speaking of the dramatic increase in hold times, Cozzie called the situation “horrible”, adding “There’s no other way to state it.” He noted that it was time for Oregon to start looking at other options and solutions to the increasing delays, such as routing non-emergency calls elsewhere.

  Cozzie said that the agency’s own statistics show an average hold time of a minute. But, it also shows a sharp rise in the number of 911 calls on hold for two minutes or longer starting in late spring and summer.

  As per The Oregonian, 574 of the 911 calls in the city had to wait on hold for more than five minutes in July. This number is more than double that of May, when 221 calls waited that long, and is drastically more than in March, when only eight 911 calls took more than five minutes to answer.

  

  Portland police officers walk past a fire started by a Molotov cocktail that a rioter hurled at them, in Portland, Oregon., on Sept. 23, 2020. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

  Compared to 2020, Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications has experienced a 20 to 45 percent increase in 911 calls, with residents making a total of 63,573 calls to 911 in July, 20 percent more than they did in July of 2020. Calls to 911 in July 2020 represented only a 2 percent increase over July 2019.

  Cozzie cited a number of reasons for the long wait times, such as a significant increase in the volume of 911 and non-emergency calls that his department receives, as well as less available staff.

  He noted that more than a dozen employees have “retired, taken leaves of absence, been promoted or resigned over the past six months,” contributing to staff shortages and thus longer wait times.

  Current staff are still in training on new medical and fire triage protocols put in place in an effort to cut down on the number of fire trucks sent to low-level medical calls, he said.

  “We’re at a tipping point now. It’s become unmanageable,” he said.

  “The system is broken.”

  The increase in both the number of 911 calls and the longer hold times comes amid a rising number of homicides in Oregon.

  

  People clash during rival rallies in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 22, 2021. (David Ryder/Reuters)

  According to the Portland Police Bureau, between July 2020 and July 2021, 98 homicide offenses were reported to the bureau. During that same period the year prior, from July 2019 to July 2020, just 23 homicide offenses were reported.

  Law enforcement officials have been resigning en masse from their posts amid continued calls to defund the police and other law enforcement agencies. In June, the entire Portland Police Bureau’s Rapid Response Team (RRT) left their voluntary positions after an officer was indicted on a protest assault charge.

  The team, which is responsible for providing public safety at crowd events when there was a threat of harm to the community, consisted of approximately 50 officers, all of whom resigned on June 16, but said they would continue with their regular assignments.

  The mass resignation came just one day after Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced his team had indicted one member, Officer Corey Budworth, on one count of fourth-degree assault for physically injuring someone during an Aug. 18, 2020, protest.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 19:40

• US, UK To Share Nuclear Submarine Technology With Australia In "Historic" Military Pact Against China
  US, UK To Share Nuclear Submarine Technology With Australia In “Historic” Military Pact Against China

  After breaking news of the the historic pact between the US, UK and Australia earlier, we have now gotten confirmation and additional information about the pact.

  As the SCMP confirmed, the US, Britain and Australia announced on Wednesday a “historic” security alliance to strengthen military capabilities in the Pacific, which will share advanced defense technologies and give Australian forces nuclear submarine technology  further extending Washington’s drive for military cooperation that has angered China (although we are confident Gen Milley has already shared said nuclear technology with China so their anger will probably be contained).

  President Biden, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison appeared virtually together to announce the partnership. “This is about investing in our greatest sources of strength, our alliances, and updating them to better meet the threats of today and tomorrow,” Mr. Biden said. “It’s about connecting America’s existing allies and partners in new ways and amplifying our ability to collaborate.” All three leaders stressed that the new submarine would be nuclear-powered and not armed, keeping in line with nuclear nonproliferation measures. None of them mentioned China in their remarks.

  The pact builds on the longstanding alliance between the three to share intelligence, deepen cooperation and help Australia as China’s influence grows.

  The new agreement, announced Wednesday by leaders of the three countries, was described by administration officials as a way to line up common interests in the Asia Pacific.

  As noted earlier, the partnership The partnership is called AUKUS, an acronym for Australia, United Kingdom and the US and will have a number of components, chief among them the development of the nuclear submarine capability for Australia. Others include security cooperation in cyberspace, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and undersea capabilities, administration officials said Wednesday.

  While officials declined to say the effort was intended to counter China, describing it as an effort to engage three allies together strategically in an important region, let’s be honest: the effort is intended to counter China whose response to this new venture will be most curious and certainly one that will not help ease the global inflationary wave . The announcement comes shortly after the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan last month, which was described as part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to focus on issues in the Indo-Pacific, including China.

  “This partnership is not aimed, or about any one country, it’s about advancing our strategic interests, upholding the international rules based order and promoting peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific,” one official said. “This is about a larger effort to sustain the fabric of engagement and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.”

  Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington urged the U.S. and others to “shake off their Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice.”

  “Exchanges and cooperation between countries should help expand mutual understanding and trust,” the spokesman said. “They should not build exclusionary blocs targeting or [harm] the interests of third parties.”

  While the U.S., the U.K. and Australia already take part in common security arrangements, and all three participate in the Five Eyes alliance, an intelligence-sharing arrangement that also includes Canada and New Zealand the new security structure provides for the technology cooperation needed to share nuclear submarine technology and other common efforts in a region where China poses growing security concerns.

  The U.S. and U.K. are starting an 18-month period of consultation on helping Australia develop the nuclear submarine capability. That would eventually allow Canberra to conduct faster, stealthier submarine missions of longer duration than conventional submarine technology allows.

  The U.S. has shared its technology in developing such a capability only with the U.K. White House officials declined to say how long it would take Australia to build a nuclear submarine but said Australia’s conventional submarines fall short of the stealth, range, speed and maneuverability needed to confront nations like China.

  * * *

  Earlier:

  President Joe Biden is expected Thursday to deliver remarks on a major new “national security initiative” which ultimately appears aimed at countering China. Citing sources in the White House, Politico is reporting the US alongside allies Australian and Britain will unveil a landmark new security pact for sharing advanced defense technologies.

  In particular, nuclear submarine technology is expected to top the list for the tech sharing initiative. As Politico writes, “The trio, which will be known by the acronym AUUKUS, will make it easier for the three countries to share information and know-how in key technological areas like artificial intelligence, cyber, underwater systems and long-range strike capabilities.”

  

  It’s being further suggested that the pact is likely to result in Australia abandoning a $90 billion submarine deal with France – which was already for years fraught with tensions over soaring costs and production delays. 

  According to The Sydney Morning Herald the anticipated “AUUKUS pact” was the likely subject of federal ministers being called to an urgent “top secret” meeting in Australia’s capital: 

  In Australia, federal cabinet ministers were called to a top-secret meeting in Canberra on Wednesday ahead of the announcement. Some members of cabinet were granted border exemptions to urgently fly to Canberra for the hastily arranged meeting, sources familiar with the development said.

  The White House announcement of the US-UK-Australia pact is expected for Thursday afternoon, at a moment Aussie Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defence Minister Peter Dutton are in Washington D.C. for annual Australia-US Ministerial Consultations. Likely they will be at the White House with Biden for the statement. Prime Minister Scott Morrison is expected to simultaneously make his own statement addressing the Australian public on the new agreement.

  Though there’s likely to be no explicit mention of China, it’s clear Washington is continuing to deepen its support to Indo-Pacific allies with an aim to curtail China’s influence, and interestingly at comes as Australia is locked in its own trade war with China, with Beijing over the past couple years curbing Australian beef imports and levying huge punitive tariffs on barley, wine, and other commodities. 

  “There’s nothing explicitly mentioning China in the three-way deal, the people said, but both noted that the subtext of the announcement is that this is another move by Western allies to push back on China’s rise in the military and technology arenas,” Politico underscored in its report.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 19:25

• Biden Mandate Will Only Boost Number Of Vaccinated By 12 Million: Goldman
  Biden Mandate Will Only Boost Number Of Vaccinated By 12 Million: Goldman

  Now that President Biden has abandoned his promise not to impose vaccine mandates on working Americans, Wall Street investment banks are trying to guess how Biden’s new mandates for federal workers – and his administration’s request that all private employers with more than 100 employees impose a similar requirement – will increase the level of vaccine-induced immunity.

  Unfortunately for Biden, a team of analysts at Goldman has run the numbers, and they’re saying the impact of Biden’s new program will probably be limited: Goldman estimates that the requirements will apply to about 25MM currently unvaccinated individuals, and boost the number of vaccinated individuals by 12MM (or 3.6% of the total population) through March next year.

  Ultimately, Goldman expects 82% of the total population (and 90% of adults) to be vaccinated with a first dose by mid-2022.

  What’s more, Goldman sees some downside employment risk in the near term, as 7MM affected workers report that they will definitely not get the vaccine, while mandates imposed earlier this summer caused some to leave their jobs.

  According to Biden’s edicts, federal workers have 75 days to comply with the vaccine mandate, and although the DOL rule has not yet been issued, we expect private businesses will be given a similar time period to comply, suggesting the rule could become binding in late-2021 or early-2022. Although the vaccine mandate will likely be challenged in court, the administration appears to believe it falls within OSHA’s authority (even if enforcement proves difficult).

  

  Goldman’s approach to estimating the impact of Biden’s order is based on the impact of French President Emanuel Macron’s immunity pass. equires proof of vaccination, immunity, or a negative test to get into restaurants, bars, hospitals, and public transportation or to work at a public venue. Although France’s immunity pass is mostly tied to spending rather than to work, it imposes similar vaccine/testing requirements to engage in normal economic life. The introduction of the vaccine passport in early July led to a sharp re-acceleration in the pace of first dose vaccinations in France, as shown by the chart above.

  Goldman’s alternate approach to projecting the impact of the order combines data from Census Household Pulse Survey on the shares of working individuals that are unvaccinated and “will probably not get it”, that “will definitely not get it,” or that are unvaccinated for other reasons, with an adjustment for individuals that misreport their vaccination status.

  Coupled with assumptions on the mandate-driven increase in the vaccination for each of these three groups, this approach implies that the requirements will boost the vaccination rate by just over 3pp by March next year. Averaging both approaches, we estimate that the new requirements will boost the number of vaccinated individuals by 12mn, or 3.6% of the total population.

  Incorporating these estimates, the recent somewhat faster-than-expected vaccination pace, and assuming that vaccinations for children ages 5-11 are approved in November, we now expect 82% of the total population (and 90% of adults) to be vaccinated with a first dose by mid-2022, as the chart below shows.

  

  As for the order’s impact on the labor market, while growing vaccination rates might convince some (at-risk) people that it’s finally safe to return to the work force, it’s more likely that Biden’s edict will lead to at least some employment reallocation this fall as vaccine-resisters search for jobs at smaller companies not subject to the mandate.

  

  Of course there is still a significant amount of uncertainty regarding the implementation of Biden’s mandate, including when and how strictly it will be enforced. At the very least, these projections will give us a chance to look back in three months and see how misguided – or perhaps how uncannily correct – they were.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 19:20

• They Are Creating The Biggest Witch Hunt In American History
  They Are Creating The Biggest Witch Hunt In American History

  Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

  Prior to this pandemic, if you wanted to weed out all of the “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” from our society, how would you have done it? 

  I suppose that sending everyone a questionnaire asking them what they believe would be one way to do it, but of course a lot of people would give false answers and many others would simply ignore the questionnaire.  Social media profiles contain a wealth of information, but many “non-conformists” are not even on social media and digging through all of that data would take an extraordinary amount of time, money and energy.  Up until just recently, there just hasn’t been an easy and efficient way to identify those that are not eager servants of the system.

  

  But now the COVID vaccines have changed everything.  These injections are the perfect litmus test, because “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” are pretty much the only ones that are refusing the shots at this point.  This makes it exceptionally easy to divide American citizens into two categories, and it also gives authorities a perfect excuse to push all of those “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” to the fringes of society.

  As I discussed yesterday, I was literally sick to my stomach as I pondered the implications of Biden’s tyrannical new decrees.  Originally, Biden and other Democratic leaders were against any sort of vaccine mandates, but now I think that they have realized that mandates are a tool that they can use to fundamentally reshape our society.

  If you don’t understand where I am going with this, just keep reading, because it will become extremely clear by the end of this article.

  Biden’s new decrees cover almost every major institution in our society.  Just think about it.  Any “major institution” is almost certainly going to be employing more than 100 people, and all such organizations are covered by Biden’s mandates.

  In addition to businesses of various sizes, we are also talking about colleges, schools, churches, non-profits, political entities, sports teams and charitable organizations.

  Millions of Americans that are employed by such institutions could be forced to leave their positions if they refuse to comply with what Biden is demanding.

  And the rules that the Biden administration is coming up with will require the institutions to be the enforcers of these draconian new measures.

  Your bosses will be forced to make sure that you are submitting to the new rules, because if not they could be hit with massive fines.

  In my last article I used the word “sickening” to describe what Biden is trying to do to all of us, but the truth is that word is not nearly strong enough.

  What we are facing is a complete and total national nightmare, and it isn’t going to end any time soon.

  Biden’s new mandates are even stricter for employees of the federal government.  Previously, employees of the federal government were at least given the option to undergo regular testing if they didn’t want to be vaccinated, but now that option is being taken away.

  So now millions of federal employees will have to choose between their principles and their careers.

  And considering the fact that so many of these people are barely providing for their families right now, a lot of really heartbreaking choices are going to have to be made.

  Earlier today, I posted a video from a woman that works for the U.S. Treasury Department.  After all these years, she publicly announced on social media that she is going to leave her job because of Biden’s new mandates.

  And countless others will follow her out the door.

  Biden’s new decrees will also force nearly everyone in the entire healthcare industry to either get vaccinated or give up their careers.

  What a horribly cruel thing to do.

  Biden is essentially putting a gun to the heads of these people.  So many of them spent an enormous amount of time, energy and money to get their educations, and now Biden is telling them that they have to sacrifice everything that they have worked for if they will not comply with his demands.

  As I pointed out yesterday, healthcare workers won’t just be forced out of their current jobs.  Because virtually every health care provider in the entire country accepts Medicaid and Medicare, those that refuse to comply will essentially be banned from the entire industry.

  At a time when a shortage of qualified workers is causing chaos throughout our economy, Biden’s tyrannical orders could force millions of Americans to suddenly lose their jobs.  This is an incredibly foolish thing to do, and it could have very serious ramifications in the years ahead.

  Sadly, it won’t just be a few people quitting their jobs.  A poll that was just conducted discovered that 72 percent of unvaccinated Americans said that they would quit their current jobs rather than be vaccinated…

  Many making this argument have cited a Washington Post-ABC News poll released over the weekend. It showed that just 18 percent unvaccinated people whose employers don’t currently have mandates said they would likely get vaccinated if their employer required it. About 7 in 10 (72 percent) said that, if they couldn’t get a medical or religious exemption, they would probably quit rather than submit to the requirement.

  I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes, but it is my opinion that Kamala Harris has had a lot of influence in the recent decisions that Biden has been making.

  She has always had authoritarian tendencies, and if she ever becomes president that will truly be a catastrophic scenario.

  Needless to say, Biden’s new mandates are going to cause great anxiety for millions upon millions of people, and a recent CNN poll found that the mood of the country was already heading in a very negative direction…

  The new poll finds 69% of Americans say things in the country today are going badly, below the pandemic-era high of 77% reached in January just before President Joe Biden took office but well above the 60% who felt that way in a March CNN poll.

  And 62% say that economic conditions in the US are poor, up from 45% in April and nearly as high as the pandemic-era peak of 65% reached in May 2020.

  My hope is that Republican governors will fight Biden’s new decrees with everything that they have got.

  Because the truth is that this is one of the most critical moments in U.S. history.

  Our most basic liberties and freedoms are under full assault, and we really are descending into full-blown tyranny.

  If Biden’s new mandates are not overturned by the courts, millions of Americans that love liberty and freedom could be forced from their jobs.

  It would truly be a witch hunt of unprecedented size and scope, and it would represent the greatest purge of “troublemakers”, “independent thinkers” and “non-conformists” that any of us have ever witnessed.

  *  *  *

  It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 19:00

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• Spanish Gov't Announces Temporary Tax Cuts To Relieve Consumers After Record Power Prices
  Spanish Gov’t Announces Temporary Tax Cuts To Relieve Consumers After Record Power Prices

  Spain’s Socialist-led government announced temporary tax cuts on power prices in an attempt to drive down household electricity costs, which have surged this summer and triggered outrage among working-poor, according to FT. 

  Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, addressed the nation on Monday night to minimize political damage from the hyperinflationary rise in power prices. He said taxes on electricity would be significantly reduced, and energy companies would be taxed on their “extraordinary profits” and “redirected to consumers.”

  

  “We have made a firm commitment that all citizens will pay the same electricity bill [this year] as in 2018,” Sánchez said, adding that energy companies’ high profits are “not acceptable.”

  The emergency measures would reduce government revenues for 2021 by around 1.4 billion euros, he said, and 650 million euros will be taken from energy companies’ profits and used to assist households. The new package is expected to be approved Tuesday. 

  The exponential rise in Spain’s wholesale electricity prices shows no signs of abating. Prices jumped Tuesday to another record high of 172.78 per megawatt-hour. From the beginning of summer, prices are up more than 200%. 

  

  One primary concern is the price of power rising as the summer season winds down and winter is ahead has become one of the most heated political issues. Sánchez is acting to alleviate consumers as record-high power prices eat away their wages. 

  Angel Talavera, head of European economics at Oxford Economics, told FT, that “people are feeling the pinch in their personal finances but this is not a Spanish problem; it is a European if not a world problem.” 

  “The issue is that, because of the different way the Spanish market works, much of the world has not noticed it yet, but sooner or later, a similar trend will happen in other countries,” Talavera said. 

  Some of the factors behind the soaring electricity and gas prices can be pinpointed to several factors, including increased gas demand by China, higher carbon prices, and reduced supply from Russia. 

  Besides Spain, Germany, the UK, Netherlands, and Dutch have also seen explosive nat gas prices, which have caused power prices to surge. This is creating political pressure on European governments and European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde to get a handle on prices. 

  Like it or not, and Europe doesn’t want to admit it, they will soon be drooling over cheap Russian gas via the Nord Stream pipeline as a way to cap soaring gas and power prices. Politicians will do anything to get re-elected, even if that means taking Putin’s gas. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 02:45

• Calls For Investigation Grow As "Close Ties" Emerge Between Huawei, Cambridge Research Center
  Calls For Investigation Grow As “Close Ties” Emerge Between Huawei, Cambridge Research Center

  Authored by Lily Zhou via The Epoch Times,

  A former Conservative Party leader has called on the British government to investigate the UK’s dependency on China as a research center of Cambridge University is alleged to have been “infiltrated” by Chinese tech giant Huawei.

  

  Speaking to The Times of London on Sunday, Sir Iain Duncan Smith said that universities in the UK are “far too dependent on Chinese money,” with Cambridge being “one of the worst offenders.”

  The senior Tory urged the government to set up an urgent inquiry into “the UK’s dependency on China across a range of institutions and companies.”

  His comment came after the newspaper reported that the chief representative and three out of four of the directors at the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Management (CCCM) have ties to Huawei.

  The Times said the information about Yanping Hu, who was listed as the chief representative of the CCCM, was removed from the CCCM website following inquiries from the newspaper.

  A cache of the page, archived on Aug. 17, said Hu had been the head of Huawei Management Engineering Group, director of Huawei Corporate Change Committee, director of Huawei Organisation Department, and the Deputy President of Huawei University before becoming the SVP at Huawei.

  The Chinese version of the page also said that Hu is the CEO of Huawei-affiliated Hua Ying Management, which is—along with Huawei and its other affiliates—on a Washington list of entities that “pose a significant risk of involvement in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”

  The page also boasted Hu’s credential as an “expert who enjoys a special allowance from the State Council.”

  Tian Tao, one of the CCCM’s four directors, is a senior adviser at Huawei Technologies and a confidant of Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei.

  The Chinese version of the CCCM’s website also stated that it’s the CCCM’s role and “historical mission” to document, synthesize, spread, and contribute to the development and management of Chinese enterprises.

  Johnny Patterson, co-founder and policy director at human rights NGO Hong Kong Watch, said the link between the university and the Chinese Communist Party have serious implications.

  “Huawei’s ties with the Chinese government are no secret. It looks as if the research centre has been infiltrated by Huawei and the university should definitely investigate it,” Patterson told The Times.

  “The close links between Huawei and Cambridge University have serious national security and moral implications,” he added.

  A spokesperson for Cambridge University said any relationship the university has is in line with government guidelines.

  The CCCM “is a business management programme focused on Chinese business practices. As such, it engages with various sectors of the Chinese economy, including technology companies,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

  “The University of Cambridge has a robust system for reviewing all strategic relationships and strict protocols for engaging with any company. Any relationship the University has with any corporate entity, domestic or international, strictly adheres to the guidelines set out by the UK government.”

  Neither Huawei, nor the UK government responded to requests for comment by the time of publishing.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 02:00

• Iran Replaces Veteran Nuclear Negotiator With "Hardliner" As Vienna Talks Still In Doubt
  Iran Replaces Veteran Nuclear Negotiator With “Hardliner” As Vienna Talks Still In Doubt

  A week after Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned the US is “getting closer” to giving up completely on the Iran nuclear deal after Vienna talks have been on hold since June 20, Iran on Tuesday replaced its longtime veteran negotiator with a senior diplomat who’s widely being described as a “hardliner”.

  The recently installed administration of Ebrahim Raisi has named Ali Bagheri Kani to replace Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Araghchi had spearhead the original negotiations on the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and has been at the forefront of Iranian efforts in Vienna.

  However, Ali Bagheri Kani – who happens to also be a relative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – had been part of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team under former President Ahmadinejad from 2007 to 2013. It was during that time that efforts to achieve mutual understanding over Iran’s nuclear program with the West failed and sanctions were imposed.

  

  As Reuters details, it appears part of shake-up at the foreign ministry to replace “moderates” previously serving under Rouhani with more hardened “anti-Western” diplomats: 

  Hossein Amirabdollahian, an anti-Western diplomat chosen as foreign minister last month, also named Mohammad Fathali as his deputy for administrative and financial affairs and Mehdi Safari as deputy for economic diplomacy, state media reported. 

  Already external observers have been concluding that Tehran is preparing to take a firmer stance should talks resume in Vienna, which include indirect talks with the US delegation based on European intermediaries. 

  Meanwhile, Washington and European signatories to the 2015 JCPOA have expressed increasing skepticism that nuclear talks will get off the ground again, blaming the Islamic Republic for stalling. Initially Iran had said it wanted to wait for the next round of Vienna talks till after new President Raisi took office on Aug.5, but we’re now long past that.

  Blinken said last week while alongside German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas: “I’m not going to put a date on it but we are getting closer to the point at which a strict return to compliance with the JCPOA does not reproduce the benefits that that agreement achieved.”

  Both sides have previously said they won’t let things drag on forever. The Iranians putting a more hardline negotiator in place could suggest Tehran is now more willing to walk away, given especially the crucial demand of immediate sanctions relief hasn’t been met.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 01:00

• California Governor Newsom Projected To Survive Recall Election, Elder Topped Alternates
  California Governor Newsom Projected To Survive Recall Election, Elder Topped Alternates

  Preliminary results of the 2021 gubernatorial recall election are in and AP, ABC, & DecisionDeskHQ (among others ) have called the race for Gavin Newsom (who will likely not be recalled and will remain governor of California).

  

  Around 67.1 percent of people voted “no” in the election, according to the California Secretary of State’s Office, while 32.9 percent voted “yes.”

  

  Larry Elder has received the most votes at 43.4 percent for who would replace Newsom if he is recalled.

  

   

  As The Epoch Times’ Vanessa Serna reports, in the 2018 gubernatorial election, Gov. Gavin Newsom was elected by the widest margin in an election race since 1950. Since his time in office, Newsom has faced criticism for his decisions to close prisons, suspend the death penalty, enforce vaccine mandates, and enforce COVID-19 statewide restrictions.

  The grassroots effort to recall the governor began in 2020, more than a year before the recall petition cleared on June 23, 2021 and state officials confirmed there were over 1,495,709 signatures, the amount required to hold a special recall election.

  In previous interviews with The Epoch Times, recall organizers attributed the impetus of the recall campaign to the governor’s decisions regarding COVID-19 state-mandated shutdowns and restrictions.

  At the height of the pandemic in Nov. 2020, Newsom received backlash after attending a party at the French Laundry restaurant without wearing a mask and with visitors from multiple households—despite telling state residents to stay home and avoid holiday gatherings.

  Following the French Laundry incident, county registrar offices reported an increase of recall petition signatures by 596,721.

  As the pandemic continued, California continued to release unemployment funds to residents whose jobs have been lost due to the pandemic. As those eligible received additional funds, it was discovered more than $31 billion in EDD funds were claimed by scammers, including prison inmates.

  

  Governor Gavin Newsom speaks to reporters at AltaMed Urgent Care in Santa Ana, Calif., on March 25, 2021. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

  Amid the recall process, Newsom also faced critics who opposed his decision to allow for 76,000 state inmates, including violent criminals and repeat felons to exit prison earlier than their release date through the help of Proposition 57 that allows inmates to receive credits for good behavior.

  Recently, California announced the mandate of vaccines for health care workers and school personnel. In healthcare workspaces, workers are required to receive the vaccine by Sept. 30. Workers who refuse to receive the vaccine and fail to obtain a religious or medical exemption will be out of a job come Oct. 1.

  The last time a governor was recalled in the state was in 2003 when Gray Davis was in office. Arnold Schwarzenegger succeeded Davis after 55 percent of state voters voted “yes” on the recall.

  On Sept. 13, President Joe Biden visited Long Beach to promote Newsom’s campaign, calling Republican candidate Larry Elder a “clone of Donald Trump.”

  

  Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder speaks to supporters during a rally in Westminster, Calif., on Sept. 4, 2021. (Ringo Chiu/AFP via Getty Images)

  Elder said if elected governor, he would immediately move to end mask and vaccine mandates.

  He also said he would suspend the California Environmental Quality Act, noting its effect on the cost of new housing being built and other construction projects.

  *  *  *

  While the final margin remains uncertain, because of the difficulty of estimating the margin of the remaining election day and late-arriving mail ballots – for what it’s worth, betting markets currently suggest that the recall is favored to fail by more than 20 percentage points.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 09/15/2021 – 00:15

• Constitution Day 2021: It's Time To Make America Free Again
  Constitution Day 2021: It’s Time To Make America Free Again

  Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The

  “That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”

  – Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

  

  The Constitution of the United States represents the classic solution to one of humankind’s greatest political problems: that is, how does a small group of states combine into a strong union without the states losing their individual powers and surrendering their control over local affairs? 

  The fifty-five delegates who convened in Philadelphia during the sweltering summer of 1787 answered this question with a document that called for a federal plan of government, a system of separation of powers with checks and balances, and a procedure for orderly change to meet the needs and exigencies of future generations.

  In an ultimate sense, the Constitution confirmed the proposition that original power resided in the people—not, however, in the people as a whole but in their capacity as people of the several states.  To bring forth the requisite union, the people through the states would transfer some of their powers to the new federal government.  All powers not reserved by the people in explicit state constitutional limitations remained in the state governments.

  Although the Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, the fear of the new federal government was so strong that a “bill of rights” was demanded and became an eventuality.

  Intended to protect the citizenry’s fundamental rights or “first liberties” against usurpation by the newly created federal government, the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments of the Constitution—is essentially a list of immunities from interference by the federal government. 

  Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

  “We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.

  The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.

  A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, travel lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.

  What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.

  Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, post-9/11 and in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic.

  The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.

  Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being arrested and charged with bogus “contempt of cop” charges such as “disrupting the peace” or “resisting arrest” for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.” And under the guise of “government speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a so-called government forum.

  The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against SWAT team raids and government agents armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited to the battlefield. As such, this amendment has been rendered nearly null and void.

  The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.

  The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or invading you, unless they have some evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise) and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.

  The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

  The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.

  The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.

  The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.

  As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts.

  If there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.

  Yet those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.

  It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:

  We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.

  In other words, we have the power to make and break the government. We are the masters and they are the servants. We the American people—the citizenry—are the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.

  Still, it’s hard to be a good citizen if you don’t know anything about your rights or how the government is supposed to operate.

  As the National Review rightly asks, “How can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they don’t understand the fundamental structure of their government? American citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly lack the capacity for it.”

  Americans are constitutionally illiterate.

  Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one.

  A survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsons television family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.

  It gets worse.

  Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, 21% said the “right to own a pet” was listed someplace between “Congress shall make no law” and “redress of grievances.” Some 17% said that the First Amendment contained the “right to drive a car,” and 38% believed that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.

  Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better. A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that one educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.

  In fact, while some educators want students to learn about freedom, they do not necessarily want them to exercise their freedoms in school. As the researchers conclude, “Most educators think that students already have enough freedom, and that restrictions on freedom in the school are necessary. Many support filtering the Internet, censoring T-shirts, disallowing student distribution of political or religious material, and conducting prior review of school newspapers.”

  Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.

  So what’s the solution?

  Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties”  is the only real assurance that freedom will survive.

  As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

  From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.

  Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.

  Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.

  If this constitutional illiteracy is not remedied and soon, freedom in America will be doomed.

  As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we have managed to keep the wolf at bay so far. Barely.

  Our national priorities need to be re-prioritized. For instance, some argue that we need to make America great again. I, for one, would prefer to make America free again.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 23:45

• China Lodges Formal Protest With US Over Possible Taiwan Diplomatic Office Name Change
  China Lodges Formal Protest With US Over Possible Taiwan Diplomatic Office Name Change

  China has lodged a formal protest with the United States over the possibility that Taiwan might change the name of its diplomatic representation office in Washington from the current “Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office” (TECO) to “Taiwan Representative Office”.

  The formal request for the US to not allow the name change came just after on Monday state-run Communist Party mouthpiece Global Times published an op-ed Monday vowing that China’s military will send fighter jets directly over the island in assertion of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan.

  

  The proposal was first requested by Taipei, and this current round of diplomatic tensions over the issue was sparked immediately upon reports the Biden administration is “seriously considering” allowing the name change. 

  Since 2017 a handful of countries including Nigeria, Jordan and Ecuador, briefly OK’ed Taiwan representation name changes, but quickly reversed course after feeling severe pressure from China, a large trading partner. 

  According to the South China Morning Post late in the evening Monday, China’s Foreign Ministry issued a formal denunciation of the possible name change at the end of a day it was being widely reported:

  Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Monday that China had “lodged solemn representations” with the US and urged it to abide by the one-China principle and the three US-China communiqués – joint statements in 1972, 1979 and 1982 that included the US stating its intention to gradually decrease arms sales to the island.

  Zhao said Washington should “stop any form of official exchanges between the US and Taiwan to improve substantive relations”, including by changing the name of Tecro.

  Meanwhile during this week’s testy Congressional hearings, Secretary of State Antony Blinken let slip the words “country” of Taiwan…

  Blinken said the US will defend the “country” of Taiwan, a rookie messaging mistake.

  — Max Abrahms (@MaxAbrahms) September 13, 2021

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

  Earlier in the summer the deputy director of the American Institute in Taiwan Raymond Greene, considered the de facto US diplomat to Taiwan, made statements indicating the US now sees in the Taiwan controversy an “opportunity” to counter Beijing. 

  The Chinese people don’t want war. We don’t build a military alliance, or impose coercive trade, all-around blockade or sanctions. We don’t request other countries to follow our political system. Americans should look in the mirror and see how bad they are. pic.twitter.com/c7pCQnaMmO

  — Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) September 13, 2021

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

  “The United States no longer sees Taiwan as a ‘problem’ in our relations with China, we see it as an opportunity to advance our shared vision,” Greene had said in the June comments. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 23:25

• Buchanan: Who And What Is Tearing The US Apart?
  Buchanan: Who And What Is Tearing The US Apart?

  Authored by Pat Buchanan,

  In Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, former President George W. Bush’s theme was national unity — and how it has been lost over these past 20 years.

  “In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks,” said Bush, “I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people. When it comes to the unity of America, those days seem distant from our own. A malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures.”

  Though he surely did not realize it, Bush had himself, moments before, given us an example of how that unity was destroyed when he drew a parallel between the terrorists of 9/11 and the Trump protesters of Jan 6. Said Bush:

  “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit.”

  

  What is Bush saying here?

  That Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran shot to death trying to enter the House chamber on Jan. 6, and Mohamed Atta, who drove an airliner into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in a massacre of close to 3,000 people, are “children of the same foul spirit.”

  Query: Was not Bush himself here giving us an example of the “malign force” that “turns every disagreement … into a clash of cultures”?

  Bush did not mention his own contribution to our national divide: his invasion of a country, Iraq, that did not threaten us, did not attack us, and did not want war with us — to disarm it of weapons it did not even have.

  Which contributed more to the loss of America’s national unity?

  The four hours of mob violence in the Capitol the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, or the 18-year war in Iraq that Bush launched in 2003?

  “In those fateful hours” after 9/11, said Bush, “Many Americans struggled to understand why an enemy would hate us with such zeal.”

  Yet, well before 9/11, Osama bin Laden, in his declaration of war on us, listed his grievances. Our sanctions were starving the children of Iraq. Our military presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, home to Mecca, was a national insult and a blasphemous outrage to Islam.

  After 9/11, Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. President Barack Obama attacked Libya and plunged us into the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars.

  Thus, over 20 years, we have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands — Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, soldiers and civilians alike — and driven hundreds of thousands more from their homes and their countries.

  Are Americans really as oblivious, as Bush suggests, as to why it was that our enemies “hate us with such zeal”?

  Many of these peoples want us out of their countries for the same reason that 18th- and 19th-century Americans wanted the French, British and Spanish out of our country and out of our hemisphere.

  Yet, it is not only the Bush and Obama wars that have made us so many enemies abroad and so deeply divided us at home.

  Our southern border is being overrun by illegal immigrants whose number, since President Joe Biden took office, has been running at close to 2 million a year, with 30,000 “get-aways” a month. These last are mostly males who never make contact with the Border Patrol as they move on to their chosen destinations. They are coming now not only from Mexico and the northern tier countries of Central America but also from some 100 countries around the world.

  Americans fear they are losing their country to the uninvited and invading millions of the Global South coming to dispossess them of their patrimony. They never voted for this invasion and have wanted their chosen leaders to stop it.

  Former President Donald Trump earned their trust because he tried and, to a great degree, succeeded.

  Unlike previous generations, our 21st-century divisions are far broader — not just economic and political, but social, moral, cultural and racial.

  Abortion, same-sex marriage and transgender rights divide us. Socialism and capitalism divide us. Affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, urban crime, gun violence and critical race theory divide us. Allegations of white privilege and white supremacy, and demands that equality of opportunity give way to equity of rewards, divide us. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the wearing of masks and vaccine mandates divide us.

  Demands to tear down monuments and memorials to those who were, until lately, America’s greats — from Christopher Columbus to George Washington to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, from Abraham Lincoln to Robert E. Lee to Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — divide us.

