Jul 02

Today’s News 2nd July 2024

  • Hungary's Orbán Announces New 'Patriots For Europe' Alliance With Austrian & Czech Nationalists
    Hungary’s Orbán Announces New ‘Patriots For Europe’ Alliance With Austrian & Czech Nationalists

    Authored by Dénes Albert via rmx.news,

    Austria’s Freedom Party (FPÖ), Czechia’s ANO, and Hungary’s Fidesz have formed a new right-wing coalition, the parties’ respective leaders announced at a joint press conference in Vienna on Sunday.

    Herbert Kickl (FPÖ), Andrej Babis (ANO) and Viktor Orbán (Fidesz) announce new right-wing coalition in Vienna. (Facebook)

    Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, and Austrian opposition leader Herbert Kickl said the new alliance would hopefully entice others to join and become the largest nationalist political group in the European Parliament.

    “Today we are creating a political formation that will ‘forge ahead’ and very quickly become the strongest grouping and largest faction of the European right,” Orbán said.

    The Hungarian prime minister expects this to happen within days, and then the “sky will be the limit.”

    Orbán pointed out that the situation in Europe is clear, that European politics must change and change is needed in Europe.

    He underlined that in 20 of the 27 EU member states, parties that promised change to the citizens won the European Parliament elections.

    The Hungarian leader revealed the parties had adopted the Patriots’ manifesto, which summarizes the ideals and goals around which they are organizing their work.

    According to Orbán, the European economy is in crisis, its weight is diminishing and the threat of terrorism and migration is constant. He warned of the ongoing war in Europe’s backyard that the European liberal elite had not been able to prevent from breaking out or from stopping.

    “Today is a historic day, as we will present the group of three parties and their representatives, which aims to bring about a political change in Europe at the inaugural session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg on July 16. It will be an era of freedom, sovereignty, peace, prosperity, and values,” said Herbert Kickl.

    “We will not stand idly by and watch the emergence of a European superstate in which the parliaments of the member states degenerate into a kind of folklore, where sovereignty and the self-determination of individual states are empty phrases. We want a Europe that once again shows itself and develops with pride, values, traditions, and diversity,” said the FPÖ President. He added that “Europe does not want to be left to Macron, Von der Leyen or some left-wing experiment.”

    At the press conference, Andrej Babiš stressed that EU environmental policy should take more account of economic development in order not to jeopardize the competitiveness of the Community. Technically sound, economically viable, and socially just solutions must be found.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 07/02/2024 – 02:00

  • The Long Sordid Career Of Creepy Joe Biden
    The Long Sordid Career Of Creepy Joe Biden

    Authored by Donald Jeffries via substack,

    I get complaints from people that I concentrate too much on Donald Trump. Basically, the message is, “But what about Biden?” I do write more about Trump, because he’s the face of the perceived opposition. The only Emmanuel Goldstein in town. I assume everyone reading me understands just who and what Joe Biden is.

    But people might not remember quite everything about Joe Biden’s lengthy career as a beloved resident of the Washington, D.C. swamp that Trump promised to drain. Biden was first elected as a U.S. Senator from Delaware in 1973. Even I was very young then. In 1981, the great “liberal” senator strongly supported the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, passed in the wake of CIA whistleblower Philip Agee’s disclosures about the Agency is his best-selling book Inside the Company. Biden declared that “I do not think anybody has any doubt about Mr. Agee. We should lock him away in my opinion.” The good senator really liked locking people up, it seems. As a strong supporter of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, he took credit for a draconian provision that mandated a five year sentence for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine.

    Little did Biden know that, decades later his own troubled son Hunter would be caught with enough crack cocaine to garner a long prison sentence under the original 1986 Act, which was softened a bit in 2010. With every ounce of “liberal” ardor that he could muster, Biden bragged at the time, “If you have a piece of crack cocaine no bigger than this quarter that I’m holding in my hand, one quarter of one dollar, we passed a law — with leadership of Sen. Thurmond and myself and others — a law that says: you’re caught with that, you go to jail for five years. You get no probation, you get nothing, other than five years in jail. Judge doesn’t have a choice.” Senator Biden also authored the horrendous 1994 crime bill which featured “three strike you’re out” and mandatory sentencing, significantly increasing the prison population.

    A JFK assassination researcher attended a Joe Biden seminar in 2005. He was able to briefly question Biden about the assassination. As recounted on a discussion forum, this was the short conversation: “Senator Biden, do you believe JFK was killed as a result of a conspiracy?” Answer:  “No.” “So do you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, alone and unaided, killed President Kennedy?” Answer:  “Yes.” This is hardly surprising, of course, but reflects Biden’s ironclad establishment mindset. In 2019, the American Prospect published a piece headlined, “Joe Biden’s Love Affair With the CIA.” Biden was very helpful to Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey, who praised him in a classified early 1980s memo to his intelligence staff. Biden would state, in a speech at Stanford, that the intelligence community had been compromised by leaks.

    So Joe Biden was never one of the Democratic Party politicians I admired back in my misguided youth. He wasn’t going to expose the abuses of the intelligence agencies, like a Frank Church. He wasn’t interested in any “sunshine” laws that would make it easier for the People to be informed about their government. His concern then about “leaks” would evolve into concern over whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. In a January, 2023 tweet, Snowden would comment on Biden’s classified documents scandal, accusing the Department of Justice of suppressing the story until after the election, and declared, “Worth noting that the President seems to have absconded with more classified documents than many whistleblowers.” Biden is on the record as saying that Snowden should “face the consequences of his actions.”

    Following Julian Assange’s release from exile last week, some assumed that the Biden administration had been responsible for it, given Biden’s recent statements that he was “considering” dropping the charges against the Wikileaks founder. However, the White House would issue a statement maintaining that they had not played a role in Assange’s plea deal. A deal which, incidentally, made the disappearance of all those troubling DNC emails a prerequisite for his release. So if you’re tempted to think that perhaps, after over fifty years of serving the interests of the corrupt Deep State, Joe Biden finally did something good, you’d be wrong. Why spoil a perfect record? Even Barack Obama commuted Bradley/Chelsea Manning’s sentence.

    So we get to the Joe Biden we’ve come to know and love.

    Apparently beset with relatively early dementia, he has bumbled, mumbled, and stumbled his way through an embarrassing series of verbal and physical gaffes. He has also avoided being held accountable for some pretty blatant criminality. As far back as when Hunter and his late brother Beau were little boys, Daddy Joe had a disturbing habit of “crashing” into vacant mansions that were on the market. They literally sometimes entered through unlocked windows. As a long time realtor, I can tell you that it’s pretty simple to make a call and schedule an appointment to see a property, especially a vacant one. It is unknown why the then United States Senator engaged in such bizarre behavior, but it speaks to some kind of odd personality flaw.

    Hunter wasn’t the only Biden offspring to become addicted to the drugs the young senator wanted to crack down on (pun intended). Biden’s daughter Ashley wrote openly about the “inappropriate” showers her father took with her when she was a young girl in her journal. This triggered an unfortunate promiscuity in her, as well as an addiction to illegal drugs. We only know about this journal, because Ashley left it behind at a drug rehab center, and the woman who found it sold it to Truth Veritas. Being as we are living in America 2.0, and not some vaunted “democracy,” the woman was prosecuted and served thirty days in jail. Joe Biden remains unscathed by what should be a very serious scandal. It’s not like he bounced his daughter on his knee, like Donald Trump and every other father has.

    Left free to his own devices, Creepy Joe resumed his long history of inappropriately touching little girls, much of it documented on videotape. Our beloved president has a rarely known perverse kink for sniffing their hair. Again, this is all clearly shown on film. If only the Washington Generals were an actual opposition party, they might want to use those damning film clips in their campaign ads. I don’t know what kind of evidence existed against any pedophiles who were given long prison sentences, but how much more incriminating can you get than an adult grabbing the undeveloped chests of minor girls, while their facial expressions register their discomfort? Sure, there is supposedly the filmed rape of a ten year old girl by Hunter Biden on his laptop, but that’s been sent down the memory hole along with those DNC emails.

    Men have been prosecuted and given lengthy prison sentences for less clear evidence of child abuse than what can be seen freely online, in numerous past instances, from our current president. Either this is the heinous crime most of us think it is, or it’s no big deal. So release all the pedophiles. Unless you have video of them actually raping children. Like the alleged rape of a child on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Or the still never seen videos of our glorious troops raping Iraqi boys while their mothers scream. Seymour Hersh claims to have seen them. Some pedophiles are more equal than others. Just keep repeating, “grab ‘em by the pussy” and click your heels three times. Creepy Joe’s rather sensual kissing of his own granddaughter was also notable. Maybe he forgot it was his granddaughter. Or he was hoping to shower with her.

    Biden was caught, again, on videotape, boasting about getting a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. Who was looking into his son’s (and his) financial improprieties in that wonderful democracy presided over by a former actor, who has a legendary proficiency for penis piano playing. That’s pretty damning evidence. But no, it was Donald Trump instead, who was impeached because of a “perfect” telephone conversation to the very same crisis actor/comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy. For asking the astute pianist to look into any possible corruption by the Bidens. I think there’s an obvious message there. But that’s what happens when you play for the Washington Generals. It’s a Harlem Globetrotters thing, you wouldn’t understand.

    I have written many articles over the years for the American Free Press, detailing Hunter Biden’s financial shenanigans in Ukraine. They are intermingled with the “Big Guy,” the same timeless statesman who has sniffed more girlish hair than any other political leader in the history of the formerly free world. Hunter Biden’s emails reveal that the “Big Guy”- his loving father- always got a cut of the booty, no matter what. Just like court historian hero William Sherman, who always got a cut of all the personal property his Union troops stole from southern civilians. As my new book American Memory Hole will show, this theft is a grand American tradition going back at least to the Mexican-American War. The Bidens obviously know their history.

    Joe Biden, when he has been comprehensible, has said some remarkable things during his terrifying presidency. How many times has he claimed that “White Supremacy” represents “the greatest danger to democracy?” Now, keep in mind this is the corrupt elite’s definition of democracy, not any form of government the ancient Greeks would recognize. That speech he made, with the bright red backdrop and sinister lighting, was perhaps the worst speech any U.S. president has ever made, when factoring in the background. All that was missing was the hammer and sickle, or a Lenin-style goatee on Creepy Joe’s chin. The Stupid Party objected a bit to that speech, in their weak, customary manner, but it should have offended every American. If only the sane remaining among us were allowed to be offended in America 2.0.

    On occasion, Creepy Joe’s attention is distracted from the hair and undeveloped chests of little girls, onto adult women. Dr. Jill was an adult (I think) after all, when she started babysitting the Biden children. Maybe he loved her shampoo. But then there was Tara Reade. Reade accused then Senator Biden of doing something remarkably similar to what E. Jean Carroll would accuse Donald Trump of. Only Tara could recall the year it happened, unlike Carroll. And she has never been videotaped writhing around on the floor like a lunatic, unlike Carroll. I seriously doubt she has a dog named Tits or paints her trees blue, like Carroll does. Reade was ridiculed by the same state controlled press and feminists who believed Carroll. A ridiculous jury awarded Carroll millions of dollars. Reade fled to Russia for her own safety.

    Hollywood and the kept media make fun of Trump’s sons. There are inferences about Eric being “special.” Riding the short bus. Those distasteful remarks are just fine, as long as they’re made against the “right” people. They are free to joke all they want about young Barron Trump, for instance, regarding whether he’s on the autistic spectrum. You know, the spectrum that didn’t exist until about thirty years ago. You’ll lose your medical license if you suggest there’s a connection there to all the massive increases in vaccines doled out to our children. But no comedian jokes about Ashley Biden’s numerous brushes with the law. Or the unmentioned Biden, Creepy Joe’s brother Frank, who has a crime record the sainted George Floyd would have envied. The “Big Guy” has a niece, Caroline, who also has had several run-ins with the law.

    Have you heard anyone, including Fox News, Breitbart, or other conservative outlets, talk about the Biden crime family? Remember poor Billy Carter? He was ridiculed and considered a real embarrassment to the still living former peanut farmer. He never wracked up all the DUIs that Frank Biden has. But Billy Beer was pretty putrid, for those of you old enough to remember it. Even young Amy Carter and young Chelsea Clinton had their looks cruelly mocked by comedians. No comedian is about to mock Hunter Biden, famously photographed asleep with a crack pipe in his mouth, let alone Ashley Biden. Can you imagine what the hysterical shrews on The View would say if Ivanka Trump had written about inappropriate showers with her father?

    Now, all Biden’s greatest crimes appear to have been committed before he developed dementia, Alzheimer’s, or whatever it is that he has. I doubt if Hunter or anyone else is even giving him his ten percent cut nowadays. Over the course of his presidency, Biden has been caught on film uttering inanities that often sound alien in nature. Maybe it’s the Reptile in him coming out. How many times have we seen him wandering off, like a misguided toddler. He did this recently at an international gathering, and despite the fact that the president of Italy was captured on film grabbing him by the arm, and leading him back to safety, Biden’s ridiculous DEI press secretary insisted that the video had been altered. His doddering was termed a “cheap fake,” or “deep fake,” depending on the source. Who can argue with that?

    Joe Biden, in fact, has been so absurd in his role as president that many suggest he is a cheap or deep fake. Some say the real Biden died a while back, and has been replaced by a clone or robot. Boy, you’d think they could make a more realistic and competent clone or robot than that. It makes one cringe to watch him try to express himself. He reminds me very much of the Peter Sellers character in the film Being There. Although Biden is not known to have been mentally challenged during his life, and nothing he’s said as president could ever be mistaken for profundity, as was the case with the Sellers’ character. He is also prone to making his key points in a menacing whisper. No, his stutter isn’t a lifelong thing, as his old filmed speeches demonstrate. It is unknown at what age he began inappropriately touching little girls.

    Biden has issued more racist comments than Donald Trump could ever dream up. He has stated that those Blacks who don’t vote for him are not really Black. He called inner city schools “jungles.” He compared poor students to White students. Senator Joe Biden helped put untold numbers of nonviolent Black crack cocaine addicts in prison. He simply makes up stories about his past, depending on his audience. He obviously didn’t go to a historically Black college, as he told a Black audience. He wasn’t practically raised in a synagogue, as he bragged to a Jewish audience. At least the “Corn Pop was a bad dude” story was funny. Fictional, but funny. Funnier than the millions of illegals he has opened the border to, flown around the country, and deposited in five star hotels. While our own homeless citizens crap in the streets.

    Joe Biden’s “performance” in the presidential debate the other night exposed the serious problems he has with his faculties at this point. He was filmed after the debate, struggling, with the help of someone on each side, to navigate one step down off the stage. Dr. Jill, who is essentially his handler, was recorded congratulating him for “answering all the questions,” in the manner a mother would praise a preschooler for using the potty by himself. It is unclear if Joe Biden is potty trained now. Rumors persist that he has publicly pooped his pants, with the latest incident being at a Normandy commemoration ceremony. Those with TDS insist that Trump has done this as well, and wears adult diapers. Maybe neither of them is potty trained. No one can say that the American people aren’t offered the best and the brightest choices.

    Exactly what record would Joe Biden run on? The billions given to Ukraine? Anyone who buys gas or shops at a grocery store knows that inflation is now worse than it has ever been in our lives. And yet Creepy Joe just cites phony statistics to claim otherwise. His administration is peopled with politically correct, sideshow circus freaks. While there is no known sword swallower, there was the bald, red dressed high ranking official who kept stealing women’s luggage at airports. And then there is our health czar Rachel Levine, who I suppose somehow “identifies” as a healthy person. The other day, the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy gender fluids visited the White House. Vice presidential cackler Kamala Harris actually answered the door. You know George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be proud.

    I don’t know what they’re planning to do with Biden.

    The day after the debate, he sounded suspiciously more lucid. He’s done that before. Dementia doesn’t usually work that way. Maybe presidential dementia is different.

    Perhaps we’ll get Gruesome Newsom. Or Hillary could stage a Brett Favre-like comeback. The sensational rumors about Michelle Obama actually being Big Mike, would cover all the DEI bases. It would represent a national “Woke” orgasm. They could have the “big reveal” in the Rose Garden. Or they could just opt to install Biden again. It’s not like he could be much less capable of the job than he’s been since his initial selection. He’ll have all the fawning press coverage he needs. His absurd persona will be off-limits to the late night comedians. No one better epitomizes the America 2.0 version of “democracy.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 23:40

  • Cruise Ship Stocks Slide As Powerful Hurricane Beryl Churns In Caribbean
    Cruise Ship Stocks Slide As Powerful Hurricane Beryl Churns In Caribbean

    Shares of Carnival Corp, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian Cruise Line fell in New York on Monday after reports of a record-breaking hurricane sweeping through the Caribbean.

    Earlier, Hurricane Beryl made landfall on Carriacou Island, a Caribbean island part of Grenada. The powerful Category 4 storm was just seven mph below the threshold for becoming a Category 5 (157 mph) on the Saffir-Simpson scale. 

    “Residents in Grenada, the Grenadine Islands, and Carriacou Island should not leave their shelter as winds will rapidly increase within the eyewall of Beryl,” Brad Reinhart, a senior hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center, wrote in a note.

    Reinhart said, “Remain in place through the passage of these life-threatening conditions and do not venture out in the eye of the storm.”

    The Caribbean is heavily trafficked by cruise ships, resulting in traders selling Carnival Corp. (-5%), Royal Caribbean Cruises (-2.3%), and Norwegian Cruises (-6%). 

    According to Philip Klotzbach, a Colorado State University hurricane researcher, Beryl strengthened into a Category 3 hurricane Sunday morning. It became the first major hurricane east of the Lesser Antilles on record for June. The reason is due to the extremely warm water in the Atlantic Basin. 

    “Beryl is an extremely dangerous and rare hurricane for this time of year in this area,” hurricane specialist and storm surge expert Michael Lowry told CBS News. 

    Looking ahead, Beryl has set its crosshairs for the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. The storm could make landfall in Mexico or Belize on Friday. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 23:20

  • Federal Government To Pause Student Loan Payments, Interest For 3 Million Borrowers
    Federal Government To Pause Student Loan Payments, Interest For 3 Million Borrowers

    Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times,

    In response to court rulings blocking key elements of the federal government’s new student loan repayment program, the Biden administration will be giving about 3 million borrowers a reprieve from their monthly payments.

    The 3 million borrowers eligible for the pause are enrolled in the income-driven repayment program dubbed SAVE and have a monthly payment that is more than zero, according to the U.S. Department of Education. About 4.5 million SAVE enrollees who qualify for zero-dollar payments because of low incomes will not be included in the pause.

    The payment pause is similar to the COVID-19 student loan relief that lasted for 3 1/2 years, from March 2020 through September 2023, during which borrowers didn’t have to pay monthly bills and interest didn’t accrue.

    Borrowers who are eligible for the new pause will be informed directly in the coming days, a spokesperson for the Education Department told The Epoch Times.

    The announcement was made days after a federal judge in Kansas, siding with attorneys general of three Republican-led states, blocked the implementation of the final segment of the SAVE plan but declined to unwind the portions of it that are already in place.

    The blocked segment is a calculation formula update scheduled to take effect on July 1. It would have allowed borrowers with undergraduate loans to have their monthly payments capped at 5 percent of their discretionary income, down from the current 10 percent limit.

    Borrowers with undergraduate and graduate school loans would also have seen a reduction in repayments, with the amount depending on the proportion of their graduate and undergraduate loan debt.

    A separate ruling by a federal court in Missouri put SAVE’s debt discharge provisions on hold while litigation challenging the program moves forward. The SAVE plan offered debt cancellations for those who originally took out $12,000 or less in loans and have made at least 10 years of monthly payments.

    Both of the judges presiding over the twin cases agreed that the SAVE plan, which uses the Higher Education Act to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in loan debt, goes beyond what the statute authorizes.

    In his opinion, Judge John Ross of the Eastern District of Missouri said Congress did not intend to make debt forgiveness under the law as economically far-reaching as President Biden’s program.

    “The court is not free to replace the language of the statute with unenacted legislative intent,” Judge Ross wrote.

    “Congress has made it clear under what circumstances loan forgiveness is permitted, and the [income-contingent repayment] plan is not one of those circumstances.”

    A Congressional Budget Office estimate said SAVE could cost $230 billion over the next decade, while researchers at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania placed the price tag at $475 billion over the same 10-year period.

    The pair of rulings prompted some Democrat lawmakers to urge the Education Department to place affected borrowers on forbearance, citing the confusion that could result from the injunctions.

    “This damning and harmful lawsuit will only throw struggling borrowers further into chaos, deny them the student debt cancellation they demand and deserve, and prevent them from purchasing homes, growing their families, and so much more,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said in a statement.

    “The Biden Administration must continue to take immediate action to ensure borrowers receive the student debt cancellation they were promised.”

    The federal government has promised a continued push for student loan forgiveness.

    “President Biden, Vice President [Kamala] Harris, and Secretary [Miguel] Cardona remain committed to fixing a broken student loan system and making college more affordable for more Americans,” an Education Department spokesperson said in a statement to The Epoch Times.

    “They will not stop vigorously defending the SAVE Plan, the most affordable repayment plan in history, and will continue to fight for this long-overdue relief.”

    Some 414,000 borrowers have had their federal student loan debts erased under SAVE, according to the department.

    The injunctions will not affect any forgiveness that has already been granted.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 23:00

  • Tennessee Law Allowing Death Penalty For Pedophiles Goes Into Effect – Only Democrats Oppose It
    Tennessee Law Allowing Death Penalty For Pedophiles Goes Into Effect – Only Democrats Oppose It

    Tennessee has joined states like Florida, Arizona, Idaho, Oklahoma and South Carolina in making the death penalty a possibility for criminals convicted of child sex abuse. 

    The law went into effect this week with Governor Bill Lee’s approval and with the approval of all Republican legislators. 

    Strangely, only Democrats and progressive activists have opposed the decision.

    Democrats have a number of arguments against the death penalty for pedophiles, including claims that seeking the punishment is “more expensive” than keeping prisoners locked up, and claims that victims would be “traumatized” by multiple appeals “drudging up memories of assault.” 

    However, as Republicans note, it doesn’t matter what it costs, the punishment should fit the crime.  And, there is no reason why child victims need to be dragged back into appeals court to relive their trauma unless new evidence directly concerning the victim comes to light.

    In other words, these excuses don’t hold water.  All 19 Tennessee legislators who opposed the law are Democrats.  The consistent leftist opposition to stricter prosecution and punishment for child sex abuse is concerning as it leads to questions over what is truly motivating their resolve.  Blue states like California have been pushing for less punishment for similar crimes; Democrat lawmakers thwarted multiple attempts last year to increase penalties for child sex trafficking.

    Leftist activists have consistently asserted that the death penalty as a punishment for pedophiles is a threat to the LGBT community and the Trans community in particular.  But why?  

    Perhaps they are worried about the growing trend of trans indoctrination taking place against children in American public schools, largely supported by Democrat groups?  Often referred to as “grooming”, trans propaganda invariably wanders into the realm of sexualization and even pedophilia.  One cannot discuss LGBT activism with children without also broaching topics of fetish and sex.  This form of indoctrination is tailor made for luring minors into abusive environments where they can be taken advantage of.  The lesser the penalty, the more emboldened such predators will be.    

    The solution is an easy one to figure out:  Stay away from the kids and everything will be alright.  Unfortunately, Democrats refuse to get the message. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 22:40

  • China Stops Reporting Renewable Energy Utilization Data
    China Stops Reporting Renewable Energy Utilization Data

    By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

    China didn’t include figures on utilization rates at power plants by source in its May monthly data series, following the previous month’s data that showed utilization at renewable energy generators had dropped, Reuters reported on Monday, citing China’s latest data release.

    In the data series through April 2024, China had given a breakdown of utilization rates at thermal, hydro, nuclear, solar, and wind power plants.

    The last such data has found that the average operating hours of wind and solar power generators fell, while utilization rates at hydropower and thermal coal-fired power plants increased, according to the January-April data.

    Now the latest data for January to May doesn’t give separate utilization rates at plants by power source, Reuters notes, adding that the publisher of the data series, China’s energy administration, didn’t give any explanation about what has prompted the change in the way the country reports power plant operations.

    Before May, China had a limit on curtailment of renewable energy at 5%, referring to the curtailment issue when excess clean energy has to be curtailed to balance the grid between supply and demand.

    But at the end of May, the Chinese authorities raised that limit of curtailment of renewable energy to 10% from 5%, a change that was bound to further lower utilization rates at renewable power plants.

    Analysts expect the higher limit on curtailment to lead to more renewable energy installations, but solar and wind plants operating at lower utilization, according to Reuters.

    Earlier this year, Fitch Ratings said that while China is set to reach its 2030 wind and solar capacity target of 1.2 terawatts (TW) six years early, this could bring challenges to utilization and the grid’s ability to maintain stable power supply.

    “Grid construction takes time and power storage capacity as a percentage of renewable capacity remains low,” Fitch said in a report in February.

    “This means that thermal power will play an important role in stabilising the power system in the transition period.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 22:20

  • Democrats Hint At Assassination In Response To Supreme Court Immunity Decision
    Democrats Hint At Assassination In Response To Supreme Court Immunity Decision

    Nobody likes to lose but leftists take indignant defeat to a whole new level.  Though they claim to “defend democracy” in their spare time, Democrats also have a tendency to abandon the democratic process when that process interferes with their intentions to remain in power.  

    Case in point: The Supreme Court’s recent decision to give immunity from prosecution to Donald Trump in the case of “some official acts” taken during his tenure in office.  Leftists have responded with outrage at the 6-3 decision with much of their political hopes resting on the strategy of burying Trump in as many legal battles as possible to keep him from running for president again.  Democrats are now flooding social media and the news feeds with suggestions that the SC decision makes it possible for Joe Biden as president to eliminate the conservative competition “as a part of his official duties.”

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    The tools for legally punishing presidents already exist, including impeachment and charges of treason.  And, keep in mind, if Trump does not have immunity for previous actions as president, then neither does any other president.  How many skeletons are in the closets of men like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama?

    Beyond this, assassination of a political opponent or the conservative members of the Supreme Court is not recognized as an official duty of the presidency.  Democrats, as usual, take their conclusions to the dramatic extreme in order to provoke public fear through emotionally energized disinformation.  Leftists have been fantasizing publicly about murdering Trump for some time now.  However, these “theories” on how Biden could respond to the Supreme Court are not simple hypotheticals for the sake of argument, there is an element of desperation and bloodlust. 

      

    What they are really upset about is the fact that Trump is free and clear to finish his election race against a mentally deficient Joe Biden.  They’re also terrified that Trump might return the favor and seek revenge if he goes back to the Oval Office.

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    Three out of the four criminal cases brought against Trump last year will now become irrelevant, likely preventing a trial in the federal election subversion case before November.  The fourth case, the hush money trial which led to his conviction this year, is considered the weakest of the efforts because it sought to turn misdemeanor charges into felony charges using an obscure statute.  

    It should be noted that Presidents already have immunity from civil liability while in office and must be impeached for a violation before lawsuits can proceed.  The Supreme Court has simply extended that immunity to cover criminal prosecution.

    Regardless of how you might feel about Donald Trump it’s clear that Democrats have been engaging in a strategy of “lawfare” – The weaponization of the courts as a means to destroy a political opponent instead of facing him head-on in the election arena.  The majority of charges made against Trump have been farcical at best, with little to no evidence to support the commission of an actual crime. 

    The SC is likely responding to this lawfare by limiting it to criminal cases outside of presidential acts, of which there are none.  Otherwise, the chicanery on the part of Democrats would cripple the presidency for years to come and every party and president from now on would have to engage in the same lawfare in order to compete.   

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 22:00

  • House Republicans Sue Garland For Tapes Of Hur Interview With Biden
    House Republicans Sue Garland For Tapes Of Hur Interview With Biden

    Authored by Jackson Richman via The Epoch Times,

    House Republicans filed a lawsuit on July 1 against Attorney General Merrick Garland, seeking to force the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release the audiotapes of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden in his classified documents probe.

    The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also asks the court to require the DOJ to hand over the audio of Mr. Hur’s interview with President Biden’s ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, who wrote two memoirs for him.

    The legal action came after the House Republicans last month voted to hold Mr. Garland in contempt for failing to comply with a subpoena for tapes of Mr. Hur’s interview with the president. The White House has asserted executive privilege.

    The Justice Department declined to prosecute the attorney general, citing the department’s “longstanding position” not to pursue criminal action against those who refuse to comply with subpoenas over which executive privilege has been claimed.

    House Republicans sought material relating to Mr. Hur’s investigation into the president’s handling of classified material after the special counsel declined to recommend charges against President Biden.

    Mr. Hur’s report, in reaching its conclusion not to go forward with charges, cited an assessment that President Biden would present to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

    The Justice Department has handed over transcripts and notes on the interview and argues that it is not necessary to provide the tapes. Doing so would deter future presidents from cooperating with similar investigations, the DOJ said.

    House Republicans have insisted that they need the tapes to verify the transcript’s accuracy and to confirm that Mr. Hur’s observation was justified.

    The Justice Department and Democrats pushed back, contending that Republicans wanted the tapes solely for partisan reasons.

    “The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal—to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” Ed Siskel, President Biden’s counsel, wrote to House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a May letter.

    In its 56-page suit, the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee contends that the Biden administration’s executive privilege claim is “frivolous.” The committee also argues that the president had waived privilege when it released a transcript of the interview to Congress.

    The Epoch Times has reached out to the Justice Department for Mr. Garland’s response to the lawsuit.

    Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) this past week said that she would force a vote on an obscure measure, known as an inherent contempt resolution, which would direct the House sergeant at arms to arrest Mr. Garland for failing to comply with the subpoena.

    The resolution is privileged, so the House will be forced to vote on it within two legislative days once she brings it to the floor. Ms. Luna had said she would bring it to the floor on June 28 but did not.

    The Epoch Times has reached out to Ms. Luna’s office to ask when she will put it on the floor and why she did not do so on June 28.

    According to Mr. Hur’s report, classified materials from 2009 about the war in Afghanistan were found at a Virginia home that President Biden rented and where he met with Mr. Zwonitzer to work on the two books.

    The classified documents were eventually sent to Delaware.

    The Epoch Times has reached out to Mr. Zwonitzer’s attorney, Louis Freeman, for comment.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 21:40

  • These Were The Best And Worst Performing Assets Of June, Q2 And The First Half
    These Were The Best And Worst Performing Assets Of June, Q2 And The First Half

    Today was the start of the second half of the year, and Deutsche Bank’s thematic research team published its usual monthly performance review with this one covering June, Q2, and H1. We will go present the full version below, but first let’s take a look at some brief highlights (all USD) and additional comments:

    • It may surprise some that silver led the way (+22.5%) in the first half, with other metals like gold (+12.8%) and copper (+12.9%) also high up the list. WTI oil (+13.8%) ensured that hard commodities packed out the top end of the sample in H1.

    • The NASDAQ (+18.6% total return) and S&P 500 (+15.3%) had very good H1s powered by a +37.0% advance for the Mag-7 and a stunning +149.5% return for Nvidia. But the small-cap Russell 2000 only returned +1.7% in H1, and was down -3.3% in Q2.

    • French assets slumped in Q2 following the snap election announcement. For instance, the Franco-German 10yr spread widened by +29bps over Q2, the biggest quarterly jump since Q4 2011 during the sovereign debt crisis. OATs were the worst performer in H1 in this sample (-6.8% in USD terms). French spreads have tightened a handful of basis points this morning though, as the chance of an overall majority for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National have been reduced (according to markets) by a slight under-performance vs. polls, and news that other candidates may drop out in areas where they can help keep the RN out. The slight under-performance for the RN might be skewed by record turnout in urban areas which are traditionally liberal bastions. Additionally, the probability of an RN government has slightly increased after yesterday which is contrary to the current market narrative.

    • As an interesting snippet on global inflation, agricultural commodities are continuing to fall back. Corn (-10.1%) was down for a 6th consecutive quarter in Q2, alongside declines for soybeans (-3.4%) and wheat (-1.2%). So potentially some relief on food prices ahead after a big increase over recent years.

    • The weakness in the Japanese Yen showed no sign of letting up, and it’s now been the worst-performing G10 currency in both Q1 and Q2.

    With the summary out of the way, here is a more extended look into the best and worst performing assets of the month, quarter and half.

    Quarter in Review – The high-level macro overview

    Markets got Q2 off to a pretty weak start. In April, there was growing concern about inflation, particularly after the US CPI report showed that core CPI was still running at +0.4% in March. That marked a third consecutive month when core CPI had been at +0.4%, raising fears that inflation was proving persistent. Moreover, geopolitical tensions were also heightened in the Middle East, and Iran launched a drone and missile attack on Israel on April 13, marking the first time there’d been a direct attack on Israel from Iran. Reports about a potential attack had already led to a selloff beforehand and on April 12, Brent crude oil prices peaked at their highs for the year above $92/bbl intraday. But as tensions eased and a further escalation didn’t occur, oil prices fell back again.

    In May, markets put in a stronger performance, and the S&P 500 and the STOXX 600 both climbed to new records. That was supported by comments from Fed Chair Powell, who said that “I think it’s unlikely that the next policy rate move will be a hike.” So that eased concerns that monetary policy could be tightened further. US inflation also showed signs of easing, with core CPI slowing to +0.3% in the April data that was released in May. Alongside that, the geopolitical situation became calmer, and Brent crude oil prices fell back in May, after gains in the first four months of the year.

    By June, rate cuts were increasingly in focus, and the ECB delivered their first rate cut since the pandemic, lowering their deposit rate by 25bps to 3.75%. The Bank of Canada also delivered their first rate cut of this cycle, meaning that 4 of the central banks with a G10 currency have now cut rates this year. Meanwhile in the US, the Fed didn’t cut rates in Q2, but the CPI release for May that was released in June showed the slowest monthly core CPI since August 2021. That helped to cement expectations that rate cuts were still on the horizon from the Federal Reserve, and at the June FOMC meeting, the median dot still pointed to one rate cut by the end of the year.