  We are even divided today on the most fundamental of questions:

  Is America now, and has it always been, a good and great country, worthy of the loyalty and love of all its children, of all its citizens?

  And are we Americans proceeding toward that “more perfect union” or heading for a reenactment of our previous violent disunion?

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 23:05

• "Life Has Not Improved By As Much As We Hoped" – Singapore Outbreak Worsens With 80% Vaccinated
  “Life Has Not Improved By As Much As We Hoped” – Singapore Outbreak Worsens With 80% Vaccinated

  Singapore has just reached a level of vaccination penetration that many other developed economies would envy: 80% of its adult population has been vaccinated. And yet, it continues to struggle with one of the worst outbreaks yet. On Sunday, the nation of 5.7 million people reported 555 new local COVID-19 cases, the most since August 2020. One day prior, Singapore recorded its 58th COVID death, a partially vaccinated 80-year-old man with a history of diabetes, hypertension and heart problems.

  Rather than lowering restrictions, Singapore’s Ministry of Health last week banned social gatherings at workplaces, allegedly because clusters of workers gossiping around the water cooler led to an outbreak. And in their free time, Singaporeans have been asked to attend one social gathering per day, tops.

  

  Despite Singapore being one of the world’s most heavily vaxxed countries, not much about life has changed for the worst of the COVID pandemic. Alex Cook, an infectious diseases modelling expert at the National University of Singapore, acknowledged that life had not improved “by as much as we might have hoped,” despite Singapore being one of the world’s most vaccinated countries.

  A curious thing has happened since Singapore hit 80%, Cook reminds us: “The community cases have actually gone up since reaching 80 per cent coverage, in part because we’re allowing more social events for those who are vaccinated and, I dare say, more fatigue at the control measures,” Cook told the ABC.

  And the outlook isn’t exactly positive: Gan Kim Yong, co-chair of the multi-ministry task force, said the “worrying” spike in infections would “probably get to 2,000 new cases a day,” describing the next two to four weeks as “crucial.”

  It’s a lesson that’s not unique to Singapore; “One main lesson from across South-East Asia is that it is incredibly hard to prevent Delta’s spread and, as Singapore shows, even high vaccination rates will not help that much,” Cook added.

  While they’re mostly symptomatic, Singapore is still finding a lot of breakthrough infections among the vaccinated. At this point, it’s only the latest piece of evidence to suggest that even the revised official efficacy rate of the Pfizer jab just isn’t realistic when we look at the case numbers.

  Another scientist said the continued spread is merely a sign that 80% vaccinated is still “too low for delta”. Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious diseases expert from Singapore’s Rophi Clinic, said the Delta strain had moved the goalposts, in terms of what level of community vaccination was necessary.

  But looking at recent waves of COVID infections in the US, Europe and in Asia, it’s starting to look like that virus simply adapts so quickly, vaccines just aren’t effective enough. Maybe natural immunity is the better rout after all.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 22:45

• The Masking Of The Servant Class: Ugly COVID Images From The Met Gala Are Now Commonplace
  The Masking Of The Servant Class: Ugly COVID Images From The Met Gala Are Now Commonplace

  Authored by Glenn Greenwld via greenwald.substack.com,

  From the start of the pandemic, political elites have been repeatedly caught exempting themselves from the restrictive rules they impose on the lives of those over whom they rule. Governors, mayors, ministers and Speakers of the House have been filmed violating their own COVID protocols in order to dine with their closest lobbyist-friends, enjoy a coddled hair styling in chic salons, or unwind after signing new lockdown and quarantine orders by sneaking away for a weekend getaway with the family. The trend became so widespread that ABC News gathered all the examples under the headline “Elected officials slammed for hypocrisy for not following own COVID-19 advice,” while Business Insider in May updated the reporting with this: “14 prominent Democrats stand accused of hypocrisy for ignoring COVID-19 restrictions they’re urging their constituents to obey.”

  

  Most of those transgressions were too flagrant to ignore and thus produced some degree of scandal and resentment for the political officials granting themselves such license. Dominant liberal culture is, if nothing else, fiercely rule-abiding: they get very upset when they see anyone defying decrees from authorities, even if the rule-breaker is the official who promulgated the directives for everyone else. Photos released last November of California Governor Gavin Newsom giggling maskless as he sat with other maskless state health officials celebrating the birthday of a powerful lobbyist — just one month after he told the public to “to keep your mask on in between bites” and while severe state-imposed restrictions were in place regarding leaving one’s home — caused a drop in popularity and helped fueled a recall initiative against him. Newsom and these other officials broke their own rules, and even among liberals who venerate their leaders as celebrities, rule-breaking is frowned upon.

  But as is so often the case, the most disturbing aspects of elite behavior are found not in what they have prohibited but rather in what they have decided is permissible. When it comes to mask mandates, it is now commonplace to see two distinct classes of people: those who remain maskless as they are served, and those they employ as their servants who must have their faces covered at all times. Prior to the COVID pandemic, it was difficult to imagine how the enormous chasm between the lives of cultural and political elites and everyone else could be made any larger, yet the pandemic generated a new form of crude cultural segregation: a series of protocols which ensure that maskless elites need not ever cast eyes upon the faces of their servant class.

  Last month, a delightful event was hosted by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for wealthy Democratic donors in Napa — the same wine region of choice for Gov. Newsom’s notorious dinner party — at which the cheapest tickets were $100 each and a “chair” designation was available for $29,000. Video of the outdoor festivities showed an overwhelmingly white crowd of rich Democratic donors sitting maskless virtually on top of one another — not an iota of social distancing to be found — as Pelosi imparted her deep wisdom about public policy.

  Pelosi’s donor gala took place as millions face eviction, ongoing joblessness, and ever-emerging mandates of various types. It was also held just five days after the liberal county government of Los Angeles, in the name of Delta, imposed a countywide mask requirement for “major outdoor events.” In nearby San Francisco, where Pelosi’s mansion is found, the liberal-run city government has maintained a more restrictive outdoor mask policy than the CDC: though masks were not required for outdoor exercising (such as jogging) or while consuming food, the city’s rules for outdoor events required “that at any gathering where there are more than 300 people, masks are still required for both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.” Though Pelosi’s fundraising lunch fell below the 10,000-person threshold for LA County’s outdoor mask mandate, it may have fallen within San Francisco’s mask mandate. Either way, it appears arbitrary at best: how would The Science™ of COVID risk have drastically changed for those sitting with no distancing, at densely packed tables, if there had been a few more tables of Pelosi donors? The CDC’s latest guidelines for outdoor events urge people to “consider wearing a mask…for activities with close contact with others who are not fully vaccinated.”

  Trying to find a cogent scientific rationale for any of this is, by design, virtually impossible. The rules are sufficiently convoluted and often arbitrary that one can easily mount arguments to legally justify the Versailles-like conduct of one’s favorite liberal political leaders. Beyond the legalities, everything one does can be simultaneously declared to be responsible or reckless, depending on the political needs of the moment. But what was most striking about Pelosi’s donor event was not the possibility of legal infractions but rather the two-tiered system that was so viscerally and uncomfortably obvious.

  Even though many of the wealthy white donors had no food in front of them and were not yet eating, there was not a mask in sight — except on the faces of the overwhelmingly non-white people hired as servants, all of whom had their gratuitous faces covered. Servants, apparently, are much more pleasant when they are dehumanized. There is no need for noses or mouths or other identifiable facial features for those who are converted into servile robots.

  Similar scenes were visible at the even more opulent birthday bash which former President Barack Obama threw for himself to commemorate his 60 years on the planet. Held at his sprawling $12 million weekend estate on Martha’s Vineyard, Obama and 400 of his closest maskless friends spent hours in indoor tents dancing, chatting in close circles, and yelling in each other’s ears over the live music. While custom-made masks engraved with Obama’s renowned humility were provided to the guests (“44×60”), only the servants were reported to have worn masks. Who can throw a Hawaiian luau-themed party at one of the country’s wealthiest retreats in the middle of a pandemic and joblessness crisis while wearing disfiguring masks, however chic and carefully hand-crafted they might be?

  Discussing the controversy over Obama’s lavish party on CNN, New York Times reporter Annie Karni explained that while some of the former president’s neighbors found the party objectionable on the grounds of health and/or optics, many adamantly argued that such concerns were applicable only to ordinary people, not the more advanced and evolved species likely to be invited to such an extravagant and exclusive liberal party. Karni described this prevailing mentality with vivid accuracy:

  [The controversy] is really being overblown. They’re following all the safety requirements. People are going to sporting events that are bigger than this. This is going to be safe. This is a sophisticated, vaccinated crowd and this is just about optics. It’s not about safety.

  An avalanche of similarly repugnant imagery poured forth on Monday night at the most gluttonous and opulent royal court spectacle of them all: the annual Met Gala held by long-time Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Town and Country has lamented that the once-elevated-and-dignified event has become quite gauche ever since it became overrun by cultural celebrities and nouveau riche tycoons — “these days, the gala is a highly commercialized, celebrity-driven media circus that celebrates sensationalist preening by individuals who couldn’t be less interested in the museum.” Yet despite this degradation, the magazine nonetheless still regards the affair as “the fashion and society event of the year.” In 2014, Wintour complained that the event was insufficiently exclusive and raised the ticket prices to $25,000 per person in order to keep out the riff-raff who had been able to get in the prior year for the middling price of $15,000 per ticket. Tickets this year cost as much as $35,000 per person. It is, pronounced Wintour’s Vogue this week, “the fashion world equivalent of the Oscars.”

  While event organizers, in an act of noble self-sacrifice and social duty, sadly cancelled the gala in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, Wintour was determined this year not to let unpleasant matters like overflowing ICU wards, ongoing school closures, looming mass evictions, and pervasive mask mandates ruin the immense enjoyment bequeathed to the world’s serfs as they watch their beloved bejeweled class pose in designer gowns. Following Pelosi and Obama’s examples, a long list of America’s most glittering stars bravely risked exposure to a deadly virus by appearing without masks, all to ensure that Americans would never again be deprived of such a richly gratifying moment for them. Co-chaired by Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Amanda Gorman, and Naomi Osaka, honorary chairs included Tom Ford, Instagram’s Adam Mosseri, and Wintour herself.

  Much of the attention on Monday night was devoted to the appearance on the red carpet by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). The usual horde of embittered online nay-sayers and envious party-poopers tried implying that there was something incongruous about a socialist politician gleefully participating in the most vulgar tribute to capitalism and social inequality to emerge since the walled-off galas thrown by the French aristocracy at the Palace of Versailles. Some petty, resentful critics even suggested that AOC’s latest star turn somehow illustrated what Shant Mesrobian has disparagingly described as “the Squad’s brand of highly educated, professional-class cultural leftism,” which “now offers elected officials a path to fame and pop culture status that circumvents much of the old, hand-dirtying business of politics,” pursuant to which “elected office itself has become merely a stepping stone to social media celebrity” and “maintaining a social media influencer empire rivals, or even surpasses, the priority of being a successful legislator.”

  Fortunately, many of AOC’s most devoted socialist supporters stepped forth with passionate defenses of their leader. As they pointed out, AOC had painted onto the back of her pristine white gown — in perfectly proportioned and tastefully scrolled red ink highlighting the stunning virtues of the designer dress’ silhouette — a leftist phrase, Tax the Rich, that not only assaulted the Biden-supporting liberal celebrities in attendance but made them feel endangered in their own habitat, as if their wealth and privilege were being imperiled not from afar but from one of their own, from within. Far from being what AOC’s dirty and petty critics tried to malign this as being — an attention-seeking, celebrity-building, branding opportunity in which AOC yet again lavished herself in the multi-pronged rewards of the very economic and cultural hierarchies she claims to despise and vows to combat — she was actually engaged in a revolutionary and subversive act, injecting into aristocratic circles a beautifully artistic yet hostile message.

  This was not, contrary to the grievances of her small-minded and jealous critics, AOC reveling in one of Louis XVI’s court festivities. Instead, she was storming the Bastille: not with weapons or fire but with the graceful designer elegance of the insurgent Marxist renegade, which made her presence all the more deceptively disruptive. While it may have appeared that Vogue‘s perfectly-coiffed red-carpet correspondents and other Met luminaries were gushing with admiration and awe at her bold fashion statement, they were actually shaking with fear over what AOC had wrought. They were quivering with rage and fear, not swooning with delight as it appeared.

  Besides, as AOC herself put it with her trademarked class consciousness, the very fact that she can attend the Met Gala while you cannot is proof of the potency of the left-wing movement she leads. Standing next to Aurora James, the designer of her dress, AOC revealed the underlying clandestine strategy of her subversive attendance: “We really started having a conversation about what it means to be a working class woman of color at the Met … we can’t just play along, but we need to break the fourth wall.”

  “We really started having a conversation about what it means to be a working class woman of color at the Met … we can’t just play along, but we need to break the fourth wall.”

  — AOC at #MetGala pic.twitter.com/UZj22DjMl3

  — The Recount (@therecount) September 14, 2021

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

  In a separate exposition, AOC explained that her appearance at the Met Gala was such a watershed moment for working-class politics because it is vital that she not be confined to dreary poor and lower-middle class venues when spreading her fist-raising rebellion. Instead, she must endure the burden of carrying her cause to the world’s richest and most privileged elite and the exclusive salons they occupy. Imagine being so unimaginative and myopic as to be unable to recognize and be grateful for AOC’s inventive praxis.

  The jealousy-driven attacks on AOC by her cultural inferiors were almost certainly driven by various forms of white supremacy, misogyny and colonialism, as AOC said of those who criticized her in 2018 for wearing an expensive designer dress (“women like me aren’t supposed to run for office”) as well as when she denounced the dismissive and condescending attitudes toward the Squad from Nancy Pelosi (“Nancy Pelosi has been ‘singling out’ freshman congresswomen of color”). Worse, Monday night’s traumatic bullying of AOC obscured the far more important fact that, yet again, we saw elites prancing around in the middle of a pandemic maskless, while those paid hourly wages to serve them or desperately try to snap a photo of them were required to keep their pointless faces covered with cloth at all times.

  

  COVID rules are now so convoluted that liberals are able to defend their leaders’ actions while not even pretending to make sense from a scientific or rational perspective. Many defended Newsom and Obama’s maskless partying on the ground that it was all “outdoors,” even though both were actually inside tents and people had been shamed for months for taking their kids to deserted beaches rather than keeping them locked away at home. Liberals argue that it is fine for elites at Obama’s party and the Met Gala to remain maskless since they are vaccinated, even as they defend the CDC’s new mask directives for vaccinated people based on the view that vaccinated people still dangerously transmit the Delta variant to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike. They will claim that it is fine for rich Democratic donors at Pelosi’s party to sit on top of one other maskless because they are eating even though the video shows they have no food in front of them (they are waiting for the masked servants of color to bring their food) and even though shoveling food into one’s open mouth does not actually create a wall of immunity against transmission of the virus from one’s open-mouthed table neighbors. The Met Gala’s red carpet is said to be “outdoors” even though it is surrounded by tent walls and other structures, and still leaving the question of why workers need to be masked in the same area.

  But all of this stopped being about The Science™ long ago — ever since months of relentless messaging that it is our moral duty to Stay At Home unless we want to sociopathically kill Grandma was replaced overnight by dictates that we had a moral duty to leave our homes to attend densely packed street protests since the racism being protested was a more severe threat to the public health than the global COVID pandemic. One can locate in all of this jumbled and always-shifting rationale various forms of control, shaming, stigma and hierarchy, while The Science™ is nowhere to be found.

  

  Even with all of this deceit and manipulation, there is something uniquely disturbing — creepy even — about becoming accustomed to seeing political and cultural elites wallowing in luxury without masks, while those paid small wages to serve them in various ways are forced to keep cloth over their faces. It is a powerful symbol of the growing rot at the core of America’s cultural and social balkanization: a maskless elite attended to by a permanently faceless servant class. The country’s workers have long been faceless in a figurative sense, and now, thanks to extremely selective application of decisively unscientific COVID restrictions, that condition has become literal.

  ---

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  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 22:25

• Chinese Data Dump Confirms Hard Landing Imminent
  Chinese Data Dump Confirms Hard Landing Imminent

  Update (2210): On the heels of data showing land sales collapsing, tonight’s smorgasbord of data (absent only GDP) on consumption, industrial output and investment will reveal the extent of the damage caused by an outbreak of the delta variant.

  As a reminder ahead of tonight’s August data, the latest official composite purchasing manager’s index fell to the lowest since February 2020, its first contraction after the virus lockdowns, signaling China’s robust economic recovery from last year’s coronavirus trough is losing momentum.

  • Industrial Production YTD YoY MISSED at +13.1% vs +13.5% exp DOWN from +14.4% prior

  • Retail Sales YTD YoY MISSED at +18.1% vs +18.9% exp DOWN from +20.7% prior

  • Fixed Asset Investment YTD YoY MISSED at +8.9% vs +9.0% exp DOWN from +10.3% prior

  • Property Investment YTD YoY MISSED at +10.9% vs +11.3% DOWN from +12.7% prior

  • Surveyed Jobless Rate IN LINE at 5.1% vs 5.1% exp IN LINE with 5.1% prior

  

  Perhaps most notably, year-over-year retail sales rose just 2.5% in August, dramatically worse than the +7% expected and well below the +8.5% in July…

  

  Retail weakness was most pronounced in communication appliances, clothing, household electronics, automobiles and eating out; and as Bloomberg’s Kevin Kingsbury notes, retail sales data are liable to be worse for September (and possibly October) as folks are apt to stay home during the upcoming holidays.

  Notably, the PBOC rolled over 600 billion yuan of funding in a move that signals Beijing is keeping liquidity levels amid the slowdown. The question is, with China’s credit impulse is at its most contractionary in 3 years, is this the turning point once again?

  

  Source: Bloomberg

  Policy makers have so far refrained from large-scale stimulus this year, instead resorting to some low-profile tools to increase credit supply to parts of the economy, especially small businesses. It will be hard for Xi to back down from his ivory tower to suddenly flip-flop to support the economy – systemically or idiosyncratically – without appearing to kowtow to the elites at at time when he is clearly focused on avoiding social unrest among the non-elites.

  *  *  *

  As we detailed earlier, one month after we warned that China had just unleashed a stagflation shockwave, as inflation – and especially factory price inflation – hit the highest in 13 years, crushing corporate profits, while GDP disappointed, and weeks after we also pointed out that China’s credit growth in August had collapsed to the lowest level since the peak of the covid crisis in Feb 2020, Bloomberg writes in its economic preview of China’s economic data dump scheduled for tonight that the country’s economy “likely slowed further in August, with data on consumption, industrial output and investment due Wednesday to reveal the extent of the damage caused by an outbreak of the delta variant.”

  The extent of the slowdown will be closely watched for sign that it’s serious enough to prompt authorities to change their current stance of slowly withdrawing liquidity from markets and keeping stimulus limited. The ongoing regulatory crackdown on sectors like education, the internet and property may have exacerbated the recent economic weakness.

  And while Bloomberg expects substantial disappointments across the board for the month of August when China was hit hard by another round of covid restrictions, including disappointing consumption, property, infrastructure and unemployment data, the reality is that China may be this close to a hard landing.

  The reason for that is that while it won’t be featured in tonight’s data lineup, high-frequency data – actual data, not that kind “filtered” by Beijing’s National Statistics Bureau – points to an absolute disaster for China’s property sector, which has imploded over the past two weeks (coinciding roughly with the terminal collapse of Evergrande).

  According to Nomura, year-over-year growth in volume terms of new home sales, existing home sales and land sales dropped further to -26.6%, -46.6% and -38.3% in the first 11 or 12 days of September from -22.5%, -39.5% and -21.9% in August, respectively. It gets worse: land sales in value terms plunged to -90.4% y-o-y for 1-12 September from -65.0% in August. Some more details from Nomura:

  New home sales growth data for WIND’s 30-city sample serves as a good tracker of official NBS new home sales growth, thanks to their high correlation coefficient of 0.92 during the period from January 2018 to July 2021. Based on our estimates, year-on-year growth in new home sales (hereinafter in volume terms for new home sales) for the WIND 30-city sample declined further to -26.6% for 1-11 September from -22.5% in August and -4.4% in July (Figure 1), while its annualized 2y-o-2y growth also fell to -10.3% in month-to-date September from -5.2% in August and 3.4% in July (Figure 2).

  

  It gets even worse, because a breakdown of the data shows that low-tier cities fared much worse: developers’ net bond financing fell into deeper negative territory in August in both onshore and offshore markets, pointing to a further tightening in developer financing conditions.

  

  According to WIND, growth in land sales in value terms in the 100-city sample, a proxy for land purchases by property developers, slumped to -90.4% y-o-y during 1-12 September form -65.0% in August. In volume (floor space) terms, it also dropped sharply to -38.3% y-o-y from -21.9% (Figure 6).

  

  Although high-frequency land sales data may be under-reported to some extent, as WIND may not receive all cities’ data in a timely manner; the downtrend in land sales growth is quite evident.

  These data support the cautious view of Nomura’s Ting Lu of China’s property sector and macro economy. As Lu writes, “we believe the ongoing property curbs are unlikely to be eased in the near term, as Beijing has attached national strategic importance to reining in property bubbles, directly intervening in credit supply for the property sector, leaving it little room to dial back these curbs.”

  The likelihood of Beijing easing its property curbs is quite low. Actually, despite the worsening property sector, a number of cities have further tightened their curbs over the past two weeks.

  This brings us to another observation made by Nomura last month in the bank’s must read report “Asia Special Report – China: Beijing’s Volcker moment” (available for pro ZH subs at the usual place) namely that the country is facing its “Volcker moment“, as Beijing seems to be willing to sacrifice some growth stability for achieving long-term targets, namely

  • less dependence on foreign high-tech goods,
  • achieving a higher birth rate and
  • reducing wealth inequality.

  Here, Lu repeats his dire conclusion, warning that “there is likely to be a much worse-than-expected growth slowdown, more loan and bond defaults, and potential stock market turmoil.”

  It’s also clear that so far low-tier cities have borne the brunt of the ongoing property sector downturn, due to Beijing’s unprecedented tightening measures, the tapering of the PBoC’s pledged supplementary lending and continued population outflows towards large cities.

  Finally, the latest covid breakout (in the nation that created covid) isn’t helping. As we reported earlier, over the weekend, Putian city in East China’s Fujian province reported 64 local positive cases and the city already imposed locality-based lockdown and “discouraged” people from leaving the city – translation: another multi-million city is under massive quarantine. Of course, it has failed and the outbreak has already spread to neighboring cities in Fujian province, including Xiamen and Quanzhou, with several districts and hospitals put under lockdown there. The situation will get worse as some analysis estimate around 30,000 people have already traveled out from Putian.

  Bottom line: Beijing is facing an economy whose wheels have suddenly come off, and unless China’s political elite is willing to unleash another massive monetary and fiscal tsunami and bail out the economy all over again – something Beijing has repeatedly vowed it won’t do this time – a hard landing, whether or not accompanied by a Volcker Moment, is virtually guaranteed.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 22:08

• Microsoft Announces Record $60 Billion Buyback Just As Market Was About To Break Key Support
  Microsoft Announces Record $60 Billion Buyback Just As Market Was About To Break Key Support

  It was just last Thursday when, commenting on the record flood of corporate bond issuance to hit investment grade companies, which hit an all-time post Labor day high of $60.6BN in new issues across a record (for any two-day period) 39 deals (the previous two-day record was 36 deals immediately after Labor Day in 2019) we said that “while much of tens of billions in proceeds will be used to refi existing debt, we expect a good portion to stay as “general corporate purposes”, i.e., used as dry powder to repurchase stocks. Which means brace for a tidal wave of buybacks in the coming days.“

  We had to wait just three trading days for this prediction to come true because shortly after the close on Tuesday, Microsoft which is the second most valuable company in the world after Apple with a market cap of just over $2.2 trillion, announced that its board approved a new share repurchase program authorizing up to $60 billion in share repurchases. The new share repurchase program represents 2.7% of MSFT’s entire market cap and comes exactly two years after the company’s last buyback authorization which was $40 billion.

  In short, it is precisely the kind of buyback tsunami we had expected would arrive just days after the biggest bond offering onslaught in history.

  But there’s more, because while MSFT stock is up about 1% on this news alone and set to hit a new all time high in the next few days making the MSFT board extremely rich(er), the record repurchase could not have come at a more critical time for stocks: with Apple crapping the bed, and tumbling on its dismal iPhone 13 launch date, it had dragged the S&P just above the critical 50 DMA support level. And just when the market despertely need a boost, here comes Microsoft.

  

  Come to think of it, this is precisely what happened in mid-August, when just as the ES was about to drop below the even more critical 4,350 support level, banks unleashed a record round of buybacks according to BofA.

  

  And so, two birds with one buyback: MSFT stock is back to just shy of all time highs, and the S&P has been rescued, with the downward momentum from the recent selling solidly supported now that traders know that the tech giants will boldly step in with tens of billions in buybacks to prop up the “market.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 21:45

• Tajikistan Summons US Ambassador, Angry Over Biden's 9/11 Remarks
  Tajikistan Summons US Ambassador, Angry Over Biden’s 9/11 Remarks

  The central Asian country of Tajikistan, which shares the entirety of its southern border with Afghanistan, has summoned the US ambassador on Tuesday to mount protest over remarks by President Joe Biden during weekend 9/11 anniversary commemoration events. 

  “A verbal note of protest was conveyed to the US Ambassador in connection with the statements by the President of the United States of America Mr. Joe Biden during his visit to a fire station in Pennsylvania,” Tajikistan’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “The verbal note stated that such statements do not correspond to the spirit of friendly relations and partnership.”

  

  The US ambassador in residence in Dushanbe – the capital of Tajikistan – John Mark Pommersheim, was summoned on Tuesday. He was informed that the country was offended by Biden’s reference to Tajiks also “hanging in the well of the wheel” if the US had landed a large C-130 transport plane in Tajikistan. 

  The diplomatic protest comes after Biden claimed at a 9/11 commemorative event in Pennsylvania that like Afghans, many Tajiks would also be “hanging in the well of the wheel” if the US pulled up a C-130 Hercules aircraft in Tajikistan.

  Here’s the offending section of the speech which Biden had delivered during a 9/11 memorial event at a fire station in Pennsylvania, according to the White House readout: 

  “As I read it, I am told, 70 percent of the American people think it was time to get out of Afghanistan, spending all that money. “But the flip of it is, they didn’t like the way we got out. But it’s hard to explain to anybody how else could you get out. For example, if we were in Tajikistan and we pulled up with a C-130 and said, “We’re going to let, you know, anybody who was involved with being sympathetic to us to get on the plane,” you’d have people hanging in the wheel well. Come on.”

  Biden was defending the pullout and horribly botched evacuation initiated in mid-August, which resulted in multiple Afghan civilian as well as troop deaths. In particular he was referencing the Afghan civilians who attempted to hold on to the wheel skirt and landing gear of a C-130 while it took off from Kabul airport.

  

  At least two had been filmed plummeting to their deaths immediately after the US plane took off, while another young man was found dead in the wheel well when it landed in Doha. The grisly scenes were widely deemed “defining images” of the US pullout fiasco in its final days. 

  Biden comments offered Tajikistan as a place where the exact same thing would supposedly happen, according to the president’s words, which were framed using a whataboutism argument using Tajikistan as the foremost next example. No doubt, Tajikistan’s leaders are outraged at the implication that the population is so desperate to flee that Tajiks would risk death to get out. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 21:25

• Texas Hospital Faces Closure Over Vaccine Mandate, CEO Says
  Texas Hospital Faces Closure Over Vaccine Mandate, CEO Says

  By Becker Hospital Review

  Nearly 140 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, and the federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate could force at least one more to shut its doors. 

  President Joe Biden’s administration is taking steps to require millions of American workers, including certain healthcare workers, to get a COVID-19 vaccine. The plan requires those who work at hospitals and other types of medical facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding to get a COVID-19 vaccine. 

  Brownfield (Texas) Regional Medical Center, a rural hospital, will lose up to 25 percent of its employees if the vaccine mandate is enforced, CEO Jerry Jasper told KCBD.

  

  Losing those workers would probably shut down the hospital because some nurses have already quit to take jobs with nursing agencies that offer higher pay, according to the report. 

  Not complying with the vaccine mandate and losing Medicare and Medicaid funding isn’t an option for Brownfield Regional Medical Center. About 80 percent of the hospital’s funding comes from Medicare and Medicaid, Mr. Jasper told KCBD. 

  The vaccine mandate puts Texas hospital leaders in a complicated position because Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order banning public hospitals from enacting COVID-19 vaccine mandates. 

  “How’s Governor Abbott going to take this? He hasn’t complied with anything federal laws have done so far,” Mr. Jasper told KCBD.

  “So, we’re going to have to, here in Texas at least, we’re going to have to wait and see how it plays out.” 

  Mr. Jasper isn’t the only hospital chief in Texas grappling with how to respond to the vaccine mandate. 

  “I’ve got President Biden telling me he’s going to mandate it, but I have Gov. Abbott who says I cannot mandate it,” Adam Willman, CEO of Clifton-based Goodall-Witcher Healthcare, told the Texas Tribune Sept. 10.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 21:05

• NBA Won't Impose Vaccine Requirement On Players After Union 'Refused To Budge'
  NBA Won’t Impose Vaccine Requirement On Players After Union ‘Refused To Budge’

  What do NBA players, Congress and US postal workers have in common? None of them will be subject to vaccine mandates that up to 100 million Americans face following last week’s Executive Order.

  

  According to ESPN, NBA players have become the latest ‘exempted class’ from the mandates, after their union (the NBPA) “refused to budge on its demand that players not be required to take the vaccine.”

  The NBA and NBPA continue to negotiate aspects of COVID-related protocols and procedures for the upcoming 2021-22 campaign, but the NBPA has refused to budge on its demand that players not be required to take the vaccine, sources say, and any proposal that mandates vaccination remains a “non-starter.”

  NBA referees and most NBA staff will be required to take the jab, according to the report.

  Roughly 85% of players are vaccinated, a league spokesman recently said, and, in a preliminary memo obtained by ESPN in early September, the league outlined a set of strict protocols for unvaccinated players.

  Such protocols include having lockers far from vaccinated teammates and having to eat, fly and ride buses in different sections. These protocols are not final and are still subject to talks with the NBPA. -ESPN

  Earlier this month, the NBA informed teams that vaccine requirements in both New York and San Francisco will be enforced for members of the Knicks, Nets and Golden State Warriors – including all players – unless there are approved medical or religious exemptions, according to a memo obtained by ESPN.

  And late last month, the NBA informed teams that anyone who came within 15 feet of players or officials during games would be required to be fully vaccinated by October 1.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 20:51

• Russia Releases Footage Of Armed 'Robot Tanks' In Action During Zapad-2021 Exercises
  Russia Releases Footage Of Armed ‘Robot Tanks’ In Action During Zapad-2021 Exercises

  Russia’s military has put its cutting edge robot armored fighting vehicles on display during the ongoing massive Zapad-2021 exercises with Belarus and other allied countries. 

  The Ministry of Defense (MoD) released brief footage of the robots being battle-tested during the exercise, with Russian state media describing that “Robotic Russian fighting machines fired anti-armor missiles and let rip with mounted flamethrowers on Monday, while their operators sat in safety away from the battlefield, in colossal drills attended by President Vladimir Putin.”

  

  One of the two models in the exercise was the Uran-9 armored fighting vehicle, which looks like a small conventional tank, and utilizes laser sensors to hone in on targets, and can be outfitted with rockets or large guns, and even a flame-thrower.

  The other model is called the Nerekhta combat robot, which has a purpose of going to places near or behind enemy lines where it’s too dangerous to send regular infantry forces. One Russian military official described that the Nerekhta is “designed to perform reconnaissance tasks, direct fire on enemy positions, and quickly deliver ammunition and equipment.”

  The pair of robots unleashed fire on a simulated enemy during the Zapad-2021 exercises. Russia is rumored to have actually deployed robotic fighting vehicles during prior years in the Syria war, though there’s yet to be footage or confirmation of this. 

  Footage of the robots in action released by the Russian MoD:

  In footage released by the Russian military, the robots maneuvering amidst a large battlefield scene looks like something straight out of The Terminator.

  Zapad-2021 kicked off last Friday, and is mainly taking place at over a dozen bases and ranges mostly on Russian and Belarusian soil. Considered the largest joint war games to take place in Europe in decades, it involves up to 200,000 troops – including elite paratroopers – nearly 800 tanks, and 15 warships plus 80 aircraft.

  #Footage The Baltic and Northern Fleet marines and underwater commandoes neutralize a group of conditional saboteurs, who took over the Russian battle ships’ homebase, during the #Zapad2021 strategic exercise https://t.co/PbWgygObNS#RussiaBelarus #JointExercises #BalticFleet pic.twitter.com/iFBYDDqGuI

  — Минобороны России (@mod_russia) September 14, 2021

  The drills are designed to test the allied militaries’ “interaction during combat operations and letting commanders and staff practice troop management during joint actions in repelling aggression against the Union State,” according to the MoD, which is a reference to the agreement going back to 1999 in which Russia and Belarus committed to deeper political, military, and economic integration.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 20:45

• NHTSA Asks 12 Competing Automakers To Help With Its Broad Investigation Of Tesla's Autopilot
  NHTSA Asks 12 Competing Automakers To Help With Its Broad Investigation Of Tesla’s Autopilot

  The wide-ranging NHTSA probe into Tesla’s Autopilot just got a little more “wide-ranging”.

  That’s because today it was reported that the NHTSA has asked for help from 12 major competitors other automakers in its probe of crashes involving Tesla vehicles. 

  General Motors, Toyota, Ford and Volkswagen were among the names contacted by the NHTSA as the regulator starts to conduct a “comparative analysis” with other “production vehicles equipped with the ability to control both steering and braking/accelerating simultaneously under some circumstances,” Reuters reported Tuesday. 

  The NHTSA is seeking out information on any crashes in which an advanced driver system was operating “anytime during the period beginning 30 seconds immediately prior to the commencement of the crash,” the report said. 

  The regulator is also looking into how driver assistance systems confirm that drivers are engaged and paying attention. And finally, the NHTSA asked other automakers about their “strategies for detecting and responding to the presence of first responder / law enforcement vehicles.”

  

  Recall, the NHTSA recently said it had opened a formal investigation into the company’s Autopilot feature. It said it is opening a probe into Tesla’s Model X, S, and 3 for model years 2014-2021. The broad range of models and model years means that this could be the broad investigation that Tesla skeptics have been requesting for years. Specifically, the regulator is looking into a litany of accidents involving Teslas on Autopilot slamming into inanimate emergency response vehicles on the road. 

  The NHTSA said the investigation would assess technologies, methods “used to monitor, assist, and enforce the driver’s engagement” during autopilot operation, according to Bloomberg.