    But despite the growing move towards rate cuts, sovereign bonds still struggled over Q2 as a whole, in part because investors were pricing in a more gradual cycle of rate cuts. For instance, at the end of Q1, 67bps of cuts were priced in by the Fed’s December meeting. But that was down to 44bps by the end of Q2. So sovereign bonds struggled to get much momentum, and the 10yr Treasury yield was up +20bps over the quarter to 4.40%.

    Political developments were also back in focus from June, as the European Parliamentary elections took place at the start of the month. Significantly for markets, that then saw French President Macron announce that there would be a snap legislative election, with the first round taking place on June 30. That led to a notable selloff among French assets, and the Franco-German 10yr spread widened by +29bps in the week after the election announcement. That was the biggest weekly widening in the spread since the sovereign debt crisis in 2011. Moreover, the CAC 40 saw its worst weekly performance since March 2022. Over Q2 as a whole, the CAC 40 (-6.6%) saw its worst quarterly performance in two years, and the Franco-German 10yr spread widened by +29bps to 80bps. That is the biggest quarterly widening in the Franco-German 10yr spread since Q4 2011, when the Euro sovereign crisis was still ongoing.

    Another theme of the quarter was the ongoing divergence between megacap stocks and the rest. For example, the Magnificent 7 was up by another +16.9% in Q2, which helped the S&P 500 to post a third consecutive quarterly gain of +4.3%. But there was weakness elsewhere, as the equal-weighted S&P 500 fell by -2.6%, and the small-cap Russell 2000 was down -3.3%. Meanwhile in Europe, the STOXX 600 was only up +1.6%, and in Japan, the Nikkei was also down -1.9%, after a very strong +21.6% gain in Q1.

    Which assets saw the biggest gains in Q2?

    • The Magnificent 7 : It was a very strong quarter for the Magnificent 7, which rose +16.9% in total return terms. Nvidia (+36.7%) advanced for a 7th consecutive quarter.

    • Metals : It was generally a positive quarter for metals, with silver (+16.7%), platinum (+9.3%) and copper (+9.6%) all having their best performance in 6 quarters. Gold was also up +4.3% in its third consecutive quarterly gain.

    Which assets saw the biggest losses in Q2?

    • French assets : The announcement of a snap election by Emmanuel Macron led to a selloff for French assets. For example, the CAC 40 fell -6.6% in total return terms, while French OATs fell -2.6%.

    • European sovereign bonds : Even though the ECB cut rates in June, investors moved to price in a more gradual pace of rate cuts over the months ahead, and sovereign bonds lost ground, including German bunds (-0.7%) and Italian BTPs (-1.5%).

    • Japanese Yen : The Japanese Yen was the worst-performing G10 currency in Q2, which was the second consecutive quarter that’s happened. It weakened by -5.9% to 161 per US Dollar.

    • Agricultural Commodities : The prices of several agricultural commodities continued to decline in Q2. That included corn (-10.1%), which fell for a 6th consecutive quarter, along with soybeans (-3.4%) and wheat (-1.2%).

    Finally hereare the best and worst performing assets in local currency and USD terms, in June…

    … in Q2…

    … and in the first half.

    Source: DB, full note available to professional subscribers.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 21:20

  • Even Nigeria Plans To Bring Gold Reserves Home To Minimize Risk
    Even Nigeria Plans To Bring Gold Reserves Home To Minimize Risk

    Authored by Mike Maharrey via Money Metals Exchange,

    Nigeria is bringing its gold reserves home to keep it safe.

    According to a report by The Star, Nigerian officials decided to repatriate the country’s gold in April “to mitigate risks associated with the weakening U.S. economy.”

    “Economic indicators such as rising inflation, escalating debt levels, and geopolitical tensions have raised apprehensions among Nigerian policymakers about the stability of the U.S. financial system.”

    Nigeria holds about 21 tons of gold in its reserves.

    Economist Fatima Abubakar called the gold repatriation plan “a strategic decision,” and that the country was taking “proactive measures to safeguard its wealth and strengthen its financial resilience.”

    Nigerian officials also said bringing gold home would reflect the country’s self-reliance.

    “By bringing its gold reserves back within its borders, Nigeria not only asserts greater control over its financial assets but also demonstrates prudence in managing economic risks amidst global uncertainties.”

    Nigeria isn’t alone in wanting to control its gold reserves and bring them home. India recently repatriated 100 tons of gold from vaults in the U.K.

    Many countries have expressed concern about the U.S. and Western powers using gold and dollar reserves as a foreign policy weapon.

    According to a World Gold Council survey in 2023, a “substantial share” of central banks expressed concern about potential sanctions after the U.S. and other Western countries froze almost half of Russia’s $650 billion gold and forex reserves in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine. According to the WGC, 68 percent of the banks surveyed said they plan to keep their gold reserves within their country’s borders. That was up from 50 percent in 2020.

    One anonymously quoted central bank official told Reuters, “We did have it [gold] held in London… but now we’ve transferred it back to our country to hold as a safe haven asset and to keep it safe.”

    Invesco head of official institutions Rod Ringrow told Reuters this reflects a widely held view.

    “‘If it’s my gold then I want it in my country,’ has been the mantra we have seen in the last year or so.”

    There has been speculation that countries have been moving gold and other assets out of the U.S. in the wake of economic sanctions on Russia, but it has been difficult to confirm because the Federal Reserve refuses to release information about the amount of gold in its vaults.

    In March, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell dodged Rep. Alex Mooney’s (R-W.Va) questions about the central bank’s foreign gold holdings. Fed officials also refused to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request for records about such holdings.

    As investigative reporter Ken Silva wrote, Headline USA filed a FOIA request with the Fed for records reflecting how much gold the Federal Reserve Bank of New York currently holds in its vault, as well as records reflecting the ownership stake that each of FRBNY’s central bank/government clients have in that gold following Powell’s evasive response. The FOIA request also sought records about the Fed’s gold holdings prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

    The Fed denied the request.

    The gold repatriation trend started long before the West slapped sanctions on Russia. In 2019, Poland brought home 100 tons of gold. Hungary and Romania also repatriated some of their gold reserves around that same time. In the summer of 2017, Germany completed a project returning roughly half of its gold reserves back inside its borders. In 2015, Australia launched efforts to bring half of its reserves home. The Netherlands and Belgium have also initiated repatriation programs.

    This gold repatriation trend underscores the importance of holding physical gold free from counterparty risk.

    If you store your gold and silver with a third party, you could lose your metal through theft, fraud, or an act of God. Of course, you could lose silver and gold stored in your home the same way (except for fraud), so you have to weigh the risk of using third-party storage and keeping large amounts of silver and gold at home.

    If you opt for third-party vaulting, it is important to choose a trusted company.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 21:00

  • These Are The Countries Sending The Most Remittances Abroad
    These Are The Countries Sending The Most Remittances Abroad

    Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao charts the top 10 countries by the most remittances sent, in current U.S. dollars, based on 2022 data from Knomad.

    Specifically, these transfer totals shown represent personal remittances, or money sent between residents in one country to another, including personal transfers and compensation for work done abroad. It does not include, and is separate from, foreign investment.

    Top 10 Countries by Personal Remittances Sent (2000-2022)

    The U.S. has consistently been home to the world’s largest immigrant population (45 million people in 2022), a key reason for topping the ranks of sending money abroad over the last two decades.

    As a result, countries with largest diasporas in the U.S. – including Indian, the Philippines, and Mexico – tend to be the biggest recipients of these flows.

    Note: Figures rounded.

    Similarly, immigrants make up nearly 80% of the population in the UAE (ranked #2 with $80 billion sent), the highest proportion of any country in the world.

    Setting the countries sending the most money abroad side-by-side with those receiving money from abroad, reveals broad geographic patterns. Advanced economies (in North America and Europe) are the biggest senders to developing economies in Asia and Africa.

    Finally, Switzerland, Netherlands, and Luxembourg are considered offshore financial centers and can be used as intermediary stops in the movement of money through the world.

    Why are personal remittances important anyway? To start, a staggering one billion people (roughly one out of eight people in the world) depend on money sent back home. In 2022, 200 million migrant workers sent $800 billion to their families in home countries. Three-quarters of the money received is spent on basic necessities like food, medical, and housing expenses.

    Thus, personal remittances represent, perhaps, one of the biggest informal engines of social transformation.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 20:40

  • US Energy Production Chalks Up Another Record
    US Energy Production Chalks Up Another Record

    Authored by Alex Kimani via OilPrice.com,

    • EIA: U.S. Energy production rose 4% to nearly 103 quadrillion British thermal units (quads) in 2023.

    • Dry natural gas production increased 4% in 2023 and 58% since 2013 while crude oil production has grown 9% since 2022 and 69% since 2013.

    • On the flip side, U.S. energy consumption fell 1% largely driven by a 17% decline in coal consumption.

    For decades, the United States has been a net consumer of energy, using up more energy than it produces. However, a sharp increase in oil and gas production following the shale boom as well as the ongoing renewable energy revolution has helped change the energy trajectory over the past 15 years. And now the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) has reported that U.S. energy production exceeded consumption by record amounts in 2023. 

    According to the EIA, U.S. Energy production rose 4% to nearly 103 quadrillion British thermal units (quads) in 2023, a record for the country. On the other hand, energy consumption fell 1% to 94 quads during the same period, implying production exceeded consumption by 9 quads, the widest margin since 1949.  

    Dry natural gas production increased 4% in 2023 and 58% since 2013 while crude oil production has grown 9% since 2022 and 69% since 2013. Meanwhile, renewable energy production rose 1% compared to the previous year and a 28% increase since 2013, hitting eight quads of energy. Solar energy production recorded an impressive 15% Y/Y growth in 2023 while wind production fell 2%.

    On the flip side, U.S. energy consumption fell 1% largely driven by a 17% decline in coal consumption. Coal demand has been on a tailspin for years to its lowest level in more than a century thanks in large part to its shrinking role in electricity generation due to a high carbon footprint.

    “Natural gas production has continued to increase despite lower prices because natural gas is produced as a byproduct of crude oil production. That’s especially true in the Permian Basin, which accounts for almost half of U.S. crude oil production,” said Chris Higginbotham, an EIA spokesperson.

    Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

    Oil Price Rally Resumes

    The oil price rally that had reversed course in recent weeks on demand concerns is now back on track. Brent crude price has increased to $86.60 per barrel at today’s close from $77.52 on June 4 while WTI has increased from $73.25 per barrel to $83.41 with oil demand exceeding expectations.

    According to commodity analysts at Standard Chartered, global oil demand in April averaged 101.77 million barrels per day (mb/d), 470 thousand barrels per day (kb/d) higher than earlier forecasts. StanChart has reiterated its forecast that oil demand will hit an all-time high in June, with May demand projection revised 0.2 mb/d higher to 103.3 mb/d while the June projection has been revised 0.3 mb/d higher to 104.1 mb/d. 

    Meanwhile, the big natural gas rally that kicked off in late April has now taken a breather. 

    European natural gas futures have been trading in a narrow range around €35 per megawatt-hour as traders weigh ample storage levels against supply concerns. The long run of sub-par EU gas inventory builds continues, with inventories having lost ground relative to the five-year average on 57 of the past 62 days. According to the latest Gas Infrastructure Europe (GIE) data, inventories stood at 85.25 billion cubic meters (bcm) on 16 June, a y/y decrease of 0.06 bcm and 12.93 bcm above the five-year average. The w/w build was 1.75 bcm, which is 1 bcm less than the five-year average. The move away from extreme surplus has combined with concerns over the viability of the remaining Russian flows into the EU to help support front-month Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF) prices. Europe’s gas prices have settled in the EUR 33-36 per megawatt hour (MWh) range on 19 of the past 20 trading days. 

     U.S. natural gas futures fell below $2.61/MMBtu in Friday’s intraday session after the EIA’s storage build report. According to the report,  U.S. utilities injected 52 billion cubic feet of natural gas into storage last week, slightly below the expected 53 bcf build. U.S. gas inventories are now 20.6% above the seasonal norm. Natural gas prices are headed for a third consecutive week of declines due to increased output, as higher prices in recent weeks encouraged producers like EQT Corp. (NYSE:EQT) and Chesapeake Energy (NASDAQ:CHK) to resume drilling. Gas output in the Lower 48 states averaged 98.6 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) in June, up from a 25-month low of 98.1 bcfd in May. On the demand side, hotter-than-normal weather is projected through at least July 12, maintaining high gas consumption for cooling purposes.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 20:20

  • "The American People Should Dissent, I Dissent" – President Biden Blasts Supreme Court's "Dangerous Precedent"
    “The American People Should Dissent, I Dissent” – President Biden Blasts Supreme Court’s “Dangerous Precedent”

    Update (2000ET): Despite the Supreme Court’s direct ruling that “the President is not above the law”, President Biden delivered lying remarks to the American people this evening about the “terrible disservice to the people of this nation” that SCOTUS delivered today.

    President Biden directly attacked SCOTUS (and the ‘far-right’ justices that Trump appointed) for “gutting voting rights and civil rights, taking away a woman’s right to choose, and today’s decision that undermines the rule of law of this nation.”

    Then he lied some more, telling Americans that “my predecessor sent a violent mob to the US Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power…”

    Biden quoted directly from Justice Sotomayor’s dissent (which was remarkably political and perfectly bite-sized for today’s social media-consuming listener) where she said, “…with fear for our democracy, I dissent”, to which Biden added “so should the American people dissent, I dissent.”

    As Mollie further noted on X:

    “Biden was only able to speak for 3-4 minutes and refused questions from even his most reliably allies in the press, as per usual. He is apparently unwilling or unable to speak without the teleprompter.”

    This is what the leader of the free world has been reduced to…

    We strongly suggest putting down all sharp objects and emptying your mouth of food before watching…

    * * *

    The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in a 6-3 vote that former presidents, including Trump, enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct involving official acts during tenure in office, but he’s not immune from unofficial acts.

    As Bloomberg notes, the decision – which kicks the ball back to the lower court –  ‘all but ensures’ that a trial won’t happen in Trump’s classified documents case before the November election.

    The justices, voting 6-3 along ideological lines, said a federal appeals court was too categorical in rejecting Trump’s immunity arguments, ruling for the first time that former presidents are shielded from prosecution for some official acts taken while in office. The majority ordered the lower courts to revisit the case to decide the extent of the allegations that are off limits to prosecution.

    “Just as former presidents have immunity from civil liability for official acts, they have immunity from criminal prosecution unless they are impeached and removed from office for the crime alleged. This decision is supported by the writings of the framers of the Constitution, the text of the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent,” wrote X user Martin Harry.

    As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley notes, now “the issue is whether what constitutes official acts,” adding that the ruling will “further delay the lower court proceedings, but Trump will have to argue that his actions fall within these navigational beacons.”

    “The lower court judge has been highly favorable for Jack Smith in the past.  Yet the court is arguing that there is a presumption of immunity for their official acts beyond the absolute immunity on core constitutional powers.”

    Meanwhile, Justice Thomas called into question the legality of Smith’s office:

    In a blistering dissent, Justice Sotomayor writes that the ruling “makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law.”

    “Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom… the court gives former President trump all the immunity he asked for and more.“

    Special counsel Jack Smith is leading two federal probes against Trump, both of which led to criminal charges. In Washington, Trump has been targeted over alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, while a Florida case revolves around the mishandling of classified documents – for which Trump has claimed presidential immunity.

    In response to the ruling, Trump said on Truth Social that it was a “”BIG WIN FOR OUR CONSTITUTION AND DEMOCRACY.”

     

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 20:20

  • DNC Weighs Early Nomination For Biden To Quash Internal Party Dissent
    DNC Weighs Early Nomination For Biden To Quash Internal Party Dissent

    Update (1615ET): Democrat strategists are throwing many things against walls and hoping some stick as the gaslighting continues.

    Bloomberg reports that the Democratic National Committee is considering formally nominating Joe Biden as early as mid-July to ensure that the president is on November ballots, while helping to stamp out intra-party chatter of replacing him after last week’s poor debate performance.

    Democrats had already planned to nominate Biden, 81, before the convention in order to ensure he appears on the ballot in Ohio, which had an Aug. 7 deadline for candidates to be certified.

    A potential date for Biden’s nomination is July 21, when the Democratic convention’s credentials committee meets virtually, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

    The panel is meeting to finalize procedures before the party’s convention in Chicago starts on Aug. 19.

    Interestingly, former President Trump’s sentencing hearing is set for July 11th, so he may well be in prison by then given the amount of pressure we assume is being placed on Judge Merchan’s shoulders to “lock him up”.

    Additionally, July 21 is just three days after Trump is scheduled to accept his party’s nomination at the Republican convention in Milwaukee.

    The desperate attempted message from all this narrative-shaping is simple – …nothing to see here, move along.

    Except we all saw the fireworks factory exploding with our own eyes.

    *  *  *

    At a Camp David gathering on Sunday, President Biden’s extended family urged him to ignore the growing number of voices asking him to quit the race — and many of his loved ones blamed his disastrous debate on his advisors. According to Politico, the two who most forcefully encouraged the 81-year-old Biden to continue were his wife Jill and his son Hunter — the two people whose opinion he reportedly values most.

    En route to Camp David from the Hamptons, Joe and Jill Biden exit Marine One on Saturday with granddaughters Natalie (19) and Finnegan (23)  

    The reports will strengthen a growing sense that Jill Biden is putting her own interests above that of her humiliated and failing husband. As one Democratic advisor told the New York Post over the weekend, “Jill Biden likes being First Lady…she doesn’t want to give that up.”

    Meanwhile, Hunter, who doesn’t exactly have strong reputation for sound judgment, is said to long for Americans to see a version of his father that — as paraphrased by the Times — is “scrappy and in command of the facts.” Much as he once was in denial about his drug problem, Hunter now seems incapable of admitting that that version of his father is gone forever: 

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

    Biden family members are said to have blamed the debate debacle on three advisors: Anita Dunn, her husband Bob Bauer — who played the role of Trump in practice sessions — and Biden’s former chief of staff Ron Klain, who was in charge of the debate training. Aides to Biden denied these reports from multiple outlets. 

    With Biden having spent a full week at Camp David gearing up for the debate, his family members and others are claiming the team worked the 81-year-old too hard, and tried to pack him full of too many statistics. They even fault advisors for a debate-night makeup job that transformed his summer-tanned face to one that was pale and unhealthy-looking. Relatives also blamed debate-host CNN for not “fact-checking” Donald Trump and not telling Biden which camera would be on him as he blankly stared a thousand miles into space with his mouth agape.   

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

    John Morgan, a top donor and friend of Biden’s brother Frank, was not at the family meeting, but joined the delusional pile-up on Biden’s advisers, telling the Times that the week-long debate prep — which involved rehearsals at various times of the day — was excessive:

    “It would be like if you took a prizefighter who was going to have a title fight and put him in a sauna for 15 hours then said, ‘Go fight.’ I believe that the debate is solely on Ron Klain, Bob Bauer and Anita Dunn.”

    Unlike his family, the president is said to still hold confidence in the trio. Klain assured the Times that Biden will see the race through, saying, “He is the choice of the Democratic voters…We had a bad debate night. But you win campaigns by fighting — not quitting — in the face of adversity.” 

    Husband-and-wife Biden adviser team Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer (via ABC News)

    Of course, Biden is “the choice of Democratic voters” largely because the Democratic National Committee made sure he was the only choice available. A post-debate CBS News poll found that just 54% of registered Democrats think Biden should be in the race. The poll found 41% of Democrats think Biden lacks has the requisite mental and cognitive health. More importantly, 72% of all voters give him a failing grade on mental health.   

    The family gathering at Camp David was reportedly scheduled before the debate, with the expectation that it would be a celebration of his performance and an opportunity for the extended Biden family — including his children and grandchildren — to be photographed by famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. 

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

    In the wake of a historically-horrendous performance that’s prompted many liberal pundits and the New York Times and Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial boards to urge Biden to quit, the gathering morphed into a summit meeting in which Biden and his family discussed the future of his campaign.  

    In one of the more pathetic vignettes illustrating the Biden family’s failure to grasp the depth of Biden’s political woes, the Times reports that “at least one of the president’s grandchildren has expressed interest in getting more involved with the campaign, perhaps by talking with influencers on social media.” 

    That should do it! 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 20:10

  • Americans Set To Travel In Record Numbers For July 4th
    Americans Set To Travel In Record Numbers For July 4th

    Fourth of July holiday travel is expected to reach a new record high in 2024, as more than 70 million Americans are forecast to hit the road or the skies to travel more than 50 miles for this year’s celebrations.

    That’s according to projections from AAA who are predicting that 60.6 million Americans will take to the nation’s roads, while 5.7 million will take a plane and 4.6 million will travel by train or other means for Independence Day.

    Infographic: Americans Set to Travel in Record Numbers for July 4th | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    As Statista’s Felix Richter notes, that represents an increase of 5 percent from last year and 8 percent from 2019, as low air fares and gas prices are fueling Americans’ appetite for travel.

    “With summer vacations in full swing and the flexibility of remote work, more Americans are taking extended trips around Independence Day,” Paula Twidale, Senior Vice President of AAA Travel said in a statement.

    “We anticipate this July 4th week will be the busiest ever with an additional 5.7 million people traveling compared to 2019.”

    All modes of transport are set to see a noticeable increase this year and road trips will continue to dominate Fourth of July travel.

    85 percent of travelers are expected to drive to their holiday destination as gas prices have eased from the historic highs of the past two years.

    Even though air travel is far less common for Independence Day celebrations, airports are expected to be busier than ever these days.

    In the weeks leading up to July 4, the TSA reported several new records for performed safety checks at U.S. airports.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 20:00

  • The Modern Myth Of "Wage Slavery"
    The Modern Myth Of “Wage Slavery”

    Via SchiffGold.com,

    The idea of ‘wage slavery’ unfairly compares today’s suffering job market to historical chattel slavery, using outdated 19th-century arguments to criticize modern work. This oversimplification overlooks the significant improvements in workers’ freedom and their right to work.  Some will choose to work at a lower wage than accept a worse alternative.

    The following article was originally published by the Mises Institute. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold.

    Unless you work for a bank or the government, you may not have noticed that June 19th was a federal holiday – Juneteenth – commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

    This is a perfectly good thing to celebrate, of course, but alas, as Connor O’Keeffe has recently noted, since the day was declared a federal holiday in 2021, it has largely been used by leftwing groups to push ever larger amounts of government intervention in favor of the Left’s favorite interest groups.

    For example, among the “property is theft” crowd, the end of chattel slavery is framed as merely a small part of the larger “ongoing struggle“ to abolish so-called “wage slavery.”

    The Origins of “Wage Slavery”

    The idea that wage earners are “slaves” of one sort or another is certainly not new. Consider, for example, this paragraph from communist Mikhail Bakunin, writing in the late 1860s:

    Slavery can change its form and its name—its basis remains the same. This basis is expressed by the words: being a slave is being forced to work for other people—as being a master is to live on the labour of other people. In ancient times, as to-day in Asia and Africa, slaves were simply called slaves. … to-day they are called “wage-earners”. The position of these latter is much more honourable and less hard than that of slaves, but they are none the less forced by hunger as well as by the political and social institutions, to maintain by very hard work the absolute or relative idleness of others. Consequently, they are slaves.

    When Bakunin wrote these words, however, the concept of the “wage slave” was already decades old. It is likely that the first anti-capitalists to use the term were conservatives, and not socialists like Bakunin.

    This was true in both Britain and in the United States.

    When it came to wage labor, many British conservatives aggressively opposed the rise of the industrial workforce, condemning factory work as a form of slavery and tying the industrialists to the supporters of chattel slavery in the West Indies and the American South where slavery remained legal. In efforts to make these comparisons stick, conservative critics of industrialization invented new terms like “wage slavery,” “factory slaves,” and “white slavery.” Much of the conservatives’ terminology and their arguments would later be adopted by socialists. These terms were valuable in that time period because at the time opposition to chattel slavery within the British public had enjoyed considerable success, culminating with the 1834 Slavery Abolition Act.

    In the antebellum United States, slave-owning conservatives used similar tactics in an effort to portray chattel slavery as a system that was more moral than free labor. Although advocates for slavery often fancied themselves the defenders of civilization against “socialists, communists, red republicans, [and] Jacobins“ they often agreed with Marxists and other socialists when it came to critiquing the capitalist wage system. While slavery advocates naturally rejected the supposed egalitarian aspects of various groups of socialists and communists, all could agree that capitalist employers exploited their workers and reduced them to a pitiable state of scratching out a subsistence while the employer pocketed all the surplus.

    On both sides of the Atlantic, conservatives argued—without any factual basis—that wages are repeatedly pushed down to subsistence levels by conspiracies among employers. The conservatives also often repeated the old canard that workers are never really free to leave their jobs because the choice workers face is between doing anything and everything employers demand on the one hand, and starvation on the other hand.

    Why Wage Slaves Don’t Exist

    The conservative ideologies of old, of course, are now politically irrelevant, and the modern threat to markets comes from the Left. In terms of theory, however, remarkably little has changed since the days of Bakunin, even if the standard of living of workers has obviously grown far beyond what nineteenth-century critics could possibly comprehend.

    At the core of the claim, whether made by slavedrivers or communists, is the idea that workers are “forced by hunger” to work ceaselessly without an opportunity to bid up wages.

    Or, as Mises summarizes the argument in Human Action:

    It has been asserted that a job-seeker must sell his labor at any price, however low, as he depends exclusively on his capacity to work and has no other source of income. He cannot wait [because he faces starvation if there is any delay in employment] and is forced to content himself with any reward the employers are kind enough to offer him. This inherent weakness makes it easy for the concerted action of the masters to lower wage rates. They can, if need be, wait longer, as their demand for labor is not so urgent as the worker’s demand for subsistence.

    Mises goes on to explain a variety of problems with this claim, including this:

    It has been shown that it is not true that the job-seekers cannot wait and are therefore under the necessity of accepting any wage rates, however low, offered to them by the employers. It is not true that every unemployed worker is faced with starvation; the workers too have reserves and can wait; the proof is that they really do wait. On the other hand waiting can be financially ruinous to the entrepreneurs and capitalists too. If they cannot employ their capital, they suffer losses. Thus all the disquisitions about an alleged “employers’ advantage” and “workers’ disadvantage” in bargaining are without substance.

    That latter point is certainly key. It is not the case that employers are able to casually “outwait” workers. Rather, there is great pressure on employers to employ their capital—which requires workers—quickly.

    When Mises notes that “it has not been shown” that workers will always take whatever wages are offered—this is not wishful thinking on Mises’s part. Were it true that employers could constantly force down wages, then we would not find that workers’ real wages have increased immensely since the eighteenth century. Economic historians have shown this again and again. The “immiseration of the workers” thesis is simply wrong.

    We can further demonstrate Mises’s claim with the fact that so many American workers choose to simply not work at all. Recent research estimates that as many as seven million men of prime age (i.e, 25-54 years old) have left the workforce altogether. How can they afford to live? While it’s true that some are on government benefits, the vast majority do not collect benefits in amounts that could even come close to rivaling the income that could be had from ordinary employment. Nor are such amounts sufficient to maintain even a lower-middle-class lifestyle. The fact is these potential workers chose to not work at all and instead primarily live off the incomes of parents, spouses and girlfriends. Yet, if all workers were on the edge of starvation and subsistence living, it would not be possible for them to also support do-nothing male housemates. The workers themselves would barely be making enough to feed themselves, and these male non-workers would be living in a constant state of near-starvation. This clearly is not the case.

    If it were impossible for workers to miss even a few days of employment, lest they face starvation, there would be virtually zero openings in minimum-wage jobs. Even casual observation, however, shows that the local burger joint often has open positions.

    Another reason the wage-slave argument fails is the fact that—assuming there is even a moderate amount of market competition among firms—employers are motivated to expand production so as to increase market share. Employers are thus incentivized to increase worker productivity. To increase productivity, workers then seek the best workers and “poach” them from other businesses. This process bids up wages.

    Historical experience points to many examples. In The Rise and Fall of American Growth, historian Robert Gordon writes:

    By 1914 [compared to 1906] the average nominal manufacturing wage had increased by 30 percent from seventeen cents per hour to twenty-two cents per hour, which translated to $2.04 per day. Consider the sensation created when Henry Ford announced early in 1914 that henceforth the base wage in his Highland Park factory would be $5 per day. His ulterior motive was to reduce labor turnover combined with a bit of altruism. Labor turnover was an endemic problem at the time, due in part to the reliance of manufacturing plants on immigration workers who were not yet married and planned to move on to another town whenever news came of better wages of working conditions. For instance, the superintendent of a mine in western Pennsylvania alleged that he had hired 5,000 workers in a single year to sustain his desired work force of 1,000. The fact that unskilled work in manufacturing plants required little or no training made it easy for immigrant workers who were dissatisfied with one type of work to quit and move to another town and try something different.

    Clearly, workers are not “forced” to remain with any particular employer or face starvation. Wage workers have options. Free labor—unlike slaves—is free to employ their freedom-to-leave in ways designed to reduce their reliance on any single source of income. Workers are free to start their own businesses—and many do. Although many point to the decline of “mom and pop” retail outlets as evidence of a lack of entrepreneurial activities, the fact is that self-employment in the service economy is very robust. There is no lack of small-time service-oriented businesses in industries ranging from accounting to auto repair to construction, and beyond.

    Moreover, workers are free to pool their resources to cope with rising costs of living. Workers are free to create communes or simply live in multi-generation households—thus reducing per-capita rent costs—as many of our ancestors did before the twentieth century. Actual slaves are not free to do any of these things.

    Another key point is an obvious moral distinction. The true reality of actual slavery is suggested by the fact that it has always been morally permissible for a chattel slave to kill his own master at any time. Given that chattel slavery is a form of kidnapping and false imprisonment, it is simply an act of self-defense when a slave responds with deadly force against his kidnappers. (Whether or not it is prudent to kill one’s master in a place where slavery is protected by law is another matter.)

    It should strike us as absurd, on the other hand, to claim that the owner of the local Taco Bell has “kidnapped” the workers who staff the drive-thru. Moreover, it is clear that countless workers who have worked in these minimum wage jobs at one time or another have moved on to other jobs with much, much higher wages. Are these former fast-food workers runaway slaves? Clearly not.

    Now, one might point out that we everywhere find a variety of laws and regulations that hamper the ability of workers to start their own businesses, reduce their cost of living, and otherwise assert independence from existing employers. In such cases, however, one cannot say that it is the market that has produced such handicaps for workers. Rather, it is the state that imposed these limitations on workers. If the realities of wage work under this interventionist system produce some sort of “slavery” at all, then we can only accurately describe the victims as something akin to “regime slaves” quite separate from any concept of wage slavery.

    And yet, the idea of the “wage slave” persists as the perennial refrain of the anti-capitalist.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 19:40

  • Seattle Woman Charged After Trying To Bribe Juror With $120,000 Cash To "Inject Racism" For Non-Guilty Verdict
    Seattle Woman Charged After Trying To Bribe Juror With $120,000 Cash To “Inject Racism” For Non-Guilty Verdict

    A woman from Seattle has now officially been charged with trying to influence the outcome of a Federal trial by dropping off $120,000 in cash at the home of a juror. 

    31 year old Ladan Mohamed Ali left the cash along with instructions to convince others to acquit the defendants, according to a report from KOMO.

    KOMO reported that “the bribe also included a set of instructions to the juror to ‘inject racism into the case’ and to use the Feeding Our Future defendants’ status as immigrants to gain sympathy from other jurors.”

    Now, she, along with her co-conspirators Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, 35, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, 23, Said Shafii Farah, 42, and 24-year-old Abdulkarim Shafii Farah, will be defendants themselves.

    U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Andrew M. Luger commented: “These defendants engaged in a chilling attack on our justice system. They sought to buy a juror and use her to infiltrate the jury with their own false arguments – arguments that had nothing to do with the evidence or the law.”

    Prosecutors added: “As part of the scheme, the conspirators decided to target Juror 52 because she was the youngest juror and they believed her to be the only juror of color. The conspirators conducted online research to obtain Juror 52’s personal information, including her home address and information about her background and family members.” 

    “They conducted surveillance of Juror 52 to confirm her home address and obtain information about Juror 52’s daily habits,” they said.

    The indictment read: “Ladan Ali handed the gift bag to a relative of juror 52 and explained there would be more money if juror 52 voted to acquit the defendants.”

    “Fortunately for all of us, juror 52 could not be bought and she terminated their scheme. It is an obvious and blatant attempt to enflame the jury so they disregard their duty to render justice based on the evidence. Through this blueprint for acquittal, the defendants made it clear they wanted to infiltrate the jury not only with a bribe, but with a well-thought out plan to corrupt our system and undermine the rule of law.”

    On June 2, the night before closing arguments in the trial, Ali and Farah drove to a juror’s house with bribe money in gift bags, according to the indictment.

    The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota told KOMO News that Ladan Ali is not in custody and is expected to self-surrender for an initial federal court appearance later this week.

    ABC News reported that this trial was the first in the Feeding Our Future fraud case, where dozens are accused of misusing federal child nutrition funds during the COVID-19 pandemic to buy luxury items.

    The DOJ has charged 47 defendants in the $250-million fraud scheme involving misappropriated and laundered funds from the Federal Child Nutrition Program.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 19:20

  • VDH: The Lies We Have Lived Through
    VDH: The Lies We Have Lived Through

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

    “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” 

    – Often attributed to Abraham Lincoln

    After last Thursday’s debate, Biden himself laid to rest the Democratic lie that he was robust and in control of his faculties. In truth, he demonstrated to the nation that he is a sad, failing octogenarian who could not perform any job in America other than apparently the easy task of President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief in charge of our nuclear codes.