  Goldman Sachs appeared anything but optimistic that the probe into Autopilot would be resolved quickly. “Given the current probe is related to a Level 2 driver-assist system, one solution could be for an enhanced driver monitoring system to ensure driver compliance with Tesla’s terms of use,” the investment bank wrote last month.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 20:25

• B-2 Stealth Bomber Damaged During "Emergency Landing" At Whiteman Air Force Base
  B-2 Stealth Bomber Damaged During “Emergency Landing” At Whiteman Air Force Base

  A U.S. Air Force stealth bomber was damaged Tuesday after an emergency landing at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. 

  

  Details are limited, but The War Zone received a statement from Air Force Global Strike Command about the incident that unfolded at 0030 local time at Whiteman AFB. 

  There has been an incident at Whiteman AFB. It occurred at approximately 12:30 a.m. on Sept. 14.

  A U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit experienced and [sic] in-flight malfunction during a routine training mission and was damaged on the runway at Whiteman Air Force Base, Missouri, after an emergency landing.

  There were no personnel injuries and no fire associated with the landing. The incident is under investigation and more information will be provided as it becomes available.

  A notice to airmen, or NOTAM, was filed around Whiteman AFB, located near Knob Noster, Missouri, “to provide a safe environment for accident investigations.” The base is home to the B-2 Stealth Bomber of the 509th Bomb Wing.

  

  No damage reports have been released or if the stealth bomber was carrying a payload. The War Zone said there was no fire, and the pilots were unharmed. 

  Northrop Grumman only built 21 of these heavy strategic stealth bombers. One was lost in Guam in 2008. And possibly another has been damaged early Tuesday morning. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 20:10

• Contaminated Pfizer Vaccines Reported In Several Japanese Cities
  Contaminated Pfizer Vaccines Reported In Several Japanese Cities

  Several cities in Japan have reported ‘white-colored floating substances’ in Vials of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine, according to Bloomberg.

  

  The vials came from lot FF5357, where white contaminants were first reported by Kamakura City in Kanagawa prefecture. On Tuesday, two more cities – neighboring Sagamihara and Sakai City in Osaka prefecture reported contaminated vials, however there were no reports of adverse reactions. In Sagamihara, white substances were reported at three different vaccination sites on Sept. 11, 12 and 14.

  The cities told Bloomberg that they will ask Pfizer for an analysis.

  Last month Moderna came under fire after black contaminants were found in multiple vials of their Covid-19 vaccine in Japan, causing the Japanese Ministry of Health to pull 1.6 million doses of the vaccine.

  

  According to NHK, “black substances” were found in syringes and a vial, while pink substances were spotted in a different syringe.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 19:57

• China's Xi Snubbed Biden's Suggestion Of Face-To-Face Summit In Phone Call
  China’s Xi Snubbed Biden’s Suggestion Of Face-To-Face Summit In Phone Call

  New reporting in Financial Times has revealed that President Joe Biden’s efforts to initiate an in-person summit with President Xi Jinping at a moment relations remain a low point have been snubbed by the Chinese leader. The serious overture that Biden made ultimately fell “on deaf ears,” the report emphasizes, as Xi apparently displayed no interest.

  FT reveals the offer was made by Biden during the two leaders’ 90-minute phone call last Thursday. The White House call readout made no mention of the proposed in-person summit. It only said “The two leaders had a broad, strategic discussion in which they discussed areas where our interests converge, and areas where our interests, values, and perspectives diverge,” and the statement added, “They agreed to engage on both sets of issues openly and straightforwardly.”

  

  But on Tuesday the FT reports, “The US president proposed to Xi that the leaders hold the summit in an effort to break a deadlock in US-China relations, but several people briefed on the call said the Chinese leader did not accept it and instead insisted that Washington adopt a less strident tone towards Beijing.”

  And further, “Five people briefed on the call said that although Xi had used less abrasive language than his senior diplomats had done this year, his overall message to Biden was that the United States must moderate its rhetoric.”

  Another official cited Biden’s efforts as including proposing “several possibilities for follow-up engagement with Xi” which included the idea of a summit. FT suggests there was widespread “disappointment” at the White House given Xi’s clear lack of interest in Biden’s significant overture.

  As for the Chinse reaction to the proposed summit, FT explains:

  Chinese accounts of the appeal pointed out that it was initiated by Biden, and quoted Xi as saying that US policies had caused “serious hardship.” They also noted that the United States “looked forward to more discussions and cooperation” with China, in language that implied Washington was pushing harder for engagement than Beijing.

  Biden on the phone to Xi last week: let’s avoid a New Cold War.

  Biden to his mates in Australia, Japan and India this week: let’s figure out how to deepen this New Cold War.https://t.co/YcRz3WAhbL

  — Carlos Martinez (@agent_of_change) September 14, 2021

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

  So it appears Beijing is not at all scarred or feeling pressure by Biden’s ‘get tough’ on China stance, which has included continuing a number of Trump policies, particularly ramping up targeted sanctions on officials related to Hong Kong and Uyghur crackdowns – and continuing weapons sales to Taiwan, alongside an increased US naval presence in the South China Sea and through the contested Taiwan Strait.

  Following the revelation of this significant snub, which no doubt the White House would have preferred to keep a tight lid on, President Xi and Beijing officials likely see China as now a bit more comfortably in the driver’s seat when it comes to future proposals and efforts at direct engagement.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 19:45

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• Watch: Latvian Army Conducts Shooting Drills In Busy Streets
  Watch: Latvian Army Conducts Shooting Drills In Busy Streets

  Footage of a war exercise in the busy streets of Latvia’s capital, Riga, shows heavily armed soldiers firing assault rifles among frightened residents.  

  According to RT News, videos of a field training exercise in Riga were first published online on Saturday morning, have since gone viral. Dozens of heavily armed soldiers conducted what appears to be urban warfare training, firing weapons with blank rounds. 

  Military exercises in the center of Riga, Latvia, no warning given

  Follow us on Telegram: https://t.co/Q7gy2WKwCh pic.twitter.com/JaFbB2RhJn

  — RT (@RT_com) September 13, 2021

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

  In one scene, a soldier fired his assault rifle as a young woman walked by, causing her baby to cry. 

  The incident prompted a backlash among residents who complained the capital was transformed into a warzone without notice. This forced the military to issue an apology:

  “During such drills, we only use blank cartridges, which make noise but do not pose any danger to the health and life of others. In this case, blank cartridges were also used, and this situation was a bitter misunderstanding, for which we apologize. The Defense Ministry calls on the public to show understanding for the exercises,” the ministry said in a statement cited by the TVnet website.

  The exercise in Riga was part of the Namejs 2021 simulated warfare drills that are being held across the region through October. Latvia is a NATO member that is located between Lithuania and Estonia and also borders Russia. 

  Last week, Soviet satellite ally Belarus kicked off war games, which were some of the largest in decades. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 02:45

• UK Government Says Vaccine Passports Integral To COVID Winter Plan Day After They Were Supposedly Scrapped
  UK Government Says Vaccine Passports Integral To COVID Winter Plan Day After They Were Supposedly Scrapped

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  The UK government has insisted that vaccine passports will remain an integral tool in fighting the spread of COVID just a day after health secretary Sajid Javid asserted that they had been completely scrapped.

  

  Well, that didn’t take long.

  During his media rounds yesterday morning, Javid said that vaccine passports represented a “huge intrusion into people’s lives,” adding, “I am pleased to say that we will not be going ahead.”

  However, within 24 hours, the government has indicated that the system will in fact form a “first-line defence” against a winter wave of coronavirus.

  Downing Street has insisted that vaccine passports are still a “first-line defence” against a winter wave of Covid-19 after the health secretary said plans to introduce them had been scrapped.

  https://t.co/ZRydxQfhfx

  — The Times (@thetimes) September 13, 2021

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

  “No 10 said checks on the vaccine status of people going to nightclubs and other crowded events remained a crucial part of the government’s winter Covid plan due to be unveiled by the prime minister tomorrow,” reports the Times.

  It appears as though the only change is that the passports won’t be introduced at the end of this month, appearing instead during early winter when COVID cases will inevitably and conveniently begin to rise again.

  Mark Harper, chairman of the Covid Recovery Group, said of vaccine passports: “They shouldn’t be kept in reserve — they are pointless, damaging and discriminatory.”

  Trusting government pronouncements on vaccine passports is a fool’s game.

  At the end of last year, the British public were assured that they would never come into force, even as the government was paying millions of pounds to private contractors to set up the system.

  As we previously highlighted, vaccine passports will put nightclubs out of business because they operate at a net profit margin of 15 per cent, while one third of under 40’s in the UK haven’t had a single dose of the vaccine.

  Boris Johnson will also signal that he won’t hesitate to re-introduce mask mandates in winter if cases numbers significantly increase, which they are sure to do given that the UK counts ‘COVID deaths’ as any that occurred within a 28 day COVID diagnosis no matter what the cause of the death.

  As we have repeatedly highlighted, vaccine passports represent a digital ID, which represents the implementation of an onerous social credit score system in the west.

  *  *  *

  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
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 02:00

• US Pledges "Ironclad" Commitment To Asian Allies After N.Korean 'Strategic' Long-Range Missile Test
  US Pledges “Ironclad” Commitment To Asian Allies After N.Korean ‘Strategic’ Long-Range Missile Test

  The Pentagon has expressed “ironclad” support to regional US allies Japan and South Korea after weekend long-range cruise missile launches by North Korea – the first in six months.

  State media described the launches as testing “newly-developed long-range cruise missiles” which flew 1,500 kilometers over North Korean territory and were successful in hitting their targets, according to Monday statements. The missiles were further described as capable of evading anti-air defenses, though it was left unspecified how many were actually launched. 

  

  US official VOA News noted that “Pictures posted in North Korean state media showed one of the cruise missiles being fired from a five-canister, road-mobile launcher that appeared to be parked on a highway.”

  It was the first significant missile test since last March, prompting US Indo-Pacific Command to put out a statement saying the Pentagon is “consulting closely with our allies and partners.”

  “This activity highlights DPRK’s continuing focus on developing its military program and the threats that it poses to its neighbors and the international community,” the US military statement said. “The US commitment to the defense of the Republic of Korea and Japan remains ironclad.”

  It’s unclear if the weekend’s test included nuclear-capable missiles, given North Korean state media had dubbed the missiles as a “strategic” launch, leaving some ambiguity over whether they may have been nuclear capable. 

  One analyst of nuclear nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Jeffrey Lewis, at Monterey was quoted as saying in VOA, “This is another system that is designed to fly under missile defense radars or around them.”

  Nuclear and ballistic weapons talks between North Korea and the US have been stalled for two years, since the latter part of the Trump administration; however, it’s been years since the north openly tested a nuclear weapons, with the last known one being at the Punggye-ri test site in 2017.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 01:00

• China Reports First 'School-Centered' COVID Outbreak
  China Reports First ‘School-Centered’ COVID Outbreak

  Weeks have passed since China finally managed to suppress the broad-based delta-driven COVID outbreak centered around Nanjiang which prompted lockdowns, restrictions on movement and mass testing after the virus spread to nearly two dozen provinces.

  But unsurprisingly (since COVID is now endemic to the global human population), a new outbreak has already flared up in Putian, a city of roughly 3MM people in the East Chinese province of Fujian. There’s one interesting detail that sets this outbreak apart from earlier ones: the outbreak has centered around a school, with dozens of school-age children number among the 90 cases that have been confirmed in recent days.

  Since September 10, the infections linked to Putian’s epidemic outbreak have soared to 96 in just three days: 79 in Putian, 10 in Xiamen and seven in Quanzhou. The outbreak, which has been deemed “locally transmitted” despite the alleged link to Singapore. Around 20 of these cases have involved children younger than 12.

  

  Because of this, Chinese health experts quoted in the Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper, warned that this latest outbreak is unlikely to be tamed by the upcoming Autumn Festival, but should be stamped out before the National Day holidays (which take place in October).

  Chinese authorities claimed to have identified the recent traveler as the source of the outbreaks, although the authorities claimed that this patient didn’t test positive until after the quarantine period. The outbreak is said to have two “chains” of transmission: one related to Putou Primary School and one to the Xiesheng shoe factory. The total infections from the school increased to at least 15, along with 10 other infections from the factory. Xianyou county where the school and shoe factory are located started county-wide testing on Monday, testing more than 900,000 people.

  What’s more, the city has since asked residents to stay in the city and all schools and kindergartens, excluding grade three senior high students and boarding schools, were asked to go to online classes starting Monday.

  Although fewer vehicles were seen in the city’s streets on Monday, the city isn’t on lockdown, according to the GT.

  The local health authority has confirmed that the infections were caused by the delta variant. The NHC has warned that there’s still a risk this outbreak could spread to other provinces, and has advised the entire country to be on alert. Right now, the worst-case projections shared with the public suggest the outbreak could continue until early October. The big question now is whether the outbreak will spread to other surrounding provinces.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 00:20

• Science Denied: The Biden Vaccine Mandate
  Science Denied: The Biden Vaccine Mandate

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via Brownstone.org,

  President Biden has decided to go hard on the virus. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

  Sadly for him, those tiny little pathogens don’t pay taxes, don’t vote, don’t have Social Security numbers, can’t be drafted, and don’t answer phone calls from poll takers, which is to say that he and his agencies cannot really control them. That must be frustrating, poor man. 

  Instead his plan is to control what he can control: people, and, most immediately, federal workers and the employees of large regulated companies. For him, the key to crushing the virus is the vaccine. Not enough people are obeying his demand for near-universal vaccination. 

  

  In a maniacal move of wild desperation – or as an excuse to try out the most extreme powers of his office – he is using every weapon that he believes he has to assure compliance with his dream of injecting as many arms as possible. Only then will we crush the virus, all thanks to his leadership, all the complaints about “freedom” be damned – and never mind that the realization of his dream did not work in Israel or the UK. 

  What are the immediate problems here? At least five:

  1. The Biden mandate pretends that the only immunity is injected, not natural. And so it has been from the beginning of this pandemic, even though all science for at least a year – actually you can say centuries – contradicts that. Indeed, we’ve known about natural immunity since 400 B.C when Thucydides first wrote of the great Athens plague that revealed that “they knew the course of the disease and were themselves free from apprehension.” Biden’s mandate could affect 80 million people but far more than that have likely been exposed and gained robust immunity regardless of vaccination status. 

  2. This natural immunity is long-lasting and broad, and we’ve known that since last year when the first studies revealed it. You can say that the addition of a vaccine provides even more but it’s new and untested relative to most drugs approved by regulators, and many people are concerned about possible side effects of this vaccine that was approved much faster than any drug in my lifetime – and there is not one living human being in a position to say with certainty that these skeptics are wrong. 

  3. The mandate presumes that everyone is equally susceptible to severe outcomes from getting exposed to the virus, which we’ve known is not true since at least February 2020. In this entire 18-month fiasco, we’ve not seen any serious high-level communication about the huge range of demographic gradients in infection based on both age and overall health. This ignorance is a consequence of poor public-health messaging, and is grossly irresponsible. The aggregated mandate from the Biden administration ignores this completely, as did the models that suggested lockdowns in the event of a virus from the Spring of 2020. 

  4. Biden seems still of the belief that vaccines stop infection (he claimed this many times) and spread but we know with certainty that this is not the case, and even the CDC admits it. The best guess at this point is that it can help in preventing hospitalization and death but this experiment is still in its early stages, and the relationship between cause and effect in human affairs is not as easy as throwing around two data sets and saying one caused the other. Most cases in the developed world now are occurring among the vaccinated – and we all know this because we have vaccinated friends who got Covid anyway. Some have died. We are not idiots, contrary to what the Biden administration believes. Nor do any of us have all the knowledge and answers. And it is precisely because science is uncertain that the decisions surrounding it need to be decentralized, depoliticized, and open to correction rather than being imposed by top-down mandates. 

  5. Biden’s order flies in the face of basic human freedoms and rights. There is no other way to put it. And it is this fact that is the most prescient for the multitudes who are right now seething in anger that one man who happens to hold power can make health decisions for the whole population regardless of their perfectly rational judgements. When the needle filled with liquid is forced into the arms of people who either have natural immunities or do not fear exposure to the pathogen, it gets personal, and people get really mad, especially after they are still forced into masks and denied other essential rights. 

  Truth is that my phone has been blowing up all evening since Biden’s speech. People are demoralized, panicked, furious, and even at the point of losing it completely over this despotic moment in which we are living. Most of us believed that we live in a scientific age in which information would be broadly disseminated to the world and this technology would somehow prevent us as a society from falling prey to charlatans, mob mysticism, and brutal methods of population control, not to mention to the deployment of superstitious talismans and quackery. That turns out not to be true, and this is perhaps the greatest shock of all. 

  Scientists worked for many hundreds of years to understand pathogens. They worked to understand their effect on the body, the range of susceptibility to both infection and severe outcomes, the demographics of vulnerability, the means by which we come to be protected from them, and the opportunities and limits available to people to protect themselves and others. After all this, humanity put together institutions that protected human freedom, individual rights, and public health, while preserving peace and prosperity in the best of times. 

  In the last 18 months, all that hard work and knowledge seems to have been shredded, replaced by superstition masquerading as some kind of new science of social and pathogenic control. In this year and a half, we’ve observed no clear successes and unrelenting flops. One year ago, humanity had the opportunity to embrace the wisdom of the Great Barrington Declaration to protect the vulnerable while letting society otherwise function. Governments instead chose the path of ignorance and violence. The list is long but it includes: travel restrictions, capacity limits, business closures, school shutdowns, mask mandates, forced human separation (“social distancing”), and now mandates of vaccination that, quite apparently, vast numbers do not want. 

  It’s all designed so that governments can prove to the world that they are powerful enough, smart enough, educated enough to outsmart and manage any living organism, even an invisible one that has been part of the human experience since humans had experiences. In this, they have completely failed – in more ways than it is possible to count. 

  We keep thinking that surely, surely, we will come to the end of this madness. I personally believed it would end the second week of March 2020. Instead, it gets worse and worse, the illusion of control having seized the barely functioning brains of the ruling classes of the world’s richest nations. If this doesn’t prove the astonishing stupidity of the world’s most powerful and educated, nothing else in history does. 

  The great myth that has clouded our vision and our expectations has been that we as a people had progressed beyond the kind of statist shibboleths and fanatic brutality that define our age. The truth is that we are not. 

  This very day, a Karen attacked me for being maskless. I looked at her and thought only of the poor people in Colonial America who dared being caught wearing buckled shoes and therefore running afoul of the sumptuary laws, or of the religious minorities in Medieval Europe who were scapegoated for every plague (look up the origins of the the phrase “poisoning the well”), or the demonization of rebels in the ancient Roman empire or the disapprobation of heretics in the hundreds of years that followed the fall of Rome.

  It is a mark of a primitive society to attribute to political compliance or noncompliance what rational science shows is a feature of the natural world. Why? Ignorance, maybe. Power ambitions, more likely. Scapegoating is apparently an eternal feature of the human experience. Governments seem particularly good at it, even when it is less believable than ever. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 09/14/2021 – 00:00

• Maskless AOC Attends Elite $50k Per Ticket Met Gala In 'Tax The Rich' Dress
  Maskless AOC Attends Elite $50k Per Ticket Met Gala In ‘Tax The Rich’ Dress

  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spent Monday night at the lavish Met Gala in New York wearing a “tax the rich” dress.

  

  The maskless AOC (who vowed to continue masking up despite being vaccinated – around poor people, we guess?) drew sharp criticism over social media for what many perceived as rank hypocrisy under the guise of a ‘bold’ political statement.

  What makes @AOC a bigger fraud:

  The “tax the rich” dress while she’s hanging out with a bunch of wealthy leftwing elites or the lack of masks after spending the past 18 months as one of the biggest authoritarian mask Karens in the country? https://t.co/pE84Pjquh1

  — Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) September 14, 2021

  Tickets for the event range from $30,000 – $50,000, with tables reportedly going between $300,000 – $500,000 (h/t Sara Eisen)

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

  “Tax the Rich”……But first I’m gonna go have the time of my life partying with them all at the most extravagant over the top party of the year that is essentially a celebration of richness. pic.twitter.com/ZkSUnRkqGs

  — Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) September 14, 2021

  Who wore it better? pic.twitter.com/IHQkmEn0as

  — Noam “MF Blum” (@neontaster) September 13, 2021

  When interviewed, she spat out word salad.

  “And we said, we can’t just play along, but we need to break the fourth wall and challenge some of the institutions, and while the Met is known for its spectacle, we should have a conversation about it.”

  WATCH @AOC speaks about her dress tonight: pic.twitter.com/qIGecrBevv

  — Henry Rodgers (@henryrodgersdc) September 14, 2021

  Virtue status: signaled

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

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 23:40

• Facebook's Invisible Elite Rules Highlight Zuckerberg's Blatant Lies
  Facebook’s Invisible Elite Rules Highlight Zuckerberg’s Blatant Lies

  Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

  Facebook’s XCheck gives millions of celebrities, politicians and other high-profile users special treatment (but not Trump), a privilege many abuse…

  

  Equal Footing Lie

  I have little use for Facebook. I don’t trust it and never did. Today the WSJ has an article on Facebook that is hardly surprising. 

  Please note Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt.

  Mark Zuckerberg has publicly said Facebook Inc. allows its more than three billion users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards of behavior apply to everyone, no matter their status or fame.

  In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules, according to company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

  The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was initially intended as a quality-control measure for actions taken against high-profile accounts, including celebrities, politicians and journalists. Today, it shields millions of VIP users from the company’s normal enforcement process, the documents show. Some users are “whitelisted”—rendered immune from enforcement actions—while others are allowed to post rule-violating material pending Facebook employee reviews that often never come.

  In 2019, it allowed international soccer star Neymar to show nude photos of a woman, who had accused him of rape, to tens of millions of his fans before the content was removed by Facebook. Whitelisted accounts shared inflammatory claims that Facebook’s fact checkers deemed false, including that vaccines are deadly, that Hillary Clinton had covered up “pedophile rings,” and that then-President Donald Trump had called all refugees seeking asylum “animals,” according to the documents.

  Lies After Lies After Lies

  The documents that describe XCheck are part of an extensive array of internal Facebook communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. They show that Facebook knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.

  Moreover, the documents show, Facebook often lacks the will or the ability to address them.

  At least some of the documents have been turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to Congress by a person seeking federal whistleblower protection, according to people familiar with the matter.

  Time and again, the documents show, in the U.S. and overseas, Facebook’s own researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects, in areas including teen mental health, political discourse and human trafficking. Time and again, despite Congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them.

  Pervasive Problem

  

  “This problem is pervasive, touching almost every area of the company. Whitelists “pose numerous legal, compliance, and legitimacy risks for the company and harm to our community.”

  The Solution?

  The WSJ comments “One potential solution remains off the table: holding high-profile users to the same standards as everyone else.”

  Lies and Perjury

  Facebook’s treatment of Trump raises howls, but It is within bounds of the law for Facebook to have rules and to claim Trump violated them.

  It is not within the bounds of the law to lie to Congress.

  Please consider False Statements to the Government Can Land You in Jail written in 2010 and the examples are dated.

  With the recent indictment of baseball great Roger Clemens, federal perjury and false statement charges are back in the news. While these charges tend to create press attention when they target celebrities—think Martha Stewart and rap star Lil’ Kim—they are powerful, and common, tools that federal prosecutors also use against ordinary individuals every day. And while these tactics may be common, the penalties are serious: a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment and a fine of $250,000, for either charge.

  Perjury vs. False Statement

  You probably already know what perjury is—lying under oath. For example, if you lie to a grand jury, the Securities and Exchange Commission or any other federal or state agency about an important fact while giving testimony under oath, that’s perjury. If you lie to an FBI agent or other government agent who has knocked on your door, or when you sign a document making a certification you know is false, you haven’t committed perjury because you weren’t under oath. But you may have violated the federal law prohibiting making false statements, and the penalties are just as severe. 

  Consequences of Lies and Perjury

  There should be consequences to lies and perjury. 

  If Zuckerberg lied to Congress, and I believe he repeatedly did, the way to stop the lies is to hold CEOs accountable. 

  Fine Zuckerberg $250,000 (that won’t matter at all to him), and send him to prison for 5 years (that will).

  Then we can address rules and how to enforce them.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 23:20

• Endgame Begins: Evergrande Hires Bankruptcy Advisors As Furious Investors Protest Imminent Default
  Endgame Begins: Evergrande Hires Bankruptcy Advisors As Furious Investors Protest Imminent Default

  It took Evergrande less than a day to go from denying “rumors” of bankruptcy (as per a statement posted on its website earlier today), to confirming that a bankruptcy is imminent.

  In a filing on the Hong Kong stock exchange on Tuesday, Evergrande which was busy trying to convince angry Chinese mobs that they will get their money and/or apartments and that it has no plans of default, the company all but conceded that a bankruptcy is imminent when it said it has hired notable bankruptcy advisors Houlihan Lokey and Admiralty Harbour Capital as joint FAs to “assess the firm’s capital structure”, a well-known euphemism of “prepare to file for bankruptcy.” And just so there was no doubt as to what is coming next, the company said if it’s unable to repay debts on time or get creditors to agree to extensions or alternative arrangements, it may lead to cross-default.

  It quickly went downhill from there, with the company saying that it expects “significant continuing decline” in contract sales in September, resulting in “continuous deterioration” of cash collection, according to the statement. That will place “tremendous pressure” on the group’s cashflow and liquidity.

  Finally, guaranteeing that a default is just a matter of days if not less, the company admitted that it has failed to make “material progress” on the sale of stakes in China Evergrande New Energy Vehicle Group Ltd. and Evergrande Property Services Group Ltd., while the sale of its office building in Hong Kong hasn’t been completed within the expected timetable.

  In short a total disaster, and all this is happening a tens of thousands of Chinese are starting to feel insurrectiony – the real thing, not that January 6 tourist trap – and if they suffer losses, and in a company with $300BN in debt they will suffer major losses, their protests which have been largely peaceful to date will turn quite violent.

  As we reported this morning, police descended on Evergrande’s Shenzhen headquarters late Monday after dozens of people gathered to demand repayments on overdue wealth management products. Protesters numbered in the hundreds on Sunday, Caixin reported. In addition to equity investors who are about to lose everything, the company is also facing angry homebuyers, creditors and even its own employees… who are also about to lose everything.

  “It looks like they are working on debt restructuring after no concrete results on asset disposals, and the first task is to stabilize the holders of wealth management products which could be a social issue,” said Daniel Fan, a credit analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “It seems the developer is working on rescheduling pretty much all onshore debt, and the next step is to do the same for offshore investors.

  Translation: a bond default is imminent, and the only question is what will creditors get in return.

  How imminent? According to Bloomberg, two units failed to discharge their guarantee obligations on time for wealth management products worth 934 million yuan ($145 million), the company said, adding it’s in talks with issuers and investors on a repayment arrangement. If the company fails to reach a resolution, it’s all over and the bankruptcy process begins.

  And while distressed investors are already circling the company’s dollar bonds which are trading around 25-30 cents on the dollar, with the market pricing in a potential restructuring, this is an especially risky proposition according to Citigroup.  According to the bank, the insolvent developer’s bonds are trading at levels that attract the type of investors who place bets on the hardest-hit companies, but dollar bond holders may not be prioritized in a debt restructuring and a resolution could take years, Citi warned. 

  “We caution that offshore holdco debt is deeply subordinated to onshore secured bank debt and opco debt, and recovery values in any restructuring could be low,” wrote Citi strategist W.R. Eric Ollom.

  “Disposition of Evergrande’s substantial land bank to meet creditor claims could be lengthy, resulting in stretched out legal proceedings.”

  Citi also speculated that a solution for Evergrande may include forced core asset sales as well as haircuts for some classes of debt – notably dollar-denominated ones – the Citi strategists wrote, noting that Evergrande’s offshore bonds may be treated as subordinated to bank and opco borrowings in an onshore restructuring. Meanwhile, Nomura credit analyst Iris Chen said a debt restructuring is “almost unavoidable,” predicting a base-case scenario where bondholders would recover 25% of their money.

  And while Evergrande’s bonds can’t really fall much more from here, and in fact are prone to short squeezes, the same can not be said for its peers, and as Evergrande stock plunged again, dropping as much as 8.6% to a the lowest since 2014, it also dragged fown lenders and companies that previously disclosed large revenue exposure to the developer after the news that bankruptcy advisors had been hired. Among them, China Minsheng Bank fell 1.2% in Hong Kong; Industrial and Commercial Bank of China fells at least 0.6%, Suning.com was down -0.4%,  Beijing Jiayu Door Window and Curtain Wall Joint-Stock -1.7%, Shenzhen Grandland -1.4%, Skshu Paint -3.5%.

  Expect much more pain once the company finally pulls the plug, and China’s Lehman moment arrives.

   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 23:00

• Prepare For A Bad Decade At The Border
  Prepare For A Bad Decade At The Border

  Submitted by Princeton Policy Advisors

  Apprehensions at the US southwest border track US job openings. And that means trouble is brewing.

  Jobs and Apprehensions

  As readers know, Customs and Border Protection reports southwest border apprehensions monthly. Readers may be less familiar with JOLTS, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, a monthly assessment of the US job market published since late 1999 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Department of Labor.

  Border apprehensions closely track JOLTS job openings. A quick tour through the historical data is enlightening.

  The previous peak for border apprehensions occurred during the hot economy of the dot-com boom in 2000, and apprehensions thereafter followed job openings down, bottoming in 2002 with the subsequent recession. The recovery from the dot-com bust brought more jobs and more migrants, with apprehensions interestingly peaking in 2005 with the US real estate market and declining precipitously thereafter. Indeed, border apprehensions were an earlier indicator than US job openings of the severe recession which took hold in late 2007.

  

  With the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, apprehensions continued to decline and collapsed to levels not seen since the late 1970s. They remained depressed until 2018.

  The Obama administration faced a small surge at the border in 2014, but managed to regain control over illegal entries by the end of that year. The border saw yet another surge in the months prior to Trump’s inauguration, with migrants accelerating their US crossings for fear of more difficult border conditions once Trump took office. Trump’s harsh rhetoric did in fact intimidate migrants into delaying their journeys north, with the result that 2017 border apprehensions were the lowest since the early 1970s. Action did not match words, however, and migrants soon came to appreciate the Trump administration as something of a paper tiger. Border traffic rebounded, culminating in another crisis starting in July 2018 and peaking in May 2019. During this period, the Trump administration undertook a series of measures to induce Mexican and Northern Triangle governments to curtail migrant movement and implemented the much-loathed Migrant Protection Protocols. These reduced apprehensions to more typical levels by the end of 2019, even though the US job market remained strong.

  The covid pandemic saw both job openings and border traffic crater. By this past spring, however, US job openings were headed into record territory and border apprehensions were keeping pace, likely to reach all-time highs this calendar year.

  The history of the last twenty years strongly suggests that migrants respond to US labor market conditions, both good and bad. Migrants are not driven principally by domestic hardship, as both CIS and I have shown. Rather, when US wages are strong and jobs are plenty, Central Americans head north. The strange and yet inescapable conclusion is that US and Latin American labor markets are to an extent integrated. Guatemala and Honduras may be exotic places in the American imagination, but Central Americans are no strangers to working in the US. The US is not exotic, it’s where the jobs are. Therefore, illegal Central Americans and Mexicans may be considered an integral part of the US labor force, a ‘subprime’ part perhaps, but nevertheless a part of it. This is quite remarkable given that crossing the border is ostensibly illegal. The migrant response to US job openings should not be so dynamic. But it is, and we see a healthy market as though the border were mostly an inconvenience, that is, we see a robust black market in migrant labor finding its way around border enforcement with comparative ease.

  Of course, US administrations have successfully limited illegal border crossings in recent years. As noted above, the Obama administration suppressed a smaller surge during 2014; the ‘Trump intimidation’ brought near record low crossings in 2017; and the various harsh Trump policies from July 2018 managed to restore order by the end of 2019. While all of these worked for a time and to an extent, traffic inevitably picked up if jobs were waiting.

  The Biden administration has managed to be both unlucky and inept, a combination not limited to border policy. The administration relaxed border enforcement straight into the teeth of the hottest job market in at least twenty years, with the likely result a record in border apprehensions for the year. The high number of border crossings is partly, but not entirely, due to administration policy. Be that as it may, the Biden administration will carry the blame, in this as in other matters.

  The Outlook for Illegal Immigration

  In some ways, the more pressing issue is the outlook for future border crossings. Just a few years ago, our friends at some of the think tanks assured us that the threat of massive surges in illegal immigration were over. By this line of thinking, granting amnesty to undocumented residents represented no risk of a new surge in illegal immigration, as had been the case in 1986 following the passage of IRCA, legislation which extended amnesty to undocumented Mexicans in the US. Clearly, the risk of a massive illegal immigration is not over.

  What should we expect in the future? Is the current surge an anomaly which will pass, or does it represent a return to earlier historical patterns? As it happens, this depends principally on the interpretation of the decade from 2008 to 2018, which in turn depends upon whether the Great Recession was only a recession, or in fact, a depression.

  A short digression on economics

  There is no agreed definition of the difference between a recession and a depression. However, if one cares to dig a bit, they can be distinguished, and if one works with a variety of time series data as I do, the hallmarks of a depression are evident after 2008. For example, on the graph below we can see US vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on US roads and highways, generally a good indicator of the country’s economic health. During the first oil shock of 1974 and the subsequent oil shocks of 1979-1982, vehicle miles traveled initially fell, but achieved new highs immediately after the recession officially ended. In the 1991 Gulf War recession and the 2001 dot-com bust, VMT barely flinched. By contrast, during the Great Recession, vehicle miles traveled fell steeply and did not regain their 2007 peak until 2014, seven years later. (And for that, thank you, US shales.) And further, VMT was not back on trend until mid-2017, ten years after the beginning of the downturn. Clearly, the Great Recession was qualitatively different from a normal recession, different even from the brutal and prolonged oil shocks of the late 1970s.

  

  These effects are also visible in housing and consumer credit, more relevant indicators for our discussion. Some analysts feel that the business cycle is essentially the housing cycle, and indeed, housing starts largely track recessions and recoveries. However, on only two occasions in modern history have house values fallen and remained depressed: the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008. Much like vehicle miles traveled, US house values did not recover their 2007 peak until late 2016, almost a decade later. This matters because homes are the primary collateral of consumers, and homeowners were thus compelled to spend the better part of a decade paying down mortgages and other loans, with consumer credit not recovering its 2008 peak until 2017. In the interim, borrowing remained depressed, employment and GDP growth were tepid, and the public mood remained sour. Establishment politicians struggled for credibility, and voters across the globe regularly turned to outsiders, including television personalities and a few comedians, hoping for a better approach to governance.

  

  So why does all this matter for illegal immigration? Because the patterns of depression are visible there as well. As with housing, vehicle miles traveled and consumer credit, remittances to Mexico from the US peaked in 2007 and did not regain that level until May 2018. Similarly, the undocumented Mexican population, according to estimates by Pew Research, peaked in 2008 and declined through 2018. Clearly, the undocumented immigrant population was under financial stress, as were US homeowners, and this stress may have contributed to some undocumented residents returning to Mexico, on the one hand, and likely acted as an impediment to new border crossers, on the other. A depression from 2008 to 2018 would explain the decline in the undocumented immigrant population.

  

  Remittances recovered their previous highs in May of 2018, and the Trump border surge began two months later, in July. This recovery in border traffic was interrupted by covid, but as the pandemic has eased, apprehensions have soared to what promises to be historic levels. One is left with the impression that the recent, elevated levels of apprehensions are not entirely one-off surges, but rather the restoration of patterns which persisted for decades before the Great Recession. It would appear that the Great Recession was the anomaly, and the Trump and now Biden surges constitute a return to business as usual.

  

  Demographic trends to 2030 — an aging US society coupled with a shortage of low wage workers — will make illegal border crossing attractive. Migrants may well be incentivized to jump the border for the balance of the decade. The future may therefore look like the pre-2007 era; indeed, from the migrant perspective, the 2020s may prove the best decade for illegal immigration since the current border regime was established in 1965.

  The numbers can be estimated. In the twenty years to 2007, border apprehensions averaged 1.2 million per year, and the undocumented population grew by 0.5 million per year. Therefore, if the Great Recession is the anomaly and the post-2018 period represents a return to normal patterns of illegal immigration across the southwest border, expect the undocumented population in the US to rise from its current level around 10 million to approximately 15 million by 2030.

  Everyone Loses

  For both the left and the right, a large increase in undocumented immigrants would be a disaster. For the Heritage Foundation, CIS and FAIR, an increase in the undocumented population of 50% is a catastrophic failure of their policy goals. But life is no better for amnesty advocates like fwd.us, the NILC or the Immigration Hub (the prior home of the President’s new immigration advisor, Tyler Moran). The emerging equilibrium may well mirror that of the 1987-2007 period, when high levels of illegal immigration made any talk of amnesty moot. Thus, a reversion to historical patterns portends disaster for literally every major stakeholder group dealing with illegal immigration: the border will be in chaos, illegal immigration will soar, and yet long-term undocumented residents will be no closer to legal status in 2030 than they are today. Even DACA may become trapped in the wash. That is what prohibitions and resulting enforcement regimes produce: wretched outcomes for everyone involved.

  As I have said many times, ending prohibitions — including the prohibition in migrant labor — is not hard. A legalize-and-tax approach ends the related pathologies in short order. We can fix the border and provide legal status for long-time undocumented residents, but we have to use the standard and proven market-based approach. It is the only one which works.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 22:40

• 'You Can't Print Electricity' – Zimbabwe Begins Daily 12-Hour Power Cuts Amid Shortage
  ‘You Can’t Print Electricity’ – Zimbabwe Begins Daily 12-Hour Power Cuts Amid Shortage

  Zimbabwe finds itself in dire economic straits. Again. 

  The South African nation, which has a knack for money printing, began rationing power Sunday. With all the money printing, one would expect the country could afford additional power generation plants or at least import energy while conducting maintenance work at its largest power stations. 

  But that’s not the case whatsoever. Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Co. (ZETDC) has cut power to customers for 12 hours per day during upgrades at Zimbabwe Power Company Hwange Power Station and Kariba Hydro Power Station. 

  

  ZETDC told Bloomberg that it “is experiencing a power shortfall due to generation” and “limited imports.” 

  The power company conducted load shedding to “balance the power supply available and the connected load.” This involves widespread cuts to industrial and agricultural areas. Hospitals, water, sewer installations, and oxygen-producing plants are going to be spared during the blackouts. 

  Reports indicate communication disruptions could be seen. Traffic disruptions are expected. Trains might experience delays. And there’s a severe risk that ATMs and petrol stations could go dark. 

  With the economy in shambles, the Zimbabwe government is learning the hard way it simply can’t print electricity. 

  Meanwhile, as the country struggles with its usual hyperinflation demons, its finance minister, Mthuli Ncube, urged citizens to “invest in understanding emerging innovations like bitcoin,” which ironically will be impossible to mine given the power outages” 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 22:20

• US Quietly Removes Patriot Missile Air Defenses From Saudi Base
  US Quietly Removes Patriot Missile Air Defenses From Saudi Base

  Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com, 

  Satellite images show that several missile batteries previously deployed to Saudi Arabia, including THAAD batteries and Patriot missiles, have been removed from the area. The images show that the removal happened sometime near the end of August.

  Pentagon press secretary John Kirby later confirmed that the air defense assets were “redeployed,” but did not provide details. The missiles were at Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh.

  

  Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal was critical of the move, saying the US must not move Patriot missiles out of the kingdom, and saying that the nation needs reassurance of US military commitment.

  Faisal said this was a bad time for the US to withdraw missiles, “when Saudi Arabia is the victim of missile attacks and drone attacks, not just from Yemen, but from Iran.”

  With the Saudi invasion of Yemen ongoing, the Houthis have launched missiles and drones in retaliation, though these are mostly in southern Saudi Arabia, a fair distance from the US deployment. Iran’s only relation is that the Saudis tend to blame Iran for what the Houthis do, on the grounds that they are both Shi’ite.

  The timing of the redeployments may also be significant, coming ahead of new releases of 9/11 documents related to Saudi involvement. The documents, as usual, are trying not to directly implicate the Saudi government in the conclusion, but with Saudis so heavily involved in every stage of the plot, the administration may have decided this was a good time to be less conspicuously providing the Saudis with military support.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 22:00

• "Like It's Loose Change": Taliban Says Former Afghan VP Left Behind $6 Million Cash & Gold Bars At Residence
  “Like It’s Loose Change”: Taliban Says Former Afghan VP Left Behind $6 Million Cash & Gold Bars At Residence

  The Taliban says it found over $6 million in cash and at least 15 gold bars after it raided the home of a longtime Afghan national politician, Amrullah Saleh.

  Saleh had been vice president since February 2020 until the collapse of the Afghan government when the Taliban overran Kabul in August. As soon as President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, reportedly with millions in cash, VP Saleh declared himself acting president of the country, which happened on Aug.17. The home where the cash was reportedly found was in the Panjshir Valley – recently taken by the Taliban. The Taliban released video of militants rummaging through the treasure that had been left behind…

  This is the money and gold found inside @AmrullahSaleh2‘s home. The vice president of one of the poorest countries around the world (where the economy entirely depends on aid) left $6,5 million behind like it’s loose change. pic.twitter.com/er5vJOrDSs

  — Sangar | سنګر پیکار (@paykhar) September 13, 2021

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

  Saleh has since the Taliban takeover been a prime opposition figure in the country fighting against the hardline Islamists’ rule – efforts which have been centered in recent weeks on contested Panjshir province, where it’s said the country’s last resistance leaders remain. 

  Saleh’s own brother was reportedly killed days ago at a Taliban checkpoint. The brother, “Rohullah Azizi was traveling with his driver on Thursday when Taliban fighters stopped them at a checkpoint in Khanez village in the province of Panjshir, the relatives said,” according to Germany’s Deutsche Welle. “As we hear at the moment [the] Taliban shot him and his driver at the checkpoint,” relatives of the family were cited as saying.

  Saleh had a long history with the US-backed national government, from 2018 to 2019 serving as interior minister, and from 2004 to 2010 being the head of the National Directorate of Security. It’s during his long career that he’s believed to have amassed his fortune, suggesting corruption.

  #BREAKING
  Taliban: We got 6.5 million dollars from Former Afghan VP Amrullah Saleh’s house pic.twitter.com/zQZyDv2ek9

  — Talib Times (@talib_times) September 13, 2021

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

  However, some observers have questioned the video as possibly fake. In releasing it, the Taliban is hoping to publicize allegations of just how deep corruption went among former US-backed Afghan politicians.

  It’s being generally acknowledged as the Taliban’s biggest haul in terms of cash recovered from a single politician’s house. There’s long been reports and confirmation out of the Pentagon and US officials who’ve admitted to flying entire crates and bricks of cash into the country over the past couple decades of war.

  Often this was with the aim of “paying off” tribal warlords and even local politicians in order to ensure some degree of stability and peace for the US occupation. Often large quantities of cash would simply disappear. Likely the Taliban will continue to release videos of uncovering piles of cash, jewelry, and gold at former Afghan officials’ residence, in order to underscore the self-serving nature of the prior corrupt US propped-up government.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 21:40

• One Of The Largest US Supermarket Chains Warns Inflation Is About To Impact More Americans
  One Of The Largest US Supermarket Chains Warns Inflation Is About To Impact More Americans

  By Jack Phillips of Epoch Times,

  An executive of Kroger, one of the largest supermarket chains in the United States, warned grocery prices are about to become even higher this year as inflation sets in.

  

  Inflation is running hotter than previously anticipated, and prices are slated to rise an additional 2 to 3 percent over the second half of 2021, Kroger CFO Gary Millerchip said during a call with reporters.

  Kroger will be “passing along higher cost to the customer where it makes sense to do so,” he said on Sept. 10.

  The comment comes as the price for beef, poultry, and pork have risen at grocery stores in recent months, leading White House officials to blame meat processing companies.

  “Just four large conglomerates control the majority of the market for each of these three products [beef, pork and poultry], and the data show that these companies have been raising prices while generating record profits during the pandemic,” said National Economic Council Director Brian Deese at a press briefing on Sept. 8.

  “Those companies have seen record or near-record profits in the first half of this year,” Deese said, taking aim at JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill Meat Solutions Corp., and the National Beef Packing Company. “And that has coincided with a period where we’ve seen disproportionate increase in prices in those segments.”

  Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack claimed that some food companies may be price-gouging, although he noted that labor and transportation costs have risen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

  “Our job is to make sure that that farmer gets a fair price and that the producer … when I go to the grocery store, and I’m in the checkout line, I’m paying a fair price,” Vilsack said.

  Neither official signaled that inflation may be the cause despite the producer price index increasing by 0.7 percent in August 2021 over the previous month. Final demand prices have also risen 8.3 percent from a year ago, which is the biggest increase since 2010, according to a Department of Labor report issued on Sept. 10.

  Other than Kroger’s warning, food giant Nestle’s Chief Financial Officer, Francois-Xavier Roger, acknowledged a higher input cost inflation in 2022 than this year.

  “If we talk of 2022, it is likely that input cost inflation will be higher next year than this year,” Roger said at a Barclays consumer staples conference, reported the Reuters news agency. 

  “Our strategy is to offset anything we receive through pricing. The idea is to pass it on to the trade and to consumers whenever we receive it,” he said.

  Earlier this year, CEO of supermarket chain Albertsons, Vivek Sankaran, said that regarding inflation, “It could go a little bit higher, but … we have a strong consumer” base in the United States.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 21:20

• Google Has Been Underpaying A "Shadow Workforce" Of Contract And Temp Workers For Years, Report Reveals
  Google Has Been Underpaying A “Shadow Workforce” Of Contract And Temp Workers For Years, Report Reveals

  Google, who hilariously is included in many “ESG” funds, underpaid “thousands” of international contract workers across several countries, a new report by the New York Times revealed on Friday.

  Even better is the fact that the big tech company reportedly discovered it was violating pay-parity laws in numerous countries and then chose “not to immediately compensate the underpaid temporary staff,” according to follow up reporting by Insider.

  In Europe and Asia, pay-parity laws require companies to pay similar wages to full-time and temp workers who perform similar jobs. The U.S. has no such laws.

  Google employs over 900 temporary workers in countries like the UK, Ireland, India, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Poland. The company’s temp and contract workers outnumber its full time staff, the report says, creating a “shadow workforce”. 

  Google chose only to correct its rate of pay for new employees after finding the error.

  

  The company also reportedly banned contractors from talking to full time employees and made temps “wear red badges” that led to a “sense of shame”, one employee told Insider.

  Google manager Alan Barry, who is based in Ireland, wrote in e-mails that the rise in pay would “give rise to a flurry of noise/frustration”. He also wrote: “I’m also not keen to invite the charge that we’ve allowed this situation to persist for so long that the correction required is significant.”

  Spyro Karetsos, Google’s chief compliance officer, told Insider: “While the team hasn’t increased the comparator rate benchmarks for some years, actual pay rates for temporary staff have increased numerous times in that period. Most temporary staff are paid significantly more than the comparator rates.”

  Karetsos continued: “Nevertheless, it’s clear that this process has not been handled consistently with the high standards to which we hold ourselves as a company. We’re doing a thorough review, and we’re committed to identifying and addressing any pay discrepancies that the team has not already addressed. And we’ll be conducting a review of our compliance practices in this area. In short, we’re going to figure out what went wrong here, why it happened, and we’re going to make it right.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 21:00

• Chinese State Media Slams Soros As "The Most Evil Person In The World" And "The Son Of Satan"
  Chinese State Media Slams Soros As “The Most Evil Person In The World” And “The Son Of Satan”

  It didn’t take China long to respond to George Soros after he went nuclear on Beijing and US investment titans abandoning their “ESG ideals” to capitalize on China’s massive market.

  Over the weekend, China’s state-run tabloid Global Times labeled George Soros a “global economic terrorist” in a tit for tat exchange playing out in dueling op-eds that underscore the rising temperature in US-China relations, the Standard and Asia Times reported.

  The article, published on September 4, accused the billionaire hedge fund manager and liberal donor and Democrat supporter of providing finance to Hong Kong’s jailed newspaper owner Jimmy Lai to support the city’s anti-Beijing protests in 2019.

  Soon thereafter, Soros penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that said New York-based BlackRock’s recent $1 billion mutual fund investment in China was a “tragic mistake” and would lose money for the asset manager’s clients. Soros wrote the BlackRock investment “imperils the national security interests of the US.” That followed an August 30 op-ed Soros published in the Financial Times that said Chinese President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on private enterprise has been “a significant drag on the Chinese economy” and “could lead to a crash.”

  Soros said indices such as MSCI’s ACWI, ESG Leaders Index and BlackRock’s ESG Aware, have “effectively forced hundreds of billions of dollars belonging to US investors into Chinese companies whose corporate governance does not meet the required standard — power and accountability is now exercised by one man (Xi) who is not accountable to any international authority.”

  The billionaire urged the US Congress to pass legislation limiting asset managers’ investments to “companies where actual governance structures are both transparent and aligned with stakeholders.” Previous reports said that Soros’ hedge fund had disposed all of its exposure to Chinese assets earlier this year.

  Having made a name (and $1.1 billion ) for breaking the Bank of England in 1992, during the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Soros also tried to break the Hong Kong dollar’s peg to the US dollar but was ultimately defeated by the Hong Kong government, which intervened heavily in markets to protect the peg. Soros was given the nickname “financial crocodile” by local media at the time.

  In September 2001, Soros was invited to visit China and met then Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji in Beijing. But after the 2008 global financial crisis, Soros told media in October 2009 that China should step up to the plate as the leader of a new global economic order.

  Then, in January 2016, Soros told a dinner audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos that “a hard landing is practically unavoidable” for the Chinese economy. A few days later, the People’s Daily, China’s Communist Party mouthpiece, warned that “Soros’s war on the renminbi and the Hong Kong dollar cannot possibly succeed – about this there can be no doubt.”

  In January 2019, Soros said Chinese President Xi Jinping was “the most dangerous enemy” of free societies for presiding over a high-tech surveillance regime. He said, “China is not the only authoritarian regime in the world but it is the wealthiest, strongest and technologically most advanced.”  He also said China’s ZTE and Huawei telecom giants should not be allowed to dominate the world’s 5G infrastructure rollout.

  But the Global Times’ “economic terrorist” label is a new escalation in the feud between the two.

  The Global Times’ commentary, titled “This global economic terrorist is staring at China!”, claimed Soros only started to criticize China because he felt regret after disposing all his investments in Tencent Music, Baidu and Vishop earlier this year.

  The article added that his Open Society Foundations financed Human Rights Watch, which it claimed spreads “rumors” against China over recent matters in Hong Kong and Xinjiang as well as the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Global Times commentary also claimed Soros had colluded with Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai to try to start a “color revolution” in Hong Kong in 2019. It also described Soros as “the most evil person in the world” and “the son of Satan.”

  This is not the first time a sovereign country has slammed Soros as “satan”: several years ago his native Hungary said George Soros is “Satan” and his agenda is one that “from its heart hates Christian Europe’s traditions and civilization.”

  In a speech entititled “The Christian duty to fight against the Satan/Soros Plan,” András Aradszki, the government’s secretary of state for energy, framed his ruling party’s long running campaign against Soros for the first time in explicitly theological terms.

  Linking Soros to “abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and the forced politicization of gender theory,” Aradszki declared from the floor of Hungary’s parliament Sunday, “The Soros mercenaries do not cite the Holy Father’s thoughts on this.”

  He added: “Soros and his comrades want to destroy the independence and values of nation states for the purpose of watering down the Christian spirit of Europe.”

  Citing an alleged plan by Soros for to forcibly settle “tens of millions of migrants” in Europe, Aradszki declared, “The fight against Satan is a Christian duty. Yes, I speak of an attack by Satan, who is also the angel of denial, because they are denying what they are preparing to do — even when it is completely obvious.”

  Going back to China, AsiaTimes reports that the Global Times article was widely republished by mainland websites and cited by Hong Kong and Taiwanese media over the past few days.

  The Global Times was not finished, and in a separate op-ed, the Global Times wrote that:

  “George Soros, who is despised by many around the world for triggering and profiting from crises, started a fresh campaign against China’s economy over the country’s recent regulatory actions. But like his repeatedly failures and massive losses in betting against the world’s second-largest economy before, Soros’ latest attempt is not only doomed to fail but will also erase any credibility he still has when it comes to China.”

  The Global Times was also concerned by Soros’ criticism of BlackRock’s massive new investment in China and Xi’s regulatory clampdown, however it had little to worry about: when it comes to China, Larry Fink’s ideals are just as flexible as the Fed’s mandate for how many bonds and ETFs the asset management giant should buy on its behalf.

  In April 2021, BlackRock Chairman Larry Fink wrote in a letter to shareholders that “the Chinese market represents a significant opportunity to help meet the long-term goals of investors in China and internationally” and provides the company an opportunity to help address the challenge of retirement for millions of people in China.

  “As China’s capital markets continue to open to foreign firms, BlackRock has taken meaningful actions to expand our onshore presence and respond to the needs of our clients,” Fink said. Last August, China approved a wealth management joint venture between BlackRock, Singapore state investor Temasek Holdings and China Construction Bank. In May this year, the joint venture, which is 50.1% owned by Blackrock, 40% by CCB and 9.9% by Temasek, was granted a license by Chinese regulators.

  So far Soros’ attempts to hinder US investments in China by asset management giants have been met with scorn and mockery.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 20:40

• 177 Stanford Faculty Members Urge DOJ To Stop Looking For Chinese Spies In Academia Because It Causes "Racial Profiling"
  177 Stanford Faculty Members Urge DOJ To Stop Looking For Chinese Spies In Academia Because It Causes “Racial Profiling”

  A group of Stanford professors have come together to urge the Justice Department to stop looking for Chinese spies at U.S. universities, a September 8 letter from the group reads.

  Arguing that such programs cause “racial profiling”, the  professors claim the “China Initiative”, which was set up to prevent U.S. technology theft, is “harming the United States’ research and technology competitiveness and “is fueling biases”, Reuters reported.

  The Justice Department brought 27 cases as a result of the initiative. While some have been dropped, others are ongoing. Peter Michelson, Stanford’s senior associate dean for the natural sciences told Reuters: “I think what the FBI’s done in most cases is to scare people – investigating people and interrogating them. And it’s harmful to the country.”

  What country, Peter?

  

  177 faculty members signed the letter, which was posted on a site they called “Winds of Freedom”. 

  “We, a group of 177 Stanford faculty members from more than 40 departments, have sent the following open letter to the U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, requesting that he terminates the Department of Justice’s China Initiative. The China Initiative was introduced by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions in 2018, with the objective of combating economic espionage, intellectual property theft and other threats associated with the government of China,” the site reads.

  It continues: “However, we believe the China Initiative raises concerns of racial profiling and is harming the United States’ research and technology competitiveness. This initiative has led to a significant increase of investigations and prosecutions to researchers in academia, with most cases unrelated to intellectual property theft or scientific/economic espionage. The investigations have been disproportionately targeting researchers of Chinese origin. The chilling effect of the China Initiative is discouraging many scholars from coming to or staying in the U.S. We believe that the China Initiative should be terminated.”

  You can read the full letter here:

   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 20:20

• Aluminum Tops $3,000 For First Time Since 2008 On Supply Woes
  Aluminum Tops $3,000 For First Time Since 2008 On Supply Woes

  Aluminum prices on the London Metal Exchange hit a 13-year high Monday, extending a year-long vertical ramp amid supply risks in Guinea and alumina refining woes in China and Europe. 

  The benchmark contract on the LME climbed nearly 1%, touching its highest level since 2008 at $3,000 per ton. Prices have jumped 50% this year and 15% in the last three weeks. 

  

  Aluminum prices have been supported by production curbs in Chinese smelting regions, often to alleviate the strain on the power grid. The latest price surge comes from a military coup in Guinea last Monday sparked concerns over the supply of bauxite, a sedimentary rock with high aluminum content.

  A stream of announcements from China has been about challenges faced by smelters. On Monday, Steelhome reported that Yunnan would limit smelter capacity to reduce energy. Smelters in the European Union are also facing pressure with record-high power costs.  

  “In China and increasingly in the EU, policy risk to aluminum supply is growing,” Goldman Sachs’ analysts Jeff Curri told clients in a note Monday. He is not worried about the coup in Guinea affecting the bauxite supply just yet and says upside risks persist due to further logistical bottlenecks. 

  Another factor boosting prices is dwindling exchange stockpiles and strong demand. LME warehouses report aluminum inventories have plunged 33% since March to 1.3 million tons, and stocks in Shanghai Futures Exchange plummeted 42% to 228,529 tons since April. 

  

  The metal has wide applications in everything from car pates, appliances, defense weapons, airplanes, and even the soda can, has faced strong demand since the pandemic after global central banks and governments unleashed trillions of dollars in stimulus. Goldman Curri recently told clients:

  “As demand improves seasonally from September, aided by reduced lockdown effects and some probable supportive policy adjustments, we expect continued tightness onshore into Q4 and support for higher import volumes of refined metal. This fundamental setup will offer support for a trend higher in both copper and aluminum prices in particular.”

  Another tailwind for Bloomberg Industrial Metals Index, already at a decade high, could be the troughing of China’s credit impulse. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 20:00

• High School Barred Students From Commemorating 9/11 Over 'Racial Insensitivity'
  High School Barred Students From Commemorating 9/11 Over ‘Racial Insensitivity’

  Controversy erupted this past weekend at a Washington State high school over plans to commemorate the 20th year anniversary since the September 11 terror attacks. Students at Eastlake High School in the city of Sammamish had organized and planned to simply wear red, white and blue clothing to a patriotic-themed football game, but were told by school administrators that it would be “racially insensitive”. 

  A local media report said the patriotic commemoration was shut down because American flag colors might “unintentionally cause offense to some who see it differently” – and that specifically it could be could be “racially insensitive and offend some people.”

  

  It was described as a last minute cancelation and caused outrage among students and parents, particularly given the school has no basis on which to ban clothing that doesn’t fit the category of crude or offensive. Instead the school literally told students not to wear red, white and blue to the game.

  A school principal had reportedly sent an email to parents explaining that while the school understands “sacrifice and values our flag represents,” but ultimately that school leadership “just did not want to unintentionally cause offense to some who see it differently.”

  The school never explained just what about red, white and blue coloring would be “offensive” to anyone. Later the school district’s communications director claimed there wasn’t enough time before the game to let everyone know about the patriotic-themed event. The school also at one point suggested the display could cause offense to the other team without enough advanced warning. 

  “Since it was not a home game, there was no opportunity to have an announcement about Patriots Day and to share why students were dressed in red, white and blue,” communication director Shannon Parthemer was cited in local reports as saying. 

  Absurdly, the school is essentially saying that display of American flag and its colors must come with an advanced “trigger warning”.

  NEW: Students were set to wear red, white & blue colors at their football game to honor the lives lost on 9/11.

  But school staff pulled the plug.

  The principal said it could “unintentionally cause offense to some who see it differently.”https://t.co/lAcE5r7N7K

  — Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) September 12, 2021

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

  One angry parent speculated as to the assumptions driving the school’s bizarre decision-making “The leadership and equity team decided that since it was against a predominantly Black team they did not want to ‘unintentionally cause offense to some who see (our flag) differently,’” the parent said.

  A local conservative talk radio show further captured the fierce pushback among much of the student body as follows: 

  Ryan Ware is the Eastlake senior class president and member of the football team. He said students were eager to wear red, white, and blue clothes and were disappointed by the school administration’s decision.

  “We disagreed and were extremely disappointed. I couldn’t believe their reasoning,” Ware explained to the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH.

  One other student noted the hypocrisy on display. The school is about inclusivity — just not when it comes to representing the country?

  “I was instantly upset, and frustrated,” one student emailed. “If Eastlake is all about including everyone’s beliefs and being together as a ‘family,’ then why are we being told we can’t represent the country we live in? I have seen other [Lake Washington School District] football teams that held a flag or did some sort of memorial recognition towards 9/11, but apparently we weren’t allowed to even wear USA colors.”

  The frustrations expressed tended to point to the school’s hypocrisy, given in past years it’s talked up and emphasized “inclusivity” – yet this apparently excludes public displays showing a minimal level respect to the United States and past Americans who have paid the ultimate sacrifice. 

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 19:40

• Top Tax Rate In NYC Would Be 61.2%, 59.7% In California Under House Dems' New Tax Plan
  Top Tax Rate In NYC Would Be 61.2%, 59.7% In California Under House Dems’ New Tax Plan

  Update (1130ET): At least one influential Democratic lawmaker is claiming that the leadership has promised to kill the SALT deduction cap as part of Biden’s newly revised budget plan.

  Despite it not being included in the outline released by House Ways and Means earlier today, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi has just released a statement claiming that the leadership have committed to removing the cap for SALT deductions.

  Inbox: Rep. Suozzi (D-NY) threatens to withhold vote for reconciliation bill unless it removes cap for SALT deduction.
  Tax document released by House Ways & Means was silent on this issue pic.twitter.com/jfb3B1sawb

  — Catherine Rampell (@crampell) September 13, 2021

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

  To be sure, it’s not exactly clear what this ‘meaningful change’ will be.

  * * *

  Update (1100ET): CNBC has just produced the first analysis of what the Dems’ new tax proposal would do to the overall tax rate of the wealthiest class of taxpayers.

  Top earners in NYC would face a combined city, state and federal income tax rate of 61.2%. For the top marginal federal income tax rate – which is the rate that taxpayers pay on every dollar of earned income above the threshold – would be 46.6%

  In NYC, the combined top marginal state and city tax rate is 14.8%. So, city taxpayers who earn more than $5MM a year would face a combined city, state and federal marginal rate of 61.2% if the House plan becomes law. These would be among the highest tax rates seen in the last 40 years.

  Things aren’t much better on the west coast. Top-earning Californians would face a combined marginal rate of 59.7%, while those in New Jersey would face a combined rate of 57.2%. Hawaii could face a combined rate of up to 57.4%. Meanwhile, there are no signs that the House will roll back any of the less popular tax hikes from the Trump plan, the SALT deduction cap, which has been a target of Democratic lawmakers since it was passed.

  However, some sources close to CNBC said it’s possible the House might seek to scrap the SALT deduction cap at a later time.

  * * *

  Update (0915ET): The House Ways and Means Committee has just released the new Democratic package of proposed tax hikes (which we previewed below, courtesy of BBG) as Dems take the first step toward revising their budget, now that Sen. Joe Manchin has made clear the $3.5 trillion pricetag wouldn’t work.

  The plan focuses on trying to lower taxes for the smallest businesses. In addition to an increase in the corporate tax rate to 26.5%, the Dems also want to impose a 3% wealth surtax on taxpayers with income above $5MM (or in excess of $2.5 million for a married individual filing separately), while increasing the top capital gains rate to 25%. Dems are also calling for a top personal rate of 39.6%, up from 37%.

  As Republicans and Moderate Dems expressed resistance to the $3.5 trillion figure in Biden’s budget plan, odds of a major hike have fallen, while the market’s expectation for a modest hike in corporate taxes, and in taxes for the wealthy, have emerged. And while there are plenty of other factors to blame for the recent market turbulence, tax hikes are certainly looming on the horizon with Dems in control of both houses of Congress.

  

  A team of Goldman Sachs strategists led by David Kostin, their top equity strategist, warned clients in a report that they probably aren’t taking the market risks of a tax hike seriously enough.

  “Tax reform, not reduced economic growth forecasts, is the key risk to US equities through year-end 2021,” they add, refering to increasing concerns among clients about what softer growth outlook means for equities. “The market appears to be only partially pricing an increased tax rate in 2022,” the strategists wrote.

  The Ways and Means Committee is planning a vote later this week.

  * * *

  Now that Sen. Joe Manchin has officially come out against President Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending package, the Democrats are being forced to rethink their budget plans – starting with the ‘income’ side, since President Biden has promised to offset additional spending with tax hikes. And so, just hours after Manchin confirmed his opposition to the budget in a series of interviews, Bloomberg reports that the Dems have drafted a new package of tax increases that falls well short of Biden’s ambitious targets.

  

  The new proposal would raise the top corporate rate from 21% to 26.5%, less than the 28% Biden had sought, people familiar with the matter said Sunday night. Meanwhile, the top rate on capital gains would rise from 20% to 25%, instead of the 39.6% Biden had originally proposed, per Bloomberg.

  The new set of “business minded” tax increases is estimated to raise more than $2 trillion, which still might not be low enough to appeal to moderate Democrats like Manchin.

  Still, the plan was criticized by conservatives, a preview of the fight ahead as the House Ways and Means Committee prepares to meet Tuesday to debate the tax portion of the economic package.

  Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group that fights for lower taxes, said the proposed tax hikes would lead to an immediate increase in consumer utility bills and make the US less competitive on the world stage.

  “Democrats want to take the current rate of 21% and raise it to 26.5%, higher than communist China’s 25% and higher than the developed world average of 23.5%. This does not even include state corporate income taxes, which average another 4 – 5% nationwide,” the group said.

  The tax increases described in the document, which is circulating among lawmakers of both parties, would raise $2.9 trillion in revenue when combined with $700 billion in revenue and cost savings from Medicare drug price changes. To fully pay for the president’s plan, the proposal factors in $600 billion from the estimated economic growth effects of the spending increase.

  What’s more, the proposal would raise an estimated $16 billion by limiting deductions for executive compensation and $96 billion by higher taxes on tobacco and nicotine products, including e-cigarettes.

  Despite pushback from the crypto community, Dems are still planning to include cryptocurrency in general tax rules allowing for cryptocurrencies to be treated the same as other financial instruments and to prevent taxpayer abuse of the rules.

  Other new taxes in the new plan include: a proposal to cut in half the $24,000 estate and gift tax exemption for married filers on Dec. 31, 2021, four years earlier than set in the tax cuts passed under former President Donald Trump.

  Notably absent from the document is any discussion of lifting the $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, raising questions about the fate of that costly proposal.

  The Ways and Means proposal “meets two core goals the President laid out at the beginning of this process – it does not raise taxes on Americans earning under $400K and it repeals the core elements of the Trump tax giveaways for the wealthy and corporations that have done nothing to strengthen our country’s economic health,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

  While the numbers are still subject to change before the proposal is officially released, such scaled-back plans would amount to an acknowledgment that even higher rates would have a tough time getting through Congress after some moderate Democrats expressed objections.

  With thin majorities in both chambers, Democrats can afford just three defections in the House and none in the Senate as they try to use a process called “reconciliation” to get their budget passed.

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 19:25

Digest powered by RSS Digest

• China Is Trying To Control Rising Semi Prices By Fining Auto Chip Manufacturers
  China Is Trying To Control Rising Semi Prices By Fining Auto Chip Manufacturers

  China is taking a page out of the Keynesian central banking playbook on how to micromanage an entire economy and is now reportedly fining auto chip sales companies for driving up prices. 

  And, like central banks will soon find out, we expect China to find out the hard way that you can’t print, fine or tax your way to productivity. 

  The price increases are likely a normal result of a shortage of supply in semiconductors, which has plagued auto manufacturers for the better part of the last year.

  China’s State Administration for Market Regulations said it had fined three local companies a total of 2.5 million yuan, according to a report in Automotive News Europe. 

  The companies fined included Shanghai Chengsheng Industrial, Shanghai Cheter and Shenzhen Yuchang Technologies. 

  

  Further, the regulator said it would continue to “closely monitor” prices and “crackdown on illegal market behavior”. You know, like letting supply and demand set prices…

  Recall, we noted just days ago how the semi shortage, combined with a Covid outbreak in South Asia, were causing auto manufacturers to slash production targets. 

  Toyota is the latest legacy auto manufacturer to come out and announce it is revising its full year production forecast by about 300,000 units to 9 million units for the year, Bloomberg reported Friday morning.

  The company is citing the Covid outbreaks in Southeast Asia that we have written about extensively, as well as continued shortages resulting from the semiconductor drought. 

  

  Output will be lower by 70,000 units in September and 330,000 units in October, the automaker said. It says its outlook for November, only two months away, is still “unclear” despite “very strong” demand. 

  We had cited Malaysian Covid outbreaks as throwing a wrench into the gears of already-stressed auto manufacturing plans for the summer. IHS predicts that 2.1 million units could wind up being lost in the third quarter of 2021 alone. 

  Malaysia is home to names like Infineon Technologies AG, NXP Semiconductors NV and STMicroelectronics NV, who all have operating plants in the country. With Covid infections soaring locally, plans for lifting lockdowns and re-opening production looked as though they could fall by the wayside last month. Daily infections were up to 20,000 per day in August, up from just 5,000 per day in late June. 

   

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 02:45

• Thousands Protest In Turkey Against COVID-19 Vaccine Passports
  Thousands Protest In Turkey Against COVID-19 Vaccine Passports

  Authored by Lorenz Duchamps via The Epoch Times,

  Thousands of people gathered in the Maltepe district of Istanbul in Turkey on Saturday to protest against COVID-19-related restrictions, including vaccine mandates, saying the restrictions infringe on their rights.

  

  Nearly 3,000 people attended the rally, which was permitted by the governor’s office and started at 2 p.m. local time, Turkish news agency Diken reported.

  Demonstrators organized the protest in the wake of new measures that passed government and will go into effect starting Sept. 13—requiring proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test for all users of intercity planes, buses, and trains, as well as for those attending large events such as concerts or theater performances.

  According to videos and photos of the rally, a large crowd of people listened to speakers while holding placards that read: “The Turkish people will not become vaccine guinea pigs,” “Freedom is not free. We are ready to pay for it,” “My body, my decision,” and “The health ministry is not a vaccine marketing office.”

  

  A woman holds a placard reading, “Freedom is not free. We are ready to pay for it,” during a protest against official COVID-19-related mandates including vaccinations, tests, and masks, in Istanbul, Turkey, on Sept. 11, 2021. (Murad Sezer/Reuters)

  Representatives of 14 political parties were present for the rally, Diken reported. Participants in the demonstration, which was dubbed “The Great Awakening,” chanted slogans such as “big resignation” and “down with the murderers.”