    In 2019, Democratic primary candidates often hit rival Joe Biden for his apparent senior moments and incoherence.

    During the 2020 campaign, Biden often became in bizarre fashion animated and nasty (“you ain’t black”/“fat”/“lying dog-faced pony soldier”/“junkie”).

    His “corn pop” stories were grotesque and had a senile accentuation of his earlier “super-predator” and “clean” black riffs.

    As president, his mental decline progressed geometrically, in the sense that every three months, Biden became far, far worse than during the prior 90 days. His handlers long ago had determined that masking his feebleness at the expense of the security and safety of the nation was a small price to pay to retain power.

    What followed was the most comprehensive deceit in presidential history, analogous to insisting that frail and dying FDR in 1944 was just fine as the November election approached or that Woodrow Wilson was expertly running the country as he lay bedridden and near comatose.

    Any who questioned the vigorous Biden narrative was trashed as “ageist.”

    Special counsel Robert Hur was dubbed a “hack” for accurately describing Biden as so amnesiac he would win nullification acquittal from a sympathetic jury.

    An array of court sycophants periodically gave interviews, insisting that the robust Biden was smarter and wiser than ever. His press secretary, Karin Jean-Pierre, helped coin a new slur, “cheap fake,” for any who collated video and audio clips demonstrating that Biden was obviously non compos mentis. Would she say the same today after the about-face CNN panelists reviewed Biden’s serial debate lapses to support their now-opportune advocacy that he not run for reelection? Would she wish to be a passenger in a car driven by Biden?

    In sum, the “dynamic Biden” farce was finally laid to rest by a debate, but not before it had served the original leftist Faustian bargain. Under the guise of COVID, an enfeebled and stationary Biden outsourced his entire 2020 campaign to toady journalists and surrogate politicians.

    His task was to pose from his basement as the uniter, ‘good ol’ Joe from Scranton,’ serving as the pseudo-moderate veneer for the most far left agenda in recent history. In the bargain, Joe and Jill enjoyed the privileges of power and status, while they farmed out the presidency to an array of former Obama subordinates and the hard left of what is left of the old Democratic Party.

    The useful lie continued throughout his presidency, escalating in direct proportion to Joe’s mounting stumbles, brain freezes, rambling, and incomprehensible speech. When our president said something either outrageous or unfathomable, the public was to assume that it was intemperate to attribute his failures to senility.

    So, the nation became acculturated to deciphering about 60 percent of what he said and writing off the rest to his never-to-be-spoken-of disability. It was the cognitive bookend to the ruse that FDR was able to stand and walk—although far worse because being wheel-chair bound is not a limitation for a president, whereas cognitive incapacity of Biden’s magnitude most certainly is.

    The Biden lie was the crown jewel of a number of other left-wing/media fabrications. The more they spread, the more they seemed absurd, and the more they were refuted—so all the more others took their place and the more their promulgators never apologized but simply moved on to their next one. The common denominator was that all the lies, during their existence, were useful to the progressive project.

    The Russian collusion hoax helped lose Trump the 2016 popular vote. Its resumption during his presidency ate up 22 months of his administration during the Special Counsel Robert Mueller farce.

    The October surprise laptop disinformation lie may have cost Trump the 2020 election. But it was concocted so that Joe Biden could stare at the debate camera and swear to the American people that Trump was a liar, citing “51 intelligence authorities” who insisted Hunter Biden’s laptop was a likely hallmark of Russian disinformation.

    We were asked to believe that clever Russian disinformationists fabricated all the sick photos and selfies of poor Hunter, knew the Biden family’s intimate tensions and fault lines as evidenced in the computer’s texts and emails, and were able to package and deposit the computer to either a Russian operative masquerading as a computer repairment or have it delivered to the supposedly useful idiot. The truth was, the FBI had the laptop during the debate and had long verified its authenticity—and thus kept mum as its brethren intelligence apparatchiks lied to the nation.

    What the untruth did not fully reveal was that Biden’s campaign foreign policy guru, Anthony Blinken (the current Secretary of State), cooked up the entire ruse. He enlisted former CIA grandee Mike Morell, who then rounded up on spec the confessed lying duo of John Brennan and James Clapper, who in turn drafted still more deceivers, among them the once esteemed Leon Panetta.

    And the lie worked perfectly as envisioned, far better than even Russian “collusion.” The nation was deceived into believing that the “asset” Trump was reduced once again to colluding with Putin to enlist his former KGB soldiers to smear the upright Biden family and thus warp yet another election.

    Note that all these lies were never retracted. No one ever apologizes. No one is ever punished, even when the lie is given under oath. No one ever has any regrets. And no one ever has any hesitation to lie again, given the utility of the prior untruth.

    We were told by the deceitful Alejandro Mayorkas that the border was “secure” as he deliberately destroyed it and welcomed in over 10 million illegal aliens. That lie survived even the absurdity of years of nightly news clips (“cheap fakes?”) of thousands swarming an open border. And it died only when the 2024 election approached and the Biden administration read polls showing that a vast majority wanted the border closed and illegal entrants deported. Then suddenly, the lie that the border was secure transmogrified into the back-up lie that “Republicans would not help us close the now-insecure border.” Translated into Orwellian terms, the border that was crossed by 10 million was always secure but could have been made even more secure had Republicans joined Democrats to secure what was already “secure.”

    We live in an era of lies. Sometimes they are purely political, like the Charlottesville “both sides” yarn. And sometimes they change history, like the fabrications that bats and pangolins, not the communist Chinese Wuhan virology lab, birthed the COVID-19 virus, or the Anthony Fauci contortion that his offices did not fund and help out, stealthily and in circumvention of U.S. law, deadly gain-of-function virology research in communist China.

    Yet another lie was institutionalized: the January 6 riot was a full-fledged, carefully planned armed insurrection to overthrow the government. In contrast, the four months in 2020 of killing, assault, arson, and looting that saw over 35 dead, 1,500 injured law enforcement officers, $2 billion in damage, and a federal courthouse, a police precinct and a historic church torched were “cries of the heart” from the oppressed and victimized.

    Those untruths ensured that hundreds of mostly naïve protestors who showed up in the capitol soon became convicted felons serving long sentences, while the 14,000 arrested for the 2020 mayhem were mostly released as overzealous but otherwise sympathetic activists.

    These lies changed the course of the nation. They are birthed by the incestuous marriage of a Washington-New York political culture and a corrupt media.

    The purveyors are Juvenal’s “who will police the police.” They are the administrative overseers in the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and the various cabinets and agencies. They feel they are exempt from any consequences for the damage they do, given that in their day jobs they operate as judges, jury and executioners.

    Finally, while all governments lie, the left is far more adroit at it because, in their any-means-necessary/the-ends-justify-the-means credo, they spread supposedly good “lies” that stop the Hitlerian Trump, neuter the creepy deplorables/irredeemables/chumps/clingers or save the good people from the MAGA anti-vaxers and assorted yahoos.

    Will the lies continue?

    Indeed, they will thrive until the people slash the administrative state of its unaccountable and unelected “experts”; until they indict those in the future like Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, John Brennan and their brethren who lie under oath or to federal investigators; until they ostracize and utterly discredit those like Mayorkas, Fauci, and the Bidens whose deceptions took hostage an entire nation; and until they tune out a bankrupt media, the power cord of the entire Pravda enterprise.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 19:00

  • Visualizing US Wealth By Generation
    Visualizing US Wealth By Generation

    In 2023, American Baby Boomers owned 52% of the country’s net wealth despite comprising only 20% of the population.

    Based on Federal Reserve data, this graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, illustrates the distribution of wealth in the United States from 1990 to 2023 by generation.

    Generations are defined by birth year:

    • Silent Generation (born before 1946)

    • Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964)

    • Gen Xers (born 1965-1980)

    • Millennials (born 1981-1996)

    Baby Boomers Own Over Half of the Wealth

    Baby Boomers are often considered one of the luckier generations in terms of timing.

    Most did not experience wars and benefited from strong economic growth driven by falling interest rates, a roaring stock market, global monetary expansion, and high earnings. Consequently, this group’s wealth grew from $4.5 trillion in 1990 to $76.2 trillion in 2023.

    Meanwhile, Gen X’s share of American wealth rose from 15% in 2013 to 26% in 2023. In contrast, with most of the cohort over 80 years old, the Silent Generation saw its share of the national wealth total drop from 79% in 1990 to 13% in 2024.

    Contrary to their ‘broke generation’ label, millennials have defied expectations. They saw their wealth reach historic highs after the COVID-19 pandemic, amassing more wealth by their 40s than previous generations. In a significant leap, millennials’ share of wealth in America increased from a modest 1.4% to a promising 9.2% between 1990 and 2023.

    If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out this graphic, which shows the retirement savings that Americans currently hold.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 18:40

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Jul 01

Today’s News 1st July 2024

  • Keep An Eye On Ukraine's Military Buildup Along The Belarusian Border
    Keep An Eye On Ukraine’s Military Buildup Along The Belarusian Border

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

    Belarusian and Russian media have been flooded with reports over the past few days about newfound tensions along the Ukrainian-Belarusian border caused by Ukraine’s alleged military buildup there:

    * “Drone flying from Ukraine deep into Belarus shot down by border service”

    * “Stash with improvised explosive device parts found at Belarusian-Ukrainian border”

    * “Belarusian army deploys MLRS Polonez squadron to cover sections of state border”

    * “Passages open to sabotage, reconnaissance forces in minefields on Ukraine side of Belarusian border”

    * “Defense Ministry on provocations at Ukraine border: Ready to use all forces to defend Belarus”

    * “Additional forces deployed to detect drones at Belarusian-Ukrainian border”

    * “Belarusian military warns of rising tensions on border with Ukraine”

    * “All kinds of measures taken to contain complicated situation at Belarus’ southern border”

    * “Belarusian air defenses register increased number of Ukrainian drones”

    These follow Belarus’ concerns over the past year since the start of Kiev’s ultimately failed counteroffensive that it might soon be directly attacked by Ukraine and/or NATO:

    * 25 May 2023: “NATO Might Consider Belarus To Be ‘Low-Hanging Fruit’ During Kiev’s Upcoming Counteroffensive”

    * 1 June 2023: “The Union State Expects That The NATO-Russian Proxy War Will Expand”

    * 14 June 2023: “Lukashenko Strongly Hinted That He Expects Belgorod-Like Proxy Incursions Against Belarus”

    * 14 December 2023: “Belarus Is Bracing For Belgorod-Like Terrorist Incursions From Poland”

    * 19 February 2024: “The Western-Backed Foreign-Based Belarusian Opposition Is Plotting Territorial Revisions”

    * 21 February 2024: “Is The West Plotting A False Flag Provocation In Poland To Blame On Russia & Belarus?”

    * 26 April 2024: “Analyzing Belarus’ Claim Of Recently Thwarting Drone Attacks From Lithuania”

    These aforementioned developments coincide with rising NATO-Russian tensions as the West intensifies their proxy war in Ukraine out of desperation to achieve some sort of strategic victory despite the odds:

    * 24 May: “The US Is Now More Openly Allowing Ukraine To Use Its Arms To Strike Inside Of Russia”

    * 26 May: “The US Is Playing A Dangerous Game Of Nuclear Chicken With Russia”

    * 30 May: “Putin Expects NATO, And Possibly Poland In Particular, To Escalate The Proxy War In Ukraine”

    * 31 May: “Is Ukraine Going Rogue Or Did It Attack Russia’s Early Warning Systems With American Approval?”

    * 11 June: “Kiev’s Plan To Store F-16s In NATO States Raises The Risk Of World War III”

    * 15 June: “The US’ Security Pact With Ukraine Is A Consolation For Not Approving Its NATO Membership”

    * 16 June: “Duda’s Call For ‘Decolonizing’ Russia Proved That Putin Was Right To Warn About This Plot”

    * 21 June: “More Air Defenses & Cross-Border Strikes Won’t Change The Ukrainian Conflict’s Dynamics”

    * 27 June: “The US’ Reported PMC Plan For Ukraine Amounts To A Partial Conventional Intervention”

    * 28 June: “The ‘EU Defense Line’ Is The Latest Euphemism For The New Iron Curtain”

    All the aforementioned insight will now be summarized for the reader’s convenience before analyzing the significance of Ukraine’s alleged military buildup along the Belarusian border.

    In brief, Russia has already won the “race of logistics”/“war of attrition” with NATO, being so far ahead that it’s now producing three times as many shells as that bloc at a quarter of the cost.

    Russia is therefore poised to achieve a military breakthrough across the front lines, which its fresh push into Ukraine’s Kharkov Region is expected to facilitate by stretching the defender’s forces even further. In that event, however, NATO might conventionally intervene in order to asymmetrically partition Ukraine.

    The reason why this escalation sequence is so dangerous is because Russia might fear that any large-scale NATO invasion force that potentially crosses the Dnieper could be preparing to attack its new regions. The NATO-Russian security dilemma is so serious right now as a result of the previously enumerated escalations that such intentions couldn’t confidently be ruled out if that happens. Russia might therefore resort to tactical nukes as a last resort out of self-defense, ergo its recent drills.

    President Putin would prefer for that dark scenario not to unfold, which his why he recently shared a generous ceasefire proposal in an attempt to avert it. Ukraine predictably refused to withdraw from the administrative borders of Russia’s new regions like he requested and is instead reportedly building up its forces along the Belarusian border in preparation of a possible offensive.

    While President Putin remains open to compromise, Zelensky clearly remains recalcitrant, likely due to fears about his political future.

    Ukraine’s potential Belarusian operation appears predicated on Kiev’s calculation that Russia might overreact in some way that prompts the conventional NATO intervention that Zelensky is hoping for or redirects troops from the existing front lines to this new one and thus creates an opening to exploit.

    The first could occur if it resorts to tactical nukes as a last resort in self-defense or launches another offensive from Belarus, the latter of which La Repubblica reported in early May would trigger a NATO intervention.

    As for the second dimension of Kiev’s risky calculation, policymakers might expect significant on-the-ground gains that could force Russia to prioritize this new front over the existing ones, thus relieving enormous pressure upon Ukraine. In that event, it could exploit whatever openings might emerge to go back on the offensive along the eastern and/or southern fronts, which could conveniently occur before the next NATO Summit from 9-11 July and thus provide a major boost to Western morale.

    This gamble could also fail and tremendously backfire on Ukraine, however, such as if Russia does indeed soon make a military breakthrough along the front lines and then steamrolls through the rest of its new regions precisely because Kiev misallocated so many of its forces to the Belarusian border. Furthermore, even though NATO might conventionally intervene in its support, Ukraine could lose a lot more land east of the Dnieper if the bloc stays on the western bank in order to manage its security dilemma with Russia.

    At the same time, it’s also possible that Western intelligence identified a serious weak point somewhere along the Belarusian border and told Ukraine to exploit it, in which case this gamble might at least partially pay off. It’s premature to predict its success or lack thereof either way, but in any case, observers would do well to keep a close eye on the Belarusian-Ukrainian border since Kiev’s military buildup appears to be something serious and not just a feint to “psyche-out” Russia.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 07/01/2024 – 02:00

  • The Hidden History Of Robert Mueller's Right-Wing Terror Factory, Part 1
    The Hidden History Of Robert Mueller’s Right-Wing Terror Factory, Part 1

    Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

    In 2007, Orlando residents were furious to discover that an FBI informant had organized a neo-Nazi rally through one of the city’s mostly black neighborhoods a year earlier.

    “To come into a predominantly black community, which could have resulted in great harm to the black community? I would hate to be part of a game,” Orlando City Councilwoman Daisy Lynum said at the time, calling for a “full-scale investigation” into the matter.

    However, an FBI agent testified that his informant participated in the event, but didn’t organize it. The city’s uproar passed without a public investigation, full-scale or otherwise—until now.

    Thanks to a trove of previously unpublicized law enforcement records and interviews with several players involved, Headline USA can reveal that the Orlando neo-Nazi rally was indeed organized by the FBI. The Orlando event also seems to have been part of a larger program to hold Nazi rallies across the country. And according to FBI records, the bureau sponsored those events despite knowing they led to an increase in the number of card-carrying Nazis in America.

    Moreover, the FBI’s Nazi rallies led to a much larger operation to target right-wing groups. Dubbed “Primitive Affliction,” the operation featured a motorcycle front group, rogue undercover agents, Outlaw bikers, Satanists, bomb-makers and a fugitive on the lam in Mexico.

    To top it off, the FBI’s Nazi operation was briefed to the highest levels of the bureau, including to then-Director Robert Mueller, according to at least one record unearthed by this publication.

    Little has been written about Primitive Affliction outside of the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center—biased groups that trained agents in the case, according to the newly revealed records.

    But despite the lack of publicity, Primitive Affliction covers a crucial time in right-wing extremist history. It began where the FBI’s 1990s-era cases against the Aryan Nations trailed off, and it helped shape the neo-Nazi groups that would march at the 2017 deadly Charlottesville Unite the Right rally—an event that inspired Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential candidacy.

    Along with big-picture history, the records from Primitive Affliction reveal malfeasance by FBI agents and officers who today hold higher positions at the bureau.

    The FBI declined to comment. Mueller didn’t respond to an email about Primitive Affliction.

    Fabricating Fascists

    About a year after the 2006 Orlando neo-Nazi rally, the FBI source who organized the event, David Gletty, had his cover blown in open court. When the Orlando Sentinel reported that Gletty organized the march, his handler reportedly denied the accusation—saying that the informant marched, but didn’t lead the rally.

    But Gletty told this publication a different story. He said the FBI instructed him to organize the rally for two main purposes: to raise Gletty’s profile in the neo-Nazi movement, and to allow the FBI to conduct surveillance of the Nazis who attended the rally.

    In fact, Gletty told this publication the FBI was staging Nazi rallies across the country with the similar goals in mind: to raise the profiles of their own informants while building a database of Nazis to track.

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    “At the time, the FBI just before that was having me put on Nazi protests, and there were Nazi protests that were handled by the FBI, and operatives like myself,” he said.

    Gletty’s statement is a bold one, and shouldn’t be taken at face value. An undercover operative and private investigator, he said the FBI trained him to lie professionally.

    But in this case, Gletty’s allegation is borne out by the evidence.

    For starters, there’s the fact that the group that Gletty marched with in Orlando, the National Socialist Movement, or NSM, was founded in the 1970s by an FBI informant—a fact revealed by Headline USA last September. That FBI informant, Robert Brannen, was active during the bureau’s COINTELPRO era, and he chaired the NSM for nearly a decade.

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    Other former NSM members have also accused the FBI of staging the mid-2000s rallies. For instance, according to former NSM member and current prison inmate Bill White, the FBI sponsored the 2005 Toledo rally, which would be one of the most violent racial protests until 2017 Charlottesville.

    “In October 2005, FBI [confidential human source] Jeff Schoep asked me to go to Toledo, Ohio, to help organize a ‘March Against Black Crime’ by what were supposed to be ‘local residents,’ but were really federal CHSs,” White said in an October 2020 sworn declaration, referring to Schoep, who led the NSM from the 1990s until shortly after the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.

    While there’s no smoking-gun evidence that Schoep was an FBI informant when he led the NSM, numerous other neo-Nazis have accused him of being one. There are also FBI records from the early 2000s showing he at least spoke to agents once, and perhaps the strongest evidence is that he now works openly as a “reformed Nazi” with groups sponsored by the DHS, FBI and other law enforcement organizations.

    Along with his accusations that Schoep was a fed, White also described the Toledo rally as being similar to what would happen in Charlottesville 12 years later—with the local cops and FBI allowing the neo-Nazis to clash with the left-wing counter-protestors.

    “On the day of the march, the Toledo Police and the FBI occupied [a nearby parking lot] and ordered myself and the NSM to use [another] parking lot. I and a small team from the NSM  arrived before the Communists to secure the location; no police were present at this time …,” White said.

    “About an hour later, police began to deploy, and, directed NSM members to enter [their parking lot] by driving through the mob. This started problems … After the police line formed, the mob then attacked the police, not us.”

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    A March 2006 FBI report about the Toledo rally largely matches White’s description of events—though it omitted the fact that law enforcement failed to keep the Nazis and counter-protestors separate.

    “Before the NSM could begin their march, local residents and counter-demonstrators began throwing rocks and bricks at vehicles, local residences and businesses. Toledo police responded by firing tear gas into the gathered counter-demonstrators and local residents. Toledo police advised the NSM to leave the area for their own protection and the NSM complied,” the report said.

    “Local residents and counter-demonstrators continued with the clash with the police, looting a store and setting fire to a local bar. This rally and riot, and the attendant media coverage for the NSM, was deemed a great success by the majority of the white supremacy movement,” the report added.

    “NSM reported increased fundraising and increased applications for membership immediately following these events,” the report concluded.

    That last sentence in the FBI report is particularly telling. It demonstrates that even if the FBI didn’t stage the Toledo event, it knew that neo-Nazi rallies increased the number of card-carrying Nazis in America—and it chose to stage one in Orlando via Gletty anyway.

    If all that evidence—Gletty and White’s statements, the evidence that Schoep was an informant, and the smoking-gun evidence that NSM was founded by an informant—weren’t enough, Headline USA also unearthed a document showing that yet another NSM Nazi rally was organized by an informant.

    That document, a 2006 FBI report, reveals that a November 2005 “rally against violence” in Kingston, New York was organized by the notorious white supremacist talk show host and former NSM affiliate Hal Turner (his name is redacted in the report, but his identity is corroborated by a separate ADL article).

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    The Kingston rally held by Turner—who outed himself as an informant in 2009 after he was charged with threatening public officials—was apparently uneventful. An ADL report from the event said it drew about 50 supporters and 100 counterprotestors. The low turnout may have been because Turner was already suspected in the neo-Nazi movement of being an informant due to his provocative calls for violence.

    “He has alienated some fellow racists in the past by making threats against them and because others consider him a liability for having urged violence against public figures,” the ADL’s 2005 article noted. “In fact, some white supremacists have said that they would only attend the event if Turner were not the one in charge.”

    Turner didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

    Setting the Stage

    In a vacuum, the FBI’s mid-2000s neo-Nazi events had little impact on national politics. However, as this series will show, they set the stage for an even larger, and arguably more sinister, FBI operation to target right-wing groups.

    Indeed, after Gletty staged the 2006 Orlando rally and had his cover blown nearly a year later, the FBI apparently decided to up the stakes by creating a neo-Nazi motorcycle FBI front group. That front group, the 1st SS Kavallerie Brigade Motorcycle Division—named after a horse-mounted unit of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS—will be the subject of the next article in this series.

    Also in the next article, Headline USA will reveal the document showing then-Director Mueller’s involvement in the operation, which was one of the first right-wing FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force operations in post-9/11 history.

    Stay tuned…

    Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 23:55

  • DOJ To Offer Boeing "Sweetheart Plea Deal" For Criminal Fraud As Boeing Agrees To Buy Spirit Aero For $4.7BN
    DOJ To Offer Boeing “Sweetheart Plea Deal” For Criminal Fraud As Boeing Agrees To Buy Spirit Aero For $4.7BN

    Boeing has finally hit rock bottom.

    The US Department of Justice will charge Boeing with criminal fraud, Bloomberg reported, leaving the planemaker to choose between pleading guilty or taking the risk of going to trial, just as the company finalizes its acquisition of Spirit Aerosystems for $4.7 billion.

    Boeing has until the end of the week to decide whether to plead guilty to the charge, the department told the families of victims of two fatal 737 Max crashes and their attorneys in a meeting Sunday, Bloomberg reported citing “people who asked not to be named.”

    Yet contrary to speculation that the DOJ would seek a pound of flesh from the Chicago-based planemake, the department will only pursue a proverbial slap on the write as it informs Boeing it will have to pay an additional criminal fine of only $243.6 million on top of the $243.6 million already paid with a 2021 deferred-prosecution agreement, bringing the total amount of fine close to $500 million, or roughly the price of five of the giant paperweights better known as 737 MAX airplanes. The company will also have to hire a corporate monitor for three years, they said.

    Officials from the Justice Department’s fraud section and the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas attended the Sunday meeting, according to an email seen by Bloomberg. Paul Cassell, an attorney representing the crash victims’ families, called the offer the department plans to make to Boeing a “sweetheart plea deal.”

    “The deal will not acknowledge, in any way, that Boeing’s crime killed 346 people,” he said in an email. “The families will strenuously object to this plea deal.”

    The fine the department will seek falls far short of a nearly $25 billion fine the families requested — with the possibility of suspending $14 billion to $22 billion of that if Boeing devotes those funds to an independent corporate monitor and improvements to its safety programs. In fact, the total punishment is far less than the monetary damages slapped on Alex Jones, even though last time we checked nobody died as a result of Jones’ newscast.

    Sweetheart deal or not, a guilty plea to criminal charges would mark a low-point in Boeing’s century-long history and a stunning development for a company that was once renowned for its cautious, straight-laced culture which has since devolved into a DEI-driven, virtue signaling nightmare that has culminated with planes “designed by clowns…supervised by monkeys.”

    According to Bloomberg the plea deal “raises concerns over US government contracts for the company at a time when Boeing needs its defense division to counteract plunging revenue at its commercial airplane business.” Of course, that’s not even remotely true since the deep state is intimately involved in using taxpayer funds to pay off contractors such as Boeing for perpetuating the US war machine, while it collects its 10% commission in perpetuity.

    The meeting comes after the Justice Department determined the planemaker violated the 2021 deferred-prosecution agreement struck between Boeing and the government in the waning days of the Trump Administration. The deal allowed Boeing to avoid criminal prosecution as long as it met certain conditions. But in May, the department concluded the company had failed to meet a requirement to implement an effective compliance program to prevent and detect violations of US fraud laws. Boeing told the DOJ that it disagreed with the finding.

    At the same time, the planemaker is in the midst of a leadership shakeup as it searches for a new chief executive officer to take over for Dave Calhoun, who plans to step down from the role later this year but not before collecting a $33 million bonus for… it’s not exactly clear what.

    And just to make it even more difficult for outside observers to keep track of things, on Sunday, Boeing agreed to acquire Spirit AeroSystems for $4.7 billion, Reuters reported citing two people familiar with the matter said, ending months of talks over a deal the U.S. planemaker hopes will help ease a spiralling safety crisis (spoiler alert: it won’t).

    Boeing will pay $37.25 per share for Spirit Aero, in an all-stock deal, after the boards of Boeing and Spirit met on Sunday and agreed to terms, and an official announcement is likely early on Monday. The acquisition values Spirit at around $4.7 billion.

    The deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals, would result in the breakup of Spirit, with some of the Kansas-based supplier’s assets going to French planemaker Airbus.

    Boeing is trying to move past a year of difficulties sparked by a Jan. 5 mid-air blowout of a door plug on a new 737 MAX 9 jet that exposed myriad safety and quality problems. Those issues have led to a substantial slowdown in output at Boeing – rippling across the global commercial aviation industry.

    And because two wrongs can somehow make a plane that flies, Spirit – which was spun off from Boeing in 2005 in one of a series of moves that critics say were emblematic of a focus on cost-cutting over quality – is the manufacturer of the defective door plug. So instead of punshing it, Boeing is rewarding its supplier by acquiring it just to make sure its DEI-infused workforce can kill even more people.

    Boeing made the decision to buy back Spirit in the aftermath of the Jan. 5 incident, which took place on an Alaska Airlines-operated flight, as part of an effort to reform its safety problems and shore up its production line. Earlier, Boeing discussed paying $35.50 per share in cash for Spirit, but this was raised to $37.25 when the agreement shifted to stock. The terms of a parallel deal for Spirit to sell its Europe-focused operations to Airbus were not immediately clear.

    Buying Spirit Aero will not immediately resolve Boeing’s problems. Following the January door plug incident, the Federal Aviation Administration imposed a cap on production of Boeing’s best-selling MAX jets.

    And with faith in Boeing among the flying public at an all time low, the once iconic US company has been losing market share to Airbus for years, and it is still dealing with the aftermath of twin crashes that killed nearly 350 people and forced a grounding of the 737 MAX.

    Those crashes led to the appointment of current CEO Dave Calhoun, who was brought in to resolve the problems at the manufacturer, but who will leave later this year with the company under greater regulatory scrutiny and with a reputation that has taken a beating.

    U.S. senators on June 18 sharply criticized Calhoun for the planemaker’s safety issues and repeatedly questioned him about his salary. Some airlines have vented their frustration with Boeing publicly and privately due to delivery delays and the company’s ongoing issues.

    Boeing recently submitted a comprehensive plan to the FAA addressing “systemic quality-control issues” at the company. We just can’t wait to find out what percentage of its workforce will have to be women and minorities after the “quality control” overhaul.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 23:20

  • Confidence In U.S. Universities Plunges To New Lows, As Young People, Women And Democrats Sour On Academia
    Confidence In U.S. Universities Plunges To New Lows, As Young People, Women And Democrats Sour On Academia

    Who could have guessed that after multiple Ivy League university presidents publicly humiliated themselves during congressional testimony – and then it broke that Harvard’s president, among others were likely involved in plagiarising key parts of their “academic” work – that confidence in U.S. universities has plunged to a new low?

    The data is according to two new national polls commissioned by FIRE and conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Americans were asked “How much confidence, if any, do you have in U.S. colleges and universities?” 

    In FIRE’s May poll, 42% of Americans expressed “some” confidence in U.S. colleges and universities, similar to Gallup’s 40%. However, fewer Americans reported “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence (28% vs. 36% in Gallup), while more expressed “very little” or “none at all” (30% vs. 22% in Gallup).

    When compared to other institutions, confidence in higher education is on par with the U.S. Supreme Court (27%) and banks (26%). However, Americans have much higher confidence in small businesses (65%) and the military (60%), and much lower confidence in Congress (8%), television news (14%), and the criminal justice system (17%).

    Confidence in higher education varies by political affiliation. Over 40% of liberals and Democrats reported high confidence in colleges, a stark contrast to only 12% of conservatives, 12% of Republicans, and 28% of independents.

    Notably, significant drops in confidence are seen among young adults (18-34), Democrats, and women. Confidence among 18-34-year-olds fell from 42% to 22%, among Democrats from 59% to 42%, and among women from 39% to 29%. These declines suggest growing disillusionment in groups that previously held higher confidence in higher education.

    Confidence in colleges and universities has dropped sharply since last summer, with notable declines following encampment protests in April and May. In February, 31% of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in these institutions, which fell to 28% in May. The percentage reporting “very little” confidence remained at 30%, but those with “none at all” rose from 7% to 10%.

    Encampment protests, particularly those highlighting the war in Gaza, have coincided with these drops. Major subgroups, including liberals, Democrats, young adults (18-34), college graduates, Republicans, white Americans, and women, all showed reduced confidence since February. No subgroup in May reported a majority with high confidence.

    The protests and the responses to them likely influenced these declines. This erosion of trust mirrors broader skepticism towards science and perceptions of universities as politically biased and financially burdensome.

    And if you think these results are ugly, just wait until the public hears what’s being taught in economics courses…

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 22:45

  • Autism Reversal In Twin Girls Through Lifestyle And Environmental Changes: New Study
    Autism Reversal In Twin Girls Through Lifestyle And Environmental Changes: New Study

    Authored by Emma Suttie, D.Ac, AP (emphasis ours),

    Findings from a recent case study show that personalized lifestyle and environmental changes successfully reversed autism symptoms in fraternal twin girls diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The study appeared in the Journal of Personalized Medicine.

    The study also reviewed existing literature on the impact of lifestyle and environmental modifications on ASD, supporting the findings with evidence from similar cases and studies.

    (Shavlovskiy/Shutterstock)

    The Study Details

    The case study involved 4-year-old dizygotic twins who were diagnosed with “level 3 severity” autism spectrum disorder, which the study describes as “requiring very substantial support.” The twins were diagnosed at approximately twenty months of age.

    Dizygotic twins, or fraternal twins, result from two separate eggs (ova) being fertilized by two separate sperm. These twins are genetically similar to typical siblings but can be as different from each other as siblings born at different times. They do not share the exact same genetic material and, therefore, can look different and have different characteristics.

    The case study shows that a non-drug, personalized approach by a team of multidisciplinary clinicians successfully reduced the number and severity of ASD symptoms using a variety of methods.

    Conception

    The twins were conceived through in vitro fertilization using an egg donor and carried by a surrogate. Their father was 51 years old at the time of conception. They were born two months premature and spent several weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit. The twins received routine vaccinations at three and six months, but no further vaccination until fourteen months. The girls were given acetaminophen before and after vaccination.

    Initial Symptoms

    The girls’ parents observed some initial symptoms. One twin had sensitivity to changes, eczema, and digestive issues, and the other had problems making eye contact, babbling communication, difficulty breastfeeding, and decreased muscle tone (hypotonia).

    Both twins received breast milk (from the surrogate and their biological mother) for twelve months and had no issues with eating or sleeping.

    At twelve months, the girls stopped drinking breast milk, and the introduction of cow’s milk caused digestive as well as behavior and language problems in both girls.

    In March of 2021, the girls received the series of vaccines that had been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After this round of vaccinations, their parents noticed a worsening of some symptoms, including “significant language loss” for one of the girls, who began communicating using only single words.

    ASD Diagnosis

    Due to the worsening symptoms, the twins were evaluated for autism spectrum disorder, and both subsequently met the criteria for DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) autism spectrum disorder diagnosis.

    Lifestyle and Environmental Interventions

    After their diagnosis, the twins’ parents began a comprehensive, personalized approach to address their daughters’ condition. Their approach was holistic and non-pharmacological and considered a variety of potential environmental and biological factors influencing ASD.