  

  A woman holds a placard reading, “My body, my decision,” during a protest against official COVID-19-related mandates including vaccinations, tests, and masks, in Istanbul, Turkey, on Sept. 11, 2021. (Murad Sezer/Reuters)

  “This pandemic is just going on with even more restrictions on our freedoms and there’s no end to it,” said Erdem Boz, a 40-year-old software developer. “Masks, vaccines, PCR tests might all become mandatory. We’re here to voice our discontent with this.”

  “We’re against all these mandates,” said Aynur Buyruk Bilen, a member of the so-called Plandemic Resistance Movement.

  “I think that the vaccines aren’t complete and that it’s an experimental liquid,” he added.

  Starting on Sept. 13, all unvaccinated school employees are required to take a PCR test twice per week. Masks and social distancing are required in public.

  Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said on Twitter on the day of the protest that vaccines are “the ultimate solution” and that mandating such rules is “essential.”

  

  Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca holds a press conference in Ankara, Turkey, on March 16, 2020. (Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images)

  According to data collected by the Turkish Health Ministry, more than 51 million people in Turkey have received their first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine under the country’s national program. Nearly 40 million people are fully inoculated as part of the program that started in January.

  New daily cases in Turkey average around 23,000, prompting a warning from Koca earlier this month, saying that right now the pandemic is only “for the unvaccinated.”

  Tyler Durden
  Mon, 09/13/2021 – 02:00

• Why Americans Were Never Told Why They Were Attacked On 9/11
  Why Americans Were Never Told Why They Were Attacked On 9/11

  Authored by Joe Lauria via Consortium News,

  After a Russian commercial airliner was downed over Egypt’s Sinai in October 2015, Western media reported that the Islamic State bombing was retaliation against Russian airstrikes in Syria. The killing of 224 people, mostly Russian tourists on holiday, was matter-of-factly treated as an act of war by a fanatical group without an air force resorting to terrorism as a way to strike back.

  Yet, Western militaries have killed infinitely more innocent civilians in the Middle East than Russia has. Then why won’t Western officials and media cite retaliation for that Western violence as a cause of terrorist attacks on New York, Paris and Brussels?

  

  Instead, there’s a fierce determination not to make the same kinds of linkages that the press made so easily when it was Russia on the receiving end of terror. [See Consortium News’s Obama Ignores Russian Terror Victims.]

  For example, throughout four hours of Sky News’ coverage of the July 7, 2005 attacks in London, only the briefest mention was made about a possible motive for that horrific assault on three Underground trains and a bus, killing 52 people. But the attacks came just two years after Britain’s participation in the murderous invasion of Iraq.

  Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of the Iraq War’s architects, condemned the loss of innocent life in London and linked the attacks to a G-8 summit he’d opened that morning. A TV host then read and belittled a 10-second claim of responsibility from a self-proclaimed Al Qaeda affiliate in Germany saying that the Iraq invasion was to blame. There was no more discussion about it.

  To explain why these attacks happen is not to condone or justify terrorist outrages against innocent civilians. It is simply a responsibility of journalism, especially when the “why” is no mystery. It was fully explained by Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the four London suicide bombers. Though speaking for only a tiny fraction of Muslims, he said in a videotaped recording before the attack:

  “Your democratically-elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters. Until we feel security you will be our targets and until you stop the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture of my people we will not stop this fight. We are at war and I am a soldier. Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.”

  The Islamic State published the following reason for carrying out the November 2015 Paris attacks:

  “Let France and all nations following its path know that they will continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State and that the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they partake part in the crusader campaign … and boast about their war against Islam in France, and their strikes against Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets.”

  Claiming It’s a State of Mind

  Ignoring such clear statements of intent, we are instead served bromides by the likes of the State Department about the Brussels bombings, saying it is impossible “to get into the minds of those who carry out these attacks.”

  Mind reading isn’t required, however. The Islamic State explicitly told us in a press statement why it did the Brussels attacks: “We promise black days for all crusader nations allied in their war against the Islamic State, in response to their aggressions against it.”

  Yet, still struggling to explain why it happened, the State Department said, “I think it reflects more of an effort to inflict on who they see as Western or Westerners … fear that they can carry out these kinds of attacks and to attempt to lash out.”

  The statement ascribed the motive to a state of mind: “I don’t know if this is about establishing a caliphate beyond the territorial gains that they’ve tried to make in Iraq and Syria, but it’s another aspect of Daesh’s kind of warped ideology that they’re carrying out these attacks on Europe and elsewhere if they can. … Whether it’s the hopes or the dreams or the aspirations of a certain people never justifies violence.”

  

  After 9/11, President George W. Bush infamously said the US was attacked because “they hate our freedoms.” It’s a perfect example of a Western view that ascribes motives to Easterners without allowing them to speak for themselves or taking them seriously when they do.

  Explaining his motive behind 9/11, Osama bin Laden, in his Letter to America, expressed anger about U.S. troops stationed on Saudi soil. Bin Laden asked: “Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple: Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.” (Today the US has dozens of bases in seven countries in the region.) 

  During a Republican presidential debate in 2008 Rudy Giuliani, who was New York mayor on 9/11, became incensed and demanded Ron Paul withdraw his remark that the U.S. was attacked because of US violent interventions in Muslim countries.

  “Have you ever read about the reasons they attacked us?” Paul said. “They attacked us because we have been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years. I’m suggesting we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.“

  “That’s an extraordinary statement,” responded Giuliani. “As someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack, because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before. And I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11.”

  The audience had never heard it either, as they heartily cheered Giuliani. “And I would ask the Congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that,” Giuliani said.

  “I believe very sincerely when the CIA teach and speak about blowback,” Paul responded. “If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. They don’t come here to attack us because we are rich and we are free. They attack us because we are over there.“

  So why won’t Western officials and corporate media take the jihadists’ statements of intent at face value? Why won’t they really tell us why we are attacked?

  It seems to be an effort to cover up a long and ever more intense history of Western military and political intervention in the Middle East and the violent reactions it provokes, reactions that put innocent Western lives at risk. Indirect Western culpability in these terrorist acts is routinely suppressed, let alone evidence of direct Western involvement with terrorism.

  Some government officials and journalists might delude themselves into believing that Western intervention in the Middle East is an attempt to protect civilians and spread democracy to the region, instead of bringing chaos and death to further the West’s strategic and economic aims. Other officials must know better.

  1920-1950: A Century of Intervention Begins

  A few might know the mostly hidden history of duplicitous and often reckless Western actions in the Middle East. It is hidden only to most Westerners, however. So it is worth looking in considerable detail at this appalling record of interference in the lives of millions of Muslims and peoples of other faiths to appreciate the full weight it exerts on the region. It can help explain anti-Western anger that spurs a few radicals to commit atrocities in the West.

  The history is an unbroken string of interventions from the end of the First World War until today. It began after the war when Britain and France double-crossed the Arabs on promised independence for aiding them in victory over the Ottoman Empire. The secret 1916 Sykes-Picot accord divided the region between the European powers behind the Arabs’ backs. London and Paris created artificial nations from Ottoman provinces to be controlled by their installed kings and rulers with direct intervention when necessary.

  What has followed for 100 years has been continuous efforts by Britain and France, superseded by the United States after the Second World War, to manage Western dominance over a rebellious region. The new Soviet government revealed the Sykes-Picot terms in November 1917 in Izvestia. When the war was over, the Arabs revolted against British and French duplicity. London and Paris then ruthlessly crushed the uprisings for independence.

  France defeated a proclaimed Syrian government in a single day, July 24, 1920, at the Battle of Maysalun. Five years later there was a second Syrian revolt, replete with assassinations and sabotage, which took two years to suppress. If you walk through the souk in Old Damascus and look up at the corrugated iron roof you see tiny specks of daylight peeking through. Those are bullet holes from French war planes that massacred civilians below.

  Britain put down a series of independence revolts in Iraq between 1920 and 1922, first with 100,000 British and Indian troops and then mostly with the first use of air power in counterinsurgency. Thousands of Arabs were killed. Britain also helped its installed King Abdullah put down rebellions in Jordan in 1921 and 1923.

  London then faced an Arab revolt in Palestine lasting from 1936 to 1939, which it brutally crushed, killing about 4,000 Arabs. The next decade, Israeli terrorists drove the British out of Palestine in 1947, one of the rare instances when terrorists attained their political goals.

  Germany and Italy, late to the Empire game, were next to invade North Africa and the Middle East at the start of the Second World War. They were driven out by British imperial forces (largely Indian) with U.S. help. Britain invaded and defeated nominally independent Iraq, which had sided with the Axis. With the Soviet Union, Britain also invaded and occupied Iran.

  

  After the war, the U.S. assumed regional dominance under the guise of fending off Soviet regional influence. Just three years after Syrian independence from France, the two-year old Central Intelligence Agency engineered a Syrian coup in 1949 against a democratic, secular government. Why? Because it had balked at approving a Saudi pipeline plan that the U.S. favored. Washington installed Husni al-Za’im, a military dictator, who approved the plan.

  1950s: Syria Then and Now

  Before the major invasion and air wars in Iraq and Libya of the past 15 years, the 1950s was the era of America’s most frequent, and mostly covert, involvement in the Middle East. The first coup of the Central Intelligence Agency was in Syria in March 1949. The Eisenhower administration then wanted to contain both Soviet influence and Arab nationalism, which revived the quest for an independent Arab nation. After a series of coups and counter-coups, Syria returned to democracy in 1955, leaning towards the Soviets.

  A 1957 Eisenhower administration coup attempt in Syria, in which Jordan and Iraq were to invade the country after manufacturing a pretext, went horribly wrong, provoking a crisis that spun out of Washington’s control and brought the U.S. and Soviets to the brink of war.

  Turkey put 50,000 troops on the Syrian border, threatening to invade. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev threatened Turkey with an implied nuclear attack and the U.S. got Ankara to back off. This sounds eerily familiar to what happened last month when Turkey again threatened to invade Syria and the U.S. put on the brakes. The main difference is that Saudi Arabia in 1957 was opposed to the invasion of Syria, while it was ready to join it last month. [See Consortiumnews.com’s Risking Nuclear War for Al Qaeda?]

  In the 1950s, the U.S. also began its association with Islamic religious extremism to counter Soviet influence and contain secular Arab nationalism. “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect,” President Eisenhower told his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. After the Cold War, religious extremists, some still tied to the West, became themselves the excuse for U.S. intervention.

  Read the rest at Consortium News

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 23:30

• Chinese Tech Names Slide On Report Beijing Seeks To Break Up Alipay; Hang Seng Tech Index Tumbles
  Chinese Tech Names Slide On Report Beijing Seeks To Break Up Alipay; Hang Seng Tech Index Tumbles

  Just when it seemed safe to poke out beyond the shell and buy some badly beaten down Chinese tech names, Chairman Xi had another surprise.

  Today’s reason why tech names are tumbling again after staging a modest rebound on Friday is a report in the Financial Times, according to which China seeks to break up Ant Group’s financial giant, Alipay, and create a separate app for its loans business.

  Citing two unidentified people familiar with the plan, regulators plan to split into an independent app the back end of its two lending businesses Huabei and Jiebei from the rest of its financial operations and bring in new shareholders. There is a plan to spin off Ant’s user data that underpins its lending decisions to a new credit scoring joint-venture which will be partly state-owned.

  For the time being Jack Ma’s team would run the new venture, the FT says citing an unidentified a person close to the company. However, the implication is that eventually the state will take control.s

  As a reminder, Ant already set up a new entity for consumer loan business which will include Huabei and Jiebei and started operations in June, but it appears that’s not enough for Beijing, whose regulators told Ant to go back to its origin of being a payments service provider and reform its lending business. Separately, WSJ reported in April that Ant was discussing with regulators the possibility of transferring some of its app-based financial services to another of its apps, called Ant Fortune, citing people familiar with the matter

  In response to the latest crackdown, the Hang Seng Tech Index – which soared on Friday on speculation that Beijing was finally done destroying its tech conglomerates, plunged as much as 3% in Hong Kong.

  

  The biggest decliners of the index are Trip.Com -5.8%, Zhongan online -5.5%; Alibaba fells as much as 4.5% after the report, while Tencent dropped as much as 3.6%. Meanwhile, Meituan dropped as much as 5.4% after Beijing tells platform companies to protect the working conditon of gig economy workers. Adding insult to injuryt, Fitch on Friday downgraded Meituan by a notch to BBB-, the lowest investment- grade rating, due to “the greater regulatory uncertainty” facing the company.

  Finally, the 21st Century Business Herald reported that MIIT hosted a conference with tech giants including Alibaba, Tencent, Bytedance, Baidu, Huawei and Xiaomi on Thursday and ordered them to open their platforms to each other before deadline. According to the report, the government will step up regulation on websites blocking competitors’ content.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 23:27

• Palm Beach Developer Tries To Flip Island Mansion For $120 Million, 41% More Than It Sold For In July
  Palm Beach Developer Tries To Flip Island Mansion For $120 Million, 41% More Than It Sold For In July

  The South Florida housing market is sizzling with hot money from the North East, pushing up homes values sky high over the last year. One example of the mania is in Palm Beach, where a private island was bought in July and was relisted months later for a whopping 41% premium, according to WSJ. 

  One of Miami’s top real estate developers, Todd Michael Glaser, is taking advantage of the bubble, fueled by Wall Street bankers and other elites who have the economic mobility to leave the Northeast for the Sunshine State. 

  Glaser purchased 10 Tarpon Way, also known as 10 Tarpon Isle, for approximately $85 million in July and has since relisted the tiny 2.5-acre island for $120 million, or $35 million more than he paid a few months ago. The island was created by dredging crews in the 1930s and is only accessible by bridge. Glaser bought the island from private investor William M. Toll and his wife, Eileen, who paid $7.6 million for the property in 1998.

  Tarpon Island 

  

  The real estate developer said potential buyers have two options: pay the $120 million now or wait ten months for a new renovation for $200 million. 

  Concept Drawing Of New Renovation

  

  He said with all the hot money flowing into the Palm Beach area, “a $100 million house isn’t that crazy anymore, believe it or not,” adding that in the last 18 months, eight $100 million homes have been sold. 

  If a potential buyer wants to wait ten months and pay an additional $80 million. The developer will completely redesign the mansion by doubling it to 25,000 sqft, with 14 bedrooms, in addition to a hair salon, gym, and spa. A new pool, octagonal tennis pavilion, and a golf practice area will be installed on the outside. 

  Some ask how long will this speculation fever last as the Federal Reserve could embark on tapering its extensive bond-buying program later this year or early 2022. 

  One real estate expert believes the peak of the South Florida housing market could be nearing:

  Dr. Ken Johnson, a real estate economist with Florida Atlantic University’s College of Business, told local news WPLG that a peak in the housing cycle could have already arrived, but he believes a crash is not in the mix because demand still outpaces supply. 

  It remains to be seen if some greater fool will pay the $120 million for the island mansion or $200 million tens months later after renovations. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 23:00

• Biden's Total Financial Surveillance
  Biden’s Total Financial Surveillance

  Authored by Matt Welch via Reason.com,

  What if every one of your non-cash financial transactions was automatically reported to a beefed-up, audit-hungry IRS?

  

  Imagine living in a world where every one of your noncash financial transactions—a restaurant meal, a Venmo transfer to a friend, maybe some bitcoin bought on the dips—was automatically reported to a beefed-up, audit-hungry IRS.

  That dystopia will become a reality if President Joe Biden gets his way.

  Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and key Capitol Hill allies such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) are pushing a vast, intrusive financial surveillance system in the name of closing the “tax gap.”

  But don’t worry: There’s no need to fear if you’ve got nothing to hide.

  “For already compliant taxpayers, the only effect of this regime is to provide easy access to summary information on financial accounts and to decrease the likelihood of costly ‘no fault’ examinations,” the Treasury Department said this May in a nakedly authoritarian document called “The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda.”

  But “for noncompliant taxpayers,” the department continues, “this regime would encourage voluntary compliance as evaders realize that the risk of evasion being detected has risen noticeably.”

  The administration’s proposed “comprehensive financial account reporting regime” would dramatically increase the types of financial institutions and transactions exposed to the feds’ prying eyes. “All business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts,” would be forced to “report gross inflows and outflows” to the IRS. And not just bank accounts: The dragnet would now include PayPal, settlement companies, and “crypto asset exchanges,” for starters.

  The new domestic surveillance program, which requires congressional approval, is one prong of a tripartite strategy for transforming the entire global financial system into a harmonious, haven-free collection funnel to the IRS. The second part, which has taken up the bulk of Biden’s multilateral diplomacy thus far, is getting the industrialized world to agree on a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent, while setting up a system to prevent multinational companies from registering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions.

  Cutting corporate taxes is “a self-defeating competition,” Yellen said in April, “and neither President Biden nor I are interested in participating in it anymore. We want to change the game.”

  In July, representatives from 130 countries, including finance ministers from the G-20 representing the world’s richest democracies, agreed in principle to a worldwide minimum corporate tax. “We have a chance now to build a global and domestic tax system,” Yellen crowed. “The race to the bottom is one step closer to coming to an end.”

  The agreement still has a significant obstacle to overcome—namely, the legislatures of 130 countries, including the U.S. Congress. But Yellen has some cause to be cocky, because the third prong of Washington’s strategy has already been constructed.

  In 2009, President Barack Obama promised to generate $210 billion in new tax revenue over 10 years by cracking down on “overseas tax loopholes.” While the corporate-tax element of the plan was quickly killed by lobbyists, the individual component remained in the form of the 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). Built on a foundation of American exceptionalism (the U.S. is one of only two countries that tax citizens living abroad), FATCA imposed onerous new annual reporting requirements on Americans with more than $10,000 in overseas financial institutions. The law brazenly threatened international banks if they didn’t rat out their U.S. clients to the IRS.

  The results were predictable: Expats were locked out of banking services, record numbers of mostly middle-class Americans renounced their U.S. citizenship, and IRS collections went essentially unchanged. But for a very small political price (no one much cares about the estimated 9 million Americans living abroad), Washington was able to bend an entire global financial system to its will.

  An IRS with the ability to compel global transaction data sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. Yet here we are—unless we consciously cover our tracks.

  “Another concern is that [the] information reporting regime will shift taxpayers toward a greater use of cash,” the Treasury Department’s compliance plan frets. It also notes that cryptocurrencies “already pose a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion.” Cash and crypto may be the last currencies compatible with privacy.

  “I promised to lead the world to deliver a foreign policy for the middle class, and today, we are doing just that,” Biden said after the 130-country agreement. Just as long as the middle class has nothing to hide.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 22:30

• Journalism Schools Produce 'Useless' Degrees, Leaving Graduates Deep In Debt
  Journalism Schools Produce ‘Useless’ Degrees, Leaving Graduates Deep In Debt

  The WSJ’s education reporters have been on a roll lately, publishing a deeply reported series of stories about the unintended consequences of the fact that there’s no lending cap on the federal government’s “Grad Plus” student loan program. By allowing students with little to no income to borrow unlimited funds to further their education in the graduate domain (while leaving taxpayers on the hook for losses), pricey graduate degree programs have proliferated like the clap. And surprisingly, only a small fraction of these programs allow the average graduate to comfortably pay off their loans without financial help from their parents.

  

  Back in June, WSJ published its initial deep-dive into high priced “useless” masters degrees offered by elite Ivy League Universities. The a few weeks after that, it followed up with a deep-dive on second- and third-tier law and MBA programs, which boomed in popularity over the past twenty to thirty years, only for many graduates to realize that six-figure jobs are mostly reserved for graduates from the top-tier programs.

  Now, WSJ is targeting another universe of “useless” degrees: the  master’s degree in journalism. Expensive programs for what is by all accounts a dying discipline abound, with the “leading” programs found at Columbia, Northwestern and USC. Roughly a dozen other expensive programs continue to enroll students across the US. Together, they produce thousands of graduates a year for an industry that has seen the number of available jobs shrink practically every year for the last two decades.

  While students borrow heavily, starting salaries from even USC and Northwestern are shockingly low at just $42K for the median graduate. Columbia’s median number is stil just $49K (accounting for the dozen or so graduates every year who find decent-paying jobs at one of the country’s top national outlets, like WSJ, Bloomberg or the NYT).

  Interestingly, the University of Missouri, which has perhaps the best-known journalism program among America’s public universities, leaves its graduate journalism students with much smaller debt loads (around $21K) with median earnings of $50.5K right out the gate. The dean of Northwestern’s graduate J-school said ballooning debt for graduate students “keeps him me up at night.”

  “Graduate student debt is the thing that keeps me up at night,” Mr. Whitaker said. He attributed some of the earnings differential to the fact that undergraduates often complete their degrees with multiple internships and years of experience on student publications.

  One student who attended Medill shortly after finishing her undergrad career wishes she had been made aware told WSJ she wouldn’t have gone if she understood how much trouble she would have paying off her student loans.

  Katie Dzwierzynski said she was flattered when Medill offered her a scholarship of a few thousand dollars a decade ago. She lived at home to save money, and borrowed nearly $70,000 to cover the rest of her costs.

  She now earns about $65,000 writing newsletters and summarizing healthcare news for companies. Most months, Ms. Dzwierzynski, has made her loan payments, around $500, but sometimes she could only cobble together half that amount while the interest continued to grow. Her student-loan balance now stands at $79,000, including $62,000 from Medill.

  Ms. Dzwierzynski, 32 years old, said she understood that she would be going into significant debt for the degree but didn’t know how little she would likely earn.

  Another student said that while they feel “fulfilled” in their new job, finances are definitely a worry. But if President Biden (or President Kamala) offer student debt relief.

  Mr. Rhodes took a 40% pay cut from their New York job, but said they are more fulfilled in their new role. Still, the loans loom large. The federal government paused payments during the pandemic, but when that lifts early next year, the 28-year-old intends to enroll in a repayment plan limiting monthly payments to a set share of their income. After 20 or 25 years, the remaining debt could be erased, and taxed as income.

  Mr. Rhodes, who also has $33,000 in loans for their bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida, is holding out hope for President Biden to forgive at least some student debt.

  “I am admittedly stressed about finances,” Mr. Rhodes said. “But if there’s any time to take on this kind of debt, it might be when it is potentially going to be erased.”

  He has a point. If anything, just the prospect of student debt forgiveness from the Dems might encourage more risk-tolerant (or risk-ignorant) young students to go for it, and try to live their fantasy of becoming the next Bob Woodward.

  Ironically, as the power, prestige and financial backing of the media industry have diminished, public trust in the media has fallen to its lowest level in the history of the American Republic. One recent report found the US ranks last globally in media trust, despite its “free” press.

  The real issue here isn’t so much the money, but the fact that Bob Woodward didn’t go to J-School. Michael Lewis took on the issue in a piece for the New Republic published all the way back in 1993, before the collapse of the media industry.

  With a nip here and a tuck there, the inadequately schooled journalist could easily make the Columbia School of Journalism sound like a seven-month extension of this anecdote. Perhaps I am that journalist. The essential point here is that the desperate futility of journalism instruction becomes clearer the closer one gets to the deed. At journalism school, one does not simply report a story. One develops a “search strategy for mass communication” (see chart above). The principal text used at Columbia, in a section called “Truth Telling,” offers the mathematical formula: Story=Truth + X. “The story is never the full truth,” it intones. “There is always an X, a missing ingredient. Actually there is not an X but a series — X1,X2,X3,X4….” This sort of irrelevant blather infects the entire curriculum. Here, for instance, is how the Columbia course bulletin describes one of the two main core courses, “Critical Issues in Journalism”:

  At the end of the day, it’s not only the academics that staff these programs who are complicit in fleecing the next generation of would-be “journalists”. The elite media brands that tap their students for unpaid (or low-paid) labor, helping to give credence to the school’s marketing, are also, in a way, responsible.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 22:00

• Pentagon Researching Microbe Mining Of Rare Earth Minerals To Cut Reliance On China
  Pentagon Researching Microbe Mining Of Rare Earth Minerals To Cut Reliance On China

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched a project to research the extraction of rare earth minerals for military technologies using microscopic bugs in an effort to reduce reliance on China.

  The technology to mine rare earth minerals using microbes doesn’t exist yet, and DARPA is researching if doing so is worth it on an industrial scale. “From a DARPA perspective, we’re looking at: what are some of the barriers for the US to maintain dominance in rare earth processing,” Stefanie Tompkins, the director of DARPA, told Defense News.

  

  DARPA launched the project in July, known as Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource. It seeks to expand supplies of 17 elements used in magnets for electric motors, high-temperature ceramics, and lasers.

  The DARPA project is just one example of how the US military is focusing on research to counter China.

  In its $715 billion budget request for 2022, the Pentagon allocated $112 billion for research, development, testing, and evaluation, known as RDT&E. The research will focus on advanced weapons, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, space and cyber capabilities, and hypersonic missiles.

  Researchers at the Pentagon have launched a project that aims to extract rare earth minerals critical for military technologies from domestic sources ― using microscopic bugs. https://t.co/9w7mdZIScw #Pentagon #Mining #RareEarths

  — Global Venture (@AGlobalVenture) September 9, 2021

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

  The Pentagon has identified China as the top “pacing threat” facing the US. Hawks in Congress don’t believe the massive $715 billion budget is enough to face China and Russia. The House Armed Services Committee recently voted to add $24 billion to President Biden’s Pentagon budget.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 21:30

• "Once The Situation Gets Out Of Control"- Chinese State Media Vows Its Military "Will Show Up At US Doorstep" And Will Win
  “Once The Situation Gets Out Of Control”- Chinese State Media Vows Its Military “Will Show Up At US Doorstep” And Will Win

  China’s state-run Global Times tabloid, which is viewed as representing the view of Beijing if with a hyperbolic slant, published an op-ed from its editorial board on Wednesday vowing that China’s military will soon confront the U.S. in a hostile exchange, American Military News reported.

  “The US will definitely see the PLA show up at its doorstep in the not-too-distant future,” the op-ed said. “The two sides’ warships and aircraft on the seas will carry huge mutual strategic hostility, and the two countries will not yield to each other.”

  “Once the situation gets out of control and triggers military clash between China and the US, we must give full play to our home field advantage. China will definitely win once there is a war,” the Global Times op-ed said.

  

  The op-ed came in response to U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold conducting a freedom of navigation operation near the Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands of the South China Sea on Wednesday, and follows China’s recent abrupt change in protocol according to which starting Sept 1, all foreign vessels (read US warships) must “report their information” when passing through what China views as its “territorial waters” and which most of China’s neighbors and Western nations consider contested.

  “What the US has done is a naked provocation, and this is obvious to all,” the Global Times op-ed said, adding that the ship “posed a threat” to the “many Chinese people and facilities” on the island.

  The op-ed further called on China to take action. “Only by making the US have a taste of its own medicine can we touch the nerves of the US and its allies, and reshape the Western world’s understanding of US bullying in the South China Sea,” it said.

  In response, the U.S. Navy 7th Fleet said the U.S. warship sailed in accordance with international law “within 12 miles of Mischief Reef,” an area that China has heavily militarized and reportedly began flying military flights out of earlier this year.

  “The land reclamation efforts, installations, and structures built on Mischief Reef do not change this characterization under international law. By engaging in normal operations within 12 nautical miles of Mischief Reef, the United States demonstrated that vessels may lawfully exercise high-seas freedoms in those areas,” the U.S. Navy said.

  While the U.S. does recognize China’s claim to the Spratly Island, it rejects any claim China makes beyond a 12-nautical mile limit of the Spratly Islands. Mischief Reef is among the seven island reefs China claims as its own and has been militarizing in recent years. China established 9,000-foot runways on three islands in the South China Sea to accommodate any aircraft in its fleet, including its nuclear-capable H-6 bombers.

  Earlier this year, Washington Times obtained satellite images showing PLA KJ-500 airborne warning and control planes, Y-9 transport planes, and Z-8 helicopters on the islands, indicating a now-permanent presence on the islands.

  The U.S. has repeatedly denounced China’s militarization of artificial islands in the South China Sea, as well as its construction of military bases and other industrial facilities in the region, and aggressive behavior toward other nations’ ships in the region.

  China claims most of the mineral-rich South China Sea, including areas that reach the shores of its smaller neighbors. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan also have overlapping claims to the maritime region.

  Meanwhile, the U.S. has vowed to continue its freedom of navigation operations to ensure free passage in the South China Sea despite China’s threats. In July 2020, the U.S. released its first official statement rejecting most of China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea as “unlawful.”

  The document rejects China’s claims to certain territories, such as James Shoal, located 50 nautical miles from Malaysia, as well as other specific territories off the coasts of Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. China has claimed some of these territories in its “Nine-Dashed Line” claim announced in 2009, despite these territories being located up to 1,000 nautical miles away from China’s coast.

  The U.S. position aligns with a 2016 Arbitral Tribunal decision, in which it rejected China’s claims as baseless against international law. Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised the decision on its fifth anniversary earlier this year, which China swiftly denounced.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 21:00

• It's Time To Acknowledge Anti-White Racism
  It’s Time To Acknowledge Anti-White Racism

  Authored by Lynn Uzzell via RealClearPolitics.com,m

  Recently, Michael Tesler commented on “The Rise of White Identity Politics.” Tesler’s analysis draws on years of research into racialized politics, and he shows convincingly that there is a rise in white identity politics and that this rise is tied to “perceptions of anti-white discrimination.” However, when trying to explain why perceptions of anti-white bias might also be on the rise, his analysis falls flat. Supposedly, it has something to do with Republicans and Donald Trump.

  Never once does the author speculate whether “perceptions” of such discrimination might be on the rise because anti-white racism is becoming increasingly common. In other words, perhaps white Americans are accurately perceiving a real phenomenon that is now pervasive in schools and the workplace.

  Anti-White Racism, by Definition

  As any student of George Orwell knows, no authoritarian government can ever gain complete control unless it commandeers people’s thinking through the manipulation of language. Thus, the dystopian powers in “1984” deliberately turned the meaning of words upside-down in a process known as double-think.

  

  The same process is happening today with the words used to discuss racism. In true Orwellian fashion, Ibram X. Kendi (pictured) insists that the only way to fight racism is to embrace racial discrimination in perpetuity. This “anti-racism,” as he calls it, is as likely to stamp out genuine racism as Orwell’s Ministry of Truth was apt to stamp out falsehoods.

  In order to understand what is going on, we must call to mind the traditional definition of racism: the stereotyping, denigrating, marginalizing, or excluding of persons on the basis of race. Look up any definition of racism prior to the racial awokening taking place in the last decade, and it will be: 1) race neutral; and 2) involve some act of free will—relating to word, deed, or belief.

  The definition of racism has undergone a radical change in a short time. According to the new eighth-grade curriculum for the Albemarle County (Va.) School District, racism now means: “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”

  Perhaps the most jarring aspect of this new definition is that it is no longer race-neutral. It is now impossible, by definition, for white people to be the victims of racism. The definition itself constructs a “racial hierarchy” whereby only people of color may be victimized, and only “white people” may marginalize or oppress.

  But there is something even more insidious about the new definition. Since the “marginalization and/or oppression of people of color” is no longer committed by word, thought, or deed — but is based instead on an inescapable “socially constructed racial hierarchy” that always “privileges white people” — it means that white people are engaging in racism simply by being white (and hence privileged) within this impersonal system of marginalization and oppression.

  A person of color is a victim of racism, by definition. A person identified as white is a racist, by definition. Therefore, not only does the new definition fail to capture the full meaning of racism; the definition is itself an example of the anti-white racism being taught to our children.

  Teaching Anti-White Racism as American History

  Anti-white racism is also seeping into history lessons, most notably through the curriculum adapted from the New York Times’ 1619 Project.When the 1619 Project was first published, it attracted immediate criticism. Five eminent historians criticized it for its bias and factual errors. Others criticized it for emphasizing only what was blameworthy about America’s history and omitting what was praiseworthy.

  While these concerns are certainly valid, there is another serious problem that has received scant attention: The account is a surprisingly racist version of U.S. history.

  The lead article for the 1619 Project is by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has been writing anti-white screeds at least since she was a college sophomore. In a letter to her college paper, she alleged: “The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.” Not only were the white people in America’s past “barbaric devils,” but the “descendants of these savage people” continue to harm “the Black community” to this day. Non-white peoples, by contrast, were uniformly portrayed as both virtuous and victimized.

  Of course, nobody should be held accountable for the hyperboles or inanities one might espouse as an undergraduate; few of us could bear the brunt of such an examination. The sophomoric scribblings of young Nicole Hannah would be irrelevant except that the pattern in her writing has not changed. What we find in her Pulitzer Prize-winning contribution to the 1619 Project is more moderate in tone and more sophisticated in composition, but otherwise it is the same racialized dualism she espoused in college.

  In Hannah-Jones’ article, an important part of the lesson plan adapted for schools, the word “white” is used to describe people or communities 77 times. In 35 cases, “white” people are described as holding some kind of power or privilege (almost always unearned or illegitimate). In 32 cases, the word is associated with oppression, injustice, and cruelty (“white enslavers,” “widespread white violence,” “systemic white suppression of black life,” etc.).

  In this telling of history, “white Americans” during the darkest days of Jim Crow held the same racist ideology as Jefferson and his “fellow white colonists.” With 32 instances of specifically “white” barbarity, it is impossible to ignore the gratuitous overuse of this racial category when describing everything that is diabolical in this country’s history. Nowhere do we read about a “white” American acting for the good, except a single instance in which certain “white Republicans” joined forces with the black community after the Civil War.

  We find the polar opposite when examining the 136 references to “black” people in this article. The word is used 72 times to describe victimization by violence or injustice (always at the hands of “whites”) and 49 times in laudable terms. There is not a single instance in which “black” is used to describe a person or deed deserving of criticism.

  While only a textual analysis can provide the big picture, individual passages drive home the racist message more explicitly. “For the most part,” according to this history, “black Americans fought [to secure rights] alone. Yet we never fought only for ourselves.” The article teaches schoolchildren that “black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good.” Children also learn: “Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did.”

  Hannah-Jones’ composition is American history in black and white. It teaches that “blackness” is everything that ennobles this country and “whiteness” is everything that debases it. There was a time in the Jim Crow South, to their everlasting shame, when schools taught children lessons in white supremacy masked as American history. The 1619 Project has introduced a new form of black supremacy to American history, and it has been adopted by over 4,500 schools.

  Anti-White Racism in the Workplace

  Anyone who has been paying attention to corporate culture in America cannot but have noticed the increasing pressures to “diversify” the hiring and promotion process, often by explicitly demanding that white (especially white male) employees be held back.

  The Economist has reported on the “dizzying number of equity-related” hiring commitments promised by American businesses. Facebook alone “has promised to hire 30% more black people in leadership positions.” Since other businesses across America have made similar commitments, we can expect the competition to hire and promote black professionals will drive their value to stratospheric heights, while the perceived value of white professionals will plummet.