    The interventions and support for both the twins and their parents began after the twins’ diagnosis at approximately twenty months of age and continued over the following two years. The following is a summary of their interventions and support:

    • The parents worked with a coach to help understand the twins’ diagnosis and gain confidence.
    • The parents learned about the “total allostatic load” concept, which links chronic stressors to disease, and used resources like webinars and forums through Epidemic Answers.
    • The parents completed the Child Health Inventory for Resilience and Prevention survey—“a comprehensive assessment of total allostatic load (cumulative effects of chronic stress on mental and physical health) among children.”
    • Made Dietary changes—They followed the Reduced Excitatory Inflammatory Diet, eliminating glutamate, gluten, casein, sugar, artificial colors, and processed foods, and focused on organic, fresh, home-cooked meals from local sources.
    • Incorporated dietary supplements—The girls took supplements that included omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins, and homeopathic remedies.
    • Differentiated the twins’ needs—Genetic variants revealed that each twin had different needs, for example, one twin needed more vitamin D, while the other needed support for neuroinflammation and detoxification.
    • The twins received various therapies, including Applied Behavior Analysis, speech therapy, and occupational therapy focused on neuro-sensory motor reflex integration.
    • The family addressed toxins in their home, using an environmental consultant to evaluate air quality, moisture levels, and water damage.
    • One twin had osteopathic care on the recommendation of a developmental optometrist resulting in notable improvements in communication and overall disposition.

    Throughout the study, the children’s parents shared insights about their journey, “Conventional statistics have stacked the odds against the ability to recover a child from an ASD diagnosis. Our approach was therefore focused on following a nonconventional, holistic understanding of each daughter’s bio-individual needs, exploring root cause and designing customized support,” they said.

    “We chose practitioners who were aligned in our belief in our daughters’ intrinsic ability to heal given the right support.”

    Results

    Due primarily to the implementation of lifestyle and environmental changes over two years, the twins achieved a reversal of their diagnoses of level 3 autism spectrum disorder. Significant improvements were seen in their social interactions, communication skills, and behavioral patterns.

    There were also dramatic improvements in scores using the Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist—a 77-question assessment tool used to evaluate the effectiveness of ASD treatment, with lower scores indicating improvement in symptoms.

    Both twins “improved dramatically,” with one going from a score of 76 to 36 in seven months, and the other from 43 to 4 over the same period.

    The study notes that the improvements were so profound the pediatrician exclaimed that one of the girls had undergone “a kind of miracle.”

    The combined interventions, along with the commitment of the children’s parents, led to a “dramatic improvement and reversal of ASD diagnoses” for the twins.

    Beth Lambert is founder and executive director of Epidemic Answers, a website made up of parents, clinicians, researchers, authors, and wellness experts dedicated to helping kids heal from health issues. She is also one of the study authors.

    Mrs. Lambert spoke with The Epoch Times and explained that there is hope for children with ASD and other conditions as well as resources for parents to support them through the process.

    “We’re doing research to try to gather evidence that many of these conditions are reversible. But also we’re trying to create a platform where we can give solutions to parents—we’re trying to educate them, and we have an online community [Healing Together] where we’re teaching them how to do this work themselves,” she said.

    Autism Prevalence

    According to the study, the prevalence of autism is growing with increasing speed. In the early 1990’s the number of children diagnosed with autism in the United States was 1 in 2000. Throughout the 1990s, the diagnostic criteria for autism were broadened to include a wider range of symptoms and behaviors. This expansion is reflected in updated editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

    For example, in the DSM-IV, published in 1994, the diagnostic criteria were expanded and broken into subtypes such as Asperger’s disorder, autistic disorder, and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified.

    There was a further expansion of the criteria in the DSM-5 released in 2013, which merged the previous subtypes into one unified diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, or ASD.

    These changes contributed to a significant increase in autism diagnoses in the subsequent years—however, some physicians believe that these factors alone are not enough to account for the dramatic rise in ASD diagnoses.

    According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, in 2000, 1 in 150 children had a diagnosis of ASD, but their most recent data state that in 2020, 1 in 36 children had a diagnosis of ASD, which represents more than a 300 percent increase in the last two decades.

    The study states that “Published projections estimate that even if the future prevalence of ASD remained unchanged over the next decade, there would be approximately 1 million new cases, thereby resulting in an additional $4 trillion of lifelong social costs in the United States. Furthermore, if the current rate of increase in prevalence continues, costs could reach nearly $15 trillion of lifelong costs by 2029.”

    Mrs. Lambert says, “Modern living is making our children sick, but it’s also making all of us sick—and our children are the canaries in the coal mine.”

    Final Thoughts

    The study findings suggest that environmental and lifestyle factors play a significant role in the manifestation of ASD symptoms and that targeted interventions in these areas can lead to substantial and lasting improvements—including a reversal of symptoms.

    The study authors note that the engagement of the parents or caregivers is vital to the process.

    “The commitment and leadership of well-informed parents or guardians is an essential component of the effective personalization that appears necessary for the feasibility of such improvements.”

    What the study clarifies is that treating ASD requires a personalized, multifaceted approach rather than a one-size-fits-all solution, as ASD diagnoses are as unique and complex as the individuals they affect.

    The twins’ parents agree, according to a section in the study containing their perspective.

    “Having fraternal twin daughters diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder at 20 months has given us a profound appreciation of the highly individual presentation of Autism.”

    For families dealing with an ASD diagnosis, Mrs. Lambert says “You are not alone.”

    “I want people to know that there is support for them. We have a conference [Documenting Hope] so that we can invite parents in so that they can become part of our community. We can do this together, which is working to heal our kids together.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 22:10

  • California To Help 1,700 First-Generation Homebuyers With Down Payments
    California To Help 1,700 First-Generation Homebuyers With Down Payments

    Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

    California will help 1,700 first-generation homebuyers with down payments in the second round of its Dream for All Shared Appreciation Loan program, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced June 28.

    The state program that debuted last year provides potential homebuyers with vouchers to pay up to 20 percent of a home’s value up to $150,000 to cover a down payment and closing costs. Eligible applicants need to be first-time homebuyers (haven’t owned a home in the last three years) and whose parents don’t currently own a home in the United States.

    “As part of the state’s comprehensive efforts to improve affordability, build generational wealth, and unlock access to housing, Dream for All is paving the way home for thousands of Californians,” Mr. Newsom said in a statement Friday.

    “This program is more than just financial assistance—it’s about providing a pathway for individuals to achieve their California dream.”

    The program allows low- to moderate-income families to apply for assistance.

    Due to the extremely high demand for the program, however, the California Housing Finance Agency uses a random selection process to ensure all applicants have an equal chance at receiving funding from the $255 million available for the second round of awards.

    A third-party audit is performed to certify that voucher recipients meet key program requirements, according to Mr. Newsom’s office.

    The housing finance agency plans to allocate funds across nine regions throughout the state—the Capital Region, Central Coast, Central Valley, Inland Empire, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area, and rural areas.

    Those who receive assistance have 90 days to find a home.

    The state provides a portion of the down payment in exchange for a share in the property.

    If the recipient sells or refinances the home later, they will be required to repay the initial amount of assistance, plus up to 20 percent of any increase in the home’s value.

    Program proceeds will be used to fund the next round of homeowners, according to the governor’s office.

    When the program was launched on April 3, 2023, with the passage of a bill authored by Sen. President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins, its $300 million budget was depleted within days.

    More than 2,400 first-time homebuyers qualified for the first round, according to Ms. Atkins.

    Only 2,200 families received first-round financing, the governor said Friday.

    The income limitation to qualify for the assistance is $159,000 for several counties throughout the state, including San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo.

    Los Angeles’s limit is $180,000. and Orange County has the highest income limit in Southern California at $230,000.

    The original legislation, written in 2021, proposed a $1 billion per year budget for the program for up to 10 years to assist an estimated 150,000 Californians.

    However, after some negotiations, the proposed amount dropped to $500 million in 2022 after the state faced a $25 billion budget deficit that year.

    Mr. Newsom again decreased the allocation to $300 million before the program debuted in 2023.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 21:00

  • "Outrage": Philadelphia Airport Adds Hidden 3% Surcharge To All Vendor Items
    “Outrage”: Philadelphia Airport Adds Hidden 3% Surcharge To All Vendor Items

    With the idea of an unrealized gains tax being tossed around at the Federal level, and just when you thought we couldn’t possibly conjure up any more fees, taxes, surcharges or other burdensome cash grabs, the Philadelphia Airport is calling your bluff.

    The airport spurred “outrage” this week after it was revealed that they are adding a 3% surcharge to every purchase, according to View From The Wing. As if airports weren’t already adding 50% surcharge on everything they sell there to begin with…

    According to the report the surcharge is  “to offset the employee wages and benefits” that must be paid to airport workers, but none of the money actually goes to employees. 

    View From The Wing then asks the astute question: “You might ask, why allow vendors to charge people more than the marked prices, instead of just raising prices?”

    And you already know the answer, right? It’s because the airport doesn’t let them raise prices, stating that “operators are only permitted to charge up to 15% more than a comparable street-side unit”.

    Thus, the airport then pretends that a surcharge isn’t a price increase. And while we’re fuzzy on the innerworkings of the charge, it would seem to us that it puts another set of hands in between the customer and the vendor, so we’d be doubtful about vendors having access to all of the new cash they are bringing in. You’ll have to pardon our skepticism, but just remember, we’ve covered Wall Street for decades.

    Off-airport stores have increased prices due to 20% inflation over the past four years, and airport vendors have followed suit. With price caps based on a percentage over ‘street pricing,’ the dollar gap between outside and airport prices has grown, the report says. 

    Now as a result of the charge, menu prices appear lower than they are, with a $10 item actually costing $10.30, excluding tips. This 3% surcharge, not a service charge, is attributed to the high minimum wage at the airport, which is $15.06 plus benefits.

    Despite wages being a cost factor, not all airports have the same wage levels, with some, like St. Louis, paying more. Perhaps funds from paid water refill stations could cover these costs instead.

    Vendors must disclose the surcharge but only at the point-of-sale and on receipts, meaning customers learn of it after being charged. This likely leads to lower tips as customers try to keep their total bill as expected. The 3% surcharge diverts money from worker tips to concession owners, undermining the minimum wage increase benefits for workers.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 20:25

  • Price Action Indicates Lack Of Any True Conviction Or Depth Of Liquidity
    Price Action Indicates Lack Of Any True Conviction Or Depth Of Liquidity

    By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

    Assume

    I think it was in the Bad News Bears, where I first saw that “Assume” can make an a** out of U and Me. I couldn’t get a good clip of that but did come across a scene from The Odd Couple where they went through the same dissection of the word (The Odd Couple, believe it or not, was before my time).

    I’ve chosen this word for today’s report as I think it is relevant on many fronts. I am also going back and trying to figure out how many things I “assume” that I should recheck. We will use presume as well, which seems like a less severe version of assume. Finally, we will discuss “mirroring” once again, as this could be very important in the coming weeks.

    Markets

    Last weekend we wrote about Fragility in a One Stock, Stock Market, and we followed up on Thursday with One Trick Pony. While much of the focus is on the difficulties and risks of interpreting broad market signals in a market that is led by a handful of stocks, we can probably rephrase it in terms of assumptions and presumptions. “Normally” we see X and can interpret Y. In some groups, there has been a lot of discussion of co-movement versus correlation. In this case, correlation is more persistent and there is an element of causation, as opposed to a few things that seem to move together from time to time. I’d lump Bitcoin and almost anything in this category, as somedays it seems very correlated to big tech, and others it beats completely to its own drum – a drum that is getting weaker, but more on that later this week.

    Then we can add “passive” to the mix. The large “passive” rebalancing in XLK is over, but in general, for the largest indices, every inflow and outflow is disproportionately (by historical standards) impacting a small percentage of the stocks in the index.

    For now, I’m sticking with the overall sentiment being one of “greedy, but less greedy than before.”

    Monday’s large sell-off in the Nasdaq 100 was completely reversed on Tuesday. The index moved higher Wednesday and Thursday, only to wind up fractionally down on the week, as stocks faded into the close on Friday. Maybe I’m alone in struggling with this price action, but it does seem indicative of a lack of any true conviction or depth of liquidity (in either direction).

    We “presumed” or concluded (or guessed) that the debate would highlight the deficit and the fact that neither candidate is particularly serious about getting it under control, let alone balancing the budget.

    In terms of being right for the wrong reasons, the 10-year Treasury yield closed at 4.4%, smack in the middle of our 4.3% to 4.5% range. But it had nothing to do with the debate (based on the trading during and after the debate). It had absolutely nothing to do with the economic data, as inflation data came in nicely (should have been priced in), and Michigan inflation expectations were surprisingly down (not priced in, but easily ignored). In any case, we were at 4.26% before the market rolled over.

    The Nasdaq 100 decided to follow Treasury prices and moved almost in lockstep with them. Whether there was causation or not remains to be seen. It was month-end and quarter-end, so that could have had an impact, though normally the “rebalancing” trades create both demand and supply for stocks/bonds. However, both were for sale. One “assumption” many use is that month-end is good for bonds, as index trackers “extend” duration into the close. That didn’t occur, again, making us wary of assumptions and rules of thumb. Adding to that, NVDA, which has been one of our main “tells” was higher for most of the day, before finishing the day lower.

    Do we bounce on Monday as we start the new quarter? Or has momentum lost enough steam that selling continues? Will asset managers slow their purchases or sell now that they have finalized what they show clients on their quarter-end statement? I remain focused on the 50-day moving averages for the broad indices, which would indicate more selling to come.

    Oil behaved differently. It traded strongly into the open, sold off with the economic data, and while finishing lower on the day, it had support into the close (unlike stocks or bonds). We will have more to come on oil as the best geopolitical risk trade.

    Elections and Debates

    European elections are nearing, and I’m leaning towards them causing some market hiccups in Europe. I’d avoid European risk here, and those elections could add pressure to U.S. markets.

    While we are non-partisan here at Academy, it is impossible to ignore the debate. While it didn’t seem to have any immediate market impact, it is difficult to know if it had any influence on markets over the course of the day (I’d like to claim I was right and the debate was why Treasuries sold off, but that is a stretch).

    There are two things that I think I can safely say about the debate:

    • Based on betting data, we saw President Biden’s odds decline, noticeably, but former President Trump’s odds increased marginally. Basically, the betters were taking chips off the Biden table, and spreading them around, not just throwing them all to Trump. I used RealClearPolling (the link seems ok, but I wouldn’t bother clicking it without a good VPN). It seemed comprehensive and in line with other reports I’ve seen. I do not know how easily manipulated the betting markets are (e.g., depth of liquidity). So, you can take this with a grain of salt, but I do think that we’ve seen a change in how people are thinking about the upcoming election.

    • We can now see why the media has been very careful to say “presumptive” nominee, as there was a lot of chatter, from sources I would consider pro-Biden, that some consideration should be given to rethinking the Democratic ticket (which seems supported by the betting odds).

    I don’t think this is what drove markets on Friday, as the day wore on, but I do think it is important from a geopolitical risk perspective.

    Assumptions and “Mirroring”

    We have discussed the concept of “mirroring” in many different reports. It is the “problem” that intelligence officers face when trying to extrapolate what an adversary might do. It is extremely difficult not to “mirror” your thoughts and perspectives when analyzing an adversary. It is one of the reasons why most military exercises have “red teams” – teams that play the role of opposition. Trying to gameplay things “properly” is important so that you are facing, in practice and simulation, the opponent that you will face on the battlefield.

    The concept of “mirroring” or making incorrect assumptions is likely part of why Academy, with our geopolitical insight, has not only been correct on our trajectory with China but was also predicting it well ahead of time. We cut through some of the “mirroring” issues many seem to face. It is certainly one element of our The Threat of Made By China 2025.

    But today, we are revisiting this concept, because it may prove important in understanding how our adversaries/competitors may take the debate.

    • China (Xi), Russia (Putin), Iran (Khamenei), and North Korea (Kim) are all autocrats. They are in charge. What they say goes. While they likely “understand” at some level, how our House of Representatives and Senate work and how the Supreme Court has influence, it may be difficult for them to comprehend that the president (with “Executive Powers”) doesn’t have the same freedom of action that they do. It seems like there is at least a potential that these actors (and some others across the globe) may view the criticism of Biden’s performance as something bigger than it is.
    • The U.S. media was (and is) completely domestically focused at the moment. U.S. media coverage always tends to be “parochial” (relatively small domestic events/human interest stories often take priority over potentially much more important events occurring globally). However, the U.S. media and social media are being dominated by the debate and the election.
      • To the extent any of these actors were planning on influencing U.S. elections, they probably already have some elements in place.
      • It seems plausible, that having watched the Ukraine funding debate and the relationship with Israel evolve since October 7th, any bad actor has potentially added some new influencing tools to their tool kit.

    A combination of misunderstanding how the U.S. works and overconfidence in their ability to win a misinformation campaign may give these bad actors the incentive to act sooner than later.

    In our recent Geopolitical Risks – Perception vs Reality we highlighted “wildcard risk.” The intensity and variety of geopolitical risks already seemed high (something we’ve mentioned in recent reports), and it seems that it is necessary to increase our estimate of geopolitical risk after Thursday.

    The concern is that some adversary, or competitor, will try to take advantage of what they perceive as an opportunity, with the president facing some new questions, even from supporters.

    The common denominators between these countries (and their likely actions) are commodities and trade.

    I want to own energy and commodity related assets now (the commodities, but also the stocks of companies in those industries). Since I’m worried about trade, in the event of some act, I’m leaning more towards energy than industrial commodities. I’ve been asked about gold and silver (and Bitcoin), but I don’t have a strong opinion (though, gold and silver would certainly seem to fit my geopolitical risk thesis).

    If you have time, re-reading The Game of Chicken in Today’s World seems like a good use of time, as all of the actors above are likely trying to figure out what, if anything, to do given the election news here and in Europe.

    Bottom Line

    Higher yields and less inverted curves. 4.3% to 4.5% is still our working range for 10s. The bias is now to break higher, but geopolitical risk, while not providing a “flight to safety” trade like it has done in the past, will support Treasuries (more at the front end).

    Lower stocks and the “catch-up” will only occur in a down market at this stage.

    With geopolitical risk rising, own commodities and commodity-related stocks (and bonds) with a bias towards energy.

    Apologies to anyone we may have offended regarding politics or the debate. We have tried to stick to the obvious things that have been happening since the debate. It would be easier to avoid discussing it at all, but since our adversaries and competitors are analyzing it, and it could influence their behavior in the coming weeks, we felt that it was important to go down this uncomfortable path. Given Academy’s expertise in Geopolitical Risk, and often being asked when and how to hedge it, it seems more timely than ever to put some trades on that will benefit from increased activity (while hoping, on a personal level, that nothing occurs, as we already have more than enough fighting happening in this world).

    In the meantime, we will continue to challenge our own assumptions and presumptions in this tricky market and world.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 19:50

  • Retiring Wealthy Now Means More Than $3 Million In Many U.S. States
    Retiring Wealthy Now Means More Than $3 Million In Many U.S. States

    The cost of living in American cities has skyrocketed so much that retirees now need more than $3 million to be considered “wealthy” in them, according to a new study from GoBankingRates.

    In this study, a team of researchers first calculated the minimum savings needed to retire for 20, 25 and 30 years in America’s 50 largest cities.

    They analyzed each city’s annual cost of living and subtracted the annual Social Security income (as sourced from the Social Security Administration’s Monthly Statistical Snapshot as of May 2024).

    Then, to find the savings needed to be “rich”, the study took the minimum savings needed in each city and doubled those amounts. We ranked each city based on the smallest to largest amounts needed to be considered rich for 25 years of retirement.

    The study found:

    1. It takes more than $3,000,000 to be considered wealthy in 10 cities. The top three cities where you’ll need the most savings to be rich are all in California: San Francisco (~$6,000,000), San Jose (~$5.5M) and Oakland (~$4.5M).
    2. It takes significantly less savings to be wealthy in New York than it does in San Francisco. You’ll need roughly $3.8M to retire rich in New York, which is substantially less than the $5.95M needed in San Francisco.
    3. Austin is more expensive than many people realize. Austin was the 11th most expensive city on our list, ranking right next to Boston. In Austin, you’ll need more than $2.5M to be considered rich for 25 years of retirement.

    According to the data, the financial requirements for retirees looking to enjoy a rich lifestyle are particularly steep in cities such as San Francisco, San Jose, and New York City.

    For instance, in San Francisco, the savings needed for a 20-year retirement amount to a staggering $4,757,745. Extending this to a 25-year retirement pushes the savings requirement to $5,947,182, and for a 30-year retirement, retirees would need an eye-watering $7,143,762. The annual cost of living after Social Security in San Francisco is $118,944, reflecting the high cost of living in this iconic city.

    Similarly, San Jose demands equally substantial savings, with $4,422,401 needed for a 20-year retirement, rising to $6,640,241 for 30 years. The annual living cost post-Social Security here is $110,560, emphasizing the financial burden retirees face in the heart of Silicon Valley.

    New York City, another major metropolitan area, requires retirees to save $3,069,460 for 20 years of retirement, increasing to $4,608,798 for 30 years. The annual cost of living after factoring in Social Security stands at $76,736, making it one of the most expensive cities to retire in. This trend is mirrored in other high-cost cities like Los Angeles and Oakland, where retirees need upwards of $2.8 million and $3.6 million respectively for a 20-year retirement, and the costs only escalate with longer retirement periods.

    The study and data on all 50 states can be read in its entirety here. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 19:15

  • California Has Seized Nearly 7 Million Fentanyl Pills Since January
    California Has Seized Nearly 7 Million Fentanyl Pills Since January

    Authored by Rudy Blalock via The Epoch Times,

    A California task force has seized nearly 7 million fentanyl pills since January thanks to efforts statewide and near ports of entry into the United States from Mexico, officials announced this week.

    The updated figures were issued in a June 26 press release from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said the state will continue its crackdown on the drug.

    “We will continue to take fentanyl out of our neighborhoods, hold drug traffickers accountable, and expand access to life-saving medicine,” he said, referencing Narcan, an opiate blocker.

    In a May press release, Mr. Newsom announced that the same task force had assisted in the seizure of 5.8 million fentanyl pills since the start of the year.

    During a one week stretch in April more than 1 million pills and more than 500 pounds of methamphetamine were seized in San Diego County and at the border, according to the press release.

    Mr. Newsom increased the number of California National Guard officers near the state’s southern ports of entry last year by 50 percent to help stop drugs from being brought across the border, according to his office.

    The crackdown has resulted in over 62,000 pounds of fentanyl seized in 2023, 1,066 percent more than what was confiscated in 2021 and up 115 percent from 2022.

    A recently launched state website, opioids.ca.gov, also now offers a “one-stop-tool” for drug prevention, treatment resources, and updates on the state’s battle to hold pharmaceutical companies and drug traffickers accountable for the drug crisis, according to the governor’s most recent press release.

    Mr. Newsom also met with President Joe Biden in February to discuss border policy and immigration issues, and last October spoke with Chinese leader Xi Jinping about addressing the transnational shipping of precursor chemicals that are used to create fentanyl, according to the same announcement.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 19:00

  • 'BI-DONE!' – Plane Trolls Biden's 'Joyless' Dud Of A Hamptons Mega-Donor Event
    ‘BI-DONE!’ – Plane Trolls Biden’s ‘Joyless’ Dud Of A Hamptons Mega-Donor Event

    In the wake of his historically disastrous presidential debate performance, President Biden set out to ease the worries of Democratic mega-donors gathered at a sprawling Hamptons oceanfront estate on Saturday afternoon.

    However, a powerful, competing message was in the air — literally — as an airplane flew by the event toting a sign with a message that concisely proclaimed that Biden’s 2024 re-election bid is already over: “BI-DONE!” According to the New York Post’s sources, the next-level aerial trolling was the work of an unnamed New York Republican donor.

    The truth is up there: This fly-by of Biden’s star-studded mega-donor event in the Hamptons sought to feed growing doubts (photo obtained by New York Post)

    The aerial rhetorical assault proved unnecessary — as donors who attended the event told the Wall Street Journal it was a “joyless” affair, and said Biden’s appearance only served to solidify their deep worries about his fitness. The event was tightly orchestrated, and Biden did his speaking with the aid of a teleprompter, reminding attendees of his inability to manage unscripted dialogue — even with a friendly audience. 

    The event was hosted by hedge fund billionaire Barry Rosenstein on his 18-acre beachfront property in East Hampton, NY. Rosenstein and his wife Lizanne set a then-US record for a home purchase price when they paid $137 million for the place in 2014. Attendees reportedly included celebrities like Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick and Howard Stern, along with Michael J. Fox and his wife Tracy Pollan, all of whom paid upwards of $250,000 to see Biden’s hollowing husk in person. Loews Hotels CEO Jonathan Tisch attended too. 

    The aircraft flew a route that took it from Montauk to Sag Harbor via East Hampton. 

    Ahead of the event, anonymous mega-donors shaken by Biden’s Thursday-night disaster confided to the Post that they were gritting their teeth and following through on their planned attendance — which they’d already paid for. “We have no choice but to believe Biden will redeem himself. The alternative is so unthinkable,” said one of them. “I’m going and everyone I know is still going.” 

    Another longtime Democratic funder, who’d opted against attending, said the mood among the people who write the big checks is dark: “Everyone going [to the fundraiser] is extremely disappointed. Everyone paid in advance… so it could be an opportunity to encourage him to drop out.” The same donor pointed a finger of blame at Jill Biden: “Lots of people are blaming his wife … for not telling him [to step aside].”

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    Donors who spoke to the Journal said they’re waiting for the incoming round of post-debate polling results, anticipating that cratering support would greatly ease the challenge of ejecting Biden, who would be 86 years old if he defied all odds and managed to serve out a second term. 

    Meanwhile, as the editorial boards of major newspapers like the New York Times and Atlanta Journal-Constitution have begun urging Biden to quit the race, Democrats of a lesser station aren’t waiting for new polls before doing some urging of their own. These demonstrators, positioned alongside Biden’s motorcade route to Saturday’s Hamptons fundraiser, tried some gentle-but-firm messaging: 

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 18:05

  • Iowa Utility Board Approves Eminent Domain For Controversial CO2 Pipeline
    Iowa Utility Board Approves Eminent Domain For Controversial CO2 Pipeline

    Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    In a major project milestone, the Iowa Utility Board (IUB) this week approved a proposal by Summit Carbon Solutions to build the world’s largest carbon capture pipeline.

    Fourth-generation South Dakota farmer Ed Fishbach is leading the charge against a five-state carbon capture pipeline proposal by Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)

    The total project spans five states: Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. It will slice through 2,500 miles of land and connect with 57 ethanol plants, and affects thousands of private landowners, many of whom have fought against the project. The portion approved in Iowa is 680 miles, a Summit spokeswoman told The Epoch Times.

    Many landowners have said, in public hearings and official protest letters submitted to the IUB, that they object to allowing the company to have a right-of-way on their land.

    With this decision, 859 land parcels can be taken by the company through eminent domain.

    “After weighing numerous factors for and against Summit Carbon’s petition, the Board found that the service to be provided by Summit Carbon will promote the public convenience and necessity,” the IUB wrote in its decision. “The Board found Summit Carbon could be vested with the right of eminent domain.”

    Conditions of Approval

    It did put some conditions on the approval.

    Summit will be required to submit certain revised exhibits as compliance filings for IUB review before the board issues the construction permit. And Summit must obtain and maintain at least a $100 million insurance policy; comply with certain construction methods; and ensure that landowners and tenants are compensated for damages that may result during construction.

    Also, Summit needs approval in all the other states.

    “The momentum will continue as we prepare to file our South Dakota permit application in early July,” said Lee Blank, Summit CEO in a statement. “We look forward to engaging with the state throughout this process and are confident in a successful outcome.”

    The company reports that it has already signed easement agreements with 75 percent of Iowa landowners on the route.

    Landowners Protested Project

    Iowa land owners attend Iowa Utility Board hearing in Fort Dodge in August, 2023, on permitting of Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline project that would require easements on hundreds of private properties. (Courtesy of Jessica Mazour)

    Landowners have argued that the project is not for the public good, but instead, is an untested science that will only profit the company making use of the private lands.

    “There is a deep-rooted passion for our farm ground in many farmers, and to have something like this rip it apart for something so unnecessary is unimaginable,” said Austin Hayek, a Fort Dodge, Iowa, farmer whose land is to be affected if the project goes ahead. “Many have wanted to be able to allow their families to continue their legacy of farming as they want, and if this is allowed, it takes options off the table for them.”

    The project is encouraged with federal tax credits as an answer to climate change. It will capture carbon dioxide from ethanol plants, compress the captured CO2, and send it by pipeline to North Dakota where it will be permanently stored underground in deep geologic storage locations.

    “Doing so will drastically reduce the carbon footprint of ethanol production and enhance the long-term economic viability of the ethanol and agriculture industries,” Summit’s website explains.

    Large-scale carbon sequestration projects receive federal tax incentives like the federal Carbon Capture and Sequestration tax credit, also called the 45Q, which is worth up to $85 per ton of CO2 captured.

    Summit expects to store 16.7 million tons of CO2 per year. That amounts to $1.4 billion in tax incentives from taxpayers.

    Tax credits can be converted into cash. Companies that have more tax credits than they can use, sell them at a discount to other companies. This way, the seller makes a profit, and the company buying the credits gets a break on their taxes, paying less than face value for the credits.

    The decision came after the IUB reviewed nearly 4,200 written comments, 7,500 pages of hearing transcripts, testimony at hearings from more than 200 witnesses and landowners; and the IUB reported receiving some 50,000 pages of prefiled testimony and exhibits from hundreds of witnesses and landowners, accepting more than 150 intervenors into the docket, and conducting 33 public information meetings over 34 months. The IUB heard a range of viewpoints in these materials.

    The Sierra Club Iowa Chapter is one group that has partnered with landowners in opposition of the project.

    “This is far from over,” Sierra Club Iowa Chapter Conservation Coordinator Jess Mazour said in a statement. “We will appeal this decision and make our arguments in front of a fair decision maker.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 17:30

  • Watch: Chinese Rocket Static-Fire Test Goes Horribly Wrong 
    Watch: Chinese Rocket Static-Fire Test Goes Horribly Wrong 

    Beijing Tianbing Technology Co., also known as Space Pioneer, suffered a catastrophic failure on Sunday during a static-fire test of the first stage of its Tianlong-3 launch vehicle at a testing facility in the Henan Province.

    “The first stage of its Tianlong-3 rocket under development had detached from its launch pad during a test due to structural failure and landed in a hilly area of the city of Gongyi in central China,” Reuters reported. 

    Space Pioneer’s two-stage Tianlong-3 (“Sky Dragon 3”) is a partly reusable rocket that is under development to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Tianlong-3 is comparable to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

    Footage uploaded on X shows the Tianlong-3’s first stage detached from the test bench due to structural failure and soared into the sky, only to come back and crash down to Earth, igniting in a massive fireball about a mile away from the launch facility.  

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    “Space Pioneer was conducting its test as a buildup to an orbital launch of the Tianlong-3, which is benchmarked against the SpaceX Falcon 9, in the coming months,” according to Space News, adding, “The company announced earlier this month that it has secured $207 million in new funding.” 

    Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to dominate the industry with its reusable rockets.

    Data from BryceTech shows that Musk’s rocket company launched an impressive 525 spacecraft (mainly Starlink satellites) in the first quarter of 2024 – more than any other rocket company or nation.

    Musk is quite literally America’s rocket program: SpaceX launched about 429,125 kg of spacecraft upmass in the first quarter, significantly outpacing China’s rocket program (China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation), which launched a measly 29,426 kg. 

    It’s not just China struggling to compete with SpaceX’s reusable rockets (read: “SpaceX Leads Reusable Rocket Race, While China Continues Crashing Boosters To Earth”) . Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is also lagging behind. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 16:55

  • Le Pen Is Mightier: Conservative National Rally Crushes Macron, Socialists In 1st Round Of French Election
    Le Pen Is Mightier: Conservative National Rally Crushes Macron, Socialists In 1st Round Of French Election

    As expected, Le Pen’s conservative (or in the world’s of the liberal media, “Far Right”) National Rally (RN) party won the first round of France’s parliamentary election on Sunday, exit polls showed, but the final result will depend on several days of horsetrading before next week’s run-off.

    The RN was seen winning around 34% of the vote, exit polls from Ipsos, Ifop, OpinionWay and Elabe showed. That was ahead of both far-left and centrist rivals, including President Emmanuel Macron’s Together alliance, whose bloc was seen winning a paltry 20.5%-23%, a far cry from his crushing victory several years ago. The New Popular Front (NFP), a hastily assembled left-wing coalition, was projected to win around 29% of the vote, the exit polls showed.

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    The exit polls were in line with opinion polls ahead of the election, but provided little clarity on whether the anti-immigrant, eurosceptic RN will be able to form a government to “cohabit” with the pro-EU Macron after next Sunday’s run-off.

    The RN’s chances of winning power next week will depend on the political dealmaking made by its rivals over the coming days. In the past, centre-right and centre-left parties have teamed up to keep the RN from power, but that dynamic, known as the “republican front,” is less certain than ever.

    If no candidate reaches 50% in the first round, the top two contenders automatically qualify for the second round, as well as all those with 12.5% of registered voters. In the run-off, whoever wins the most votes take the constituency.

    According to Reuters, the high turnout on Sunday suggests France is heading for a record number of three-way run-offs. These generally benefit the RN much more than two-way contests, experts say.

    Sure enough, the horsetrading began almost immediately on Sunday night. In a written statement to the press, Macron called on voters to rally behind candidates who are “clearly republican and democratic”, which, based on his recent declarations, would exclude candidates from the RN and from the hard-left France Unbowed (LFI) party. The problem, of course, is that Macron’s party was crushed in the recent European parliamentary elections precisely because the people have had enough with “clearly republican and democratic” puppets of the World Economic Forum and want actual change.

    LFI leader Jean-Luc Melenchon said the second-placed NFP alliance will withdraw all its candidates who came third in the first round.”Our guideline is simple and clear: not a single more vote for the National Rally,” he said. It is, however, unlikely that many will care what the French socialists want: after all, last week the French socialist leftist alliance said it would raise the top marginal income tax rate to 90% if it were to take over the government.

    Meanwhile, Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old RN party president, said he was ready to be prime minister – if his party wins an absolute majority. That’s right, a 28 year old kid may soon be a prime minister of the 2nd largest European economy. He has ruled out trying to form a minority government and neither Macron nor the NFP will form an alliance with him.

    “I will be a “cohabitation” Prime Minister, respectful of the constitution and of the office of President of the Republic, but uncompromising about the policies we will implement,” he said.

    While the RN is seen winning the most seats in the National Assembly, only one of the pollsters – Elabe – had the party winning an absolute majority of 289 seats in the run-off. Experts say that seat projections after first-round votes can be highly inaccurate, and especially so in this election.

    Voter participation was high compared with previous parliamentary elections, illustrating the political fervour Macron aroused with his stunning decision to call a parliamentary vote after the RN trounced his party in European Parliament elections earlier this month.

    His decision plunged France into political uncertainty, sent shockwaves around Europe and prompted a sell-off of French assets on financial markets.

    A longtime pariah, the RN is now closer to power than it has ever been. Le Pen has sought to clean up the image of a party known for racism and antisemitism, a tactic that has worked amid voter anger at Macron, the high cost of living and growing concerns over immigration.

    At 1500 GMT, turnout was nearly 60%, compared with 39.42% two years ago – the highest comparable turnout figures since the 1986 legislative vote, Ipsos France’s research director Mathieu Gallard said.

    In short, the people have had enough and they finally want to be heard.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 16:45

  • IRS, Treasury Announce New Crypto Tax Reporting Rule For Brokers
    IRS, Treasury Announce New Crypto Tax Reporting Rule For Brokers

    Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) published a final rule on Friday that requires cryptocurrency brokers to report details of digital asset transactions to the tax agency.

    The Treasury Department in Washington on March 25, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

    “The final regulations announced today will require brokers to report gross proceeds on the sale of digital assets beginning in 2026 for all sales in 2025,” the Treasury said in a June 28 press release.

    “Brokers will be required to also report information on the tax basis for certain digital assets beginning in 2027 for sales in 2026.” Tax basis refers to the original purchase price of digital assets and is used to determine taxes owed following its sale.

    The new rule does not change tax requirements for taxpayers. It is only directed at brokers for reporting on crypto transactions.

    Normal taxpayers engaged in digital asset transactions have always owed taxes on the sale or exchange of digital assets. Earlier, they had to rely on expensive third-party services to calculate their gains or losses to pay taxes, the Treasury stated. But under the new rule, the brokers will send this information to taxpayers.

    “By implementing the law’s reporting requirements, these final regulations will help taxpayers more easily pay taxes owed under current law, while reducing tax evasion by wealthy investors,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy Aviva Aron-Dine in the press release.

    Various organizations had previously raised concerns about the rule when it was proposed last year. In comments submitted by Cboe Global Markets, the organization pointed out that while the rule requires “brokers” to file information returns and provide payee statements related to digital asset transactions done by customers, “we are concerned about the overly broad definition of broker.”

    The rule defined a broker as including certain digital asset trading platforms, payment processors, and hosted wallet providers.

    Cboe pointed out that the definition covers “entities that are not best positioned to provide information for tax reporting purposes.” And by requiring these entities to comply with the new reporting requirements, the rule creates complications, it said.

    For instance, “digital asset exchanges—like Cboe Digital—would have different and more onerous tax reporting obligations from those that exist for traditional securities exchanges.” The rule would also require exchanges “to report information that may be outright infeasible to provide.”

    Meanwhile, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce criticized the rule’s effective date which begins on Jan. 1, 2025. The chamber said the deadline does not provide enough time “for even the most sophisticated, well-resourced digital asset brokers” to develop and test systems required to implement the reporting rules.

    Boosting Tax Compliance

    IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel praised the reporting requirements, noting that the regulations were finalized after reviewing thousands of public comments. The final rule addresses concerns raised by the public, he said. The regulations will help close the “tax gap” related to digital assets.

    ‘These regulations are an important part of the larger effort on high-income individual tax compliance. We need to make sure digital assets are not used to hide taxable income, and these final regulations will improve detection of noncompliance in the high-risk space of digital assets,” Mr. Werfel stated.

    “Our work to address potential non-compliance in digital currency is another reason why it is so critical to fully fund IRS operations … These new assets expand the complexity of our tax system, and the technology and personnel necessary for the IRS to keep pace with these changes is resource intensive.”

    The IRS pointed out that the new regulations were not applicable to brokers who do not take possession of the digital assets being exchanged. These brokers are also called decentralized or non-custodial brokers. The IRS and the Treasury intend to provide rules for these brokers in the future.

    Meanwhile, current tax rules require Americans to report all cryptocurrency and digital asset incomes they made when filing taxes.

    The IRS has placed a question related to these transactions on tax forms. For tax year 2023, the question was: “At any time during 2023, did you: (a) receive (as a reward, award, or payment for property or services); or (b) sell, exchange, or otherwise dispose of a digital asset (or a financial interest in a digital asset)?”

    All taxpayers filing forms 1040, 1040-SR, 1040-NR, 1041, 1065, 1120, 1120 and 1120S must answer the question regardless of whether they conducted digital asset transactions or not.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 16:20

  • Replace Biden With Gavin Newsom? Polls Show Democrats Would Still Lose
    Replace Biden With Gavin Newsom? Polls Show Democrats Would Still Lose

    Remember when it was “conspiracy theory” to question Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities? After Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance in Atlanta this week, the media-sphere is swirling with conjecture over a potential replacement for the doddering candidate.  The Biden team continues to insist that he won’t drop out of the race by the time the Democratic National Convention launches in Chicago this August.  That doesn’t mean the DNC won’t consider picking another candidate to run, though.

    Convention rules are not legal requirements, they are simply rules dictated by the DNC and by tradition.  Delegates that already voted for Biden are supposed to continue their support, but there are avenues by which they can change their minds and trigger an open nomination process on the convention floor.  It’s telling that far-left media outlets like Time Magazine and Politico are already war-gaming the possibility of Biden stepping down; that’s how poorly received his debate performance was.

    Following Thursday’s debate Johanna Maska, a Democratic consultant and former Barack Obama aide, posted a video on X urging her party to change its 2024 presidential candidate. She said: “We cannot do this, Democrats. Joe Biden can’t put a sentence together. We have to change our candidate, and we have so many good candidates who are sitting on the sidelines.”

    While some (like Maska) don’t like the idea, one name that is continually mentioned in this discourse is California Governor Gavin Newsom.  Many Democrats and some Republicans believe he would be the primary alternative if Biden is somehow removed from the running.  Their suspicions have merit – Last year Newsom was given ample attention by the establishment media and he did act as if he was running for president.     

    Newsom’s capacity for authoritarianism was made clear during his strict pandemic lockdowns, as was his hypocrisy when he was caught attending lavish parties while millions of other Californians were ordered to stay home and away from friends and family.  

    His one and only talent seems to be a capacity for twisting statistics to fit his false narratives; he has consistently misrepresented California’s increasing economic distress as “success” and downplayed growing homelessness and crime.  His advantage is that he’s able to do this with a completely straight face, and for those unfamiliar with such statistics and how they can be manipulated, Newsom appears knowledgeable and formidable. 

    Beyond that, he’s not very impressive as a candidate and the polls show this.

    A March Rasmussen Reports survey of 912 likely voters found that former President Trump would lead by 17 points (51 percent to 34) if Newsom were the 2024 Democratic nominee.

    In February 2024, an Emerson College Polling survey of 1,225 showed that Trump would win in a hypothetical White House race against Newsom by 10 points (46 percent to 36).

    A November 2023 Fox News poll of 1,001 registered voters found that Trump would win an election against Newsom by four points (49 percent to 45).

    Other candidates fare even worse.  Trump crushes Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (also a potential alternative to Biden) by 12 points in Emerson polls.  

    Kamala Harris loses by 6.6 points in Real Clear Politics polling.  Meanwhile, former first lady Michelle Obama also trailed behind Trump in a hypothetical matchup (50 to 43 percent) according to Rasmussen.

    Bottom line?  The Democrats might want to replace Biden, but they don’t have anyone that will win according to the current data.  A switch may occur simply as a way to avoid any irreparable disgrace to the party going into November, but it’s important to remember that Biden is simply a foil, a mouthpiece for a political ideology of socialist extremism that the majority of Americans now find dangerous and ugly.  Every candidate the Democrats put forward will espouse the same exact rhetoric and promote the same exact policies. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 15:45

  • The Housing Tide Starts Turning: National Inventory Rose 4% In Q1 2024
    The Housing Tide Starts Turning: National Inventory Rose 4% In Q1 2024

    While the government may be able to fake BLS and CPI data to gloss over the fact that 5.5% rates have already likely driven the nation into a deep recession, independent data on the housing market is showing a decades-long shortage in inventory starting to rebound. 

    A new report from Construction Coverage has revealed where the largest increases in real estate inventory in the U.S. are taking place.

    The report notes that the current housing shortage—which is now estimated to be between four million and seven million homes—can trace its beginnings to long before the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 10 years following the Great Recession, the United States constructed fewer new homes than in any other decade since the 1960s.

    They write that the lack of housing affects certain areas more severely than others. Researchers ranked locations based on the percentage change in the average monthly housing inventory—the total number of active listings plus pending sales at the end of the month—between Q1 2023 and Q1 2024.

    Data from a national level showed that U.S. housing inventory decreased from more than two million in 2012 to a low of approximately 630,000 at the start of 2022.

    Over the same period, months’ supply—a measure of how long it would take existing inventory to sell if no new homes came on the market—plummeted from a national high of 7.5 months to a historic low of 1.1 months, the report adds.

    It also noted that inventory has rebounded slightly since early 2022: throughout the first quarter of 2024, the national inventory hovered around 970,000 homes for sale, marking a 4.0% year-over-year increase.

    Despite this uptick, existing inventory would sustain the current sales pace for just 2.9 months—a marginal increase from the 2.8 months’ supply recorded last year.

    The report broke down trends by cities and states, finding that as of the first quarter of 2024, states with the lowest levels of supply are concentrated in and around the Midwest (such as Kansas with 1.5 months of supply) and the Northeast (including Rhode Island with 1.8 months of supply).

    However, Washington also stands out for having some of the lowest levels of available housing nationally, with just 1.9 months of supply.

    In contrast, several states in the South, led by Florida (5.2 months of supply), along with Hawaii (5.2 months) and Montana (5.1 months), present notably more favorable conditions for buyers.

    Among the nation’s largest cities, Denver, El Paso, and Dallas recorded the largest year-over-year increases in housing inventory. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Las Vegas, Raleigh, and Chicago recorded the biggest declines.

    The data is hardly a 2008-style collapse, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t noteworthy. 

    While the ‘turning of the tide’ still remains muted, the housing market is so large it rarely corrects swiftly. It’s important to notice, however, that rising inventory ticking higher – combined with mortgage rates now over 7% – could easily be telegraphing a correction in prices heading into 2025.

    You can view the entire study here.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 14:35

  • Judge Denies Alec Baldwin Motion To Dismiss Manslaughter Charge In 'Rust' Shooting
    Judge Denies Alec Baldwin Motion To Dismiss Manslaughter Charge In ‘Rust’ Shooting

    Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A New Mexico judge on June 28 denied actor Alec Baldwin’s request to dismiss an involuntary manslaughter charge against him relating to the 2021 fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of his film “Rust.”

    Alec Baldwin attends the Roundabout Theatre Company’s annual gala at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in New York City on March 6, 2023. (Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

    Previously, Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers requested that the court dismiss the charge, arguing that the firearm involved in the shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was damaged during FBI forensic testing before defense attorneys could examine it.

    Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer rejected the arguments, stating that Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers failed to establish that the firearm had “an exculpatory value that was apparent before the evidence was destroyed.”

    “Rather, a significant amount of evidence indicates that the unaltered firearm did not possess apparent exculpatory value,” she stated in an 18-page ruling.

    The judge referenced Mr. Baldwin’s statements to a New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau officer on Dec. 8, 2021, in which he claimed that “the problem didn’t have to do with the gun. It had to do with the bullet.”

    “Further, prior to the accidental discharge testing, [FBI forensic examiner Bryce Ziegler] found the firearm to be fully operative and without modification,” the judge added.

    Judge Sommer added that Mr. Baldwin’s lawyers also failed to establish that “the State acted in bad faith when destroying certain internal components of the firearm in the course of the accidental discharge testing.”

    “In other words, the evidence before the Court does not demonstrate that the State or its agents knew that the unaltered firearm possessed exculpatory value at the time of the accidental discharge testing, and nonetheless destroyed it, thereby indicating that the evidence may have exonerated the Defendant,” she stated.

    The judge also ruled that prosecutors must fully disclose to the jury “the destructive nature of the firearm testing, the resulting loss, and its relevance and import.”

    Mr. Baldwin is set to stand trial in July.

    Ms. Hutchins was killed after a gun Mr. Baldwin was handling discharged on set on Oct. 21, 2021. He has pleaded not guilty to an involuntary manslaughter charge, which carries a maximum sentence of 18 months in prison.

    Sheriff’s investigators initially sent the revolver to the FBI for routine testing, but when an FBI analyst heard Mr. Baldwin say in an ABC TV interview that he never pulled the trigger, the agency told local authorities they could conduct an accidental discharge test, though it might damage the gun.

    The FBI was told by a team of investigators to go ahead, and tested the revolver by striking it from several angles with a rawhide mallet. One of those strikes fractured the gun’s firing and safety mechanisms.

    Armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted in March of involuntary manslaughter for her role in the shooting and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

    The Associated Press contributed to this report.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 14:00

  • Watch: Just Another Night In Gavin Newsom's California 
    Watch: Just Another Night In Gavin Newsom’s California 

    President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate with former President Trump on Thursday has led leftist corporate media to publish headlines calling for the elderly president to step aside.

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    Although there is no evidence that Biden is willing to end his presidential campaign, some corporate media outlets have suggested replacements, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom.

    However, Gov. Newsom is probably one of the worst possible candidates. The entire nation has watched the radical leftist governor transform California into a socialist hellhole over the years characterized by rampant lawlessness, widespread homelessness, an affordability crisis, and a poor economic climate with high taxes. 

    The latest issue in the Golden State has been out-of-control youth reenacting scenes of the video game ‘Grand-Theft-Auto’ through wild street takeovers.

    According to the Los Angeles Police Department, at least 50 vehicles were involved in a street takeover in downtown Los Angeles early Saturday morning. 

    Videos of the chaos were uploaded on X. They show multiple cars engulfed in flames. 

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    Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de Leon told CBS News that street takeovers are unacceptable, adding, “It angers me, because it puts other people in danger.” 

    The lack of law and order in the state suggests Gov. Newsom has a very limited shot against Trump.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/30/2024 – 13:25

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jun 30

Today’s News 30th June 2024

  • Don't Let The Elite Get Away With Gaslighting That They Didn't Know About Biden's Senility
    Don’t Let The Elite Get Away With Gaslighting That They Didn’t Know About Biden’s Senility

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

    Biden’s disastrous debate performance last week made it impossible to deny his senility, yet the Western elite is gaslighting they were supposedly oblivious to this until now. Time Magazine published a piece titled “Inside Biden’s Debate Disaster and the Scramble to Quell Democratic Panic”, which was complemented by CNN’s about how “Foreign diplomats react with horror to Biden’s dismal debate performance”.

    Both make it seem like Biden’s senility is a surprise for everyone who knew him.

    The reality is that they knew about this all along but covered it up by lying that any claims to this effect were “Russian propaganda” and/or a “conspiracy theory”, all because they actually approved of the Democrats installing a literal placeholder in the White House who the liberal–globalist elite could control. It was a refreshing change of pace from Trump, who was much too independent for their liking despite his occasional capitulations to their demands, and it also reassured America’s allies who disliked him too.

    They both went along with the lie that Biden is in tip-top mental condition for reasons of political convenience, but now it’s impossible to keep up the charade any longer, hence why they’re all feigning surprise and shock. The elite shouldn’t be allowed to get away with their latest gaslighting and should be exposed for one of the greatest cover-ups in American history. The country is being ruled by a shadowy network of transnational and domestic elites that are united by their radical liberal-globalist ideology.

    Biden was chosen as the Democrats’ candidate in 2020 precisely because he was already senile and therefore completely controllable. That party, which functions as the public face of the abovementioned elite network, wanted someone who’d do whatever they demanded on the home and foreign policy fronts. In particular, they sought to turn America into a liberal-globalist hellhole while ramping up NATO’s containment of Russia in Ukraine, but the second policy backfired after the special operation began.

    Nevertheless, they’ll never have another chance to install someone like Biden since 2020 was an exceptional election year due to it being a referendum on Trump – who a significant share of the public was preconditioned to falsely believe is the new Hitler – and mail-in voting due to COVID-19. These conditions can never be replicated in the same way again no matter how hard the elite try, which is why they decided to keep Biden as their candidate instead of replace him early on.

    Although there’s now a push by some for him to be replaced during the party’s upcoming national convention, Politico and NBC News among others both pointed out that this would be a difficult process, so there’s no guarantee that they’ll seriously attempt it. That said, he might also suffer some sort of emergency that incapacitates him more than he already is, so the scenario can’t be ruled out. In that case, they’ll still do everything they can to gaslight that they had no idea that he was so unhealthy.

    Any acknowledgement that they were aware of this would expose their role in 2020’s de facto coup, which was the elite’s latest after the ones in 2001, 1974, and 1963. Back then, 9/11 was exploited as the pretext for taking the national security state to its next level, while Nixon’s resignation in the face of the CIA’s Watergate scandal was meant to remove a truly independent and popular visionary leader. As for Kennedy’s assassination, many believe that it was aimed to stop his planned withdrawal from Vietnam.

    The elite’s latest coup was meant to turbocharge the US’ preexisting liberal-globalist trajectory after Trump partially offset it with his comparatively more conservative-nationalist policies, which necessitated provoking a proxy war with Russia in order to unify the West around this ideological cause. The damage has already been dealt and a lot of it is irreparable, but Trump’s return to power would still be better for Americans and the rest of the world, which is why the elite are dead-set against it.  

    Irrespective of whether the decision is made to replace Biden, which has its pros such as putting a more publicly appealing candidate on the ballot but also its cons like stoking panic about the party’s electoral prospects, the elite will do everything to cover up for their knowledge of his senility. Acknowledging that they knew about this would leave little doubt in the minds of many that the 2020 election was actually the elite’s latest coup, which his why they’re going overboard gaslighting about how they’re surprised.  

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 23:20

  • Are MTA Subway Tracks In Queens Being Held Together By Zip Ties
    Are MTA Subway Tracks In Queens Being Held Together By Zip Ties

    Where is the boatload of tax money New York City takes in going?

    That’s likely the main question on the minds of Gotham’s citizens this week after the NY Post revealed in a report the latest “feature” of riding the prestigious MTA public transit: there appears to be zip ties holding together subway tracks.

    While illegal migrants are being treated to stays in four star hotels in Midtown, it appears NYC citizens riding the train at the Rockaway Boulevard A train station in Ozone Park are footing the bill. They have been left asking if the tracks of the subway they have been riding are barely holding on for dear life. 

    Nursing student Kayle Persaud asked the NY Post: “Should I be worried? If I cut one zip tie, does it start to fall?”

    Photos of the zip ties were first published by AMNY:

    Another subway rider told the Post: “The first time I saw it I thought, ‘Hmm… Is it holding the tracks together?’Even the screws look like they’re not all the way in.”

    A third rider added: “Even if it’s not actually holding the track together, it just looks awful. They could have cut it off or painted it the same color. I hope it’s not holding the tracks together for all the money we pay to travel on the subway.”

    Zip ties on wooden railroad ties are used to prevent splintering and falling debris, according to a track worker and the MTA. MTA officials stated they mark areas needing future repair and are not a safety concern. 

    However, the MTA’s announcement to halt capital projects following Governor Kathy Hochul’s delay of the congestion pricing plan has worried commuters. The congestion pricing was expected to generate $1 billion for $15 billion in improvements. Some commuters criticized the use of zip ties, calling them a “ridiculous” look. 

    “Hopefully, it’s just a sign of laziness,” said New Yorker Rose Mohammed. “We’re supposed to be the greatest city in the world, and we have zip ties around our tracks?”

    MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said: “When inspectors find certain issues, they use ties for temporary protection and to identify locations where following repair crews will make more permanent repairs.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 22:45

  • Trump Sentencing Will Put Merchan's Bias In Crosshairs
    Trump Sentencing Will Put Merchan’s Bias In Crosshairs

    Authored by Kenin Spivak via RealClearPolitics.com,

    On July 11, acting New York Judge Juan Merchan will sentence former President Donald Trump.

    Trump was convicted in a New York State court in Manhattan on a novel theory and on facts never before used to secure a conviction in New York. Disregarding at least a dozen reasons his conviction should be reversed, because Trump was convicted of falsifying records with the intent to commit a second crime – illegally interfering in the 2016 presidential election – the falsification was upgraded to a class E felony, comprising 34 counts, one for each entry. The maximum penalty is four years in jail on each count, not to exceed a total of 20 years.

    New York defendants sentenced to less than a year are usually jailed in notorious Rikers Island, known for its overcrowding, drug problems, and violence. The New York City Council voted to close the facility by 2026. New York Post photos from just a few years ago show the awful conditions there.

    For sentences of a year or longer, Trump could be remanded to one of 41 state prisons for men, though most likely to one of the three minimum security facilities. It seems highly unlikely that the U.S. Secret Service would permit Trump to be held in a New York prison. While space might be made available in a federal prison, or a building converted for exclusive use by Trump, it is more likely that he would serve any sentence in home confinement, wearing an ankle monitor.

    Alternatives to incarceration include probation for up to 10 years, unconditional discharge, or discharge, without probation, conditioned on not committing a further crime during the following three years, and a fine of up to $5,000.

    Merchan could order that confinement be limited to weekends or nights, and could permit exceptions for political or business activities.

    He also could split the sentence, for example, requiring 30 days of home confinement followed by conditional discharge.

    Even if Trump is conditionally discharged or given probation but is later convicted of another crime, he could be remanded to prison. In setting the sentence, Merchan will consider a mandatory Pre-Sentence Report and the nature of the crime in addition to Trump’s background, age, and health. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg follows a policy of not recommending incarceration for those convicted of non-violent class E felonies. During the trial, Merchan observed that he sees incarceration as a “last resort.”

    Trump’s indictment for numerous other crimes and his frequent violations of Merchan’s gag order will make unconditional release less likely. However, Trump’s evaluation also will suffer because of recent verdicts that he is liable for civil fraud and defamation, and for presumably refusing to accept guilt during the pre-sentence interview.

    If Merchan properly considers the nature of the offense, that similar offenses have not been prosecuted in New York, the “false records” were internal Trump accounts, there was no monetary loss, and the so-called effort to interfere in the 2016 election failed in New York (where Clinton overwhelmingly won), and Trump has no prior record, there should be no jail time or home confinement.

    However, if Merchan approaches sentencing with the same antagonism to Trump’s rights he brought to the trial, he can be expected to cite a fraud on the national electorate to justify at least a brief period of home confinement. Even then, it would be shocking if Merchan did not stay the sentence until after the election, pending Trump’s appeal.

    Trump likely will appeal to New York’s intermediate appeals court and will seek to have any sentence stayed pending the outcome of the appeal. Given the multitude of errors at trial and the pending election, it is a near certainty that his request for a stay will be granted.

    Trump could also bring an action in federal district court asserting that Bragg and Merchan lacked jurisdiction to accuse him of interfering in a federal election, and he was not given adequate notice of the alleged crimes. It is unlikely a federal judge would get involved prior to a state appeals court. Trump could seek intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court, but federal statutes generally require that the highest court in a state rule before the Supreme Court intervenes.

    In the end, it seems likely that Trump’s conviction will be overturned. Whether the sentence is harsh or a slap on the wrist, the entire process has been a political prosecution intended to keep Trump off the campaign trail and give Biden the talking point that Trump is a convicted felon. That flagrant abuse of due process is not how our justice or electoral systems are supposed to work.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 22:10

  • Pentagon Exposes Biden Lie That Troop Deaths Haven't Occurred Under His Watch
    Pentagon Exposes Biden Lie That Troop Deaths Haven’t Occurred Under His Watch

    The Pentagon is trying to run cover following Biden’s Thursday night debate falsehood claiming that he is the “only” president this century who hasn’t overseen American troop deaths “anywhere in the world”. But journalists forced a belated response.

    Here’s what Biden asserted in the CNN debate with Trump: “The truth is, I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any this — this decade, that doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world, like [Trump] did.” But the reality is…

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    Newsmax and others have pointed out that all of the following happened under Biden, some which is relatively recent: 

    There have been 16 U.S. troops killed overseas since Biden took office, with 13 during the retreat from Afghanistan on Aug. 26, 2021, and three just five months ago in Jordan. Biden also glossed over the large number of U.S. troops that have perished in training incidents during his time in office.

    In April 2023, nine soldiers were killed during a training exercise in Kentucky and 20 U.S. service members have been killed in Osprey-related crashed alone from March 2022 through November 2023, as noted by NBC News.

    The Pentagon press secretary was asked about the discrepancy in a Friday press briefing, and whether she stands by the president’s statement…

    “Thank you for the question. For more on the president’s comments and on the debate itself, I’d refer you to the White House,” spokesperson Sabrina Singh said, trying to deflect the question.

    “But in terms of our service members who have been killed in some tragic events around the world … you’ve seen the president call these families to express condolences. This is someone that has intimately experienced the commitment and dedication of what our military does,” she added.

    Singh was asked the same question a second time after the attempted dodge:

    “Just to be clear, was the president’s statement incorrect?”

    “Again, not trying to get involved in that,” Singh said.

    A journalist pressed her for the third time: “Has President Biden had service members die anywhere in the world during his time in office?”

    To which she reluctantly responded: “As you have reported on, we have certainly had service members pass during this administration, and you’ve seen not just the secretary, but the president, weigh in and comment and offer condolences,” Singh finally admitted. She clearly tried to initially desperately avoid contradicting Biden’s claim, but the truth proved too obvious in the end.

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    Does Biden himself even remember what he tried to claim in the Thursday night debate? 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 21:35

  • Warren Buffett Reveals Plans For $130 Billion Fortune In His Will
    Warren Buffett Reveals Plans For $130 Billion Fortune In His Will

    Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

    Famed investor Warren Buffett has revealed details of his will, with the 93-year-old founder of Berkshire Hathaway charting a charitable course for his vast $130 billion fortune after he passes away.

    In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Buffett said that he intends for nearly all of his immense fortune to be put into a charitable trust that will be used to help the less fortunate.

    “It should be used to help the people that haven’t been as lucky as we have been,” Mr. Buffett told the outlet.

    His three children—Howard, Susan, and Peter Buffett—will manage the trust, he said. In order for a donation to be made, all three will have to be in agreement on the cause, he said.

    “There’s eight billion people in the world, and me and my kids, we’ve been in the luckiest 100th of 1 percent or something,” Mr. Buffett said.

    “There’s lots of ways to help people.”

    In 2006, Mr. Buffett committed to making annual gifts to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as four foundations associated with his family.

    At the time, it was a mystery what he would do with his fortune after his death. However, in the June 28 interview, Mr. Buffett revealed that the donations to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would come to an end.

    “The Gates Foundation has no money coming after my death,” Mr. Buffett told the outlet.

    Besides that, the billionaire investor hasn’t prescribed to his children how to spend the money.

    “I feel very, very good about the values of my three children, and I have 100 percent trust in how they will carry things out,” Mr. Buffett said.

    In a press release issued on June 28, Mr. Buffett said the full contents of his will are to stay secret until his death, but that his Nov. 21, 2023, letter to shareholders set forth procedures of his will that are “unlikely to be changed before my death.”

    ‘Playing in Extra Innings’

    In the Nov. 21, 2023, letter Mr. Buffett noted his advanced age while shedding light on the future governance of his vast fortune.

    “I feel good but fully realize I am playing in extra innings,” he wrote.

    At the time, he disclosed that his three children would serve as executors of his will and trustees of a charitable trust that would receive more than 99 percent of his wealth.

    Mr. Buffett wrote in the letter that, when he started giving his fortune away in 2006, his children were not prepared to assume the “awesome responsibility” of managing the process. However, “they are now,” he said.

    In his June 28 statement, Mr. Buffett announced that he had donated $5.3 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities.

    The $5.3 billion was his biggest annual donation to date, bringing his total giving to the charities to roughly $57 billion.

    Despite having given away more than half of his Berkshire stock since 2006, Buffett still owns about one-seventh of the outstanding shares.

    “I have no debts and my remaining A shares are worth about $127 billion, roughly 99½ percent of my net worth,” Mr. Buffett said in the statement. “Nothing extraordinary has occurred at Berkshire; a very long runway, simple but generally sound capital deployment, the American tailwind and compounding effects produced my current wealth.’

    “My will provides that more than 99 percent of my estate is destined for philanthropic usage,” he said.

    Besides the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Buffett has donated to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which funds abortion drugs; the Howard G. Buffett Foundation, which works to alleviate hunger and improve public safety; the Sherwood Foundation, which supports Nebraska nonprofits; and the NoVo Foundation, which has initiatives focused on minority girls and women.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 21:00

  • He's Just Sundowning: Biden Admin Spins Debate Meltdown – While Family 'Oligarchy' Decides Fate
    He’s Just Sundowning: Biden Admin Spins Debate Meltdown – While Family ‘Oligarchy’ Decides Fate

    How bad must those Hur tapes be?

    Following President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance on Thursday, the world saw that his cognitive decline isn’t some right-wing conspiracy theory fueled by “cheapfakes” – and that the White House’s desperate attempts to cover for Biden’s obvious dementia were nothing more than propaganda.

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    It’s so bad that the NY Times Editorial Board has called for Biden to quit the 2024 race.

    It’s so bad that the White House is now telling Axios that Biden is ‘dependably engaged’ between the hours of 10am to 4pm, and that outside of that range, he’s ‘more likely to have verbal miscues and become fatigued.’

    In other words: he’s sundowning hard.

    Which would explain why he looked like he swapped out Hunter’s Finest for his morning sugar at a mid-day rally on Friday, with no hint of a ‘cold’ we’ve been told explains his debate performance.

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    Yet, Biden will tune out calls to exit the race unless his ‘kitchen cabinet’ of lifelong family advisors counsels him to do so, Axios also reports.

    Dave Smith explains during his debate recap:

    According to Axios, “The only way President Biden steps aside, despite his debate debacle, is if the same small group of lifelong loyalists who enabled his run suddenly — and shockingly — decides it’s time for him to call it quits.”

    Dr. Jill Biden; his younger sister, Valerie Biden; and 85-year-old Ted Kaufman, the president’s longtime friend and constant adviser — plus a small band of White House advisers — are the only Biden deciders.

    …

    This decades-long kitchen cabinet operates as an extended family, council of elders and governing oligarchy. These allies alone hold sway over decisions big and small in Biden’s life and presidency.

    • The president engaged in no organized process outside his family in deciding to run for a second term, the N.Y. Times’ Peter Baker reports.
    • Then Biden alone made the decision, people close to him tell us.

    According to the report, if Biden refuses to quit – it’s because “He and the oligarchy believe he has a much better chance of being former President Trump than Vice President Harris does.”

    Additionally, Axios also notes that:

    • Biden allies have played out the scenarios and see little chance of anyone besides Harris winning the nomination if he stepped aside.
    • Is the Democratic Party going to deny the nomination to the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to be elected V.P.? Hard to see.
    • These allies privately think Harris would struggle to pull moderate and swing voters, and would enhance Trump’s chances. (Harris “fares only one or two points worse than Biden in polls with margins of sampling error that are much larger than that,” The Washington Post found.)

    Meanwhile, Democratic congressional leaders are receiving panicked calls and texts from colleagues who think Biden’s weakness could also cost the party House and Senate seats in November.

    “This is no longer about Joe Biden’s family or his emotions,” said one adviser who’s in ‘constant touch’ with the West Wing. “This is about our country. It’s an utter f***ing disaster that has to be addressed.“

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 20:25

  • Magical, Mysterious, And Sometimes Dangerous Food Ingredients That Are Impossible To Pronounce
    Magical, Mysterious, And Sometimes Dangerous Food Ingredients That Are Impossible To Pronounce

    Authored by Matthew Little via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Not long ago, people could only dream of the foods we have today. Tasty, cheap, and ready to eat. They last forever, look great, and come in endless varieties. Ultra-processed foods are a dream come true.

    Illustration by The Epoch Times

    These new foods have achieved their incredible feats thanks to innovations in processing and a long list of additives that grant them superpowers denied to the foods eaten by previous generations.

    Some of these additives do important work, like keep food bacteria-free or let it stay safe from spoiling without need for refrigeration. But others are “experiential” and do things like make the food bright red or give it a more satisfying texture.

    Additives come in a variety of types. There are preservatives, flavorings, colors, stabilizers, emulsifiers, firming agents, humectants, and more. They have names like “titanium dioxide,” “sodium benzoate,” and “xanthan gum.” And the fact that people are living longer despite most Americans mostly eating ultra-processed foods would seem to indicate their safety.

    Except that they are linked to many chronic diseases like cancer, and many other issues, including depression, and anxiety, and may contribute to cognitive decline. They may even be addictive.

    Many additives have come under increasing scrutiny, with some states even banning some of them. And in some other countries, additives used in the United States have been banned for years.

    While it’s easy to blame food makers for adding ingredients that may make us less healthy, the truth is that we buy what they sell, and ask for more—at the cheapest price possible.