  A recent training program at Bank of America made the consequences of such commitments unmistakably clear. It instructed “white employees in particular” to “cede power to people of color.” There was no word that any member of Bank of America’s board of directors had offered to step down to make room for a replacement of color. Demands for self-denial are always made by persons who already hold seats of power and privilege (and who have no intention of giving them up). It is ever the less privileged employees who are expected to submit to degradation based on their race or sex.

  Thus far, the discontent arising among marginalized employees is only being discussed in whispers. Anne Applebaum recently interviewed a couple of men who believe they were punished at work “because a white, male boss felt he had to publicly sacrifice another white man in order to protect his own position.” Yet Americans are reluctant to speak out about anti-white racism, lest they be accused of being anti-black.

  Racism of any kind is never a single, defining act. It is death by a thousand cuts, and these cuts to white employees have become ubiquitous.

  I know of a book project that had been under contract for two years before being scuttled. The press rejected the volume of collected essays, in part, because the 14 contributing authors were not sufficiently “diverse.” The acquisition editor at the press defended the judgment of one of its anonymous reviewers: “Books coming out right now simply have to address the systemic whiteness and maleness that pervades the academy, and particularly political science.”

  This demand came despite a shortage of “scholars of color” who write on the particular subject the book addresses. Nevertheless, it was deemed essential that the volume’s contributors find some way to dilute their “whiteness” (in the subjective gaze of one anonymous reviewer) before the press would consent to publish on this topic.

  The Dangers of Anti-White Racism, and the Solution

  Skeptics inclined to dismiss the seriousness of anti-white racism will likely counter that the examples I’ve described are milquetoast; they’re not nearly as horrific as the anti-black racism of the Jim Crow South. Of course they’re not. Anti-white racism is not that bad now, nor is it reasonable to expect it will get that bad in the foreseeable future.

  Nevertheless, racism of any kind is an evil in itself; anti-white racism is today a greater problem, at least in the white-collar world, than anti-black racism; and its continued prevalence and severity is likely to spawn a backlash that will further enflame racial enmity.

  For anyone who may be skeptical that anti-white racism is now worse than anti-black racism, consider this: Overt acts of anti-black discrimination today are socially, politically, and professionally unimaginable. Anti-white discrimination, on the other hand, has become almost an institutional requirement. Schools and businesses seem fearful lest they are accused of not doing enough to stereotype, denigrate, marginalize, and suppress “whiteness.”

  In addition to the ubiquity of the evil itself, this racism is bound to provoke a backlash. The more that citizens identifying as “white” perceive themselves as under attack, the more likely they will be to coalesce politically as a form of defense. Hence, it is predictable that we would find, as Tesler has reported, undercurrents of white identity politics at the polls and, at the fringes, a rise in white supremacy and white nationalism.

  Yet, if Tesler and others are serious about combating this scourge of white identity politics, it will require a better understanding of its causes than they seem willing to explore. As long as anti-white racism is so flagrant, it is useless to hope that Americans won’t notice or won’t respond to it. Only by first acknowledging the rise in anti-white racism can we start thinking creatively about combating both the evil itself and the evils it spawns.

  Any permanent solution to America’s enduring problems with racism will ultimately have to come from the victims rather than the perpetrators. We have minimal influence over the minds and hearts of the bigots. However, as I’ve written before, if the targets of racism would identify as non-racial, they cease cooperating with the bigotry of racial sorting.

  It is not only anti-white racism that can be defeated by this strategy. Racial renunciation is emerging as a rallying cry from public intellectuals with diverse skin tones. Whether it’s known as “race abolitionism” or “unlearning race,” Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Kenny Xu and Christian Watson, Erec Smith, Paul Rossi, and Angel Eduardo have all been powerful spokesmen for real change. In what is perhaps the best descriptor of this goal, Jason D. Hill has argued that black Americans, in particular, “are ideal candidates for racial self-emancipation.” There is a budding recognition that people of all complexions would benefit from renouncing the divisive racial categories imposed on us by others.

  If Americans can ever learn to internalize these three words, “I am non-racial,” it would free them from feelings of personal outrage when confronted by the racism of others. If they begin insisting that their bosses and teachers recognize their non-racial designation, they free themselves from the most overt forms of their discrimination. Eventually, there will come a day when racism will lose its grip on the minds and hearts of Americans.

  *  *  *

  Lynn Uzzell is Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University. She specializes in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the political thought of James Madison.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 20:30

• "F**k Joe Biden" Chants Heard Across US College Football Stadiums
  “F**k Joe Biden” Chants Heard Across US College Football Stadiums

  Having garnered the most votes of any presidential candidate ever in November, Americans appear to be losing faith in President Biden’s ability to ‘build back better’.

  From the embarrassment of his chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal to increasing concerns over his tyrannical plans to ‘control’ the pandemic; and from soaring violent crime to anything-but-transitory food inflation, Americans (both young and old) are seemingly suddenly unafraid to express their dissatisfaction, as from coast to coast, college football stadiums on Saturday were packed with fans chanting “F**k Joe Biden.” 

  TENNESSEE CHECKING IN 🗣 #FJB pic.twitter.com/u3WHUHElgM

  — Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 11, 2021

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  Fuck Joe Biden! 👊🏼🇺🇸👊🏼 pic.twitter.com/yt9MUz05lI

  — Art TakingBack 🇺🇸 (@ArtValley818_) September 11, 2021

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  FUCK JOE BIDEN CHANT IN DEATH VALLEY 🗣 @OldRowLSU pic.twitter.com/wS1yzbl7Yq

  — Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 12, 2021

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  FUCK JOE BIDEN, ROLL TIDE! 🗣 pic.twitter.com/F551mJrC4b

  — Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 11, 2021

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  Virginia Tech joins in! #FJB pic.twitter.com/VX6TekQbRW

  — Old Row Sports (@OldRowSports) September 11, 2021

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  The president’s approval rating has been in a downward spiral since Gallup first reported signs of a meaningful decline in support was observed in July.

  

  A CNN poll released Friday shows 69% of Americans say things are going wrong in the US. 

  Stadiums are one place where crowds of people cannot be censored, unlike social media platforms that will shadow ban or de-platform users for speaking their minds. 

  Not exactly what Democrats were expecting ahead of the midterms.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 20:00

• Hedge Fund CIO: "We Have Entered The Most Uncertain Period Of Our Lifetimes"
  Hedge Fund CIO: “We Have Entered The Most Uncertain Period Of Our Lifetimes”

  By Eric Peters, CIO of One River Asset Management, one of the largest institutional holds of cryptocurrencies.

  The Case for Quantum Change

  Change is the great constant in human existence. And yet, for reasons we will perhaps never fully understand, we seek its opposite – stability – a state that does not exist. In fact, stability is the one thing we cannot have no matter how hard we strive to secure it. All we can hope to attain is the illusion, so we conjure it, and shelter within. Even still, change finds us, we cannot escape. The passing of another day in a short human life. The gentle shift from summer’s green leaves to September’s hint of yellows, reds. Then one day we find ourselves suddenly old. Engulfed in autumn’s peak.

  Some change is undeniable, quantum, jarring. At least we perceive it so. An earthquake shocks, a raging forest fire too. While the forces that lead to such events are imperceptible, their outcome is inevitable, time uncertain. Silent subterranean pressures. Drying tinder. An invisible rise in atmospheric CO2, a warming ocean, the ferocious hurricane. Persistent forces quietly at work, compounding. These dynamics are not limited to the natural world. The intentions of individuals and human culture unleash the same grinding force. It is as much a part of us as we are a part of nature, which is to say, inseparable. Perhaps someday we will break free from the pattern of our origin; so far, there is scant evidence to suggest it.

  Each of us, at our core is a mystery; to those around us, to ourselves. Yet nearly all our behaviors are predictable, exploitable. The success of nearly every organization relies on harnessing the power of predicting behaviors. Governments, religions, militaries, corporations, central banks, universities, etc. These organizations maintain control by understanding how to manipulate us at scale. Having attained power, they are unwilling to relinquish it. Established organizations therefore actively oppose substantial change. It is their existential threat.

  Those with the courage and conviction to execute on innovative ideas change the world. They are ridiculed at first, dismissed, sometimes persecuted. Socrates. Galileo. A few break barriers, and are afterwards celebrated, sometimes enriched. Einstein. Edison. Even though the rest of us operate at lower altitudes, we too are sublime enigmas, each in our own way. So, although our behaviors are nearly always predictable, they are not entirely. And that is why, when connecting millions or billions of such creatures, we can often model the near future with reasonable accuracy but must recognize that the more distant horizon is highly uncertain.

  And this leads me to investing.

  There are many investor types. At one end of the spectrum are those who identify tiny anomalies in the prices of various securities and bet they will revert to mean. Such investing requires relatively little imagination, and therefore, enormous leverage is required to generate meaningful returns. At the other extreme are early-stage venture investors who are skilled at recognizing a changing world. They themselves do not generally conceive of that different future; rather, they see it through the eyes of visionaries who do, and then provide modest sums of capital to build it. Their unlevered returns can be enormous. More artistically minded people are often drawn to this investing style. 

  Between those poles are countless others. Each bet on outcomes they see as probable relative to what is priced into markets. The biggest obstacle to an investor’s success is in overcoming their own biases, weaknesses, shortcomings. That’s no small task. The fact that most human behavior is predictable extends to our market interactions. The central tendency of most creatures is to follow – traveling in packs, herds, flocks, schools, tribes. This is why most successful investors tend to be deeply introspective. Their study of human nature helps them step outside of themselves. Iconoclast, they learn to lean against the crowd when risks rise wildly relative to rewards, or the inverse. They jump on macro mega-trends as the world begins to change while the herd resists.

  But major transitions rarely happen. So, most investors bet heavily on tomorrow closely resembling today. Simple statistics point to this as the optimal path. It is especially true at the end of major cycles, when the rewards for predicting a continuation of the status quo have persisted for so long that they appear structural, perpetual. Returns for those bets compress through time, requiring investors to explicitly and implicitly leverage their portfolios to sustain performance. When the world changes, they are devastated. Great fortunes are made and lost in the transitions from one cycle to the next as a result. While we often view such episodes as isolated events, they are phases within a cycle, parts of a process, connecting what had come before to what inevitably follows.

  And this takes us to the profound shifts now underway.

  Investors tend to look at last year’s market collapse as a Black Swan. But it should be viewed as the final phase in a process that started in the late 1980s. An epic earthquake, decades in making. By early 2020, it was evident that monetary easing combined with central bank bond buying was no longer sufficient to spur the real economy on its own. To be sure, rate cuts and quantitative easing could lift asset prices if applied aggressively, but this in turn amplified inequality which contributed to the underlying conditions that afflicted the real economy. The Fed itself was crying out for politicians to engage in aggressive fiscal expansion.

  The central bank’s well intended efforts to meet its dual mandate meant it did whatever was necessary to support stable prices and maximum sustainable employment. This had the unintended consequence of relieving politicians of making hard policy choices. The Fed stood ready to offset any and every economic interruption, leaving politicians under little pressure to act in the long-term best interest of the nation. With de minimis political costs of inaction, very little good happened. Special interests feasted. Leadership withered. The body politic followed, frayed.

  The problem was not confined to the United States. It had become a global phenomenon. Decades of U.S. dollar dominance as the global reserve currency forced every developed nation to adopt the Fed’s general approach to monetary policy. Failure to do so resulted in currency appreciation, which in turn hurt international trade. In a world fixated on ever-expanding globalization, such a consequence was universally viewed as unacceptable. So, over the decades, global monetary policy converged with Fed policy.

  The world thereby entered 2020 with a level of global policy homogeneity unlike any previously experienced. That policy no longer worked. The pandemic provided the most potent catalyst imaginable to catapult developed economies into an entirely new policy paradigm. Had it not been COVID-19, it would surely have been something else. The pandemic allowed even the most dysfunctional global governments and warring political tribes to coalesce around a common economic policy at a scale that will change how the world operates for decades.

  By requiring governments to borrow and spend previously unimaginable sums to offset the economic depressionary forces, the pandemic restored politicians to power. Central banks played their part, accommodating the unprecedented borrowing. But it is not central bankers who spend money. It is elected politicians. And after decades of increasing political dysfunction, a wide range of societal, infrastructure, environmental and geopolitical problems had grown to the point that nearly everyone recognized them as such, even as they may have disagreed about how to address them. The pandemic pushed our politicians back into action.

  Unlike global bankers, who came to closely resemble one another as their policy frameworks coalesced around the Fed playbook, politicians are a varied species. How each approaches borrowing and spending can differ wildly even within a single country. The way they approach lists of long-neglected priorities naturally varies. What sectors will win and lose, what commodities will rise and fall, what taxes will come and go, regulations too, all such things are now in play. And nations differ. So, what had been a paradigm of unprecedented policy homogeneity, is in a year unrecognizable. Policy is now becoming increasingly heterogeneous.

  Were this the only transition now underway in our always evolving world, it would mark the most important change that has occurred in half a century. It has already resulted in the world’s largest economy borrowing roughly 15% of GDP for two years running, with the Fed buying nearly all that debt. The subterranean forces that produced such a shock are manifold and have only just begun to surface. Into this cauldron comes something earthshaking that was conceived as a response to these same forces. It manifested in 2009 and is so utterly revolutionary as to be initially incomprehensible to almost everyone.

  Blockchain technology.

  In twelve short years, the blockchain ecosystem has grown to include 6,000+ protocols with a market capitalization over $2 trillion. Many are built to replace something incumbent institutions presently do; only faster, cheaper, and more securely. Some protocols are built to do things we previously considered impossible. Still others do things not previously imagined. Many pioneers have generated the kind of wealth only amassed in periods of great disruption, transition. They are not cashing out; they have only just started. They see a world very different from what has been. They have a revolutionary mindset, a broadening view of what is possible, and the wealth to bring their dreams to life. They are not afraid to fail. Many will of course. But not all. Their spirit is extraordinary, the ambition breathtaking.

  The most revolutionary aspect of these technologies is that they allow for fully decentralized power. In their purest form, they are built to operate without central control. They allow the planet’s 7.9 billion people, connected through the cloud, to interact, exchange value, information, property rights, encrypted data, and do things we have only started to imagine, securely, without a centralized authority. Such change presents an existential threat to every organization operating with a centralized control model, which is nearly every single institution.

  Some incumbents will attempt to co-opt these systems, harnessing their efficiencies, while distorting the protocols to achieve centralized control. Such is the vast power of these technologies that this path holds the potential to lead the world toward a dystopian future. Beijing appears to be pursuing this path, reflected in the implementation of its central bank digital currency. Perhaps the West will take a different path, one that reflects its values and the source of its strength, providing the space for a Cambrian explosion of these new private technologies. Allowing them to flourish – all within a sensible regulatory framework – bringing with them innovations and efficiencies that we are only beginning to glimpse. Such a path holds the potential to produce another Renaissance. Where this all ultimately leads is impossible to say.

  And this brings me to investment strategies for the decade ahead.

  The most important thing to internalize when constructing portfolios for the coming years is that we have entered the most uncertain period of our lifetimes. It is even possible we are at the dawn of the period of greatest change for the past few centuries. This is almost inconceivable, considering the bruising pace of transformation we are living through now. Our natural inclination, our human bias, is to deny this possibility. But as investors, it is our job to step outside ourselves and survey the landscape objectively. A fair accounting of the range of potential outcomes when looking out over the coming decade or two spans from dystopia to Renaissance. It would be unsurprising, with so much uncertainty, for sentiment to swing from expectations for one such extreme toward the other, multiple times.

  Prices move over the longer-term to reflect fundamentals. The big moves happen because the future is materially different from the present. When that gap is not properly recognized and therefore not priced into today’s market, a large trend becomes inevitable. Of course, nothing is truly predetermined, and so sometimes price trends, once underway, can themselves distort the future. Such dynamics can either temper trends or amplify them reflexively. The latter can extend to such wild extremes that prices then reverse with equal force and severity.

  Given the change ahead, and the reluctance of people to accept it, let alone recognize it, one should expect large moves in prices. Trends. Such an environment will reward the artistically minded, the venture investors, and those prepared to break with what is now seen, after decades of growing policy homogeneity, as investing orthodoxy. It should come as no surprise that at the outset of such an environment, investors in digital assets and the companies that are focused on these new technologies have produced extraordinary returns. That trend has only just begun.

  There will be enormous trends in other assets as well. Volatility markets will naturally present exceptional opportunities. Talented discretionary investors with unconstrained mandates, open minds and disciplined risk management should produce tremendous returns. An exceptional way to systematically capitalize on such an environment at scale is by deploying capital to trend-following strategies (CTAs). By removing the emotion and bias that handicap discretionary traders, and by spreading bets across many individual markets representing all the major asset classes, systematic trend-following strategies can profit in bull markets, bear markets. Renaissance. Dystopia. Extreme outcomes in either direction. The strategies are agnostic to the outcome, passionless, open minded, adaptable.

  Systematic trend following has arguably just had its worst decade in the past century. The decade coincided with peak policy homogeneity, with central bankers expending extraordinary efforts to produce stability. Now trend strategies are generally shunned by investors, even as the world is transforming. Unsurprisingly, such strategies had their best decade of the last century in the tumultuous 1970s, producing tremendous returns in a period when inflation devastated most investment portfolios. After decades of low and stable prices, a return to a higher inflation regime appears not only likely, but it is a stated policy goal. None of this is to suggest we are headed for a repeat of the 1970s, or any other historical period for that matter. Systematic trend-following profits from great change, and it need not be a repeat of some previous regime.

  We are at a truly unique moment in human history, headed as always, into the unknown but with an unusually wide range of possible outcomes. This is a time of existential risk for those unwilling to adapt, and a time of extraordinary opportunity for those of us prepared to embrace quantum change. In periods of such profound transition, it is the case that the investment strategies that profited most handsomely in the old regime, suffer in the new. And as with all natural phenomena, those that struggled, have their day in the sun.

  Eric Peters
  Chief Investment Officer
  One River Asset Management

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 19:30

• One In Five Americans Say Employer Requires Vaccination
  One In Five Americans Say Employer Requires Vaccination

  The share of Americans who are required by their employer to get vaccinated against COVID-19 took a jump up in August to 19 percent, according to a Gallup poll.

  As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, the number had been as low as 9 percent in July and 6 percent in June.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Over the past couple of months, many major companies and government branches have released vaccination requirements and the type of employer issuing requirements goes beyond obvious ones like healthcare providers and the military. The full approval of the Pfizer vaccine on August 23 helped make the legal footing of employer-mandated vaccinations sounder.

  According to Fortune, companies that require vaccinations for employees in order to work from their premises include Bank of America, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix and Uber. Three federal departments – those for defense, veteran affairs and health and human services – also require them without alternatives for frontline workers. Six states – Colorado, Maine, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington – have released mandates for healthcare workers to get vaccinated or be terminated, while the more common mandates for state and local government employees normally leave the option of regular testing and sometimes masking for the unvaccinated.

  The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent federal government agency, has said that it is legal for employers to require all employees who physically enter a workplace to be vaccinated against COVID-19, as long as the employers also comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act in order to accommodate those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 19:00

• Navy SEAL Who Shot Bin Laden Says Internal Division Now Biggest Threat To America
  Navy SEAL Who Shot Bin Laden Says Internal Division Now Biggest Threat To America

  Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

  Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL credited with killing Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, said that the biggest threat to America comes not from outside but from internal strife and division.

  

  Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama bin Laden, poses for a portrait in Washington, on Nov. 14, 2014. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo)

  O’Neill made the remarks in an interview with Fox News on the eve of Sept. 11, as the nation prepared to honor victims of the terror attack on the World Trade Center 20 years ago that killed at least 2,977 people and injured thousands more.

  “My biggest concern is the division in this country,” O’Neill told the outlet.

  “Most people are good to each other. But the anger and the division gets the ratings, and that’s what people hear. A lot of people know if they keep people divided they can stay in power and it’s wrong.”

  “We can disagree with each other but we’re on the same team when it all comes down to it,” O’Neill added.

  

  Smoke billows from one of the towers of the World Trade Center as flames and debris explode from the second tower, in New York City, on Sept. 11, 2001. (Chao Soi Cheong/AP Photo)

  O’Neill was part of the 2011 raid in Pakistan targeting the Al-Qaeda leader and says he was the one who fired the fatal shot.

  In a separate interview with CBS News, O’Neill recounted the daring mission that left bin Laden dead.

  “When I turned the corner, I saw Osama bin Laden standing there,” he said, adding that he thought the Al-Qaeda leader may have been preparing to detonate an explosive.

  “He’s a threat, he’s going to blow up, I need to treat him like a suicide bomber and that’s why I had to shoot him in the face,” O’Neill said.

  

  Copies of a newspaper are seen outside the World Trade Center site after the death of accused 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was announced by U.S. President Barack Obama, in New York City, on May 2, 2011. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

  O’Neill said the mission to get bin Laden was a testament to the ability of people holding different political views to join forces to counter threats against the homeland.

  “We proved that we can work together,” he said, adding that he hopes events like the anniversary of 9/11 are seized as an opportunity by both the right and the left to bridge divisions in the pursuit of common objectives.

  “When all is said and done, we’re all Americans and we should be on the same team,” he said.

  O’Neill’s remarks about the need for Americans to bridge political and ideological divides was echoed by President Joe Biden, who in a recorded video released on Sept. 10 recalled the heroics seen in the aftermath of the terror attacks and how America saw “a true sense of national unity.”

  Biden, who on Saturday was set to visit three sites attacked on 9/11, added in the video that “unity makes us who we are” and called for people to “have a fundamental respect and faith in each other and in this nation.”

  Former President Donald Trump, meanwhile, told Fox News that he planned to visit Ground Zero in New York City on Saturday to mark the 20th anniversary of the attacks.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 18:30

• "Bitcoin Really Does Fix This": El Salvador's Adoption Of Bitcoin Will Cost Money Transfer Companies Hundreds Of Millions In Fees
  “Bitcoin Really Does Fix This”: El Salvador’s Adoption Of Bitcoin Will Cost Money Transfer Companies Hundreds Of Millions In Fees

  If you’re from El Salvador living and working elsewhere in the world, Bitcoin wallet adoption in the country fixes an age-old problem that clunky money-transfer companies like Western Union used to have to solve: getting money back home. 

  According to CNBC, about 70% of the Salvadoran population receives remittance payments that could now be transferred using Bitcoin. 

  Jaime García of Saskatchewan, who left El Salvador after his house was bombed by rebels, told CNBC: “In this day and age, it is wild that I had to go to a physical Western Union office, give them actual cash, and then hand them another $25 on top of that, before they would send my money over.”

  “And then, of course, it takes three days for it to actually arrive in El Salvador,” he continued.

  Then, back in El Salvador, collecting also becomes a problem: “They have to take a bus to go to a physical location to pick it up, and there are gangs that hang out around those offices. They know what people are going there for, and they basically rob them.”

  Last year, more than $6 billion, or about 23% of the country’s GDP, was sent back home from the 2.5 million who have fled El Salvador. “60% of that cash comes via remittance companies and 38% through banking institutions,” CNBC reported, citing official data.

  The shift in how payments are made could wind up costing money transfer companies up to a billion dollars, Mario Gomez Lozada estimated. Lozada was born and raised in El Salvador, has previously worked as a banker with Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse and now works running a derivates exchange for crypto assets.

  

  Lozada said: “It will be interesting to see the impact on remittances in a few months and see what percentage of it uses the bitcoin network rails. My guess is most people initially will cash bitcoin into U.S. dollars, as this is what they are used to, but we should see a gradual adoption of bitcoin as the main means of transaction and pricing. I see a future where consumer items like milk and bread are priced in bitcoin directly and people might even start holding bitcoin.”

  Matt Hougan, chief investment officer of Bitwise Asset Management, told CNBC: “Remittances are one area where the status quo in our legacy financial system is terrible, with extraordinarily high fees leveled at populations that can ill afford them.”

  He continued: “It won’t be overnight; 100% of remittances aren’t going to move to the Chivo app tomorrow. These things take time, and people naturally worry about trying new things with money. But the current fee levels of charge for remittances are going to prove unsustainable.”

  Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer for the Human Rights Foundation, said: “Wherever you are now, you can send bitcoin to anyone with a Chivo wallet in El Salvador, and in minutes, they have the value and then they can go to one of the ATMs and take it out in cash without a fee. That’s drop-dead stunning. It’s an incredible humanitarian improvement.”

  Hougan concluded: “It’s a worn-out Twitter saying, but bitcoin really does fix this.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 18:00

• North Korea Reportedly Test-Fires New Long-Range Cruise Missile
  North Korea Reportedly Test-Fires New Long-Range Cruise Missile

  South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency is reporting that North Korea’s state-owned media KCNA said that North Korea said it has successfully test-fired a “new type long-range” cruise missile on September 11 and 12.

  “The efficiency and practicality of the weapon system operation was confirmed to be excellent,” state news agency KCNA said in a statement

  The missiles flew 1,500km (930 miles) traveling for 7,580 seconds before hitting their targets and falling into the country’s territorial waters, KCNA said.

  The development of the missiles provides “strategic significance of possessing another effective deterrence means for more reliably guaranteeing the security of our state and strongly containing the military maneuvers of the hostile forces,” KCNA said.

  This is not the first such test-fire during Biden’s term.

  In March, Kim Jong Un test-fired two short-range ballistic missiles, prompting U.S. Indo-Pacific Command spokesperson Capt. Mike Kafka to warn at the time:

  “This activity highlights the threat that North Korea’s illicit weapons program poses to its neighbors and the international community.”

  But one still wonders at the timing of such a provocation.

  Kim would not fire anything without Beijing’s blessing, so is this Xi piling on more pressure on Biden as Washington faces turmoil in almost every foreign policy endeavor.

  Last week, North Korea staged its first military-style parade since Joe Biden became U.S. president, with Kim presiding over an event where displays of his state’s weaponry were scaled down from previous exhibitions. There were no ballistic missiles, which are faster and harder to intercept than cruise missiles, on show.

  

  Also interesting, given the timing, Australia’s Defense Minister Peter Dutton and Foreign Minister Marise Payne are in Seoul to meet with their South Korean counterparts, as the two countries mark the 60th anniversary of official relations.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 17:35

• California Medical Ethics Prof With Natural Immunity Sues University Over Vaxx Mandate
  California Medical Ethics Prof With Natural Immunity Sues University Over Vaxx Mandate

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  We recently discussed the lawsuit filed by a George Mason University professor who refused to get the Covid vaccine upon the recommendation of his doctors and due to his natural antibodies after recovering from the virus. GMU later relented and gave him an exception. However, now a University of California professor has sued on the same ground. Aaron Kheriaty, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California at Irvine, is the latest effort to force review of the issue of natural antibodies as a protection from Covid.

  

  Kheriaty is suing the Board of Regents and the University president due to his antibodies from a case of Covid-19 in July 2020. He told SBG “[i]f my immunity is as good, indeed, very likely better, than that conferred by the vaccine, there doesn’t seem to be any rational basis for discriminating against my form of immunity and requiring me to get a different form of immunity.”

  What is most interesting about the case is that Kheriaty serves as director of UCI’s Medical Ethics Program and is a member of the UC Office of the President Critical Care Bioethics Working Group. Kheriaty has complained that it is now verboten to even raise natural antibodies despite studies showing that they may be even more effective than vaccines.  A study (often cited by the CDC) suggests the opposite.

  Kheriaty cited studies showing that recovery yields considerable protection, including a study from researchers at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology found that that the immune systems of those who recovered from COVID-19 had durable memories of the virus up to eight months after infection.  He goes into detail on such studies. Thus, this is not some screed against vaccines but a science based challenge.

  There has been an obvious aversion of the CDC and the Biden Administration in addressing the natural antibody issue. Most media have held that same line and there has been little discussion of such objections.

  The challenge for Kheriaty is whether a court will find that taking the vaccine as someone with natural antibodies has not been found to be dangerous or harmful. As a result, it may conclude that it is simply too difficult for employers to establish natural antibodies and their specific level of protection. However, the same difficulty is present by vaccinated individuals who will likely have differing levels of protection over time.

  Past challenges to mandates have included the natural antibody issues.  Recently, in a challenge to Indiana University’s mandate, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected a motion for a preliminary injunction. The Court noted that there is not “a fundamental right ingrained in the American legal tradition” to refuse a vaccine. Challenges have also bee rejected to policies at Houston Methodist Hospital and Los Angeles Unified School District.

  This case however presents the natural antibody case in its strongest and most direct terms. The odds are in favor of the university but it could be a case with potential for the Supreme Court.

  Here is the complaint: Kheriaty Complaint

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 17:30

• Al Qaeda Leader Appears In New Video Marking 9/11, Despite Death Rumors
  Al Qaeda Leader Appears In New Video Marking 9/11, Despite Death Rumors

  It’s been years since the world heard from Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri, who became the main face of the terror group after the 2011 death of Osama bin Laden. After the wars in Iraq and Syria and with the rise of ISIS, al-Qaeda has also seen its “prestige” eclipsed in recent years. 

  Zawahri has even long been rumored to be dead; however, a new video of the reclusive 70-year old jihadi and one of the founding members of al-Qaeda is being considered fresh proof that he’s still alive and is directing the organization. The video was reportedly released to mark the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as The Associated Press details:

  The SITE Intelligence Group that monitors jihadist websites said the video was released Saturday. In it, al-Zawahri said that “Jerusalem Will Never be Judaized,” and praised al-Qaida attacks including one that targeted Russian troops in Syria in January.

  17) Amid rumors of his death, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri shown in new 60-minute video, this time offering some evidence that he is not dead–particularly, reference to events after December, when rumors of death surfaced. (A speech from March offered no such proof) pic.twitter.com/IXpz6wIZvh

  — Rita Katz (@Rita_Katz) September 11, 2021

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  But there’s speculation that it may have been recorded at the start of this year, given no mention is made of the recent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Rita Katz, head of the counter-terror analysis group SITE, said in a weekend statement of Zawahri that “He could still be dead, though if so, it would have been at some point in or after Jan 2021.”

  Clues in the video as to the timing of its production include the terror leader’s mention of a Jan.1, 2021 attack on Russian troops outside Raqqa in Syria. Al-Qaeda has for years been vocally supportive of the armed “jihad” in Syria and attempts to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.

  The video is somewhat lengthy, at over 61 minutes, and was produced reportedly by al-Qaeda’s as-Sahab Media Foundation.

  22) As the AQ community continues to flood channels and hype up Zawahiri speech, their incitements remind one that AQ remains intent as ever to harm America. One pro-AQ magazine released today incites for more attacks with aircraft: “Are we not able to repeat it?” pic.twitter.com/BiypVvZVQw

  — Rita Katz (@Rita_Katz) September 11, 2021

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  Since the video’s weekend release – timed just as America held memorials at New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania where United Airlines Flight 93 went down after al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked it – al-Qaeda propaganda channels and media have suggested its terror operatives desire to “repeat” such a major attack against the West and the US.

  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 17:00

• Two Years Ago Today: Wuhan Bat Lab Mysteriously Scrubbed Database With 22,000 Specimens
  Two Years Ago Today: Wuhan Bat Lab Mysteriously Scrubbed Database With 22,000 Specimens

  More than three months before Covid-19 officially ‘broke out’ in Wuhan, China, the Wuhan Institute of Virology mysteriously took its bat and rodent pathogen database offline – suddenly making over 22,000 specimens unavailable.

  

  This is the same China that ordered virus samples destroyed after a ‘rogue lab’ published the genome for Covid-19 (48 hours after the WIV database was further altered), and deleted more than 300 studies encompassing “hundreds of pages of information”

  We’re reminded of this by biologist and writer Matt Ridley, who said in a Sunday Twitter thread:

  …The explanation that Shi Zhengli gave, that there had been hacking attempts, makes no sense.

  Why would there be before the pandemic?

  And sharing the data with a secure source overseas to protect against it being altered would render hacking futile…

  — Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) September 12, 2021

  Continued: 

  …The fact sheet describing the database was not taken down but it was edited, on or before 30 December, to change the key words, and alter some terms from “wildlife” to “bat and rodent”. Why?

  The database remains inaccessible to the world to this day. We know it contains unpublished samples and sequences of bat viruses but we have never been told what they are. Shockingly,@peterdaszak has excused this lack of transparency, while other virologists have ignored it…

   

  There has been no call from the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences or western governments for this database to be shared with the world, even though it could be vital to understanding how this pandemic started or how the next one may start. Why not?

  The failure to share this information at a time when millions have died is not just unforgivable. It is also circumstantial evidence of the relevance of the site. The quickest way to dispel suspicion is to share this information. pic.twitter.com/34kUpC9yWh

  — Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) September 12, 2021

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   And as Paul Graham notes, “Perhaps it would be a useful exercise to try to pinpoint, if Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, exactly which day it did so. Perhaps “reconstructing the crime” would help ascertain whether it happened.”

  Perhaps it would be a useful exercise to try to pinpoint, if Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, exactly which day it did so. Perhaps “reconstructing the crime” would help ascertain whether it happened. https://t.co/cHhi33slIL

  — Paul Graham (@paulg) September 12, 2021

  We aren’t going to hold our breath for any answers from the CCP.

  Wuhan and PRC authorities have been asked for raw data that might help reconstruct / reverse trace the origins of SARS2. This was their response: https://t.co/5qbLbNdQl9

  — jj ⌛️💡🔭 (@murchiston) September 12, 2021

  Going even deeper down the rabbit hole… (click tweet to jump in)

  A thread on the origins of COVID-19, and a possible bio-containment failure at one of the Wuhan labs.

  I feel there are facts not enough people know about, so I decided to summarise the important & interesting ones in this post.

  — The Seeker (@TheSeeker268) October 7, 2020

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  Tyler Durden
  Sun, 09/12/2021 – 16:30

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• McMaken: 9/11 Was A Day Of Unforgivable Government Failure
  McMaken: 9/11 Was A Day Of Unforgivable Government Failure

  Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

  Perhaps more than anything else, the rationale given for the necessity of the state – and the necessity of supporting the regime at any given time – is that it “keeps us safe.” This permeates thinking about government institutions at all levels, from “thin blue line” sloganeering at the local level, all the way up to jingoism surrounding the  Pentagon.

  Presumably, the hundreds of billions of dollars extracted from taxpayers, year after year after year, is all both necessary and laudable because without it, chaos would reign on our streets, and foreign invaders would slaughter Americans.

  Yet, this rationale for state power also presumes that the nation’s alleged defenders are actually competent at their jobs.

  Whether or not this is case certainly remains debatable as the recent military disasters in Afghanistan have made clear. The Pentagon brass pushed for continued war in Afghanistan for 20 years, and ultimately, lost the entire country to the Taliban, the very people Pentagon generals assured us they would eliminate “soon.”

  Moreover, the so-called “intelligence community” in the United States has repeatedly failed in its mission at crucial times. This can be seen in the fact the CIA was asleep at the switch in the lead ups to both the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 —both of which constituted an immense blow to American “safety” by the American regime’s metrics.