    My wife and I do stock some ready-to-eat foods though. Many grocery stores stock vacuum-sealed pouches of Indian food for $3, including rich dishes like baingan bharta, madras lentils, and palak paneer. The names may sound unfamiliar, but if you’ve ever eaten at an Indian restaurant, you know the food is well-flavored, typically a little expensive, and very satisfying.

    And the thing that has always amazed me about the instant pouches is the stunning lack of weird ingredients. They are full of whole foods and spices with nothing that’s hard to pronounce. It makes me wonder what kind of foods the innovative companies in the United States could come up with if we really wanted them to.

    America created ready-to-eat processed foods that have spread around the world, delivering exactly what we wanted in terms of price, flavor, and convenience. Now we just need to ask for foods with higher-quality ingredients and fewer additives that have uncertain effects on our brains and bodies.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 19:50

  • Deadly Attack On Israeli Embassy By Crossbow-Armed Terrorist
    Deadly Attack On Israeli Embassy By Crossbow-Armed Terrorist

    A bizarre attack on Israel’s embassy in the Serbian capital of Belgrade has unfolded Saturday, and ended in the death of the attacker, and a wounded security guard now fighting for his life.

    Serbia’s interior ministry is calling the incident a terrorist attack which involved a man armed with a crossbow shooting a police officer, wounding him in the neck, before the officer shot the assailant dead. Authorities are in the aftermath looking at links to Islamic extremism. 

    Via Associated Press

    The Serbian government statement indicated the officer who had been protecting the embassy “used a weapon in self-defense to shoot the attacker, who died as a result of his injuries.”

    A bolt was fired from the crossbow, and lodged in the officer’s neck. He was still conscious but described as in life-threatening condition upon being transported to the hospital.

    Authorities are describing that the assault was likely motivated by Islamic terror. According to a statement:

    “There are some indications that [those arrested] are already known to security services and we are talking about the Wahhabi organization, but that is not confirmed,” Dačić said, referring to a strict school of Islam.

    The officer was in a guard house and the attacker had approached him several times asking him where a museum was. He carried a bag from which at one point he took the crossbow and shot the guard, Dačić said.

    Serbia has maintained close relations with Israel and has even been supplying weapons to Tel Aviv throughout the course of the ongoing Gaza operations.

    For example, Middle East Eye has documented: 

    The Israeli newspaper Haaretz and Balkan Insight recently revealed that Belgrade was still exporting large volumes of weapons and ammunition to Israel, and ramped up exports this year amid the current war on Gaza.

    Both publications reported that Serbia exported at least €16.3m ($17.1m) worth of weapons to Israel through Israeli military planes as well as some civilian aircraft using Greek airspace, possibly also carrying crucial 155mm artillery rounds, produced by the Serbian state company Krusik. 

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    Israeli officials have meanwhile feared that the longer the Gaza operation persists, the greater chance of Israeli embassies and consulates abroad coming under physical attack.

    Already there have been been major anti-Israel protests throughout the world, including in front of consulates abroad. However, this is the first time a weapon like a crossbow has been used and resulted in a live fire incident.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 19:15

  • Did Fauci Admit That School Closures Were A Mistake?
    Did Fauci Admit That School Closures Were A Mistake?

    Authored by Ian Miller via The Brownstone Institute,

    Anthony Fauci actually concedes that he may have been mistaken?

    Stop the presses!

    It’s hard to believe considering the list of his policy failures, spectacular misinformation, and revisionist history is almost quite literally endless.

    Yet in a recent media interview, Fauci stated that a nationwide policy that he supported actually didn’t work. Kinda.

    If only he’d been willing to admit this years ago.

    Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the country’s foremost proponents of closing schools in a futile attempt to slow the spread of Covid, now admits that he may have taken it too far. Whoops!

    Fauci is out on his book tour, doing the rounds with friendly media outlets in support of his self-congratulatory, revisionist exploration of the pandemic. And in an interview with CBS Mornings, Fauci explained that maybe, just maybe, keeping schools closed for years was actually a bad idea.

    Co-host Tony Dokoupil asked Fauci about schools, and initially, Fauci downplayed what a disastrous result his advocacy caused. “One clear area seems to be the school closures, which did enormous harm to kids on multiple levels,” Dokoupil said, “and didn’t seem to save lives. And I wonder, can we say today that that is a mistake?”

    Fauci, of course, said “No,” because admitting that a policy he authorized was an unmitigated failure would mean accepting his role in creating that failure. Instead, as is his usual procedure, he deflected blame onto others. Just as a good scientist should.

    “Keeping it for a year was not a good idea,” Fauci said. “So, that was a mistake in retrospect?” Dokoupil asked. “We will not repeat it?”

    “Absolutely, yeah,” Fauci replied.

    Well, look who finally caught up to the damage he caused! And make no mistake, this most certainly is all on him.

    WASHINGTON, DC – Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during a White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing at the White House on November 19, 2020. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

    Anthony Fauci Once Again Directly Contradicts Anthony Fauci

    Fauci now pretends as if he had nothing to do with keeping schools closed long after they should have been reopened. But of course, that completely contracts his harmful, unconstitutional, ‘flatten the curve’ mandates to America in real-time during the height of the pandemic in 2020.

    In September 2020, Fauci described reopening efforts as “very concerning.” Even earlier, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke about wanting to get schools open as soon as possible, Fauci criticized him and his plan: “If you have a situation where you don’t have real good control over an outbreak and you allow children together, they will likely get infected.”

    Fauci also criticized Sen. Rand Paul for pushing for schools to open amid the clear realization that children were not at significant risk of serious side effects from Covid. “I think we better be careful that we’re not cavalier, in thinking that children are completely immune to the deleterious effects,” he said at the time.

    Then in 2022, he told ABC News, “I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake,’” when referring to school closures. “If I do, it gets taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on,” he continued. “We should realize, and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that.”

    But that was exactly the sentiment of DeSantis, and even former President Donald Trump in 2020. They warned that keeping kids home wasn’t going to save lives or even prevent the spread of the virus. And as we saw from Europe’s results, they were right. Fauci criticized them regardless because he not only supported school closures, but he even demanded they do so.

    Even now, he still speaks derisively about Dr. Scott Atlas, whose top priority on the Covid task force was getting schools open. In another MSNBC interview, Fauci said that Atlas told Trump “everything he wanted to hear.”

    Fauci didn’t want schools open, because he mistakenly believed closing them and other public spaces would have an impact on the spread of Covid. It didn’t. Just like masks didn’t have an impact, or vaccine passports, or getting huge numbers of people vaccinated. Nothing Fauci said would help actually worked. But admitting that is an impossibility for someone whose ego, willingness to hide information and condescending, patronizing attitude don’t allow for mistakes.

    And his Covid mandates were undoubtedly used for more malicious purposes than ‘stopping the spread’ of a virus.

    *  *  *

    Republished from the author’s Substack

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 18:40

  • How Uninhabited Terrain Became A Hotbed For Black Market Marijuana
    How Uninhabited Terrain Became A Hotbed For Black Market Marijuana

    Authored by Brad Jones via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The air is thick with the unmistakable pungent stench of cannabis plants in a massive network of illegal grow operations in a rural part of northern California, as Mount Shasta looms on the horizon.

    (Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Public Domain, John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

    Gated-off with chain link and wire fences—some with tattered shreds of privacy screening—the properties northeast of Weed, Calif., near Montague, are a compound of ramshackle huts, old RVs, and cheaply-made greenhouses of hoops and plastic.

    Several spotters in vehicles patrol the dusty roads, watching for police and intruders near the site off Shasta Vista Drive.

    These “guards” are often armed with automatic rifles, according to Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue.

    The sheriff estimates about 90 percent of the nearly 2,000 properties in the Mount Shasta Vista subdivision are involved in illegal grow operations.

    Miles from Interstate 5, the illegal grow operations are out-of-sight and out-of-mind for most people, but even a glance at a satellite map reveals the vast network.

    “If you zoom out, that subdivision is pretty large—nine square miles,” Mr. LaRue said.

    The lots are on volcanic soil. Unsuitable for water wells and septic systems, the land is far from an ideal spot to build a “dream home,” he said.

    The once essentially uninhabited terrain is now scattered with makeshift shelters and other structures built without permits in camps that look like they belong “in a third-world country,” he said.

    The illegal cannabis operations have brought serious crime, including robberies, theft, and five unsolved homicides, he said.

    A recent armed robbery allegedly involved outsiders robbing people who were selling marijuana, Mr. LaRue said.

    “That doesn’t happen, generally speaking, to people that are growing alfalfa or cherries, or strawberries or corn. So, it’s a crop that really brings just a massive amount of violent crime with it,” he said. “People are willing to die for marijuana for some reason.”

    Hundreds of illegal marijuana grow operations are located outside of Montague, Calif., on May 7, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

    Legalizing Marijuana

    More than 57 percent of California voters approved Proposition 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, in 2016, which legalized the recreational use of marijuana.

    Californians have led the push to soften cannabis laws in the United States since 1972 with Proposition 9, a failed ballot initiative that attempted to legalize marijuana. Eventually, in 1996, more than 55 percent of state voters supported Proposition 215 allowing the medical use of cannabis.

    But unlicensed cannabis cultivation and sales are prohibited, and cultivation is still illegal under federal law.

    Around 2015, a group of about 100 people moved from the Midwest and bought private property in Siskiyou County, where they started cultivating outdoor marijuana grows, Mr. LaRue said.

    The land was cheap then; 2.5-acre parcels sold for about $500, but today the same land is worth between $30,000 to $40,000 because illegal grow operations are lucrative and the sites are in high demand, he said.

    He estimates there are currently about 10,000 people involved in illegal cannabis cultivation.

    Nearly 5,000 “hoop houses,” a term the sheriff prefers to describe the makeshift greenhouses, cultivating three crops a year means the black market sites generate billions of dollars in profits, he said.

    Property owners have brought in illegal pesticides and other toxic chemicals, many from China, that are “destroying the environment,” he said.

    His deputies do the best they can to avoid contamination from unregulated and illegal pesticides found during routine raids, but Mr. LaRue said he worries about the risks they could face from long-term exposure to such toxins.

    Recent traffic stops show that illegal cannabis is going to licensed locations and that the legal market is also being supplied by the black market, he said.

    “Everything has kind of turned into what I call the gray market because everything is just dirty,” he said. “You really don’t know what’s legit and what isn’t … and the average user has no clue.”

    This makes the illegal pesticide issue even more alarming because “those chemicals are now on the product that’s going into legal dispensaries,” he said.

    “People are buying it as medicine for cancer patients and actually just smoking and consuming carcinogens. That should be troubling for the state. That’s a public health issue.”

    Marijuana is weighed on a scale at Virgil Grant’s dispensary in Los Angeles on Feb.8, 2018. In California, it is a felony to plant, cultivate, harvest, dry, or process more than six cannabis plants “to intentionally or with gross negligence cause substantial environmental harm to surface or groundwater,” according to the California Department of Cannabis Control. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

    Penalties for Illegal Cultivation

    Proposition 64, or the Adult Use Marijuana Act, which took effect in November 2016, allowed adults over age 21 to legally grow and harvest up to six plants.

    Under California law, it is a felony to plant, cultivate, harvest, dry, or process more than six cannabis plants “to intentionally or with gross negligence cause substantial environmental harm to surface or groundwater,” the California Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) said in a statement emailed to The Epoch Times.

    Anyone 18 years or older convicted of planting, cultivating, harvesting, drying, or processing more than six living cannabis plants can face misdemeanor charges and up to six months in a county jail or a fine of up to $500, or both, under Article 11358 of the California Health and Safety Code.

    Penalties for anyone under age 18 include up to eight hours of drug counseling or up to 40 hours of community service, or both, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

    The DCC did not provide any statistics indicating how many people, if any, have been convicted and sentenced to jail time and stipulated that the prosecution of such crimes “is dependent on the jurisdiction where they occurred.”

    In practice, for illegal cultivation to be prosecuted as a felony, the crime is usually tied to an environmental infraction, Siskiyou County District Attorney Kirk Andrus told The Epoch Times.

    “It’s a misdemeanor all day long no matter how much you grow unless you have an environmental violation, and so that takes us some work to prove,” Mr. Andrus said.

    Meanwhile, the state is losing tax revenue, and some people who entered the legal cannabis market thinking they can make a profit are going out of business, he said.

    “If they want to make marijuana legal for recreational use, then defend the white market. The black market is killing the white market,” he said.

    “We have a black market in this county that’s the size of a small nation. I’m not a marijuana proponent but if it’s going to be legal, defend your market by letting us eradicate the black market.”

    A worker removes leaves from marijuana plants to allow more light for growth at Essence Vegas’ 54,000-square-foot marijuana cultivation facility in Las Vegas on July 6, 2017. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

    Potential Remedies and Solutions

    While Mr. LaRue admits there’s no quick fix for the crisis, he has urged the governor to take executive action to “free up money” for rural communities where police funding often falls short and implement more “aggressive” enforcement policies.

    “Not just in words but in action,” he said.

    Funding for six deputies to cover nearly 6,300 square miles and only two to deal with illegal grow operations just isn’t enough, Mr. LaRue said.

    He urged state lawmakers to take a closer look at what’s happening in Siskiyou County.

    “They need to look at it as an actual problem and get some laws on the books that would actually deter people from continuing this,” he said, stressing that his intent—and the purpose of tougher laws—is “not to lock everyone up in prison.”

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 17:30

  • Tropical Storm Beryl Set To Become 'Major Hurricane' 
    Tropical Storm Beryl Set To Become ‘Major Hurricane’ 

    Tropical Storm Beryl, currently in the Atlantic Basin and east of the Windward Islands, could strengthen into the year’s first hurricane before reaching Barbados late Sunday.  

    “Beryl is expected to rapidly strengthen and become a major hurricane when it reaches the Windward Islands late Sunday night or Monday. It will bring destructive hurricane-force winds and life-threatening storm surges,” the National Hurricane Center wrote in a message on Saturday. 

    NHC issued a hurricane watch for Barbados as Beryl gained strength about 820 miles (1,320 km) east-southeast of the island nation. Beryl could soon become the first hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic storm season. 

    “The storm has been on a steady strengthening trend since it formed yesterday, and now that its structure is more symmetric and compact, it likely will have an opportunity to rapidly intensify given the low wind-shear conditions,” NHC senior hurricane specialist John Cangialosi wrote in a note. 

    Cangialosi said, “The new NHC intensity forecast explicitly calls for rapid strengthening and shows Beryl becoming a major hurricane before moving across the Windward Islands.”

    “There have only been a few storms in history that have formed over the central or eastern tropical Atlantic this early in the year,” he noted.

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    In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted an above-normal 2024 Atlantic hurricane season of 17 to 25 named storms, including as many as 13 hurricanes.

    We have pointed out that this hurricane season, the Biden administration must contend with an elevated number of storms. It only takes one major storm to disrupt Gulf Coast refineries, which would catapult average gasoline prices at the pump to the politically sensitive $4 a gallon before the elections this fall.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 16:55

  • The Art Of Being Eternally Shocked: How The Press And Pundits Are Again Mystified By The Obvious
    The Art Of Being Eternally Shocked: How The Press And Pundits Are Again Mystified By The Obvious

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    No one would think of the Beltway as being a place of the naive innocents of our society.

    Washington is the only ecosystem composed entirely of apex predators.

    Yet, this week everyone seems to be eternally shocked by what has been obvious for years.

    The press and pundits are coming off an embarrassing couple of weeks where the Hunter Biden laptop was authenticated in federal court as real. This occurred in the trial of the president’s son almost on the anniversary of a debunked letter of intelligence officials claiming that the laptop appeared to be Russian disinformation. Biden then repeated the claim in the last presidential debates to avoid answering questions over the massive influence peddling scheme of this family revealed by the laptop.

    After the story was suppressed before the 2020 election, it took years for the media to admit that, oops, the laptop is surprisingly real.

    For years, the press and pundits piled on experts who suggested that Covid 19 escaped from a Chinese lab. The New York Times reporter covering the area called it “racist” and implausible.  Now, even W.H.O. accepts the lab theory as possible and federal agencies now believe it is the most likely explanation.

    The response: surprise and spin.

    This week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Justice Department has unlawfully charged hundreds of people with obstruction of an official proceeding after the January 6th riot. For years, objections to the excessive treatment of these cases were dismissed as the view of the radical right. Now, even Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson voted to toss out these convictions.

    Surprise.

    Whether it was the false story about agents whipping migrants in Texas or the photo op claim in Lafayette Park, false stories were disproven only to have a collective shrug from those who spread them.

    For years, the press and pundits have repeated like gospel that Trump had called neo-Nazis “fine people.” At the time, most of us noted that Trump condemned the racists and neo-Nazis and made the statement about fine people on both sides of the controversy over the removal of historic statues.

    Six years later, Snopes finally decided to do a fact check and, surprise, found that Trump never praised neo-Nazis as fine people.

    The only person not surprised was Biden who repeated the false story on Friday as true.

    Heading into the presidential debate, the White House and the media attacked Fox News and other outlets for “cheap fake” videos designed to make the President look confused and feeble.

    For months, politicians and pundits have insisted that Biden is sharp and commanding in conversations even after Special Counsel Robert Hur cited his decline as a reason for not charging him criminally for the unlawful retention and mishandling of classified material.

    On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough stated “start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And F— you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I have known him for years…If it weren’t the truth I wouldn’t say it.”

    Then the presidential debate happened and, after years of being protected by staff, tens of millions of people watched the president struggle to stay focused and responsive.

    After the debate, there was total surprise, if not shock, on CNN and MSNBC. Suddenly, it is not a cheap fake but reality.

    Just seven days before the debate, the New York Times was running cheap fake articles on how Biden was being wrongly portrayed. The day after the debate, it was calling for him to withdraw from the race after expressing shock at his appearance.

    On CNN, Biden biographer and CNN contributor Evan Osnos admitted that many Americans were likely “shocked” by Biden’s appearance:

     “I don’t think there’s any other way to put it. This was clearly a person who was diminished from where he was on the debate stage four years ago.”

    Pro-Biden columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that he was floored by what he saw and that “heartbreaking” appearance of Biden made him “weep.”

    Washington is now full of surprises.

    It is a city of people who display that practiced faux shock that you adopt when you learn in advance that your friends are throwing a surprise party. The key is to look stunned and then mingle.

    It is a city of Claude Rains:

    The laptop is real, the President is really old, and Washington is really really phony.

    The only thing that would be more surprising is if pundits and the press started being a lot less shocked and more honest.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 16:20

  • Iran Threatens Israel With 'Obliterating War' If It Attacks Lebanon
    Iran Threatens Israel With ‘Obliterating War’ If It Attacks Lebanon

    Iran’s mission to the United Nations has put Israel and the world on notice, saying that if Israel launches an all-out war against Hezbollah in Lebanon the whole region will burn.

    A Friday statement from Iran’s ambassador warned the UN that any “full-scale military aggression” in Lebanon against Hezbollah will mean that “an obliterating war will ensue.”

    The Iranian statement continued by emphasizing that “all options, including the full involvement of all resistance fronts, are on the table” in a statement posted to X. 

    By “resistance fronts” Tehran means the militias it supports in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen will also ramp up their military activities. On a few occasions, Iraqi Shia militias have launched missiles and drones against southern Israel, as have the Houthis, with limited effect.

    Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged this week that a “seven front war” could open up, in reference to all of Iran’s proxies across the region. 

    For years already, Israeli jets have been regularly attacking ‘Iranian assets’ inside Damascus, also in a continued effort to weaken Assad, despite the presence of Russia’s military primarily in the northwest coastal region.

    Israel has meanwhile continued to pound Hezbollah positions in south Lebanon, amid continued fears of a bigger war at any moment. The US has even sent amphibious military ships closer to Israel and Lebanon in the Eastern Mediterranean to be ready to evacuate Americans if a bigger conflict ensues.

    The Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper wrote Saturday, “In the past few hours, warplanes attacked several Hezbollah targets, including a military site for the organisation in the Zabqin area, two operational infrastructure sites in the Khiam area, and a Hezbollah building in the al-Adissa [Odaisseh] area.”

    Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has told Israel and its allies that a war with no limits will ensue if Israel attempts to invade southern Lebanon. Some Israeli officials fear that the IDF could be stretched too thin if this happens, considering it’s still in the thick of anti-Hamas Gaza operations in the south.

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    Most analysts agree that Hezbollah is far more capable a paramilitary and guerilla force than Hamas, or any other Iran-linked group in the region for that matter. In the 2006 Lebanon war, there were reports that IRGC operatives were on the ground in Lebanon assisting Hezbollah.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 15:45

  • CDC Recommends New COVID-19 Vaccines For Nearly All Americans
    CDC Recommends New COVID-19 Vaccines For Nearly All Americans

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on June 27 recommended forthcoming COVID-19 vaccines for virtually all Americans.

    “CDC recommends everyone ages 6 months and older receive an updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccine to protect against the potentially serious outcomes of COVID-19 this fall and winter whether or not they have ever previously been vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine,” the agency said in a statement.

    The COVID-19 vaccines now available, which are also broadly recommended, target the XBB.1.5 strain. But observational data indicate they provide short-lived protection against COVID-19 infection and hospitalization.

    U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials, acting on advice from their advisers, recently directed vaccine manufacturers to produce COVID-19 vaccines with updated formulations.

    Updated vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna will target the KP.2 variant, while an updated shot from Novavax will target the JN.1 variant.

    The updated formulations are expected to be available in September.

    CDC advisers earlier Thursday unanimously advised the CDC to recommend the forthcoming vaccines to virtually all Americans, even though no clinical efficacy or safety data are available for them.

    Data from animal testing suggest that the vaccines trigger higher levels of antibodies than the shots currently available, manufacturers said previously.

    CDC advisers considered a risk-based recommendation that would only say certain groups receive one of the vaccines but ultimately opted for what is known as a universal recommendation.

    Dr. Jamie Loehr, one of the members, said before the vote that the cost-effectiveness of vaccinating young people, who are generally at little risk from COVID-19, had him leaning towards a risk-based approach. He changed his mind, though, after listening to a presentation from a CDC researcher.

    Dr. Denise Jamieson, another member, said that members should not “get too caught up in cost-effectiveness currently.” She said, “If we compare it to other vaccine-preventable diseases it seems like a really good investment.”

    Each dose of a new shot could cost up to $130, according to estimates presented during the meeting.

    Pooled effectiveness estimates from studies of the currently available vaccines, which target the XBB strain, and the last slate of shots, which were bivalent, found that effectiveness against hospitalization due to COVID-19 was below 50 percent, the original threshold laid out by regulators.

    Researchers with the CDC and other institutions have also found the protection wanes over time, one reason U.S. officials have turned the COVID-19 vaccine model into a once-a-year update similar to the influenza vaccination program.

    Many Americans took the original COVID-19 vaccines but most have opted against receiving the newer shots. As of May 11, just 14.4 percent of children and 22.5 percent of adults have received one of the currently available COVID-19 vaccines, according to CDC surveys, which also found that many doctors have stopped recommending the shots because they’re focused on promoting other vaccines and worry recommending COVID-19 vaccination could increase hesitancy among patients to receiving the other vaccines.

    Experts said in Thursday’s meeting that the message needs to be that people need another shot.

    “We have to keep saying that over and over and over again—you need this year’s vaccine to be protected against this year’s strain of the virus,” Carol Hayes, who represents the American College of Nurse-Midwives as a liaison to the CDC panel, said during the session.

    The CDC estimated that up to 116,000 hospitalizations from COVID-19 will be prevented over the next year with universal vaccine recommendations, assuming an initial 75 percent effectiveness against hospitalization.

    The effectiveness was projected in certain scenarios to drop to 50 percent after three months, the CDC said.

    The KP.2 strain is the dominant strain in the United States as of May 25, according to CDC data. The closely related KP.3 strain, and the JN.1 variant, are also causing a number of cases.

    Modeling through June 22 projects the rise of a new strain called LB.1.

    A spokesperson for the CDC told The Epoch Times recently that LB.1 “has the potential to infect some people more easily based on a single deletion in a spike protein“ but ”there is currently no evidence that LB.1 causes more severe disease.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 15:10

  • NY Times Editorial Board Urges Biden To Quit Race – Did Trump Administer Premature Kill Shot?
    NY Times Editorial Board Urges Biden To Quit Race – Did Trump Administer Premature Kill Shot?

    Thursday night’s presidential debate mortally wounded President Biden’s political career, and now the New York Times has hammered a significant nail in the coffin — publishing an editorial bluntly declaring that “the greatest public service Mr. Biden can now perform is to announce that he will not continue to run for re-election.” 

    With this development, Biden’s departure from November ballots is taking on an air of inevitability. At the same time, Team Trump is reckoning with what may have been a strategic error —  enabling a premature kill shot that could leave Trump facing a worse matchup. 

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    Repeatedly emphasizing President Trump’s supposed “enormous…danger” to the country, the Times editorial board wrote that Biden is “engaged in a reckless gamble” with America’s future, saying “it’s too big a bet to simply hope Americans will overlook or discount Mr. Biden’s age and infirmity that they see with their own eyes.” 

    You don’t have to respect the Times to appreciate the enormity of a cornerstone liberal media institution declaring an incumbent Democratic president mentally incapable of running for re-election. This move by a “newspaper of record” will embolden other leftist entities and elected officials  to do the same, and the momentum is likely to only grow stronger as the snowball effect gathers force. 

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    Here are some more pointed highlights: 

    • “Voters cannot be expected to ignore what was instead plain to see: Mr. Biden is not the man he was four years ago.”

    • “The president’s performance cannot be written off as a bad night or blamed on a supposed cold, because it affirmed concerns that have been mounting for months or even years.”

    • “[Biden] insisted on a date months earlier than any previous general election debate. He understood that he needed to address longstanding public concerns about his mental acuity and that he needed to do so as soon as possible. The truth Mr. Biden needs to confront now is that he failed his own test.”

    • “Democrats who have deferred to Mr. Biden must now find the courage to speak plain truths to the party’s leader….The clearest path for Democrats to defeat a candidate defined by his lies is to deal truthfully with the American public: acknowledge that Mr. Biden can’t continue his race.“

    Whistling past his boss’s political graveyard, Biden-Harris co-chair Cedric Richmond told CNN, “The last time Joe Biden lost the New York Times editorial board’s endorsement, it turned out pretty well for him” — a reference to the Times backing Senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 Democratic primary.  

    In what might be a political first, many of Biden’s most alarming moments in the debate came when he wasn’t speaking

    At this point, the post-debate glee at Trump campaign headquarters is likely infused with some angst. Presidential races are all about the matchups, and Trump couldn’t have asked for a more favorable opponent than Biden. That’s now in jeopardy. 

    In our debate preview, we warned that frontrunner Trump may have made a major strategic error in agreeing to an extraordinarily early date for the first debate:   

    Trump may come to regret agreeing to a debate that’s far earlier in the presidential election calendar than normal — indeed, before either party has even had its nominating convention. If tonight’s debate puts Biden’s mental decline under the national spotlight, the Democratic Party…may scramble to persuade Biden to leave the race with dignity and replace him with someone else.

    Now, as that exact scenario is playing out, the Trump campaign is feebly trying to steer Democrats away from benching Biden and subbing in the likes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom or Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Responding to the Times editorial, the Trump campaign told NBC News that Biden is the “incumbent president, he is the Democrat nominee, he has also said he won’t drop out, it’s too late to change that.”

    Don’t bet on it. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 14:55

  • Dam In East Texas On 'Potential Failure Watch'
    Dam In East Texas On ‘Potential Failure Watch’

    Officials in East Texas declared a “potential failure watch” status over concerns that heavy rains in the Houston region may result in a structure issue at the spillway of the Lake Livingston Dam. 

    On Friday night, The Trinity River Authority confirmed that the spillway “has been adversely impacted by the recent heavy rainfall and flooding in the dam’s drainage area.” 

    “While there is no immediate danger of either failure or breach of the dam, the potential does exist however remote it might be,” the river authority’s statement continued, adding, “The day-to-day operation of the dam will continue as necessary, although normal gate operations may vary as conditions dictate.”

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    “Beginning April 28, the Piney Woods region of the state received torrential rainfall that included more than 20 inches of rain falling in a seven-day period near the lake,” Houston Chronicle said. 

    Here’s footage of the dam:

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    Early last week, a century-old concrete gravity dam on the Blue Earth River in Rapidan Township, near Rapidan, Minnesota, experienced a ‘partial failure.’ 

    To summarize, America’s aging critical infrastructure is deteriorating as the lifespans reach their limits. However, leftist corporate media outlets continue to attribute failing infrastructure to climate change. Rather than funneling tens of billions of dollars of US taxpayer funds to Ukraine, the American people should demand that political elites in Washington, DC, fix America first before any more foreign wars.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 14:35

  • Lithium: A Clean Energy Solution With A Dirty Secret
    Lithium: A Clean Energy Solution With A Dirty Secret

    Authored by Haley Zaremba via OilPrice.com,

    • Lithium is essential for the clean energy transition, but its extraction often involves severe environmental and health consequences.

    • AlkaLi, a startup company, aims to revolutionize lithium extraction with a lower environmental footprint and potentially make the US more competitive in lithium processing.

    • The demand for lithium is expected to increase dramatically in the coming years, driven by the growth of electric vehicles and renewable energy storage.

    Lithium is essential to saving the world from climate change – but will it destroy the environment in the process? 

    Ironically, lithium extraction is just as associated with sharply negative environmental externalities as it is with clean and green energy initiatives. The communities where lithium is extracted are already suffering from dire health and ecological issues stemming from the extraction of the metal, but the lithium industry is just getting started. To avoid devastation for such communities, something about the lithium extraction process has to change drastically and soon. 

    Gradiant, a unicorn startup company that treats industrial wastewater, thinks that it has a solution to this rapidly expanding problem. It’s opening a new spin-off business called alkaLi which aims to extract lithium from naturally occurring brine and then process it for use in lithium-ion batteries via novel methods. The company’s innovative process “uses resins and membranes to more easily extract the lithium from brine, then relies on its own technology to concentrate the mineral, which ultimately is precipitated into a solid for use in batteries,” Forbes summarized in a recent report. 

    The team behind Gradiant and alkaLi believes that their disruptive lithium extraction and processing approach can turn the lithium industry on its head and jettison the budding AlkaLi  into the stratosphere. “The demand side of lithium is crazy,” Gradiant co-founder and chief operating officer Prakash Govindan was quoted by Forbes. “We believe we can create a billion-dollar company just from the lithium business, but it is in the early stages of revenue.”

    It’s true that the demand for lithium is going gangbusters and shows no signs of stopping. A 2023 report from Popular Mechanics calculated that “an electrified economy in 2030 will likely need anywhere from 250,000 to 450,000 tonnes of lithium.” By comparison, “In 2021, the world produced only 105—not 105,000—tonnes.”

    The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) corroborates this astronomical scale of growth. Its 2022 lithium report estimates that lithium demand for battery-making alone is expected to increase by a factor of ten over the decade between 2020 and 2030. These batteries will be essential to the global clean energy transition to power electric vehicles as well as to store variable renewable energy produced by solar and wind power.

    But there are a few problems with the massive growth of lithium demand.

    First is the aforementioned environmental impact of lithium mining and extraction. Lithium extraction is typically extremely water-intensive – according to a 2018 report from WIRED magazine, extracting a single ton of lithium requires approximately 500,000 liters of water. In a cruel irony, lithium is often found and extracted in extremely water-stressed areas, such as South America’s so-called ‘lithium triangle,’ which overlaps with the Atacama, the world’s driest desert. What’s more, extraction through brine ponds also poses a potential threat of contaminating existing, preciously scant water reserves. 

    Moreover, the chemicals involved in lithium extraction are extremely toxic. “The release of such chemicals through leeching [sic], spills or air emissions can harm communities, ecosystems and food production,” reads a recent report from international environment activism group Friends of the Earth. “Moreover, lithium extraction inevitably harms the soil and also causes air contamination.”

    Finally, the lithium industry presents key geopolitical issues in its current form. While most lithium is extracted in Australia and South America, almost all lithium processing takes place in China, creating a potentially dangerous concentration of a vital supply chain. 

    AlkaLi claims that its lithium extraction and processing method has a lower water footprint and carbon footprint than typical methods, and that it’s 50% cheaper to boot. This means that they may not only have found a way to reduce the environmental harm that the lithium boom threatens to cause around the globe, but also allow for the United States to eventually become competitive with China – a target that the U.S. desperately seeks. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 14:00

  • Costco To Build 800-Unit Apartment Complex In South Los Angeles
    Costco To Build 800-Unit Apartment Complex In South Los Angeles

    Costco is building a ‘mixed use’ 800-unit apartment complex in south Los Angeles – with 184 units designated as affordable housing, which some have speculated will allow them to fast-track the construction of an actual Costco Big Box store by taking advantage of a state law which removes significant red tape from such projects, the NY Post reports.

    Costco plans to open a new store in South Los Angeles and has teamed with developers to build an 800-unit apartment complex — with 84 units set aside for affordable housing. Thrive Living

    The project, in partnership with  Baldwin Village by developers Thrive Living and architects AO, is still in the permitting stage so no word on when ground will be broken.

    Via @CohenSite

    “The planning and land use system in California and in LA is a Rube Goldberg machine,” housing activist Joe Cohen told SFGATE, “and this project is seeing that machine laid bare.”

    The mixed-use complex would rise on a vacant, five-acre lot that was previously home to a hospital. 

    The plans include a gym, multi-purpose spaces, gardens, a rooftop pool, landscaping and a large parking lot, according to the press release. -NY Post

    According to Cohen – who calls it Costco Prison, the complex is “a bunch of small units along these long hallways, with a massive recreation center as an amenity space,” adding “From a plain view, it looks like an old school prison design,” due to its use of pre-manufactured apartment modules that can he brought to the site by truck.