  Needless to say, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were made possible by an immense military and intelligence failure on the part of the United States government. Not only did the US government provide the motivation for the attacks—through endless meddling in Middles Eastern regimes—but the US regime failed to protect its own citizens when the blowback arrived. 

  

  Yet, as is so common following displays of incompetence by government bureaucrats, virtually no government agents was held accountable for this failure. The head of the CIA on 9/11, George Tenet, continued at his post for years afterward. There certainly was no “house cleaning” at the FBI either. 

  Yet federal agencies allegedly formed to “keep us safe” were more or less AWOL in the lead up to 9/11, choosing to focus on relatively petty goals, and on augmenting the agencies’ public-relations efforts, rather than on terrorism.

  The CIA at the Center

  A bevy of books have been published over the last 20 years examining the massive intelligence blundering that preceded 9/11. Many of them are partisan, and many attempt to blame everything on elected officials. But the failures leading up to 9/11 go much deeper than that. Much of this is described in detail by Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn in their book Constructing Cassandra: Reframing Intelligence Failure at the CIA, 1947-2001.

  The authors note that the 9/11 failure was a failure of multiple intelligence agencies, as well as numerous US policymakers across many agencies and institutions.

  But, as Jones and Silberzahn contend, “the CIA stands at the center of the failure. … [p]rior to 9/11, the CIA was primus inter pares among the agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, chartered specifically to coordinate the community’s activities against threats—especially surprise attacks originating abroad.”

  The story of the CIA’s failure is one of an organization that was repeatedly warned of the al-Qa’ida threat by internal analysists. But both the CIA leadership, and the rank and file, chose to ignore the warnings.  Rather, before 9/11, the leadership insisted on focusing on China, Iran, and Iraq. Other priorities included drug trafficking, organized crime, and illicit trade practices and “environmental issues of great gravity.”

  Thanks only partly to guidance handed down form the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, “intelligence about al-Qa’ida [was] equal to that [of] …the illegal trade of tropical hardwood.” Jones and Silberzahn note the CIA did not “push back” against these priorities but concerned itself with telling politicians what they wanted to hear. 

  Looking at “CIA budgetary decisions prior to 9/11” it becomes clear that intelligence on terrorism and al-Qa’ida were “extremely low priorities” at the CIA and “the agency had repeatedly diverted money away from counterterrorism to other purposes.”

  For instance, the CIA’s intelligence briefings for the Bush administration in 2001 (prior to September 11) were extremely vague and never communicated much beyond the bland facts that Islamic terrorists exist and might carry out attacks—sometime, somewhere.  The agency never devoted many resources to following up on the possibility of these attacks. Briefings on the topic of Islamic terrorism were historical in nature with little effort given to anticipating the details of possible future acts. There was no “actionable warning.”

  The 9/11 Commission noted this problem:

  Commission staff member Douglas McEachin—a veteran former CIA analyst himself—thought that it was “unforgivable” that no NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] on al-Qa’ida or terrorism of any sort was produced for four years before the attacks. McEachin was “shocked that no one at the senior levels of the CIA had attempted for years— to catalog and give context to what was know about al-Qa’ida.”

  Yet, to this day, apologists for the CIA will shrug their shoulders and insist “hindsight is 20/20!” and “how could anyone have known?” These defenders of the regime, of course, ignore the fact that the intelligence community in 2001 was receiving $30 billion in taxpayer money—an amount that was real money in 2001—to anticipate security threats. Providing “early warning of an enemy attack” was (and is) their job.

  (It’s also worth asking if the perennial excuse-makers for government failure can provide an example of a military or intelligence failure that they wouldn’t shrug off.)

  The CIA Was Warned, and Did Nothing

  Moreover, the data is clear that it didn’t require revolutionary thinking to anticipate that Islamic terrorists might use airplanes as weapons, or that al-Qa’ida posed a credible threat.

  After all, the CIA leadership was warned by its own analysts, especially those under Michael Scheuer who headed up the CIA’s much-ignored bin Ladin unit. As early as 1996, Scheuer had attempted to warn his superiors at the CIA of the threat of Islamic terrorism in general, and al Qa’ida in particular. Usama bin Laden had been publicly threatening Western nations to Western media since 1993, and publicly declared war on the United States on September 2, 1996.

  Unlike most staffers and officials at the CIA, Scheuer took bin Ladin seriously, but he and his unit were regarded with little esteem at the agency. While Scheuer was attempting to raise the profile of al-Qa’ida, “Anyone with seniority or savvy avoided assignment to the bin Ladin unit.”

  Scheuer was regarded as “obsessive” and those who were assigned to work with him were usually “very junior” and also female. Indeed, the bin Ladin unit, staffed as it was by Scheuer and a number of women, came to be derisively called “The Manson Family” among CIA staff.

  Eventually, Scheuer lost what little influence he had in 1999. Frustrated with senior officials, Scheuer attempted to engage CIA director Tenet directly. This was regarded as an unforgiveable breach of bureaucratic protocol and Scheuer was demoted to the position of a librarian and shunted off to a cubicle in the library at Langley.

  Airplanes as Weapons: It Was Predictable

  Having studiously ignored the potential threat of al-Qa’ida throughout the late 1990s, CIA staff and leadership also failed to anticipate the methods eventually used on 9/11.

  Followers of early 2000s popular culture will sometimes recall that the television show The Lone Gunmen—a spinoff of The X-Files—aired an episode in March 2001 in which a nefarious “hacker” deliberately flies a 747 at the World Trade Center.

  Many note with amazement that authors of fiction saw the potential for the use of airplanes as weapons while the intelligence community apparently ignored the idea. Yet, the writers at The Lone Gunmen were hardly the first to conceive of the idea, which further illustrates the lack of imagination employed at the CIA.

  As Jones and Silberzahn note,

  In 1994, an Algerian group hijacked a plane in Algiers and apparently intended to fly it into the Eiffel Tower; in 1995, Manila police reported in detail about a suicide plot to crash a plane into CIA Headquarters; since the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, the NSC actively considered the use of aircraft as suicide weapons. Tom Clancy also wrote a novel about such an attack. As the [9/11] commission itself noted, the possibility of commercial planes as suicde weapons was both “imaginable and imagined” not just at the CIA.

  A Lack of Expertise

  So why was the CIA leadership so incapable to taking the al-Qa’ida threat seriously?

  Much of it, Jones and Silberzahn conclude, was due to sizable weaknesses in the CIA’s analytical capabilities. Just as a general example, the authors note that even as late as 2013, “very few CIA analysts can read or speak Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, or Farsi—which collectively comprise the languages spoken by nearly half the world’s population.”

  Jones and Silberzahn note this is part of a general problem at the CIA of cultural homogeneity. Prior to 9/11, and likely still today, the CIA capabilities in understanding foreign cultures is limited by the fact the CIA is largely the domain of college-educated Americans, generally from the same socio-economic strata.

  As noted by one CIA officer shortly after 9/11:

  The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern Background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist… For Christ’s sake most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia.

  Indeed, “In 2001, only 20 percent of the graduating class of clandestine case officers were fluent in a non-Romance language.” It’s unlikely that in 2001, the CIA had even a single case officer who spoke Pashto, the language of the Taliban. These great intelligence “experts” were groping around in the dark, often due to bureaucratic laziness and ignorance. 

  The CIA’s defenders today may still make excuses for the CIA’s failure to know the details of the 9/11 conspiracy ahead of time, but it is clear today that the CIA wasn’t even looking in the right general direction to discover such information were it to present itself. Rather, in 2001, the CIA was apparently more interested in working with policymakers and media to leak headlines that would play up the foreign threats the CIA was most interested in talking about.

  Unfortunately, in spite of these enormous failures, the CIA and the intelligence community have seen little damage to their reputations. Nor is there any reason to assume the situation has substantially changed and that the federal bureaucracy is any more competent today than it was on September 10, 2001. There is no market test or objective measure of success in government bureaucracies. In the decade following 9/11, the US’s intelligence agencies were rewarded with a marked increase in funding over 1990s levels. 

  Twenty years after 9/11, a much-needed culture of skepticism around the nation’s “intelligence community” has yet to arise. This attitude will only pave the way for the next time it becomes tragically clear that America’s well-funded collection of intelligence agencies doesn’t actually “keep us safe.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 23:30

• Boston Suburb Attempts To Limit Gun Stores With New Zoning Proposal
  Boston Suburb Attempts To Limit Gun Stores With New Zoning Proposal

  It comes as no surprise the Second Amendment is under attack in a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, one of the most anti-gun states in the country. 

  Members of the Select Board in Brookline, Massachusetts, are proposing zoning limits for gun stores, according to the Patch. 

  

  Under the new zoning proposal submitted by town board members Petra Bignami, Janice Kahn, Alexandra Metral, and Sharon Schoffman, gun stores would only be allowed to operate by special permit. It also states buffer zones will be around residential properties, private and public K-12 schools, and childcare facilities, which would block firearm businesses from operating within a certain distance. 

  The proposal came after the City of Newton, one town over, approved new zoning rules for gun stores in June that restricted them to three locations. This action was in response to a new gun store attempting to open. 

  “When the issue of the gun store going into Newton, that got everybody’s attention I think about potentially a flaw in the towns land use that might allow gun stores in places we don’t want, and so I asked the planning department to begin to work on that,” Brookline’s Town Administrator Melvin Kleckner said at a Select Board meeting last month. 

  Kleckner said the proposal is a good idea and is “essentially the Newton model.”  

  Responding to this liberal madness is The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN), who said: 

  “Not surprising that the proposal is coming from Massachusetts, one of the most anti-gun states in the country. The irony is that the same people who claim to be for personal freedom and free expression push laws that stifle commerce and limit free choice. The simple fact is that zoning gun shops out of participation in the local economy will do absolutely nothing to stop gun violence and will only make it harder for law-abiding citizens to access their 2nd amendment rights and defend themselves.”

  The Newton model might work in the Northeast, but elsewhere, 1,930 US counties are protected by Second Amendment Sanctuary legislation, and a crackdown on gun stores might be challenging. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 23:00

• Gaslighting The American People: Biden's "Extraordinarily Successful" Withdrawal From Reality
  Gaslighting The American People: Biden’s “Extraordinarily Successful” Withdrawal From Reality

  Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClearPolitics.com,

  The Democratic Party and its apparatchiks in the media keep asking the American people variations on a single question: What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

  

  From the Trump/Russia collusion fantasy and concocted claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” to ongoing efforts to cast an America that has never been freer or fairer as a nation riddled with “systemic” racial oppression, they keep insisting that we reject clear and convincing evidence and embrace politically driven falsehoods.

  The latest example is President Biden’s refusal to even acknowledge the catastrophic failure of his withdrawal from Afghanistan. The nation heard him say on July 8 that it was highly unlikely that the Taliban would overrun the country. The Washington Post reports that his senior leadership team was caught so unaware by the Taliban’s August advance that many were on vacation when Kabul fell. Then came the images of chaotic panic at the airport, a grim scene turned violently grisly when a suicide bomber murdered scores of people, including 13 Americans.

  Biden subsequently described the withdrawal as an “extraordinary success” even as he left behind lethal state-of-the-art military equipment worth billions of dollars as well as many Americans and Afghans who had aided us during the 20-year struggle – including the interpreter who helped rescue Biden himself in 2008.

  Slowly but surely the mainstream press, which initially covered the debacle forthrightly,  is beginning to embrace Biden’s narrative. Ezra Klein offered his New York Times readers a fatuous counterfactual defense: “A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one.” Jonathan Karl of ABC News played the Trump card: “The truth is that Biden accomplished exactly what Trump had tried to do in his final year in office. The only real difference is that Trump wanted to withdraw more quickly and with less regard for the Afghan citizens who worked with the United States.”

  Expect to hear more of the same in the coming weeks. Don’t be surprised if Biden is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The brazenness is stunning. This is not your typical political spin, it is propaganda. It is the willful effort to corrupt our perception of reality. Say it loud and long enough and people will believe it. If they don’t, get Twitter mobs and cancel culture to silence and punish them. That is increasingly becoming the Democrats’ playbook.

  Why do they do it? The obvious and most important answer is that they can, and it is incredibly useful. The spread of the Trump/Russia conspiracy theory helped them hobble a presidency just as the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story helped them win an election.

  They are able to get away with it because they have convinced their allies in the press and millions of voters that our nation is locked in an existential battle with an evil enemy: the Republican Party. False narratives that kneecap the enemy are serving a higher truth; admissions of error are taboo because they will only strengthen the opposition. Give no quarter is their mantra.

  There is also a politico-psychological dynamic behind this posture. Democrats are the party of well-educated elites, whose position in society and sense of self are anchored in their belief in their intellectual merit. Likewise, the Democratic Party’s argument for an all-powerful government is based on claims of competence and expertise. Acknowledging errors undermines their claims to authority.

  This helps explain the lack of accountability. Firing, say, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken or Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley for the Afghanistan debacle would suggest that our brilliant leaders are not so brilliant.

  To admit the obvious, yes, Republicans practice deception all the time. And it is also corrosive. But they do not control the government or, more importantly, the news. Their lies are almost always exposed, while those of the Democrats are often propagated.

  

  This is at the root of our country’s deep divide.

  Even thoughtful conservatives are rightly skeptical of most everything they are told. This increasingly knee-jerk antagonism not only leads some to seek the truth, but also others to reject honest information, such as the efficacy of vaccines.

  When you don’t know who to trust, you don’t know what to trust. As long as our leaders keep trying to subvert reality, this is the reality we are consigned to inhabit.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 22:30

• The Road To Decarbonization: Visualizing The United States Electricity Mix
  The Road To Decarbonization: Visualizing The United States Electricity Mix

  The U.S. response to climate change and decarbonization is ramping up, and putting a focus on the country’s electricity mix.

  As pressure has increased for near-term and immediate action after the UN’s latest IPCC report on climate change, major economies are starting to make bolder pledges. For the United States, Visual Capitalist’s Omri Wallach notes that includes a carbon pollution-free utilities sector by 2035.

  But with 50 states and even more territories—each with different energy sources readily available and utilized—some parts of the U.S. are a lot closer to carbon-free electricity than others.

  How does each state’s electricity mix compare? This infographic from the National Public Utilities Council highlights the energy sources used for electricity in U.S. states during 2020, using data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

  

  The U.S. Electricity Generation Mix By State

  How does the United States generate electricity currently?

  Over the course of 2020, the U.S. generated 4,009 TWh of electricity, with the majority coming from fossil fuels. Natural gas (40.3%) was the biggest source of electricity for the country, accounting for more than nuclear (19.7%) and coal (17.3%) combined.

  Including nuclear energy, non-fossil fuels made up 41.9% of U.S. electricity generation in 2020. The biggest sources of renewable electricity in the U.S. were wind (8.4%) and hydro (7.3%).

  But on a state-by-state breakdown, we can see just how different the electricity mix is across the country (rounded to the nearest percentage).

  At a glance, regional availability of a fuel source and historical use is clear.

  For example, coal is the most-used electricity source in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Wyoming, historical coal rich regions and economies.

  On the flip side, the Pacific Northwest and New England generated the most hydroelectricity, and the biggest producers of wind energy were all located in the Great Plains. Even the biggest percentage producers of solar and geothermal energy, California and Nevada, have plenty of access to sunlight and geothermal activity.

  The Changing Electricity Landscape

  But for the U.S. to reach its ambitious carbon-free goal by 2035, the biggest impact will need to come from the biggest electricity producers.

  That title currently goes to Texas, which generated 12% of total U.S. electricity in 2020. Despite being the most populous state, California generated less than half Texas’ output, and less than both Florida and Pennsylvania.

  

  So although it’s positive that many states in the Pacific Northwest and New England have more plentiful non-fossil fuel electricity, their overall impact on the total U.S. picture is lessened.

  Still, more and more states (and countries) are increasing their efforts and ambitions to decarbonize, and that progress makes it easier and more affordable over time. States that might struggle to attain carbon-free electricity, or where costs are too high, face less hurdles as technology improves and subsidies increase.

  And with most major U.S. based utilities focusing on improving their ESG reporting and keeping up with decarbonization pledges of their own, the total electricity mix is expected to shift rapidly over the next decade.

  National Public Utilities Council is the go-to resource for all things decarbonization in the utilities industry. Learn more.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 22:00

• US Military Court Rules Bump Stock Is Not A Machine Gun
  US Military Court Rules Bump Stock Is Not A Machine Gun

  Op-Ed via The Machine Gun Nest (TMGN). 

  There’s been big news for gun rights these past few days, with headlines focusing on President Biden officially pulling David Chipman’s nomination to serve as ATF director.

  With Chipman’s nomination removed, gun owners might have missed this story, absent from mainstream media, about military courts ruling bump stocks are not machine guns. 

  

  On Sept. 9, the U.S. Navy-Marine Corps Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that bump stocks are not machine guns in the case U.S. v. Ali Alkazahg. This is a big win for gun owners and reaffirms the fact that items that are not machine guns by legal definition cannot be classified as machine guns simply because the ATF “feels” like they meet the definition.

  Let’s take a peek at the case. Private Ali Akazahg was in Hawaii on the Marine Corps base in Kaneohe Bay. While there, he was convicted of possessing two machine guns in violation of the UCMJ or Uniform Code of Military Justice. Although, these “Machine Guns” were, in fact, bump stocks. Akazahg’s defense argued that bump stocks did not meet the legal definition of a machine gun.

  

  Here’s an excerpt from the decision:

  “Instead, the President directed the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives [ATF] to issue a new interpretation of a rule—that contradicted the ATF’s previous interpretation—governing legislation from the 1930s. This Executive-Branch change in statutory interpretation aimed to outlaw bump stocks prospectively, without a change in existing statutes.”

  The court is essentially laying out the fact that the ATF bypassed Congress to create law. They go on to explain that:

  “In 1986, Congress passed the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act [FOPA], banning possession of machine guns not owned before 1986. FOPA also banned any parts, to include frames and receivers, which were part of a machine gun or were designed for converting a weapon into a machine gun. The current statute at issue is 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b), which defines what a machine gun is. Due to having a bump stock, Appellant was charged under the statute which states that a machine gun is “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically, more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

  The court explains that the bump stock not only does not meet that definition, but similar situations have already been litigated in Civilian courts as well. They cite Gun Owners of America v. Garland, which took place in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In GOA v. Garland, the Sixth Circuit agreed that bump stocks did not meet the definition of a machine gun. Interestingly, they noted that the current classification of bump stocks as machine guns has relied upon Chevron deference. For those unfamiliar, it is a legal principle that compels federal courts to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous or unclear statute. 

  To sum up, the Judges declared that bump stocks are not machine guns. This adds to the growing list of bump stock court cases making their way to the Supreme Court, as the US Court of Military Appeals is like the Federal Court of Appeals, one step below the Supreme Court. 

  So now you might be asking yourself? “Why should I care about the bump stock?” Well put simply, the current legal precedent allows for ATF, and the anti-gun lobby to now take steps to ban all semi-automatic firearms. It is essential for those of us that care about our 2nd amendment rights to draw a line in the sand and say, “No More.” The goal of the anti-gun lobby and the Congressmen that line their pockets with their donations is the complete and total disarmament of the United States of America. The bump stock might just be the key to their goal. The complete and total repudiation of this ban is how we stop them.  

  * * * 

  … and if readers want to learn more about possible future gun policy via TMGN, they’ve laid out the “puzzle pieces” of how the ATF maybe David Chipman appointed as White House “Gun Czar” has plans to classify semi-automatic rifles, such as the AR-15, as “machine guns.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 21:30

• KFC Bets On Vegan Nuggets Amid Nationwide Poultry Shortage
  KFC Bets On Vegan Nuggets Amid Nationwide Poultry Shortage

  Kentucky Fried Chicken is serving up a new vegan future for its fast-food chain amid poultry shortages and the continued disruption caused by the virus pandemic. 

  KFC’s president in the U.S., Kevin Hochman, has been preparing the Louisville-based fast-food restaurant chain, known for its “Finger-Lickin’ Good” chicken, for a future of plant-based meat. The company has been testing plant-based nuggets from Beyond Meat in select locations but has yet to take it nationwide. 

  

  The poultry shortage, which has disrupted chicken supply chains across the UK and US, could be why Hochman brings a faux option that replicates chicken to market faster than anticipated to alleviate supply woes. The shortage is so dire in the US that the company cannot promote its breaded chicken tenders on US television. 

  Bloomberg’s Leslie Patton said KFC is preparing for what looks like an inevitable future of fake chicken going mainstream. He sat down with the KFC executive to discuss more about faux nuggets. 

  “Our plan is to try to replicate that Kentucky Fried Chicken as close as we can, obviously without using the animal. A lot of that is about how the chicken cuts and tears and the mouth feel. The gold standard is the chicken tenderloin or chicken strip,” Hochman told Patton, adding that millennials are more receptive towards plant-based meat. 

  He continued: “We’re pretty bullish on that. We don’t think that plant-based is a fad, we think that’s something that’s going to continue to grow over time.” 

  However, vegan could be a tough sell for the fast-food chain. The C-suite employees at its Louisville headquarters are more rounded than anyone else in their target audience and shouldn’t deviate from the norm: Finger-Lickin’ Good” chicken. Trying to convince someone in middle America to eat fake meat versus the real thing could be a tricky sell. 

  In the meantime, fake chicken nuggets could be the solution for KFC to alleviate supply troubles. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 21:00

• Escobar: 9/9 & 9/11, 20 Years Later
  Escobar: 9/9 & 9/11, 20 Years Later

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

  We may never know the full contours of the whole riddle inside an enigma when it comes to 9/11 and related issues…

  

  Massoud leaving Bazarak in the Panjshir after our interview in August 2001, roughly three weeks before his assassination. Photo: Pepe Escobar

  It’s impossible not to start with the latest tremor in a series of stunning geopolitical earthquakes.

  Exactly 20 years after 9/11 and the subsequent onset of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the Taliban will hold a ceremony in Kabul to celebrate their victory in that misguided Forever War.

  Four key exponents of Eurasia integration – China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan – as well as Turkey and Qatar, will be officially represented, witnessing the official return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. As blowbacks go, this one is nothing short of intergalactic.

  The plot thickens when we have Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid firmly stressing “there is no proof” Osama bin Laden was involved in 9/11. So “there was no justification for war, it was an excuse for war,” he claimed.

  Only a few days after 9/11, Osama bin Laden, never publicity-shy, released a statement to Al Jazeera: “I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons (…) I have been living in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders’ rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.”

  On September 28, Osama bin Laden was interviewed by the Urdu newspaper Karachi Ummat. I remember it well, as I was commuting non-stop between Islamabad and Peshawar, and my colleague Saleem Shahzad, in Karachi, called it to my attention.

  

  Saudi-born alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden in a video taken ‘recently’ at a secret site in Afghanistan. This was aired by Al Jazeera on October 7, 2001, the day the US launched retaliatory bombing of terrorist camps, airbases and air defense installations in the first stage of its campaign against the Taliban regime for sheltering bin Laden. Photo: AFP / Al Jazeera screen grab

  This is an approximate translation by the CIA-linked Foreign Broadcast Information Service: 

  “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people.

  “I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it.

  “Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country or ideology could survive. Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year (…) They need an enemy.”

  This was the last time Osama bin Laden went public, substantially, about his alleged role in 9/11. Afterward, he vanished, and seemingly forever by early December 2001 in Tora Bora: I was there, and revisited the full context years later.

  And yet, like an Islamic James Bond, Osama kept performing the miracle of dying another day, over and over again, starting in – where else – Tora Bora in mid-December, as reported by the Pakistani Observer and then Fox News.

  So 9/11 remained a riddle inside an enigma. And what about 9/9, which might have been the prologue to 9/11?

  

  Arriving in the Panjshir valley in one of Massoud’s Soviet helicopters in August 2001. Photo: Pepe Escobar  

  A green light from a blind sheikh

  “The commander has been shot.”

  The terse email, on 9/9, offered no details. Contacting the Panjshir was impossible – sat-phone reception is spotty. Only the next day it was possible to establish Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Lion of the Panjshir, had been assassinated – by two al-Qaeda jihadis posing as a camera crew.

  In our Asia Times interview with Massoud, by August 20, he had told me he was fighting a triad: al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the Pakistani ISI. After the interview, he left in a Land Cruiser and then went by helicopter to Kwaja-Bahauddin, where he would finish the details of a counter-offensive against the Taliban.

  This was his second-to-last interview before the assassination and arguably the last images – shot by photographer Jason Florio and with my mini-DV camera – of Massoud alive.

  One year after the assassination, I was back in the Panjshir for an on-site investigation, relying only on local sources and confirmation on some details from Peshawar. The investigation is featured in the first part of my Asia Times e-book Forever Wars.

  The conclusion was that the green light for the fake camera crew to meet Massoud came via a letter sponsored by CIA crypto-asset warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf – as a “gift” to al-Qaeda.

  In December 2020, inestimable Canadian diplomat Peter Dale Scott, author among others of the seminal The Road to 9/11 (2007), and Aaron Good, editor at CovertAction magazine, published a remarkable investigation about the killing of Massoud, following a different trail and relying mostly on American sources.

  They established that arguably more than Sayyaf, the mastermind of the killing was notorious Egyptian blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, then serving a life sentence in a US federal prison for his involvement in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

  Among other nuggets, Dale Scott and Good also confirmed what former Pakistani foreign minister Niaz Naik had told Pakistani media already in 2001: the Americans had everything in place to attack Afghanistan way before 9/11.

  In Naik’s words: “We asked them [the American delegates], when do you think you will attack Afghanistan? … And they said, before the snow falls in Kabul. That means September, October, something like that.”

  As many of us established over the years after 9/11, everything was about the US imposing itself as the undisputed ruler of the New Great Game in Central Asia.

  Peter Dale Scott now notes, “the two US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 were both grounded in pretexts that were doubtful to begin with and more discredited as years go by.

  “Underlying both wars was America’s perceived need to control the fossil fuel economic system that was the underpinning for the US petrodollar.”

  

  Deceased Taliban founder Mullah Mohammed Omar in a file photo. Photo: Wikimedia

  Massoud versus Mullah Omar

  Mullah Omar did welcome Jihad Inc to Afghanistan in the late 1990s: not only the al-Qaeda Arabs but also Uzbeks, Chechens, Indonesians, Yemenis – some of them I met in Massoud’s riverside prison in the Panjshir in August 2001.

  The Taliban at the time did provide them with bases – and some encouraging rhetoric – but deeply ethnocentric as they were, never manifested any interest in global jihad, in the mold of the “Declaration of Jihad” issued by Osama in 1996.

  The official Taliban position was that jihad was their guests’ business, and that had nothing to do with the Taliban and Afghanistan. There were virtually no Afghans in Jihad Inc. Very few Afghans speak Arabic. They were not seduced by the spin on martyrdom and a paradise full of virgins: they preferred to be a ghazi – a living victor in a jihad.

  Mullah Omar could not possibly send Osama bin Laden packing because of Pashtunwali – the Pashtun code of honor – where the notion of hospitality is sacred. When 9/11 happened, Mullah Omar once again refused American threats as well as Pakistani pleas. He then called a tribal jirga of 300 top mullahs to ratify his position.

  Their verdict was quite nuanced: he had to protect his guest, of course, but a guest should not cause him problems. Thus Osama would have to leave, voluntarily.

  The Taliban also pursued a parallel track, asking the Americans for evidence of Osama’s culpability. None was provided. The decision to bomb and invade had already been taken.

  That would have never been possible with Massoud alive. A classic intellectual warrior, he was a certified Afghan nationalist and pop hero – because of his spectacular military feats in the anti-USSR jihad and his non-stop fight against the Taliban.

  

  Jihadis captured by Massoud’s forces in a riverside prison in the Panjshir in August 2001. Photo: Pepe Escobar  

  When the PDPA socialist government in Afghanistan collapsed three years after the end of the jihad, in 1992, Massoud could easily have become a prime minister or an absolute ruler in the old Turco-Persian style.

  But then he made a terrible mistake: afraid of an ethnic conflagration, he let the mujahideen gang based in Peshawar have too much power, and that led to the civil war of 1992-1995 – complete with the merciless bombing of Kabul by virtually every faction – that paved the way for the emergence of the “law and order” Taliban.

  So in the end he was a much more effective military commander than politician. An example is what happened in 1996, when the Taliban made their move to conquer Kabul, attacking from eastern Afghanistan.

  Massoud was caught completely unprepared, but he still managed to retreat to the Panjshir without a major battle and without losing his troops – quite a feat – while severely smashing the Taliban that went after him.

  He established a line of defense in the Shomali plain north of Kabul. That was the frontline I visited a few weeks before 9/11, on the way to Bagram, which was a – virtually empty and degraded – Northern Alliance airbase at the time.

  All of the above is a sorry contrast to the role of Masoud Jr, who’s in theory the leader of the “resistance” against Taliban 2.0 in the Panjshir, now completely smashed.

  Masoud Jr has zero experience either as a military commander or politician, and although praised in Paris by President Macron or publishing an op-ed in Western mainstream media, made the terrible mistake of being led by CIA asset Amrullah Saleh, who as the former head of the National Directory of Security (NDS), supervised the de facto Afghan death squads.

  Masoud Jr could have easily carved a role for himself in a Taliban 2.0 government. But he blew it, refusing serious negotiations with a delegation of 40 Islamic clerics sent to the Panjshir, and demanding at least 30% of posts in the government.

  In the end, Saleh fled by helicopter – he may be now in Tashkent – and Masoud Jr as it stands is holed up somewhere in the northern Panjshir.

  

  In this file photo taken on September 11, 2001, a hijacked commercial aircraft approaches the twin towers of the World Trade Center shortly before crashing into the landmark skyscraper in New York. Photo: AFP / Seth McAllister

  The 9/11 propaganda machine is about to reach fever pitch this Saturday – now profiting from the narrative twist of the “terrorist” Taliban back in power, something perfect to snuff out the utter humiliation of the Empire of Chaos.

  The Deep State is going no holds barred to protect the official narrative – which exhibits more holes than the dark side of the moon.

  This is a geopolitical Ouroboros for the ages. 9/11 used to be the foundation myth of the 21st century – but not anymore. It has been displaced by blowback: the imperial debacle allowing for the return of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to the exact position it was 20 years ago.

  We may now know that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11. We may now know that Osama bin Laden, in an Afghan cave, may not have been the master perpetrator of 9/11. We may now know that the assassination of Massoud was a prelude to 9/11, but in a twisted way: to facilitate a pre-planned invasion of Afghanistan.

  And yet, like with the assassination of JFK, we may never know the full contours of the whole riddle inside an enigma. As Fitzgerald immortalized, “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” probing like mad this philosophical and existential Ground Zero, never ceasing from asking the ultimate question: Cui Bono?

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 20:30

• Japan's First Fully Autonomous Container Ship Is About To Tackle A 236 Mile Trial Run
  Japan’s First Fully Autonomous Container Ship Is About To Tackle A 236 Mile Trial Run

  The world’s first autonomous cargo ship, based in Japan, is facing its first real test as it gets ready to take on a 236 mile journey. It’s the first step in a literal journey of a thousand miles that Japan hopes will result in half of all domestic ships eventually piloting themselves. 

  Japan’s Nippon Foundation, a public interest organization, is backing the effort in hopes of seeing crewless ships make up 50% of Japan’s local fleet by 2040, according to Bloomberg. 

  The first such trial run will belong to Nippon Yusen KK, who is setting up a container ship to pilot itself from Tokyo Bay to Ise in February 2022. The 236 mile trip will be the first of its kind by an autonomous ship in heavy marine traffic.

  The autonomous global shipping market could be worth as much as $166 billion by 2030, the report notes.

  

  Satoru Kuwahara, a general manager at Nippon Yusen subsidiary Japan Marine Science Inc. told Bloomberg: “When it comes to the automation of ships, our mission is to have Japan lead the rest of the world.”

  He continued, stating that he thinks there’s a “real need” for autonomy in shipping because the country’s workforce is shrinking and aging. 40% of the country’s crew are 55 years or older, the report notes.

  The Nippon Foundation believes $9 billion in savings can be realized by autonomous shipping and that it can eliminate many maritime accidents. “With the issue of Japan’s shrinking workforce in mind, there’s growing need for these technologies to uphold safety,” Kuwahara said.

  Data will be collected from February’s test run and the vessel will be controlled remotely, if necessary. 

  Kuwahara predicts “practical use” of the technology by as early as 2025. 

  He concluded: “We need this technology to be recognized, otherwise actual implementation in society won’t move forward. As a first demonstration, we can’t fail.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 20:00

• Canadian Schools Hold Book-Burning Demonstration To Be A More "Inclusive Country"
  Canadian Schools Hold Book-Burning Demonstration To Be A More “Inclusive Country”

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  We recently discussed how many on the left have discovered the allure of book burning, book banning, and blacklisting of authors.

  While expressing shock at ISIS and other extremist groups burning books, the practice appears acceptable based on the titles or content.

  

  Now educators in Ontario have held a “flame purification ceremony” for the local indigenous population by burning roughly 5,000 books.

  The notion of teachers burning books is almost as bizarre as the thought of book sellers embracing blacklisting but both are now part of the realities of our age of rage.These school officials actually videotaped the celebration of book burning for students at 30 schools with the announcement that:

  “We bury the ashes of racism, discrimination and stereotypes in the hope that we will grow up in an inclusive country where all can live in prosperity and security.”

  

  The announcement even has a type of Maoist cultural revolution feel to it. In addition, Lyne Cosette, a spokeswoman for the public French-speaking Catholic schools of Ontario, told the National Post newspaper, “Symbolically, some books were used as fertilizer.” 

  The entire demonstration was a disgrace to educators everywhere. The lesson of book burning left with these children will likely be indelible and lasting. I have worried about the rise of a generation of censors but the Catholic schools of Ontario appear intent on raising a generation of book burners.

  What is truly chilling is the Orwellian call for children to burn books in order to be a more “inclusive country.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 19:30

• Forget New Or Used, Even Wrecked Car Prices Are Hitting Record Highs
  Forget New Or Used, Even Wrecked Car Prices Are Hitting Record Highs

  Junked-car auctioneer Copart, Inc., or simply Copart, reported earnings this week and said given the stellar growth in new and used car prices this year, wrecked car prices are getting a lot more expensive. 

  On Thursday, Copart’s CEO Jeffrey Liaw told investors on an earnings call that strong used car prices are a driving force behind “the record average selling prices” for wrecked cars. 

  

  Copart specializes in auctioning wrecked cars that insurers have totaled. The vehicles go to auction and are frequently bought by companies who part out vehicles. 

  Selling prices for wrecked cars surged 20.7% in the most recent quarter versus the same period in 2020. That compares with a 48% jump in the three months ending in April and 35% in the quarter before that. 

  

  During the question and answers part of the call with investors, the CEO told Jefferies’ Bret Jordan that insurers are totaling cars more quickly because technology has gotten so sophisticated that it might be too expensive to replace and recalibrate sensors in a minor fender bender. The rise in prices gives insurers a more significant economic incentive to total and let Copart auction it off than fixing. 

  “When it comes to the insurance vehicles, yes, more cars are drivable today because a car can be totaled because a rear sensor or front sensor or lane departure warning sensor on the mirror is knocked out and the replacement and calibration is expensive. That yes, there are more run and drive cars as a percentage of the total. 

  “If you visited some of our yards, you would be astonished by some of the high-value Range Rovers and European vehicles that you would see on the lots that at least on their surface look perfectly good and perfectly functional — and in many cases are,” Liaw said. 

  Another reason for soaring wrecked car prices is that supply-chain woes in the automotive industry have made it more challenging to find new parts, thus boosting demand for used parts. Also, higher metal prices have made wrecked cars more appealing to scrappers. 

  This is just more evidence that the Federal Reserve’s narrative of “transitory” inflation is a whole bunch of nonsense as rising prices rip through the automotive industry. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 19:00

• Why Did The USA Hand Afghanistan To China?
  Why Did The USA Hand Afghanistan To China?

  Authored by Roger Simon via The Epoch Times,

  Paul Shinkman of U.S. News wrote the other day:

  “China is considering deploying military personnel and economic development officials to Bagram airfield, perhaps the single-most prominent symbol of the 20-year U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

  “The Chinese military is currently conducting a feasibility study about the effect of sending workers, soldiers and other staff related to its foreign economic investment program known as the Belt and Road Initiative in the coming years to Bagram, according to a source briefed on the study by Chinese military officials, who spoke to U.S. News on the condition of anonymity.”

  As Moon Unit Zappa used to say, “Gag me with a spoon!”

  

  Feasibility study? You don’t have to be Nostradamus to figure out how that’s going to turn out, assuming it hasn’t been done already and this is just a masquerade.

  Why wouldn’t the Chinese take over Bagram? It’s sitting there.

  And no real estate could be more apt for their Belt and Road Initiative (BRI, also known as One Belt, One Road), essentially a large-scale bait-and-switch operation. The Chinese—in reality the Chinese Communist Party—lends the poor country—in this case the impoverished Taliban—money to modernize their infrastructure with the caveat that, if they don’t pay off the loan in a certain amount of time, guess who owns said infrastructure?

  Well, we know the answer to that. The Chinese are in essence buying the world with the help, note well, of some of the most prominent American firms (pdf) busy enriching themselves with more money than most of us can compute.

  (If you’re interested in how successful the BRI has been, here’s a helpful map from the Council of Foreign Relations.)

  What has occurred in recent days is that China has achieved something absolutely free for which the Soviets and the United States wasted decades of personnel (tragically dead or wounded), matériel and trillions of dollars, not to mention ended up by disgracing themselves in the eyes of the world.

  Effectively, the Chinese own Afghanistan, the important parts of it anyway—airbases, ports, mineral rights, and so forth—or will shortly.

  As for internal Taliban affairs, the Chinese communists aren’t about to lift a finger about the horrifying level of women’s rights or the extensive drug growing and dealing the terror group engages in, especially if they send as much of it as possible to America.

  As long as the various Islamic terror organizations leave the Chinese alone, the Chinese will let them do as they wish. Yes, some—al-Qaeda, ISIS-K, one we haven’t heard of yet—may make a fuss about the treatment of the Uyghurs and make their violent presence known, but I would imagine they ultimately see the Chinese forces as much more ruthless than the Americans (now especially) and this will be at best a temporary sideshow of little global importance. Realpolitik will be at play on both Chinese and Taliban (Islamic) sides as they benefit each other, at least for now.

  So how did we get here? If this is all so obvious—and it is—wasn’t our State Department and our military aware of how this would, or certainly could, turn out? (Wouldn’t they at least leave a small NATO force guarding Bagram and destroy our weaponry?)

  I imagine many of our officials were—how could they not be—aware of this eventuality. And that’s highly disturbing.

  Why then did the USA cede Afghanistan—a territory bounded by Iran and Pakistan, among other states, not to mention control of much of the world’s rare earths and other key resources—to the increasingly totalitarian China of Xi Jinping?

  For an answer, it’s hard not to think back to those days when, shortly before declaring for the presidency and reversing himself on the topic, our current president told us “The Chinese aren’t our enemies, folks.”

  Was he covering up for his own activities and connections that could have been recorded on his son Hunter Biden’s laptop, much of which is as yet unseen? Do the Chinese, in the crudest sense, have something on him? Unfortunately, considering the operations and governance of our FBI and Department of Justice, we may never know.

  We can, however, make our own surmises. But whatever they may be, they’re only a part of a more depressing overall zeitgeist.

  I have believed for some time—and our extraordinarily rapid and ill-conceived evacuation of Afghanistan, leaving behind not only Bagram but enough U.S. weaponry to make the Taliban’s army nearly equivalent to the Italian’s, not to mention putting our advanced military technology in the hands of the Chinese and the Russians, only underscores this—that a large percentage of our Democratic Party leadership as well as a tragically significant percentage of the Republican have long believed the Chinese regime are winning the battle between China and America for global hegemony. They are therefore, overtly or covertly, consciously or subconsciously, throwing in with the Chinese side for their own economic—and to a lesser extent survival, though the two interact—advantage.

  Our globalist-leaning corporations, like the giant law firm linked above, that deal extensively with China are similar. They’re going with what they think is the winning side.

  And globalism is not democracy. For the globalist, people voting has been irrelevant, even retrograde, for decades. It’s the one-party state gone world-wide.

  So, to be overly colloquial, “bugging out” on Afghanistan to them is no big deal. And China taking over, well, to them it’s just part of the game.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 18:30

• Stagflation "Phase 1" Begins As Democrats Scramble To Pass Largest Fiscal Stimulus Of All Time
  Stagflation “Phase 1” Begins As Democrats Scramble To Pass Largest Fiscal Stimulus Of All Time

  For all the speculation about the upcoming taper, which we now know will start in November at a pace of $15bn per month and conclude by July…

  

  … the main event this fall, if not this year, may be on the fiscal side, and specifically what is the final shape of the upcoming bipartisan + Build Back Better stimulus avalanche, which as BofA’s Michael Hartnett calculates will represent – at roughly $1 trillion in biparstian “infrastructure” spending plus some $3.5 trillion in Build Back Better reconciliation – some $4.5 trillion in “epic fiscal stimulus”, which at 20% of GDP will be more than double the size of the previous record stimulus and will represent the largest fiscal stimulus package of all time.

  

  This stimulus, which will pass one way or another, would arrive at a time of 12% GDP growth (if plunging fast), 5% inflation, and 33% deficit.

  

  Furthermore, the final size of the reconciliation package is, in BofA’s view, the driver for yields next 3-6 weeks – anything above $2 trillion  = higher yields as stimulus shores up weakening US consumption & heightens inflation.

  

  But stimulus or not – and for the sake of the economy and democrats there better be one – the macro backdrop is turning uglier by the day. As Hartnett notes, his macro backdrop for the second half is one of higher inflation, hawkish central banks, weaker growth, i.e. stagflation. At the same time, the investment backdrop is one of rising Rates, Regulation, Redistribution (3Rs)…

  

  … and peak Positioning, Policy, Profits (3Ps).

  This means that all else equal, investment returns will be low/negative for both stocks and credit in the second half, while the optimal H2 portfolio is a “barbell” trade of long inflation (e.g. commodities, TIPS, small cap, banks, Japan) & long quality (e.g. cash & defensive utilities, staples, healthcare, REITs).

  And speaking of stagflation, Hartnett compares the current period to the three stagflationary phases of the-1960s/70s and concludes that “we are in phase 1 with phase 2 starting in 2022…”

  1. 1965-68…inflation & interest rates breakout to upside from multi-year ranges, stock market peaks, but “stagflation” neither visible nor anticipated…equities outperformed via a “barbell” of small cap value and Nifty 50 tech outperform;

  

  2. 1969-73…end of Bretton Woods & oil shock causes sharp rise in inflation ending Nifty-50 bull market & kick-starting volatility & commodity bulls;

  

  3. 1974-81…inflation & real assets outperform all asset classes.

  

  Needless to say, stagflation is hardly what your financial advisor ordered as equity and bond returns tend to be especially ugly during such periods. So will this time be any different? Alas, central banks already blew their load, and while the differential between monetary and fiscal policy remains, (with monetary policy driving absolute returns, while fiscal policy driving relative returns) what is coming is ugly on the absolute return side, since the pace of central bank bond purchases is decelerating from its record of $8.5tn in ’20 to just $2.3tn in ’21, and then to just barely positive $0.3tn in ’22 before turning negative.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 18:00

• "A Decision They'll Regret" – Australia Regulator Bans Ivermectin Use As COVID-19 Treatment
  “A Decision They’ll Regret” – Australia Regulator Bans Ivermectin Use As COVID-19 Treatment

  Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

  Australia’s medicine and therapeutics regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), has introduced new restrictions on the prescribing of ivermectin for COVID-19 and other off-label use.

  

  The TGA, an agency under Australia’s Department of Health, announced that the changes were introduced “because of concerns with the prescribing of oral ivermectin for the claimed prevention or treatment of COVID-19.”

  The new restrictions mean that general practitioners may only prescribe the drug for TGA-approved conditions and not for other non-approved purposes—also referred to as “off-label” use. No penalties were specified in the TGA announcement in the event of a GP skirting the rules.

  The Epoch Times has reached out to the TGA for further information.

  Only certain specialists can continue to prescribe oral ivermectin for off-label use. They include infectious disease physicians, dermatologists, gastroenterologists, and hepatologists, the TGA announced.

  Stromectol ivermectin 3mg is the only oral ivermectin product that is TGA-approved. The indications approved are river blindness, threadworm of the intestines, and scabies.

  Ivermectin is not TGA-approved for use to treat COVID-19 in Australia. The TGA said that its use for COVID-19 in the general public is “currently strongly discouraged” by three entities—the National COVID Clinical Evidence Taskforce (pdf), the World Health Organization, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

  TGA Lays Out Concerns

  The TGA in its announcement asserted that there are “a number of significant public health risks associated with taking ivermectin in an attempt to prevent COVID-19 infection rather than getting vaccinated.”

  The agency added that people who think they are protected from COVID-19 by taking ivermectin “may choose not to get tested or to seek medical care if they experience symptoms,” and claimed that doing so “has the potential to spread the risk of COVID-19 infection throughout the community.”

  The TGA said that a second concern involves “unreliable social media posts and other sources” that have reportedly advocated for the use of ivermectin in “significantly higher” doses compared to what is approved and found safe for the treatment of scabies or parasites.

  “These higher doses can be associated with serious adverse effects, including severe nausea, vomiting, dizziness, neurological effects such as dizziness, seizures, and coma.”

  The regulator also said that there has been a three- to four-fold increase in the dispensing of ivermectin prescriptions in recent months, which has resulted in “national and local shortages for those who need the medicine for scabies and parasite infections.”

  “It is believed that this is due to recent prescribing and dispensing for unapproved uses, such as COVID-19,” its statement reads.

  “Such shortages can disproportionately impact vulnerable people, including those in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.”

  Immediate Backlash by MPs

  Two Australian politicians immediately issued announcements late Sept. 10 criticizing the TGA restrictions.

  Federal MP George Christensen, a Liberal Party member from the state of Queensland, posted on Telegram a photo of his medications, writing, “My ivermectin treatment pack. Prescribed by a GP. Now the TGA has banned GPs from prescribing the drug off-label. It’s a decision they will regret.”

  Christensen also shared a lengthy list of studies, writing, “here’s some REAL INFO on IVERMECTIN.”

  Federal MP Craig Kelly, a former Liberal Party member and now leader of the United Australia Party, in a statement posted on Telegram called the TGA move “OUTRAGEOUS” and accused the agency of having “interfered with the sanctity of the Doctor patient relationship in Australia, by ignoring the evidence of over 50 published studies and also ignoring expert medical advice from doctors that have treated thousands of patients successfully with Ivermectin—by prohibiting doctors from prescribing this medicine to sick Australians.”

  “The UNITED AUSTRALIA PARTY tonight calls for [an] urgent Royal Commission in this TGA over this decision,” he wrote, saying that the decision “could be investigated for possible corruption.”

  “It’s a sad day for the nation, as the expert medical evidence from overseas indicates that this outrageous decision by the TGA will result in the death of Australians,” Kelly added.

  

  A health worker shows a box containing a bottle of Ivermectin in Cali, Colombia, on July 21, 2020. (Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images)

  On Ivermectin

  Ivermectin is a generic medicine that can be produced cheaply in many places around the world and has been widely used in humans against some parasitic worms, and to combat scabies, lice, as well as rosacea. It is also used as an anti-parisite drug in livestock, including horses and cows.

  William Campbell and Satoshi Omura in 2015 won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery and applications of ivermectin. The World Health Organization features ivermectin on its List of Essential Medicines. It is also an FDA-approved antiparasitic agent.

  Doctors and health care professionals have considered ivermectin as a repurposed medicine in tackling COVID-19, especially when used in early treatment. Many have praised ivermectin for having successfully helped thousands of their patients survive the initial waves of COVID-19.

  As of Sept. 9, there are at least 63 studies, of which 45 are peer-reviewed, on the treatment of COVID-19 with ivermectin.

  Two groups, the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance and the British Ivermectin Recommendation Development Group, have been campaigning for the off-label use of the drug to combat the disease amid the pandemic.

  Monash University, based in the Australian state of Victoria, announced in April 2020 that a study it led showed that “a single dose of the drug, Ivermectin, could stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture.”

  But it cautioned that ivermectin “cannot be used in humans for COVID-19 until further testing and clinical trials have been completed to confirm the effectiveness of the drug at levels safe for human dosing.”

  “The potential use of Ivermectin to combat COVID-19 remains unproven, and depends on funding to progress the work into the next stages,” the university said at the time.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 17:30

• Taliban Holds Flag Raising Ceremony On Same Day Americans Commemorate 9/11
  Taliban Holds Flag Raising Ceremony On Same Day Americans Commemorate 9/11

  On the day the US marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban sent its own ‘message’ by raising its large flag over the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul on Saturday.

  The Taliban’s cultural commission spokesman Ahmadullahh Muttaqi announced Saturday that the raising of the flag was part of a ceremony to mark the start of the new Taliban government over Afghanistan.

  

  “The Taliban’s new Prime Minister Mohammad Hasan Akhund raised the flag in a ceremony at 11 a.m. local time to mark the official start of work by the Taliban’s 33-member caretaker government,” The Associated Press reported of the event. 

  The group which the US fought in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks also painted their flag of jihad over the US Embassy in Kabul, which had been quickly abandoned in the days prior to the last US troops leaving Afghanistan on Aug.30.

  “Earlier, another Taliban official said the religious militia’s black and white flag was first raised at the palace on Friday,” AP continues. “The militant group has also painted their banner on the entry gate to the US Embassy building.”

  It was on Tuesday that the Taliban named and confirmed its caretaker government, complete with an Interior Minister who is still on the FBI’s ‘most wanted’ terrorism list. The Saturday ceremony officially inaugurates the government, but the symbolism of the timing couldn’t be clearer nor more ironic. 

  Afghan women at a pro-Taliban protest on 9/11 wore full burkas and shouted “death to America” as they marched with Taliban fighters standing guard. pic.twitter.com/S8XwwH6wo7

  — CBS News (@CBSNews) September 11, 2021

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  The Islamic ‘shahada’ – or Muslim confession of faith – was earlier plastered in large script over the entrance to the US embassy in Kabul…

  An Afghan Taliban photograph of its messaging and a giant shahada banner at the abandoned U.S. embassy in Kabul: pic.twitter.com/VoYvecMZgu

  — Christopher Anzalone (@IbnSiqilli) September 7, 2021

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

  The formal raising of the black and white Taliban flag over Kabul’s government buildings took place simultaneous to the US holding somber memorial commemorations at New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania where United Airlines Flight 93 went down after al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked it.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 17:00

• NY Hospital Forced To Stop Delivering Babies After Maternity Workers Resign Over Vaccine
  NY Hospital Forced To Stop Delivering Babies After Maternity Workers Resign Over Vaccine

  A hospital in upstate New York has been forced to ‘pause’ the delivery of babies starting Sept. 24 after a flood of maternity workers resigned over Covid-19 vaccine mandates.

  

  Lewis County Health System CEO Gerald Cayer made the announcement in a Friday press conference, according to WWNY. According to Cayer, six employees in the maternity unit resigned and another seven are ‘undecided,’ rendering the hospital unable to safely deliver children.

  “If we can pause the service and now focus on recruiting nurses who are vaccinated, we will be able to reengage in delivering babies here in Lewis County,” said Cayer.

  Cayer said 165 hospital employees have yet to be vaccinated against COVID-19; that’s 27 percent of the workforce.

  The other 464 workers, or 73 percent of employees, have gotten their shots, he said.

  In August, the state announced all health care workers at hospitals and long-term care facilities across New York would be required to have gotten at least their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccination by September 27.

  Cayer said the announcement prompted 30 workers to get vaccinated, while another 30 resigned. -WWNY

  New York isn’t the only state with healthcare workers who refuse to get vaxxed. Last month, a group of New Mexico healthcare workers protested vaccine mandates – which they say ‘take away people’s choice and informed consent,’ and ‘violate medical codes of ethics as well as fundamental human rights, the constitution, and the Nuremberg Code,’ according to KFOX14.

  Protests have also been held in California, Colorado, Wisconsin, Arizona, Washington and elsewhere.

  And judging by the overwhelming upvotes on YouTube, most people support them.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 16:30

• While Biden Joins 'Drone Club' At 9/11 Ceremonies, Trump Hits Streets Of NY
  While Biden Joins ‘Drone Club’ At 9/11 Ceremonies, Trump Hits Streets Of NY

  While President Biden joined former presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton at 9/11 services held at the World Trade Center and Shanksville, Pennsylvania – a group which presided over the deaths of countless Middle Easterners over 20 years of undeclared “wars on terror” that benefited the US Homeland Security-Industrial Complex and a few others, former President Trump took to the streets of New York to shake hands with first responders.

  It was quite the juxtaposition to say the least – with former President Bush pushing the ‘domestic terrorism‘ and ‘angry America’ narrative during a speech in Shanksville (echoing Klaus Schwab), and images of Biden pulling down his mask to shout at someone…

  

  Vs. President Trump being greeted by working men and women in uniform who won’t go home to mansions after the ‘ceremonies’ are over.

  

  SCOOP: NY firefighters break out in applause as President Trump makes surprise visit today pic.twitter.com/FBEhLxBbnf

  — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 11, 2021

  Narrative fail pic.twitter.com/gWdZdODW6w

  — Greg Price (@greg_price11) September 11, 2021

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

  More via Dan Scavino:

  

  

  

  We can’t imagine it would go as well for Biden and the other former presidents.

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

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 16:00

• NYT Confirms Biden Murdered Innocent Family In Kabul Drone Strike
  NYT Confirms Biden Murdered Innocent Family In Kabul Drone Strike

  President Joe Biden murdered an innocent family when the US military conducted a “righteous strike” on Aug. 29 against a vehicle that American officials thought was an ISIS bomb that posed an imminent threat to thousands of people at the Kabul airport.

  In a late Friday afternoon report, the New York Times reveals that “Military officials said they did not know the identity of the car’s driver when the drone fired, but deemed him suspicious because of how they interpreted his activities that day, saying that he possibly visited an ISIS safe house and, at one point, loaded what they thought could be explosives into the car.”

  In reality, they were filling water bottles.

  Biden and Milley claimed this was an ISIS attack in the making

  They were filling water bottles

  And their entire family was murdered so Joe Biden could get a headline pic.twitter.com/kSXn0cbW3d

  — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 10, 2021

  More via the New York Times: 

  Times reporting has identified the driver as Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group. The evidence, including extensive interviews with family members, co-workers and witnesses, suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work. And an analysis of video feeds showed that what the military may have seen was Mr. Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.

  While the U.S. military said the drone strike might have killed three civilians, Times reporting shows that it killed 10, including seven children, in a dense residential block.

  Mr. Ahmadi, 43, had worked since 2006 as an electrical engineer for Nutrition and Education International, a California-based aid and lobbying group. The morning of the strike, Mr. Ahmadi’s boss called from the office at around 8:45 a.m., and asked him to pick up his laptop.

  Scroll down for a lengthy recap by one of the NYT journos

  Milley lied. He murdered a US ally and his entire family.

  War crime.
  pic.twitter.com/oMbYH0e0pi

  — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) September 10, 2021

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

  The Biden administration lied about who it killed with its drone strike. They had no idea who they hit. The media mindlessly repeated the false claim that they killed “terrorists” when, in fact, they just killed innocent people.

  A perfect summation of the US Endless Wars: https://t.co/1qNbQZWrYQ

  — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 10, 2021

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

  As we noted last week, NBC News spoke with members of the Ahmadi family who said they were hoping to make it onto an evacuation flight out of Kabul before the United States ended its withdrawal from the country.

  

  “They were 10 civilians,” said Emal Ahmadi, whose 2-year-old toddler, Malika was among those killed. “My daughter … she was 2 years old,” he said.

  

  More via NBC News:

  That day, Ahmadi’s cousin, Zemari Ahmadi, 38, had just pulled up at home from work, with his 13-year-old son, Farzad, his youngest of three, racing to greet him. (Other reports have said Farzad was 12, but both Ahmadi and another relative told NBC News he was 13.)

  Farzad, who had just learned to drive, wanted to park his father’s car, a wish Zemari was happy to oblige as other family members gathered around.

  It was in that moment that Ahmadi said an explosion tore through the vehicle, killing Zemari, Farzad and eight other family members, as was first reported by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

  According to Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, Washington is “not in a position” to dispute reports that the Sunday drone strike killed civilians, however he claimed that one of the family members belonged to radical Islamic group, ISIS-K.

  Malika and two other toddlers were the youngest family members killed, along with Ahmadi’s nephews Arwin, 7, and Benyamin, 6, and Zemari’s two other sons, Zamir, 20, and Faisal, 16, Ahmadi said.

  Zemari was a technical engineer for Nutrition and Education International, a nonprofit working to address malnutrition based in Pasadena, California.

  Just a day before his death, he had been helping to prepare and deliver soy-based meals to women and children at refugee camps in Kabul, Steven Kwon, president of NEI, told NBC News in an email.

  One colleague and friend of six years to Zemari said he was devastated, while also describing Ahmadi as a “good man with good ethics.”

  

  Also killed in Biden’s drone strike was Ahmad Naser – a former officer in the Afghan Army and contractor with the US military, according to his cousin. Naser was days away from his wedding when he was killed.

  Instead, there will be a funeral.

  “They were all buried,” said 31-year-old Yousef. “We’re all ruined. The family is gone.”

  

  According to an evidence-free statement by US Central Command, however, there “were substantial and powerful subsequent explosions resulting from the destruction of the vehicle,” suggesting that there was a “large amount of explosive material inside that may have caused additional casualties.”

  *  *  *

  We now know that was utter bullshit.

  Times journalist Evan Hill recaps the entire event in the following Twitter thread:

  Ahmadi was a 14-year employee of Nutrition & Education International, a U.S. NGO that fights malnutrition. He helped start up soy factories, repair machinery, transport his colleagues and distribute food from his Corolla to displaced Afghans. pic.twitter.com/S7r1TyHBs0

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

  But the U.S. military was on high alert. Three days earlier, an Islamic State suicide attack at the Kabul airport had killed 13 troops and more than 170 Afghans. “All threat warnings are flashing red,” a senior official told us. They expected another attack. pic.twitter.com/2haQhzhhHo

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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

  But @mattaikins interviewed all 5 men who were in the car with Ahmadi that day. They said that what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves represented a typical day in his life. He drove his colleagues around town, where they made plans for food distributions. pic.twitter.com/qD08rGmomI

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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

  At 2:35pm, Ahmadi and a colleague fill several large plastic containers with water. The footage shows Ahmadi bring them to the office earlier that day. His brother told us his neighborhood suffered from a water shortage and that he routinely filled up containers at the office. pic.twitter.com/GqzL8NeXmy

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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  The location of the “unknown compound” overlaps with the location of the NGO’s office, and the military told us that they only saw the white sedan at one location that afternoon. We believe that what the military called an unknown compound was in fact the NGO’s office.

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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

  Ahmadi drops his colleagues off and turns onto his street. His and his brothers’ children surround the car, his relatives said. The family has a habit of letting kids steer the car into the courtyard of their home. Somehow, the military said, the drone team sees none of this. pic.twitter.com/HjRbHxN5QX

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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  The decision to strike does not flow down the typical chain of command. Because of the chaos of the Kabul airport evacuation, an official told us, President Biden and the military have delegated the authority to approve airstrikes to lower-level commanders.

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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

  We gathered photos and videos of the scene taken by journalists, and @mattaikins visited the courtyard multiple times. We shared that evidence with three experts. All three agreed that the damage was consistent with a single Hellfire strike, and not large secondary explosions. pic.twitter.com/HUXcZFHwCL

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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

  The morning after the U.S. drone strike killed Ahmadi and 9 others, the Islamic State did launch rockets at the airport, firing from an area that Ahmadi had driven through the previous day, and using a white Toyota to do so. pic.twitter.com/TPVu9Mwv0O

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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

  Four days before Ahmadi was killed, his employer had applied for his family to receive refugee resettlement in the U.S. At the time of the strike, they were still awaiting approval. Looking to the U.S. for protection, they became some of the last victims in America’s longest war. pic.twitter.com/3IcgTyc5ca

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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

  This story began with the core and essential work of our team, a quick and accurate geolocation from @heytherehaIey: https://t.co/EuqimJpxyr. We followed that up with thorough reporting, expert consultation, and tireless on-the-ground work by @mattaikins.

  — Evan Hill (@evanhill) September 10, 2021

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

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 15:55

• The Insecurity Of Social Security
  The Insecurity Of Social Security

  Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

  The latest annual report from the Social Security Trustees showed the insecurity of social security.

  According to the July 2021 snapshot from the Social Security Administration, nearly 70-million people receive a monthly benefit check, of which 51.3 million are over the age of 65.

  

  Social Security provides the majority of income to most elderly Americans. The system provides at least 50 percent of incomes for about half of seniors. For roughly 1 in 4 seniors, it provides at least 90 percent of total incomes. But, that dependency ratio is directly tied to the financial insolvency of the vast majority of Americans. According to a CNBC report:

  “Morning Consult found that nearly 18% of adults with an annual income of $50,000 or less have no savings, while some 34% have enough to cover just three months of expenses. Another 11% would deplete savings within six months. Only 10% of that income group has more than a year’s worth of cash.

  Higher-income households are only somewhat better prepared, the survey found. Among those with annual incomes of $50,000 to $100,000, about 18% said they have between three months and six months of savings. About 25% said their cash would last less than three months, and 6% had set aside nothing at all. None of those questioned in that income group had more than a year’s worth of savings.”

  

  Such is a huge problem that will impact boomers in retirement.

  The Insecurity Of Social Security

  Given the financial insecurity of the bottom 90% of Americans, the dependency on social security is problematic. Here are some facts from the latest SSI report from CRFB:

  • Social Security is Only 13 Years from Insolvency. Social Security cannot guarantee full benefits to current retirees under current law. The Trustees project the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) trust fund will deplete its reserves by 2033. The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) trust fund will be insolvent by 2057. The theoretical combined trust funds will exhaust their reserves by 2034. Upon insolvency, all beneficiaries will face a 22% benefit cut.

  

  Source: CRFB

  • Social Security will run cash deficits of $2.4 trillion over the next decade. Such is the equivalent of 2.3% of taxable payroll or 0.8% of (GDP). Social Security’s 75-year actuarial imbalance totals 3.54% of taxable payroll. That is 1.2% of GDP or nearly $21 trillion in present value terms.

  • Finances Are Deteriorating. Social Security’s finances worsened over the last year. Current projections show Insolvency occuring a year earlier, and the 75-year actuarial deficit is over 10 percent larger. The 75-year shortfall is nearly 85% larger than orginally estimated in 2010.

  The problem is evident. Given the large and growing dependency on social security, benefits will get cut for recipients if Congress fails to act. As noted by the Center Of Budget & Policy, social security for many retirees is the difference between living in poverty or not.

  

  Demographics Are Destiny

  One of the primary contributors to the insecurity of social security is demographics.

  In 1940, the life expectancy of a 65-year-old was just 14 years. Today it is over 20 years. By 2035, the number of Americans 65 and older will increase from approximately 56 million today to over 78 million.

  The problem for social security is that in 1940, nearly 16-workers paid into the program for each person receiving benefits. Currently, that ratio is just 2.8 workers for each Social Security beneficiary. By 2035, that ratio will decrease to 2.3 covered workers for each beneficiary.

  “Social Security will see negative cash flow of $147 billion this year. The deficits will keep adding up as the population ages as fewer workers pay into the system relative to the number of retirees collecting benefits.” – Reason

  Such increases in the number of retirees and lower birth rates decrease the relative number of workers. However, this decline in the “support ratio” is not just domestic, but global.

  “Recently released official U.S. birth data for 2020 showed births fell continuously for more than a decade. The ‘total fertility rate,’ is a measure constructed from the data to estimate the average total number of children born. That rate fell from 2.12 in 2007 to 1.64 in 2020. It is now well below 2.1, the value considered to be ‘replacement fertility,’ which is the rate needed for the population to replace itself without immigration.“

  

  However, the problem isn’t just the “replacement rate” of workers paying into the system. But also the structural change to the workforce itself.

  A Structural Employment Problem

  The structural shift in employment is due to technology and automation. Yet, it is an overarching problem most give little attention to.

  While the mainstream media focuses their attention on the daily distribution of economic data points, there is a hidden depression running along the country’s underbelly. While reported unemployment is heading back to historically lower levels, there is a swelling mass of uncounted individuals. These are individuals assumed to have either given up looking for work or are working multiple part-time jobs. 

  The chart strips out the argument of retiring baby boomers, who ironically, aren’t retiring. Such is not because they don’t want to retire, but because they can’t afford to.

  

  These higher levels of under and unemployment apply downward pressure on wages even as work hours increase. Real wage declines are evident as companies opt for increasing productivity, continued outsourcing, and streamlining employment to protect corporate profit margins. However, as the cost of living is affected by the rising food, energy, and health care prices without a compensatory increase in incomes, more families are forced to turn to assistance to survive.

  

  Without government largesse, many individuals would live on the street. The chart above shows all the government “welfare” programs and current levels to date. The black line represents the sum of the underlying sub-components. Thus, while unemployment insurance did taper off after its sharp rise post-pandemic, social security, Medicaid, Veterans’ benefits, and other social benefits continue to rise.

  Importantly, these social benefits are critical to the average person’s survival as they make up more than 25% of real disposable personal incomes.

  With 1/4 of incomes dependent on government transfers, it is not surprising the economy continues to struggle. Recycled tax dollars used for consumption purposes have virtually no impact on the overall economy.

  The Social Security Insecurity Endgame

  As stated above, the biggest problem for Social Security, and the U.S. in general, comes when Social Security begins paying out more in benefits than it receives in taxes. Then, as the cash surplus gets depleted, Social Security can not pay full benefits from its tax revenues alone.

  

  Already, welfare programs in the U.S. are consuming ever-growing amounts of general revenue dollars to meet obligations.As noted recently,mandatory spending already consumes more than 100% of Federal tax revenues.

  “In the fiscal year 2019, the Federal Government spent $4.4 trillion, amounting to 21 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Of that $4.4 trillion, federal revenues financed only $3.5 trillion. The remaining $984 billion came from debt issuance. As the chart below shows, three major areas of spending make up most of the budget.”

  

  Think about that for a minute. In 2019, 75% of all expenditures went to social welfare and interest on the debt. Those payments required $3.3 Trillion of the $3.5 Trillion (or 95%) of the total revenue collected. Given the decline in economic activity during 2020, those numbers become markedly worse. For the first time in U.S. history, the Federal Government will have to issue debt to cover the mandatory spending.“

  Eventually, either the benefits will get slashed, or the rest of the government will have to shrink to accommodate the “welfare state.” It is improbable the latter will happen.

  

  Conclusion

  Demographic trends are reasonably easy to forecast and predict. Each year from now until 2035, we will see successive rounds of boomers reach the 62-year-old threshold. Two problems are resulting from these consecutive crops of boomers heading into retirement.

  The first is that each boomer has not produced enough children to replace themselves, which leads to a decline in the number of taxpaying workers. It takes about 25 years to grow a new taxpayer. We can estimate, with surprising accuracy, how many people born in a particular year will retire. The retirees of 2070 were born in 2003, and we can see and count them today.

  The second problem is the employment problem. The decline in economic prosperity is the result of four decades of misguided policy:

  • Increases in non-productive debt and deficits,

  • Reduction in savings,

  • Declining income growth due to productivity increases; and,

  • The shift from a manufacturing to service based society that generates lower levels of taxable incomes in the future.

  “The more time that passes, the heavier the lift will be. According to an analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates for low deficits and sustainable entitlement programs, delaying action until insolvency hits in 2034 will make the needed tax increases or benefit reductions about 25 percent larger than if Congress acted today. In either case, the changes will be seriously disruptive to Americans’ retirement plans and financial security.” – Reason

  The entire social support framework faces an inevitable conclusion where no wishful thinking will change that outcome. The question is whether our elected leaders will start making the changes necessary sooner, while they can get done by choice or later when forced upon us.

   Post Views: 296

  2021/09/10

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 15:30

• NYC Using $5.9 Billion In Federal Relief Funds To Pay Artists $5,000, Give Cash To Cab Drivers And Encourage Outdoor Dining
  NYC Using $5.9 Billion In Federal Relief Funds To Pay Artists $5,000, Give Cash To Cab Drivers And Encourage Outdoor Dining

  Instead of just reopening, NYC seems hell bent on keeping its workers and businesses on the Covid-stimulus government dole. The city is distributing a portion of its $5.9 billion in federal aid to cab drivers, artists and restaurants.

  The city is one of the first to distribute aid from President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, according to Bloomberg. Last week the city published a more than 70 page report laying out its plans for the funds.

  Those plans include $2.27 billion for the city to replace lost revenue after the city shut down.

  The report read: “New York City’s Recovery for All plan prioritizes vaccinating against COVID-19 to jump-start the recovery, using the City government to fight inequality, building a fairer economy, helping children recover emotionally and academically from the impact of the pandemic, strengthening community-based solutions to public safety, and fighting the climate crisis.”

  

  $1.45 billion in funds will expand the state’s healthcare system, which will make Covid vaccines more available and will expand testing sites.

  Another portion of the cash will go to 1,800 grants of $5,000 each for artists and taxi medallion owners. It’s also going toward a program that will encourage outdoor dining, that starts in 2023. 

  $1.51 billion will be used to “support small businesses”, according to the report. We wonder if Bill de Blasio ever thought about supporting small businesses by actually allowing them to fully re-open, or if his plans are simply to paper over the entire NYC economy with printed paper.

  Finally, the city put aside $52.5 million for its tourism industry, which makes up 376,800 jobs and suffered from a 67% decline in visitors to the state in 2020. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 09/11/2021 – 15:00