    The reason for the ‘prison’ look, Cohen says, is that “Costco was facing years of public hearings, millions of dollars of consultant fees, and an uncertain outcome,” in order to gain approval.

    Thrive Living

    “However, mixed-use housing projects that meet certain criteria are automatically exempt from discretionary reviews by state law (AB 2011),” he continues.

    “So Costco did what any good Scooby-Doo villain would do. They put on a mask that says “I’m an apartment building, not a big-box store.”“

    To get the full protection of state housing laws (HAA), mixed-use buildings must be at least 2/3 residential. The Costco itself is 185,000 square feet. So they needed at least 370,000 sq ft of residential.

    (They ended up with 471,000 sq ft of residential plus an additional 56,000 sq ft of amenity space)

    But for a project that big, to qualify for AB 2011, you need to not only pay prevailing wages, but use “skilled and trained” (aka union) labor.

    “luckily”, union labor requirements only apply to on-site construction. So to lower the amount of on-site labor needed, Costco turned to pre-fab building modules.

    Pre-fab modules need to fit on trucks, which results in mostly small shotgun-style one-bedroom units.

    And that’s how you end up with a Costco housing project that resembles a prison! -Joe Cohen

    The Costco store itself will be close to mass transit, and will include a multi-floor, underground garage, pharmacy, and optical center according to SFGATE.

    “Mayor Bass has declared a housing emergency in Los Angeles, and we’re answering the call,” Jordan Brill of Thrive Living in a statement included in the press release. “Our company is focused on addressing the severe housing affordability crisis in Los Angeles, while also attracting retailers willing to make long-term commitments.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 13:25

  • Banksy 'Launches' Migrant Boat Stunt At Glastonbury Festival, Which Has An 8-Mile-Long, 20ft-High Border-Wall
    Banksy ‘Launches’ Migrant Boat Stunt At Glastonbury Festival, Which Has An 8-Mile-Long, 20ft-High Border-Wall

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    The ‘street’ artist Banksy carried out a stunt at the now uber trendy Glastonbury Festival Friday night by launching a mock-up small boat complete with dummy migrants into the crowd.

    The Guardian reports that many in the crowd thought it was part of the band Idles’ set given that their songs are all about lefty political positions such as the idea that limiting mass illegal immigration is right wing and evil.

    The report notes, however, that Banksy was behind the stunt stating “The raft, a reference to the small boats carrying migrants across the Channel that have been such a high-profile target of Rishi Sunak’s immigration policy, was crowdsurfed through the thousands-strong Other stage crowd, which Idles were headlining on Friday night.”

    Given that Sunak has done practically nothing to prevent the boats and the Conservative government has actively incentivised mass illegal immigration for years now, you’d be forgiven for thinking the stunt was some sort of endorsement.

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    Indeed, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what the point of it was. 

    What is the crowd cheering about here?

    The report further notes that the boat was ‘launched’ during a song called Danny Nedelko, which contains the following lyrics:

    My blood brother is an immigrant, a beautiful immigrant. My blood brother’s Freddie Mercury. A Nigerian mother of three. He’s made of bones, he’s made of blood. He’s made of flesh, he’s made of love. He’s made of you, he’s made of me. Unity. Fear leads to panic, panic leads to pain. Pain leads to anger, anger leads to hate.

    The report also notes that “Migration is a major theme at this year’s Glastonbury festival, with a new area dedicated to the topic.”

    Mega cringe.

    It continues, “Entrants to ‘Terminal 1’ must answer a question from the UK government’s citizenship test for prospective migrants.”

    The message being that having some form of secure border and vetting system is oppressive… or something.

    If people manage to pass the test they’re then treated to “music by representatives from Notting Hill carnival and Bristol’s St Paul’s carnival, alongside visual art by global artists including Love Watts, Yoshi Sodeoka and the Turner prize winner Mark Wallinger.”

    No thanks then.

    It perhaps would’ve been more accurate to treat them with a four star hotel, loaded debit cards and free meals.

    The idea that Glastonbury is some sort of moral arbiter on migration is laughable given that it is surrounded by an eight kilometre long 20 ft high hi tech secure perimeter complete with guards and watchtowers.

    The BBC noted in 2019 that “The festival might even be more secure than Mr Trump’s planned border wall between the US and Mexico.”

    Admittance is only granted to the select few who pay the massively extortionate ticket price and can afford to spend more than the majority of people earn in an entire month once inside.

    It’s basically full of metropolitan shitlib ‘creatives’ and influencers with trust funds and disposable incomes.

    So it’s the perfect venue to engage in empty virtue signalling stunts.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/29/2024 – 12:50

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Jun 29

Today’s News 29th June 2024

  • Why Won't The US Help Negotiate A Peaceful End To The War In Ukraine?
    Why Won’t The US Help Negotiate A Peaceful End To The War In Ukraine?

    Authored by Jeffrey Sachs via AntiWar.com,

    For the fifth time since 2008, Russia has proposed to negotiate with the U.S. over security arrangements, this time in proposals made by President Vladimir Putin on June 14, 2024. Four previous times, the U.S. rejected the offer of negotiations in favor of a neocon strategy to weaken or dismember Russia through war and covert operations.

    The U.S. neocon tactics have failed disastrously, devastating Ukraine in the process, and endangering the whole world.

    After all the warmongering, it’s time for Biden to open negotiations for peace with Russia.

    Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. grand strategy has been to weaken Russia. As early as 1992, then Defense Secretary Richard Cheney opined that following the 1991 demise of the Soviet Union, Russia too should be dismembered. Zbigniew Brzezinski opined in 1997 that Russia should be divided into three loosely confederated entities in Russian Europe, Siberia, and the far east. In 1999, the U.S.-led NATO alliance bombed Russia’s ally, Serbia, for 78 days in order to break Serbia apart and install a massive NATO military base in breakaway Kosovo. Leaders of the U.S. military-industrial complex vociferously supported the Chechen war against Russia in the early 2000s.

    To secure these U.S. advances against Russia, Washington aggressively pushed NATO enlargement, despite promises to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not move one inch eastward from Germany. Most tendentiously, the U.S. pushed NATO enlargement to Ukraine and Georgia, with the idea of surrounding Russia’s naval fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea with NATO states: Ukraine, Romania (NATO member 2004), Bulgaria (NATO member 2004), Turkey (NATO member 1952), and Georgia, an idea straight from the playbook of the British Empire in the Crimean War (1853-6).

    Brzezinski spelled out a chronology of NATO enlargement in 1997, including NATO membership of Ukraine during 2005-2010. The U.S. in fact proposed NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia at the 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit. By 2020, NATO had in fact enlarged by 14 countries in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia, 2009; Montenegro, 2017; and Northern Macedonia, 2020), while promising future membership to Ukraine and Georgia.

    In short, the 30-year U.S. project, hatched originally by Cheney and the neocons, and carried forward consistently since then, has been to weaken or even dismember Russia, surround Russia with NATO forces, and depict Russia as the belligerent power.

    It is against this grim backdrop that Russian leaders have repeatedly proposed to negotiate security arrangements with Europe and the U.S. that would provide security for all countries concerned, not just the NATO bloc. Guided by the neocon game plan, the U.S. has refused to negotiate on every occasion, while trying to pin the blame on Russia for the lack of negotiations.

    In June 2008, as the U.S. prepared to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev proposed a European Security Treaty, calling for collective security and an end to NATO’s unilateralism. Suffice it to say, the U.S. showed no interest whatsoever in Russia’s proposals, and instead proceeded with its long-held plans for NATO enlargement.

    The second Russian proposal for negotiations came from Putin following the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, with the active complicity if not outright leadership of the U.S. government. I happened to see the U.S. complicity up close, as the post-coup government invited me for urgent economic discussions. When I arrived in Kiev, I was taken to the Maidan, where I was told directly about U.S. funding of the Maidan protest.

    The evidence of U.S. complicity in the coup is overwhelming. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was caught on a phone line in January 2014 plotting the change of government in Ukraine. Meanwhile, U.S. Senators went personally to Kiev to stir up the protests (akin to Chinese or Russian political leaders coming to DC on January 6, 2021 to rile up the crowds). On February 21, 2014, the Europeans, U.S., and Russia brokered a deal with Yanukovych in which Yanukovich agreed to early elections. Yet the coup leaders reneged on the deal the same day, took over government buildings, threatened more violence, and deposed Yanukovych the next day. The U.S. supported the coup and immediately extended recognition to the new government.

    In my view, this was a standard CIA-led covert regime change operation, of which there have been several dozen around the world, including sixty-four episodes between 1947 and 1989 meticulously documented by Professor Lindsey O’Rourke. Covert regime-change operations are of course not really hidden from view, but the U.S. government vociferously denies its role, keeps all documents highly confidential, and systematically gaslights the world: “Do not believe what you see plainly with your own eyes! The U.S. had nothing to do with this.” Details of the operations eventually emerge, however, through eyewitnesses, whistleblowers, the forced release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act, declassification of papers after years or decades, and memoirs, but all far too late for real accountability.

    In any event, the violent coup induced the ethnic-Russia Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine to break from the coup leaders, many of whom were extreme Russophobic nationalists, and some in violent groups with a history of Nazi SS links in the past. Almost immediately, the coup leaders took steps to repress the use of the Russian language even in the Russian-speaking Donbas. In the following months and years, the government in Kiev launched a military campaign to retake the breakaway regions, deploying neo-Nazi paramilitary units and U.S. arms.

    In the course of 2014, Putin called repeatedly for a negotiated peace, and this led to the Minsk II Agreement in February 2015 based on autonomy of the Donbas and an end to violence by both sides. Russia did not claim the Donbas as Russian territory, but instead called for autonomy and the protection of ethnic Russians within Ukraine. The UN Security Council endorsed the Minsk II agreement, but the U.S. neocons privately subverted it. Years later, Chancellor Angela Merkel blurted out the truth. The Western side treated the agreement not as a solemn treaty but as a delaying tactic to “give Ukraine time” to build its military strength. In the meantime, around 14,000 people died in the fighting in Donbas between 2014 and 2021.

    Following the definitive collapse of the Minsk II agreement, Putin again proposed negotiations with the U.S. in December 2021. By that point, the issues went even beyond NATO enlargement to include fundamental issues of nuclear armaments. Step by step, the U.S. neocons had abandoned nuclear arms control with Russia, with the U.S. unilaterally abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, placing Aegis missiles in Poland and Romania in 2010 onwards, and walking out of the Intermediate Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty in 2019.

    In view of these dire concerns, Putin put on the table on December 15, 2021 a draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees.” The most immediate issue on the table (Article 4 of the draft treaty) was the end of the U.S. attempt to expand NATO to Ukraine. I called U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the end of 2021 to try to convince the Biden White House to enter the negotiations. My main advice was to avoid a war in Ukraine by accepting Ukraine’s neutrality, rather than NATO membership, which was a bright red line for Russia.

    The White House flatly rejected the advice, claiming remarkably (and obtusely) that NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine was none of Russia’s business! Yet what would the U.S. say if some country in the Western hemisphere decided to host Chinese or Russian bases? Would the White House, State Department, or Congress say, “That’s just fine, that’s a matter of concern only to Russia or China and the host country?” No. The world nearly came to nuclear Armageddon in 1962 when the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba and the U.S. imposed a naval quarantine and threatened war unless the Russians removed the missiles. The U.S. military alliance does not belong in Ukraine any more than the Russian or Chinese military belongs close to the U.S. border.

    The fourth offer of Putin to negotiate came in March 2022, when Russia and Ukraine nearly closed a peace deal just weeks after the start of Russia’s special military operation that began on February 24, 2022. Russia, once again, was after one big thing: Ukraine’s neutrality, i.e., no NATO membership and no hosting of U.S. missiles on Russia’s border.

    Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky quickly accepted Ukraine’s neutrality, and Ukraine and Russia exchanged papers, with the skillful mediation of the Foreign Ministry of Turkey. Then suddenly, at the end of March, Ukraine abandoned the negotiations.

    U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, following in the tradition of British anti-Russian war-mongering dating back to the Crimean War (1853-6), actually flew to Kiev to warn Zelensky against neutrality and the importance of Ukraine defeating Russia on the battlefield. Since that date, Ukraine has lost around 500,000 dead and is on the ropes on the battlefield.

    Now we have Russia’s fifth offer of negotiations, explained clearly and cogently by Putin himself in his speech to diplomats at the Russian Foreign Ministry on June 14. Putin laid out Russia’s proposed terms to end the war in Ukraine.

    “Ukraine should adopt a neutral, non-aligned status, be nuclear- free, and undergo demilitarization and de-nazification,” Putin said. “These parameters were broadly agreed upon during the Istanbul negotiations in 2022, including specific details on demilitarization such as the agreed numbers of tanks and other military equipment. We reached consensus on all points.

    “Certainly, the rights, freedoms, and interests of Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine must be fully protected,” he continued. “The new territorial realities, including the status of Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions as parts of the Russian Federation, should be acknowledged. These foundational principles need to be formalized through fundamental international agreements in the future. Naturally, this entails the removal of all Western sanctions against Russia as well.”

    Let me say a few words about negotiating.

    Russia’s proposals should now be met at the negotiating table by proposals from the U.S. and Ukraine. The White House is dead wrong to evade negotiations just because of disagreements with Russia’s proposals. It should put up its own proposals and get down to the business of negotiating an end to the war.

    There are three core issues for Russia:

    1. Ukraine’s neutrality (non-NATO enlargement),

    2. Crimea remaining in Russian hands, and

    3. boundary changes in Eastern and Southern Ukraine.

    The first two are almost surely non-negotiable.

    The end of NATO enlargement is the fundamental casus belli. Crimea is also core for Russia, as Crimea has been home to Russia’s Black Sea fleet since 1783 and is fundamental to Russia’s national security.

    The third core issue, the borders of Eastern and Southern Ukraine, will be a key point of negotiations. The U.S. cannot pretend that borders are sacrosanct after NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 to relinquish Kosovo, and after the U.S. pressured Sudan to relinquish South Sudan. Yes, Ukraine’s borders will be redrawn as the result of the 10 years of war, the situation on the battlefield, the choices of the local populations, and tradeoffs made at the negotiating table.

    Biden needs to accept that negotiations are not a sign of weakness. As Kennedy put it, “Never negotiate out of fear, but never fear to negotiate.” Ronald Reagan famously described his own negotiating strategy using a Russian proverb, “Trust but verify.”

    The neocon approach to Russia, delusional and hubristic from the start, lies in ruins. NATO will never enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia. Russia will not be toppled by a CIA covert operation. Ukraine is being horribly bloodied on the battlefield, often losing 1,000 or more dead and wounded in a single day. The failed neocon game plan brings us closer to nuclear Armageddon.

    Yet Biden still refuses to negotiate. Following Putin’s speech, the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine firmly rejected negotiations once again. Biden and his team have still not relinquished the neocon fantasy of defeating Russia and expanding NATO to Ukraine.

    The Ukrainian people have been lied to time and again by Zelensky and Biden and other leaders of NATO countries, who told them falsely and repeatedly that Ukraine would prevail on the battlefield and that there were no options to negotiate. Ukraine is now under martial law. The public is given no say about its own slaughter.

    For the sake of Ukraine’s very survival, and to avoid nuclear war, the President of the United States has one overriding responsibility today: Negotiate.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 23:25

  • Americans Dread Vote Between Two Unpopular Candidates
    Americans Dread Vote Between Two Unpopular Candidates

    When President Joe Biden and his predecessor and presumptive challenger Donald Trump faced off in the first of two planned presidential debates in Atlanta, Georgia on Thursday night, things were very different from usual.

    First of all, it was the earliest date ever for a presidential debate, which are usually held in September and October, shortly ahead of the election and after the candidates have officially been nominated by their parties. Secondly, the debate was hosted by CNN and held without a live audience, bypassing the Commission on Presidential Debates, which had organized all such events since 1988.

    Additionally, as Statista’s Felix Richter notes, the debate was also unique in that it featured two candidates that are viewed as unfit for the job by large parts of the American public, albeit for very different reasons. While President Biden is widely viewed as too old for a second term (and apparently proved that view correct last night), former President Trump is the first convicted felon to run for the country’s highest office.

    As a result of this unusual match-up, many voters feel like they’re caught between a rock and a hard place, as they have serious reservations about both candidates.

    According to a recent poll by The Economist and YouGov, Biden and Trump are seen unfavorably by almost 60 percent of Americans, with a shocking 44 and 47 percent holding very unfavorable views of the incumbent and his challenger, respectively.

    Of course, those numbers are largely driven by the extreme polarization of today’s political landscape, resulting in 92 percent of likely Democratic voters seeing Trump unfavorably and 94 percent of likely Republican voters holding a negative view of Biden, but there are reservations about their own candidate on both sides of the political spectrum as well.

    Infographic: Americans Dread Vote Between Two Unpopular Candidates | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    As Statista’s chart above shows, this results in what is often described as “election dread” or a widespread lack of enthusiasm ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

    According to The Economist/YouGov, 44 of percent of the 1,600 U.S. adults surveyed are not or not at all enthusiastic about voting in November, with election dread most widespread among those who identified as Independent – at 78 percent.

    Unsurprisingly, those who identify with or lean towards the Republican party are more enthusiastic about the upcoming vote, as concerns about Biden’s age appear to be more widespread within the Democratic base than doubts about Trump’s fitness for office are among Republicans.

    We will see if these numbers tilt aggressively in favor of Trump in the following days after Biden’s performance last night.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 23:00

  • DOJ Sues 5 Pro-Life Activists For Repeatedly Obstructing Access To Abortion Clinics
    DOJ Sues 5 Pro-Life Activists For Repeatedly Obstructing Access To Abortion Clinics

    Authored by Beth Brelje via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a lawsuit against pro-life advocates, alleging violations under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, a law that prevents interfering with women entering abortion clinics.

    Calvin Zastrow and his daughter, Eva Zastrow, pause in Indiana while on a road trip from their home in Michigan to a federal court in Nashville, Tenn., on April 1, 2024. (Courtesy of Trish Zastrow)

    The civil suit seeks a monetary penalty and an injunction preventing repeat offenders from continuing their activity, marking a departure from the criminal cases that have been brought to prosecute violators of the FACE Act in recent years. In previous cases, the DOJ has asked the court to sentence the alleged offenders to 11 years in prison for each offense.

    The DOJ filed the lawsuit on June 20 in the Middle District of Florida against five people for violating the FACE Act two years ago at the Fort Myers Health Center, a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic.

    The case alleges that five people brought operations at the Fort Myers Health Center to a halt for at least one hour on Jan. 27, 2022. As a result, several patients had their appointments rescheduled or canceled, and one employee quit working there after eight years.

    Named in the lawsuit are Calvin Zastrow of Michigan, a longtime pro-life advocate; Kenneth Scott of Florida, who has been charged numerous times for pro-life advocacy at abortion clinics and often represents himself in court; Chester Gallagher of Tennessee, a former police officer who left his job to advocate for the unborn; Eva Zastrow of Michigan, a missionary and pro-life activist; and Katelyn Sims, also known as Katelyn Velasco, of Texas.

    The defendants trespassed onto a reproductive health center’s property, blocked the entrances, and temporarily stopped operations at the center, the complaint alleges.

    The defendants were charged locally in Lee County and found guilty. Several pro-life minors were also arrested for the incident and charged locally with trespassing.

    The defendants have been charged in previous FACE cases and are unlikely to stop showing up at abortion clinics, according to the complaint.

    Stephen Crampton, senior counsel for Thomas More Society, will represent some of the defendants, who have been advised not to make statements about the case.

    “This prosecution is yet another example of our two-tiered justice system ... whereby defenders of life are aggressively prosecuted while most who violently attacked churches and pro-life pregnancy centers are not brought to justice,” Mr. Crampton told The Epoch Times.

    “While we are pleased the DOJ has pulled back from its effort to inflict draconian criminal punishment on these gentle pro-life advocates, we are disappointed that they have decided to relentlessly pursue these peaceful, nonviolent demonstrators and seek civil penalties—including ruinous fines—for events that occurred years ago and which resulted in local law enforcement already taking action, as our federalist system of government rightly contemplated,” he said.

    The Department of Justice in Washington on March 25, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

    Blocked Door

    On Jan. 27, 2022, a Planned Parenthood security coordinator noticed the defendants arriving across the street from the Fort Myers Health Center at about 7:45 a.m. in several cars with out-of-state license plates, according to court papers. By 8:25 a.m., the center’s management was instructing employees to park at a tile outlet store’s parking lot next door and to wait for the security coordinator to escort them into the building.

    As employees arrived to work, the abortion protesters allegedly shouted “baby murderer” and “you’re going to hell” at them, the complaint said. A Planned Parenthood doctor was instructed to stay in her car due to the protests, and the DOJ says she was unable to enter the business until 10:30 a.m.

    The Lee County Sheriff’s Office then received reports from the Fort Myers Health Center that protesters were preventing individuals from entering the building, according to the complaint.

    Some defendants walked onto the property in front of the sheriff’s deputies and toward the door, while yelling, “They are killing babies inside and you are not doing anything about it.”

    A woman arrived for services while some defendants were blocking the door. The Planned Parenthood security officer had to pry open the door and the woman had to squeeze past the protesters to enter, court papers say.

    Sheriff’s deputies arrested one protester for trespassing. Another was still sitting in front of the door and refused to leave. He was also arrested for trespassing.

    Two other protesters went to the back door where employees had entered and tried to get in, but the door was locked, court papers say.

    The protesters tried to shove signs under the door, and according to the DOJ, employees inside were frightened by the protesters’ attempts to get in the back door and grabbed weapons, including a scalpel and an IV pole, to defend themselves if the protesters got inside.

    Those protesters were also arrested for trespassing.

    Repeat Offenders

    The defendants violated the FACE Act by blocking doors and intimidating women and abortion workers, the DOJ alleges, adding they have done it before and are likely to continue to commit such violations.

    Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Zastrow, and his daughter, Ms. Zastrow, have been criminally convicted in a previous FACE case and await sentencing. The Zastrows await court for other cases in Michigan.

    Each criminal case carries up to 11 years in federal prison. Instead of prison, this civil case asks for a penalty of $20,516 for first violations and no more than $30,868 for subsequent violations, plus damages of $5,000 for each person allegedly aggrieved by the defendants.

    It is unclear how many people the DOJ is counting as aggrieved in this incident.

    The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 22:35

  • These Are The Most Expensive US Metro Areas To Raise A Kid
    These Are The Most Expensive US Metro Areas To Raise A Kid

    Raising a child can be expensive, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars from birth through to adulthood.

    This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, shows the 10 most expensive metro areas to raise a child in, among the 50 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. Costs include food, housing, childcare, healthcare, transportation, and other necessities.

    All figures are as of February 2024. Data is from SmartAsset.

    Methodology: SmartAsset used MIT Living Wage Calculator data to compare the living costs of a household with two working adults and one child to that of a childless household with two working adults in extensive metro areas.

    Boston Tops the List

    Raising a child in a large U.S. metro area costs an average of $25,181 per year.

    The Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA, area is the most expensive, at $37,758 annually. Childcare costs $22,806 annually, and additional housing needs cost $5,425.

    The San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metro area comes in second, with an annual cost of $35,642 per child. Washington, DC, ranks third with an average cost of $35,554. Washington also leads the country in childcare costs alone at $24,886 annually.

    Additional housing costs are higher in the San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad area, amounting to $7,056 annually. Meanwhile, the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area tops the list for food, healthcare, and transportation costs.

    If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out Ranked: The Most Valuable Housing Markets in America.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 22:10

  • 21 Facts That Joe Biden Doesn't Want You To Know
    21 Facts That Joe Biden Doesn’t Want You To Know

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    It takes a lot of gumption to go on television and repeatedly lie to more than 300 million Americans.  I honestly don’t know how Joe Biden does it.  I suppose that after you have been lying for your entire career, lying comes as naturally as breathing does.  Sadly, there are still millions of Americans that are falling for his lies after all this time.  Biden would like for us all to believe that the economy is “booming”, that the southern border is under control, that our communities are safe, and that Ukraine is going to win their war against Russia.  Our entire society is literally crumbling all around us, and Biden and his minions have brought us to the brink of global war.  I am entirely convinced that he has been the worst president in U.S. history, and that is really saying something.

    Ultimately, Joe Biden is just another slimy politician that is trying to save his job.

    I get that.

    But come on man, how can anyone actually believe the nonsense that he is shoveling?

    There are a few numbers that Biden can cherry pick to try to make himself look good, but here are 21 facts that Joe Biden doesn’t want you to know…

    1. It takes the typical U.S. household $1,069 more a month just to purchase the same goods and services that it did three years ago.

    2. Two-thirds of the respondents to one recent survey indicated that they had to take action to deal with rising financial stress within the past year.  Those actions included “cutting back on spending, skipping monthly bills, or taking an additional job”.

    3. Home insurance rates have risen by 38 percent since 2019.

    4. Home rental prices are up 30 percent since Joe Biden entered the White House.

    5. A whopping 61 percent of U.S. renters cannot afford the rent on a median-priced apartment in the United States right now.

    6. Gasoline prices are up 46 percent since Joe Biden entered the White House.

    7. The average rate on a 30 year fixed mortgage is up 148 percent since Joe Biden entered the White House.

    8. According to Zillow, the monthly mortgage payment on a typical home in this country has almost doubled during the past four years.

    9. One recent poll discovered that 44 percent of retired Americans are considering going back to work because the cost of living has become so oppressive.

    10. New home sales fell 11.3 percent last month.

    11. Pending home sales are dropping at the fastest rate ever recorded.

    12. According to the House Budget Committee, there have been more than 8 million migrant encounters nationwide while Joe Biden has been in the White House.  We truly are in the midst of an immigration crisis that is far greater than anything that we have ever witnessed before.

    13. Thanks to our unprecedented immigration crisis, the homeless population in the city of Chicago actually tripled in just one year.

    14. Murder rates are up by double digit percentages in many major U.S. cities this year.

    15. Continuing jobless claims just shot up to the highest level in almost three years.

    16. The number of job openings in the United States has dropped to the lowest level in more than 3 years.

    17. Rite Aid just announced that it will be closing 27 more stores.  That is on top of more than 500 stores that it has already decided to shut down.

    18. Walgreens plans to close approximately one-fourth of its 8,600 U.S. stores.  If the economy really was “booming”, why would they be doing this?

    19. Today, 20 percent of the entire population of the state of California is living in poverty.

    20. According to one recent survey, 46 percent of Americans don’t even have 500 dollars saved up.

    21. So far, the U.S. has spent a total of approximately 175 billion dollars on the war in Ukraine, and the Russians are still winning.

    Over the past three and a half years, there has just been one epic failure after another.

    The nightmarish withdrawal from Afghanistan set the stage for the entire Biden presidency.  Everything that Biden and his minions have touched has gone sour.  In fact, usually the best thing that Biden and his minions can do to solve a problem is to do nothing at all.

    Have you ever known someone that has a knack for royally messing things up no matter how hard they try?

    Unfortunately, Biden and his minions aren’t just incompetent.

    They have blended extreme incompetence with sheer evil, and now they are asking voters to give them a chance to run America for another four years.

    But if we stay on the path that we are on, will our nation even survive?

    If we want to turn things around, we need to do the exact opposite of what we have been doing.

    And we better move fast, because the clock is ticking…

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 21:45

  • Trump Vows To Immediately Free WSJ's Gershkovich, Says Putin "Laughing" At Biden
    Trump Vows To Immediately Free WSJ’s Gershkovich, Says Putin “Laughing” At Biden

    Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been languishing in a Russian jail since March of last year after his arrest on allegations of espionage. Soon after his detention the US formally designated him “wrongfully detained”.

    Former President Donald Trump in last night’s debate with President Joe Biden hammered the administration on the lack of action on freeing the journalist. Trump vowed that if re-elected he would secure Gershkovich’s release very quickly upon entering office.

    Via Reuters: Evan Gershkovich is accused of espionage and could face up to 20 years in prison.

    “I will have him out very quickly, as soon as I take office, before I take office,” Trump said from the CNN debate stage, and continued: “As soon as I win the election, I will have that reporter out.”

    Trump sought to paint a general picture of the world “laughing” at us, especially leaders like Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin. Trump also said the only way Biden has gotten Americans released from foreign prisons is by handing overseas despots billions of dollars upon their demanding it.

    The Republican frontrunner specifically referenced $6 billion ‘given’ to gain the release of five detained Americans in Iran in 2023, in reference to freeing up frozen Iranian assets that had been held primarily in South Korea.

    Trump claimed that Putin is now demanding “billions of dollars” for Gershkovich’s release and that Putin “is laughing at this guy” – in reference to Biden.

    This week, starting Wednesday, Gershkovich’s trial began in secret in Ekaterinburg, which is the city some 900 miles away from Moscow where Russia’s FSB arrested him last year. He appeared in court behind the typical defendant’s glass cage.

    Watch Trump go after Biden on the issue of the journalist’s detention:

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

    WSJ’s Editor in Chief Emma Tucker has stated: “This bogus accusation of espionage will inevitably lead to a bogus conviction for an innocent man who would then face up to 20 years in prison for simply doing his job. And an excellent job he was doing, at that.” Trump on Thursday night hailed him as a “good guy”.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 21:20

  • Does The US Want A Strong Or Weak Dollar?
    Does The US Want A Strong Or Weak Dollar?

    Authored by Law Ka-chung via The Epoch Times,

    Financial markets generally show no clear direction these days. Accordingly, relatively small movements cause market noise. A few examples happened in the currency market where non-U.S. dollar exchange rates depreciated. While Euro depreciation had its back story of extreme right-wing parties rising in election polls, Japanese Yen depreciation had its story of the central bank (Bank of Japan) not managing market expectations well, Chinese Yuan depreciation had its story of bad outlook, the ultimate result was a strong U.S. dollar, against all.

    Many views have listed so many reasons that the U.S. dollar should decline, if not collapse. However, the “cruel” fact is the U.S. dollar is still trading near its historical high.

    Based on the well-known dollar index (DXY) compiled by Bloomberg, it has been over 100 for two years already, where most of the time in its history (from 1967 to now), it has ranged between 80 and 100. Directionally speaking, it has been trending up from 2008 to now.

    Even in terms of world trade invoicing, central bank reserves, and financial denominations, the U.S. dollar share remains stable.

    The strength of U.S. dollar is neither solely political nor solely economic.

    U.S. interest rate higher than the others is one force making the U.S. dollar stronger, but a mega wave of inflation and interest rates is generally a global phenomenon that all non-U.S. central banks would act similarly.

    It follows that any interest rate differentials are more likely the results of time lag and technical factors than global divergence.

    More importantly, the U.S. Dollar is widely used in so many countries that it might not reflect only the U.S. economy and policies but also some global boom-bust factors.

    Does the U.S. prefer a strong dollar?

    Of course, the U.S. would like to maintain the existing U.S. dollar status, but given the current situation, it might prefer a weaker currency, which would be good for the U.S. economy.

    As the accompanying chart shows, whether over the medium to long-run (from 2000 to now) or shorter-run cyclical term, GDP YoY growth moves oppositely to DXY YoY growth.

    DXY and U.S. GDP YoY. (Courtesy of Law Ka-chung)

    That said, a weaker dollar favours economic growth in both cyclical and decadal terms.

    Thus, the U.S. should have no incentive to maintain a strong dollar, which might be a market outcome.

    As most financial assets are denominated in U.S. dollars, risk-on/off has been the key factor of weak/strong dollar (at least over the past two to three decades). The recent strong U.S. dollar might reflect a certain reluctance to comprehensive global risk-on. That said, we do see some countries (like the U.S.) and some sectors (like tech) performing well, but this is far from a general phenomenon happening everywhere and at all times. Central banks like the Federal Reserve, Bank of Japan, and the People’s Bank of China have tried hard to intervene, but the effects were short-lived.

    Having said that, the long-term real effect on the global economy is largely contained as long as the DXY movement is within plus or minus 10 percent (such as the range of 80-100). At the sovereign level, short-term currency movements are never of any concern.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 20:55

  • These Are The World's Oldest And Youngest Countries, By Median Age
    These Are The World’s Oldest And Youngest Countries, By Median Age

    The median age is a single indicator of the age distribution of a population – where half the population is older and half is younger than the listed age.

    It can help government and private companies plan for age-specific demand for goods and services from the resident population.

    In the chart below, Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao visualizes the world’s oldest and youngest countries by median age, based on 2024 estimates from the CIA World Factbook.

    Ranked: Countries by Median Age in 2024

    Monaco and Japan – two countries with high life expectancies and low birth rates -`have some of the highest median ages (50+) in the world.

    A high median age is indicative of an aging population. Without policy support, this can lead to economic ramifications.

    Here are the median ages of 200+ countries and territories in the world.

    Rank Country/Territory Median Age
    1 🇲🇨 Monaco 57
    2 🇵🇲 Saint Pierre & Miquelon 51
    3 🇯🇵 Japan 50
    4 🇦🇩 Andorra 49
    5 🇮🇹 Italy 48
    6 🇧🇱 Saint Barthelemy 47
    7 🇭🇰 Hong Kong 47
    8 🇪🇸 Spain 47
    9 🇩🇪 Germany 47
    10 🇬🇷 Greece 47
    11 🇵🇹 Portugal 46
    12 🇸🇮 Slovenia 46
    13 🇵🇷 Puerto Rico 46
    14 🇸🇲 San Marino 46
    15 🇰🇷 South Korea 46
    16 🇷🇴 Romania 46
    17 🇱🇻 Latvia 46
    18 🇱🇹 Lithuania 45
    19 🇧🇬 Bulgaria 45
    20 🇭🇷 Croatia 45
    21 🇸🇭 Saint Helena 45
    22 🇪🇪 Estonia 45
    23 🇬🇬 Guernsey 45
    24 🇦🇹 Austria 45
    25 🇺🇦 Ukraine 45
    26 🇮🇲 Isle of Man 45
    27 🇭🇺 Hungary 45
    28 🇧🇦 Bosnia & Herzegovina 45
    29 🇹🇼 Taiwan 45
    30 🇱🇮 Liechtenstein 44
    31 🇨🇿 Czechia 44
    32 🇨🇭 Switzerland 44
    33 🇷🇸 Serbia 44
    34 🇧🇲 Bermuda 44
    35 🇲🇹 Malta 44
    36 🇫🇮 Finland 43
    37 🇻🇮 Virgin Islands 43
    38 🇵🇱 Poland 43
    39 🇸🇰 Slovakia 43
    40 🇨🇦 Canada 43
    41 🇫🇷 France 43
    42 🇨🇺 Cuba 43
    43 🇲🇴 Macau 43
    44 🇳🇱 Netherlands 42
    45 🇩🇰 Denmark 42
    46 🇧🇾 Belarus 42
    47 🇧🇪 Belgium 42
    48 🇷🇺 Russia 42
    49 🇹🇭 Thailand 42
    50 🇧🇧 Barbados 41
    51 🇰🇾 Cayman Islands 41
    52 🇸🇪 Sweden 41
    53 🇨🇰 Cook Islands 41
    54 🇲🇪 Montenegro 41
    55 🇸🇽 Sint Maarten 41
    56 🇦🇼 Aruba 41
    57 🇳🇴 Norway 41
    58 🇬🇧 UK 41
    59 🇲🇰 North Macedonia 41
    60 🇮🇪 Ireland 40
    61 🇨🇳 China 40
    62 🇨🇨 Cocos (Keeling) Islands 40
    63 🇲🇩 Moldova 40
    64 🇱🇺 Luxembourg 40
    65 🇱🇨 Saint Lucia 40
    66 🇲🇺 Mauritius 40
    67 🇨🇾 Cyprus 40
    68 🇸🇬 Singapore 39
    69 🇺🇸 U.S. 39
    70 🇦🇲 Armenia 39
    71 🇸🇨 Seychelles 39
    72 🇰🇳 Saint Kitts & Nevis 39
    73 🇹🇹 Trinidad & Tobago 39
    74 🇻🇬 British Virgin Islands 39
    75 🇬🇪 Georgia 38
    76 🇯🇪 Jersey 38
    77 🇦🇺 Australia 38
    78 🇨🇽 Christmas Island 38
    79 🇮🇸 Iceland 38
    80 🇳🇿 New Zealand 38
    81 🇨🇼 Curacao 38
    82 🇻🇨 Saint Vincent & the Grenadines 38
    83 🇦🇮 Anguilla 37
    84 🇩🇲 Dominica 37
    85 🇨🇱 Chile 37
    86 🇫🇴 Faroe Islands 37
    87 🇲🇸 Montserrat 37
    88 🇬🇮 Gibraltar 37
    89 🇺🇾 Uruguay 37
    90 🇱🇧 Lebanon 36
    91 🇦🇱 Albania 36
    92 🇼🇫 Wallis and Futuna 36
    93 🇹🇨 Turks and Caicos Islands 36
    94 🇰🇵 North Korea 36
    95 🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates 36
    96 🇨🇷 Costa Rica 36
    97 🇬🇩 Grenada 35
    98 🇵🇫 French Polynesia 35
    99 🇵🇼 Palau 35
    100 🇬🇱 Greenland 35
    101 🇧🇷 Brazil 35
    102 🇹🇳 Tunisia 34
    103 🇳🇨 New Caledonia 34
    104 🇦🇿 Azerbaijan 34
    105 🇶🇦 Qatar 34
    106 🇲🇫 Saint Martin 34
    107 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka 34
    108 🇹🇷 Türkiye 34
    109 🇦🇬 Antigua and Barbuda 34
    110 🇮🇷 Iran 34
    111 🇧🇭 Bahrain 33
    112 🇦🇷 Argentina 33
    113 🇻🇳 Vietnam 33
    114 🇨🇴 Colombia 33
    115 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia 32
    116 🇲🇵 Northern Mariana Islands 32
    117 🇧🇳 Brunei 32
    118 🇸🇷 Suriname 32
    119 🇽🇰 Kosovo 32
    120 🇲🇻 Maldives 32
    121 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan 32
    122 🇲🇾 Malaysia 32
    123 🇵🇾 Paraguay 32
    124 🇫🇯 Fiji 32
    125 🇮🇩 Indonesia 32
    126 🇲🇳 Mongolia 32
    127 🇵🇦 Panama 32
    128 🇹🇲 Turkmenistan 31
    129 🇻🇪 Venezuela 31
    130 🇯🇲 Jamaica 31
    131 🇲🇲 Burma 31
    132 🇲🇽 Mexico 31
    133 🇧🇸 Bahamas 31
    134 🇧🇹 Bhutan 31
    135 🇲🇦 Morocco 31
    136 🇿🇦 South Africa 30
    137 🇬🇺 Guam 30
    138 🇰🇼 Kuwait 30
    139 🇵🇪 Peru 30
    140 🇮🇱 Israel 30
    141 🇦🇸 American Samoa 30
    142 🇮🇳 India 30
    143 🇸🇻 El Salvador 30
    144 🇧🇩 Bangladesh 30
    145 🇩🇴 Dominican Republic 29
    146 🇩🇿 Algeria 29
    147 🇳🇮 Nicaragua 29
    148 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan 29
    149 🇨🇻 Cabo Verde 29
    150 🇬🇾 Guyana 28
    151 🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan 28
    152 🇫🇲 Micronesia, Federated States of 28
    153 🇪🇨 Ecuador 28
    154 🇰🇭 Cambodia 28
    155 🇹🇻 Tuvalu 28
    156 🇳🇷 Nauru 28
    157 🇳🇵 Nepal 28
    158 🇼🇸 Samoa 27
    159 🇴🇲 Oman 27
    160 🇰🇮 Kiribati 27
    161 🇧🇼 Botswana 27
    162 🇧🇿 Belize 27
    163 🇧🇴 Bolivia 27
    164 🇩🇯 Djibouti 26
    165 🇱🇾 Libya 26
    166 🇹🇴 Tonga 26
    167 🇵🇭 Philippines 26
    168 🇭🇳 Honduras 26
    169 🇲🇭 Marshall Islands 26
    170 🇱🇦 Laos 25
    171 🇸🇧 Solomon Islands 25
    172 🇯🇴 Jordan 25
    173 🇭🇹 Haiti 25
    174 🇬🇹 Guatemala 25
    175 🇸🇿 Eswatini 25
    176 🇻🇺 Vanuatu 25
    177 🇪🇬 Egypt 24
    178 🇸🇾 Syria 24
    179 🇱🇸 Lesotho 24
    180 🇵🇰 Pakistan 23
    181 🇹🇯 Tajikistan 23
    182 🇳🇦 Namibia 23
    183 🇰🇲 Comoros 23
    184 🇮🇶 Iraq 22
    185 🇲🇷 Mauritania 22
    186 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea 22
    187 🇬🇦 Gabon 22
    188 🇾🇪 Yemen 22
    189 🇵🇸 West Bank 22
    190 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea 22
    191 🇬🇭 Ghana 21
    192 🇪🇷 Eritrea 21
    193 🇲🇬 Madagascar 21
    194 🇿🇼 Zimbabwe 21
    195 🇨🇮 Cote d’Ivoire 21
    196 🇰🇪 Kenya 21
    197 🇸🇹 Sao Tome & Principe 21
    198 🇷🇼 Rwanda 21
    199 🇹🇬 Togo 21
    200 🇨🇬 Congo 21
    201 🇹🇱 Timor-Leste 21
    202 🇨🇫 Central African Republic 20
    203 🇪🇹 Ethiopia 20
    204 🇲🇼 Malawi 20
    205 🇬🇲 Gambia 20
    206 🇦🇫 Afghanistan 20
    207 🇱🇷 Liberia 20
    208 🇵🇸 Gaza 20
    209 🇬🇳 Guinea 19
    210 🇸🇱 Sierra Leone 19
    211 🇳🇬 Nigeria 19
    212 🇸🇩 Sudan 19
    213 🇸🇳 Senegal 19
    214 🇹🇿 Tanzania 19
    215 🇸🇴 Somalia 19
    216 🇨🇲 Cameroon 19
    217 🇸🇸 South Sudan 19
    218 🇧🇫 Burkina Faso 19
    219 🇿🇲 Zambia 18
    220 🇧🇮 Burundi 18
    221 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau 18
    222 🇲🇿 Mozambique 17
    223 🇧🇯 Benin 17
    224 🇨🇩 DRC 17
    225 🇹🇩 Chad 17
    226 🇲🇱 Mali 16
    227 🇦🇴 Angola 16
    228 🇺🇬 Uganda 16
    229 🇳🇪 Niger 15

    Note: Figures rounded.

    Meanwhile, the presence of six European nations on the oldest countries list is a quick insight into the continent’s changing demographic. The UN estimates that one in four Europeans are currently aged 60 and over.

    Conversely, many countries in Africa have low life expectancies and high birth rates. This results in the opposite phenomenon: lower median ages.

    A low median age also has its own concerns. A higher proportion of children and adolescents can strain the education infrastructure. Without enough job growth, underemployment and unemployment can rise.

    However, if managed well, low median ages can lead to a demographic dividend, where the workforce temporarily grows faster than the dependent population, increasing per capita income.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 20:30

  • VDH: Stop The Ukrainian Meatgrinder?
    VDH: Stop The Ukrainian Meatgrinder?

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

    Nearly eleven months ago, in August 2023, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials had estimated that some 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed, wounded, or missing in the then 18-month Ukrainian War.

    Both Russia and Ukraine underreport their losses. Hundreds of thousands of additional casualties have followed in the 28 months of fighting.

    In the West, the mere mention of a negotiated settlement is considered a dangerous appeasement of Russia’s flagrant aggression. In Russia, anything short of victory would be seen as synonymous with the collapse of the Putin regime.

    Yet as the war nears two and a half years this summer, some facts are no longer much in dispute.

    Controversy still arises over the circumstances of the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.

    Russia charges that the West engineered the “Revolution of Dignity” – an effort to westernize the former Soviet republic, to expand the borders of Europe right to the doorstep of Russia, and eventually to fully arm Ukraine as a member of NATO.

    Westerners counter that most Ukrainians wished to be part of Europe and independent from Russian bullying – and they had a perfect right to ask to join either NATO or the EU or both despite anticipated escalating tensions.

    After the heroic Ukrainian defeat of the 2022 Russian bid to take Kyiv, there have been few significant territorial gains by either side.

    Like the seesaw bloodbath on the Western Front of World War I, neither side has developed the momentum to force the other to negotiate or grant concessions.

    As nuclear Russian threats against Europe mount, NATO is seeking to regain deterrence capabilities by boosting defense budgets, incorporating robust frontline nations Sweden and Finland, and uniting over shared concerns about Russian aggression.

    Many in the U.S. cheer on the conflict as a necessary proxy war to check Russian aggression and bolster NATO’s resistance.

    But unlike third-party wars during the Cold War, now the Western client, Ukraine, is fighting directly against the chief antagonist of European NATO members.

    Arming a proxy in a war waged against the homeland of a nuclear adversary is a new and dangerous phenomenon.

    The West counts on supplying Ukraine with more and better weapons than a richer, larger, and more populous Russia.

    But Ukraine’s problem is not so much weapons as manpower. Nearly a fourth of Ukraine’s population has fled the country.

    Ukraine may have suffered some 300,000 causalities. The average age of its soldiers is over 40 years. It already lacks sufficient forces to replay the failed 2023 counter-offensive. The Russian plan of attrition is to wear down and bleed out the Ukrainian people.

    In a geostrategic sense, the new alignment of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is starting to gain opportunistic support from illiberal Middle East regimes, Turkey, and the Islamic world in general.

    The Biden administration’s respective approaches to the Ukraine and Gaza wars continue to be utterly incoherent.

    It lectures our strongest ally Israel on the need for a ceasefire, proportionality, a coalition wartime cabinet, and the avoidance of collateral damage. The administration considers the terrorist Hamas almost a legitimate state.

    However, Biden and the American diplomatic establishment urge Ukraine to keep fighting without negotiations. They urge Kyiv to seek critical disproportionality through superior weaponry, including hitting strategic targets inside Russia.

    The U.S. has overlooked the cancellation of Ukrainian political parties and elections by the Zelensky administration. America does not seem to care about Ukrainian collateral damage to the borderlands. And it considers the Russian government a near-terrorist state.

    No one in the West, at least prior to the Russian February 2022 invasion—neither the prior Obama, Trump, and current Biden administrations or the Ukrainian government itself—had considered it even possible to regain by force the Crimea and the Donbass absorbed by the Russian invasion of 2014.

    Add up all these realities, and the only practicable way to avoid another near-one million dead and wounded would be a settlement, however unpopular.

    It would entail the formalization of the 2014 Russian absorption of Crimea and Donbass.

    Russia would then agree to withdraw all its forces to its pre-2022 borders. Ukraine would be fully armed but without NATO membership.

    Both sides would agree to a demilitarized zone on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Russia would brag that it prevented its former province from joining NATO while finally institutionalizing its prior incorporation of the Donbass and Crimea.

    Ukraine would be proud that, like heroic 1940 Finland, it miraculously stopped Russian aggression. It would remain far better armed than at any time in its history and soon enjoy a status similar to that of non-NATO Austria or Switzerland.

    The deal would anger all parties. But it would make public what most concede privately—and stop the ongoing destruction of Ukraine and the further slaughter of an entire generation of Ukrainian and Russian youth.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 20:05

  • Iran Openly Talks About Building A Nuke In Historic Shift
    Iran Openly Talks About Building A Nuke In Historic Shift

    In what’s likely messaging intended for both Israel and a potential incoming Trump administration in the US, Iranian officials are becoming more open about the possibility of building a nuclear bomb. Tehran’s official policy, backed by years of consistent statements by the Ayatollah, has been to insist its nuclear program is only for peaceful energy purposes, and that nukes go against Islamic morality. 

    Currently, it is no secret that the Islamic Republic has been drastically increasing the quantity and purity of its enriched uranium – which has hastened over the last year, after an already upward trajectory since Trump pulled out of the JCPOA nuclear deal in 2018. 

    The New York Times in a fresh report says an unprecedented trend is cause for serious alarm: “For the first time, some members of Iran’s ruling elite are dropping the country’s decades-old insistence that its nuclear program is entirely for peaceful purposes.” This comes just as Iran – which remains the archnemesis of Israel – is about to pick a new president after Ebrahim Raisi’s recent death in a helicopter crash.

    “Instead, they are publicly beginning to embrace the logic of possessing the bomb, arguing that recent missile exchanges with Israel underscore the need for a far more powerful deterrent,” continues the NY Times.

    Tehran is fully aware of its status as a ‘threshold state’ and is using this to project strength in its broader standoff with Israel in the region:

    In interviews with a dozen American, European, Iranian and Israeli officials and with outside experts, the cumulative effect of this surge appears clear: Iran has cemented its role as a “threshold” nuclear state, walking right up to the line of building a weapon without stepping over it.

    And yet Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has warned many times over the years that he will not allow Iran to achieve nuclear status. He has vowed to launch a preemptive attack should Tehran cross this line. 

    But this has not stopped an official close to Iran’s supreme leader from recently explaining that if the country were to face an existential threat, it would “reconsider its nuclear doctrine” — as quoted in the Times report. 

    Without doubt, Iranian leaders have in the back of their minds the examples of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. Both gave up their WMD programs and nuclear aspirations, and soon after were invaded, overthrown, and executed (and in Gaddafi’s case he was killed on the street by NATO-backed rebels).

    Below are some key sections from the lengthy NY Times investigative report…

    * * *

    How fast to achieve a bomb?

    And they caution that while Iran could now produce the fuel for three or more bombs in days or weeks, it would still take considerable time — maybe 18 months — for Iran to fabricate that fuel into a warhead that could be delivered on missiles of the kind it launched at Israel in April.

    Gaza tinderbox has raised the stakes

    “Iran is sending a clear message that if the pressure of sanctions continues, if assassination of its commanders continues and if Washington or Israel decides to tighten the noose, it will then break all the chains,” said Hossein Alizadeh, a former Iranian diplomat who defected in 2010. He spoke from Britain, where he now lives.

    Practicing preemptive strikes

    While the U.S. and Israeli air forces often practiced what it would take to bomb Fordow, even building a mock-up of the site in the Nevada desert, military officials say it would take repeated, precise strikes by the United States’ largest “bunker buster” to reach down that deep.

    Anti-nuke Fatwah still officially in place

    Iran has insisted that it cannot manufacture or use nuclear weapons because of a 2003 “fatwa,” or religious edict, issued by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The country said the fatwa remained in effect even after Israel stole, and then made public, a huge archive of Iranian documents that made plain the country was trying to design a weapon.

    Coordinated statements signaling policy change

    If Israel threatened Iran’s nuclear facilities, General Haq Talab said in a speech in mid-April, “it’s entirely possible and imaginable that the Islamic Republic will reconsider its nuclear doctrine and policies and reverse its previously stated positions.”

    A few weeks later, Mr. Kharazi told Al Jazeera that Iran had the capacity to produce a nuclear bomb, but that it has not decided to do so.

    “If Iran’s existence is threatened, we will have no choice but to reverse our nuclear doctrine,” he said.

    And in late May, Mr. Araghchi said at a conference in Doha, Qatar, that Israeli attacks “could force others to rethink their security calculations and their nuclear postures.”

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 19:40

  • You Keep Using The Term 'Authoritarian'…
    You Keep Using The Term ‘Authoritarian’…

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

    You know the term “authoritarian.” You think you know what it means. 

    An authoritarian dad, boss, or government says: my way or the highway. They are forever barking orders and see compliance as the answer to all human problems. There is no room for uncertainty, adaptation to time and place, or negotiation. It’s ruling by personal dictate while tolerating no dissent. 

    To be authoritarian is to be inhumane, to rule with arbitrary and capricious imposition. It can also mean to be ruled impersonally by a machine regardless of the cost. 

    Sounds like a conventional government bureaucracy, right? Indeed. Think of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Think of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy which are right now issuing edicts that will end in the ability of your washing machine to clean your clothes and your car to go the distance. 

    They have been doing this to us for many decades, with or without the permission of Congress or the president. The agencies have become literally out of control in the sense that no one can control them. 

    Any society managed by a large and intrusive bureaucratic machinery is necessarily authoritarian. A government that is not authoritarian is necessarily limited in size, scope, and range of power. 

    Let’s say you have a political leader who has routinely called for less in the way of authoritarian rule by bureaucracies. He intends to use whatever power he has to curb the autonomous rule by administrative bureaucracies and subject them more to the wishes of the people, who should ideally be in charge of the regime under which they live. 

    Such a leader would not be called an authoritarian. He would be called the opposite, an emancipator who is trying to dismantle authoritarian structures. 

    If all of the above makes sense to you, try to make sense of this news story in the New York Times. It’s about the growing efforts on the part of many activists to resist a second term of Donald Trump. 

    In passing, the story says: “If Mr. Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones” including “making it easier to fire civil servants.”

    The story quickly adds that he intends to replace the fired employees with “loyalists.” Maybe. But consider the alternative. The president is supposed to be ostensibly in charge of 2 million plus bureaucrats that are employed by 400-plus agencies in the executive branch — but they don’t actually have to carry out the policies of the elected president. They can in fact completely ignore him. 

    How is this compatible with either democracy or freedom? It is not. There is nothing in the Constitution about a vast army of bureaucrats who rule behind the scenes that is in no way reachable or manageable by elected representatives. 

    The attempt to pull back, rein in, and otherwise do something about this problem is not authoritarian. It is the opposite. Even if “loyalists” replaced the fired employees, that would be an improvement over a system of government in which the people truly have no control at all. 

    Two years into Trump’s first term, the administration came to figure out that this was a problem. The administration intended some dramatic turns in policy in a number of areas. All they experienced was dogged resistance from people who believed they and not the elected president were in charge. Over the next two years, they undertook many efforts to at least solve this problem: namely, the president should be in charge of the government that falls under his jurisdiction. 

    This only makes sense. Imagine you are the CEO of a company. You discover that the main divisions that actually run the company care nothing about what you say and cannot be fired even if you demand it, and yet you are personally held responsible for everything these divisions do. What are you going to do?

    It is not “authoritarian” to unseat or otherwise attempt to gain control over that for which you are held responsible, professionally or politically. That is truly all that the Trump people are suggesting. This is nothing other than a Constitutional system: we are supposed to have a government by and for the people. That means that the people elect the administrator of the executive branch. At a minimum, the winner of the election needs to be able to have some influence over what the agencies in the executive branch do. 

    And for suggesting this and trying to make it happen, Trump is called an authoritarian. Prepare yourself: this will be said millions of times between now and November and following. Can the mainstream media just flat-out change the meaning of a term like this? They can but there is also every reason to push back and not let it happen. 

    Language is a human construct. The more vibrant and fast-moving society is, the more the language changes. That can be a wonderful thing. In fact, one of my favorite books to read in off-hours is H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, written by this genius when he was otherwise censored for his views in wartime. 

    It’s a marvelous chronicling of the evolution of American usage, published in 1919, but oddly pertinent even today, applicable to the dwindling number of people who can still form coherent sentences. 

    When it comes to vocabulary, there are two schools of thought broadly speaking: prescriptivist and descriptivist. The prescriptivist view is that words have embedded meanings that you can trace from other languages and should be used as intended. The descriptivist approach sees language as more a living experience, a tool of utility to make communication possible, in which case anything goes. 

    As Americans, we mostly accept the descriptivist outlook but this can go too far. Words cannot mean literally anything, much less the opposite. But this is exactly what is happening. It’s the same with the word “democracy,” which is supposed to mean the people’s choice, not whatever elites dish out to us. If Trump is the choice, so be it. That is the unfolding of democracy. 

    If we want the president to be the CEO of the executive branch of government — and that’s a pretty good description of what the US Constitution establishes — then the administration ought to have that managerial authority. If you don’t like it, take it up with the Founders. 

    Again, any society managed by a large and intrusive bureaucratic machinery is necessarily authoritarian. A government that is not authoritarian is necessarily limited in size, scope, and range of power. 

    Any one president who takes action to curb the power and reach of arbitrary authority is not an authoritarian, but rather one who seeks to give authority back to the people. Such a man would be an emancipator, even if everyone said otherwise. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 19:15

  • These Are The World's Least Affordable Housing Markets
    These Are The World’s Least Affordable Housing Markets

    Many cities around the world have become very expensive to buy a home in, but which ones are the absolute most unattainable?

    In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’ Marcus Lu highlights a number of housing markets that are deemed to be “impossibly unaffordable” in 2024, ranked by their median price-to-income ratio.

    This data comes from the Demographia International Housing Affordability Report, which is produced by the Chapman University Center for Demographics and Policy.

    Data and Key Takeaway

    The median price-to-income ratio compares median house price to median household income within each market. A higher ratio (higher prices relative to incomes) means a city is less affordable.

    See the following table for all of the data we used to create this graphic. Note that this analysis covers 94 markets across eight countries: Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

    According to the Demographia report, cities with a median price-to-income ratio of over 9.0 are considered “impossibly unaffordable”.

    We can see that the top city in this ranking, Hong Kong, has a ratio of 16.7. This means that the median price of a home is 16.7 times greater than the median income.

    Which Cities are More Affordable?

    On the flipside, here are the top 12 most affordable cities that were analyzed in the Demographia report.

    Cities with a median price-to-income ratio of less than 3.0 are considered “affordable”, while those between 3.1 and 4.0 are considered “moderately unaffordable”.

    See More Real Estate Content From Visual Capitalist

    If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out Ranked: The Most Valuable Housing Markets in America.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 18:50

  • Nearly 1-In-3 Americans Earning Over $150,000 Worry About Making Ends Meet: Fed Report
    Nearly 1-In-3 Americans Earning Over $150,000 Worry About Making Ends Meet: Fed Report

    Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

    Americans in upper-income groups are concerned about their ability to pay bills, with more than 15 percent of this demographic taking up additional jobs over the past year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

    As of April 2024, 32.5 percent of respondents earning over $150,000 annually were worried about making ends meet over the next six months, up from 21.7 percent in April of last year, the June survey showed.

    This percentage is higher than for those in the income groups of $100,000 to $149,999, $70,000 to $99,999, and $40,000 to $69,999. Only individuals who earned less than $40,000, the lowest income group, were more worried than the $150,000-plus group.

    Among all income levels, the percentage of people anxious about their ability to pay bills was higher in April 2024 compared to a year ago. The share of respondents concerned about making ends meet rose among those already paying their bills on time, with the increase most prevalent among people who are younger, female, or in higher income groups.

    In April last year, 20.7 percent of individuals who could pay all of their bills were worried about the next six months. In 2024, this jumped to 26.2 percent.

    The various income groups behaved differently in how they handled their tighter financial situations over the past year.

    Among the $150,000 group, 15.3 percent took an additional job, the highest among all income levels. This group borrowed the least from formal sources but was the second-highest when it came to borrowing from family or friends.

    People earning less than $40,000 ranked at the bottom in terms of taking up an additional job. However, they ranked second-highest in borrowing from formal sources and were at the top in terms of borrowing from family or friends.

    Only 8.8 percent of individuals in the $150,000 or more group skipped their monthly bills or debts or made partial payments, the least among all income levels. Those making above $100,000 cut back the least on essential as well as discretionary spending.

    The survey shows that while upper-income groups were more worried about higher prices impacting their ability to pay bills, a smaller proportion were forced to cut down on spending compared to their lower-income counterparts.

    A June 10 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York presented a more upbeat outlook, finding that U.S. households have become “more optimistic” about their future financial condition.

    “Year-ahead expectations also improved, with a smaller share of respondents expecting to be worse off and a larger share of respondents expecting to be better off a year from now,” it said.

    Inflation Burden

    As high-income groups come under increasing inflationary pressures, discount retail chains are reporting an increase in the number of customers from this demographic. In March, Dollar Tree said their outlets saw a traffic uptick from relatively wealthy shoppers last year.

    During an earnings call in May, Walmart executives also said that they saw “higher engagement across income cohorts, with upper-income households continuing to account for the majority of the share gains” in the recently reported quarter.

    Historically, people with higher incomes have shopped at the company’s stores, said Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO. Such groups have usually been selective in the categories they buy.

    “So, if we offer them the right items at the right prices, whether that’s in-store, first party, or marketplace, they’ll respond to that. And so, as we’ve been able to expand our assortment online, we can appeal to more people.”

    In an August survey by Achieve, a digital personal finance firm, the majority of respondents said they were not anywhere close to reaching their definition of financial freedom.

    However, just above half of them were optimistic and believed their journey towards financial freedom was getting better.

    “We’re seeing far fewer Americans with the goal of becoming ‘rich’ and many families pivoting to just trying to be able to pay their bills on time. With all of the economic pressures facing American families, financial freedom is currently more about making ends meet,” Brad Stroh, co-founder and co-CEO of Achieve, said.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 18:25

  • Supreme Court Rejects Bannon Bid To Avoid Monday Prison Deadline
    Supreme Court Rejects Bannon Bid To Avoid Monday Prison Deadline

    Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has until Monday to report to prison after the Supreme Court rejected his 11th hour bid to remain free while he pursues an appeal of his conviction for two counts of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee.

    US District Judge Carl Nichols had previously put Bannon’s sentence on hold as he pursued his appeal, saying that Bannon had presented a “substantial question of law or fact likely to result in reversal” of the conviction.

    That, however, was rejected by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in May – leaving him only the Supreme Court to help him avoid time behind bars.

    Bannon has argued that he was acting on the advice of counsel when he refused to comply with the subpoenas.

    He must report to prison on July 1.

    As the Epoch Times notes further, Bannon through his lawyers asked the Supreme Court to intervene. In the application, lawyers said it would be unfair for Mr. Bannon to start serving his sentence before the full appeals court and justices consider overturning the recent appeal rejection.
    “If Mr. Bannon is denied release, he will be forced to serve his prison sentence before this court has a chance to consider a petition for a writ of certiorari, given the court’s upcoming summer recess,” the lawyers wrote.
    Department of Justice attorneys, on the other hand, urged the Supreme Court to reject the application. They said Mr. Bannon “cannot make the demanding showing necessary to override the normal requirement that a convicted defendant begin serving his sentence.”

    Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), chairman of the House Administration Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, told the court in a brief that the panel that subpoenaed Mr. Bannon produced flawed subpoenas because it failed to comply with House regulations, as it did not have a ranking member appointed by the Republican minority.

    “Notwithstanding the applicant’s indictment and sentencing, the select committee’s enforcement of the subpoena and the prosecution of Mr. Bannon for failing to participate in a deposition was factually and procedurally invalid,” Mr. Loudermilk wrote. “As such, this court should conclude that the entire prosecutorial process against the applicant was tainted and must be dismissed as a matter of law.”

    Peter Navarro, another former adviser to President Trump, is already serving a sentence after being convicted of contempt of Congress after also declining to cooperate with subpoenas from the same committee.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 18:00

  • Cultural Marxism: A Century Old… And Thriving
    Cultural Marxism: A Century Old… And Thriving

    Authored by Larry Sand via American Greatness,

    In 1923, a group of professors known as the Frankfurt School came to the fore. These German Marxists—notably Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse—harbored a deep disdain for capitalism and traditional morals.

    Unfortunately, the professors did not stay in their homeland long. Adolph Hitler’s rise to power forced them out of Germany, and they reemerged at Columbia University in New York City in 1935.

    And a century later, the malign effects of their teachings are still with us.

    Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black Lives Matter (BLM), gender indoctrination, wokeism, etc., fade in and out of the news cycle, but they have established a secure foothold in the nation’s culture, notably in our schools.

    Cultural Marxism is still pervasive in a significant number of our colleges. In Illinois, legislators want to embed racial considerations into state appropriations for public universities. According to its website, Yale’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision” when making hires.

    There are a few bright spots, however. Public universities in Texas, Florida, and Utah have banned DEI. However, those decisions came from state governments, not from the colleges themselves.

    At MIT, a private university, President Sally Kornbluth confirmed in May that the school would “no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring.”

    Also, according to an analysis from OpenTheBooks.com, the University of North Carolina spends an estimated $90 million each year on 686 employees who promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in their departments or across the system. But change is on the horizon. In a repudiation of DEI ideology, the UNC Board of Governors voted on May 23 to repeal its diversity policy.

    Sadly, at the elementary and high school level, the Marxists predominate. In fact, our K-12 schools lay the groundwork for all the college campus lunacy we see practically on a daily basis.

    Christopher Rufo reports that in Portland, the Intifada begins in kindergarten. For example, the teachers union suggests that kindergarteners be gathered into a circle and taught the history of Palestine: “Seventy-five years ago, a lot of decision-makers around the world decided to take away Palestinian land to make a country called Israel. Israel would be a country where rules were mostly fair for Jewish people with white skin. There’s a BIG word for when indigenous land gets taken away to make a country; that’s called settler colonialism.” (Ibram X. Kendi, probably the most strident CRT proponent in the country, contends that kindergarten is too late to start. He thinks that ‘Antiracist’ education should start before age 3.)

    The Jew-hating lies have been working. In the three months following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the Anti-Defamation League tallied 256 antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools nationwide.

    The Zinn Education Project, named after the late Communist college professor, is advancing its agenda via the “Teach Truth Day of Action,” which is celebrated in June. (There is no specific date.) The goal is to eliminate “right-wing forces” and “fascists,” which the organization laughably insists dominate public education in the country. The Zinners maintain that more than 65 organizations are co-sponsoring the Teach Truth Day of Action, including the Abolitionist Teaching Network, the African American Policy Forum, the American Library Association, Black Lives Matter at School, Black Teacher Project, SNCC Legacy Project, and more.

    Notably, the National Education Association is a big supporter of the Teach Truth Day of Action. On its website, the teachers’ union states, “On June 8, educators, students, parents, and community members across the country joined the 4th annual Teach Truth Day of Action, taking part in book exchanges (including banned ones!), historic walks, voter registration drives, and more.”

    It’s worth noting that while schools are doing a bang-up job of indoctrinating students, only 22% of eighth-graders scored at or above the NAEP Proficient level on the most recent test in civics, and just 13% scored at or above the NAEP Proficient level in U.S. history.

    One state seems to be moving in the right direction. Texas is doing what it can to reinstate tradition by injecting Bible stories into elementary school reading programs. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick praised the curriculum changes, explaining that they will “get us back to teaching, not necessarily the Bible per se, but the stories from the Bible.”

    What can be done to stem the Marxists?

    In public schools, state laws can help, and local school board elections can make a difference, but when the school bell rings and the classroom door is shut, the teacher will talk about whatever he or she wants to.

    Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former fifth-grade teacher, writes that a 2017 RAND Corporation survey found that “99% of elementary teachers and 96% of secondary schools use ‘materials I developed and/or selected myself’ in teaching English language arts. The numbers are virtually the same in math. But putting teachers in charge of creating their own lesson plans or scouring the internet for curriculum materials creates an irresistible opportunity for every imaginable interest group that perceives—not incorrectly—that overworked teachers and a captive young audience equal a rich target for selling products and pushing ideologies.”

    As an example, Pondiscio cites a public school in Brooklyn, part of the New York City Board of Education. Kids were sent home with an “activity book” promoting the tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement, including “queer affirming,” “transgender affirming,” and “restorative justice.” The book was not authorized for classroom use by either the N.Y.C. Department of Education or Brooklyn’s Community School District 15. “It appears to have begun its journey into students’ backpacks at the massive ‘Share My Lesson’ website run by the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union.”

    Pondiscio notes that while they are seldom traceable to formally adopted school curricula, there are 75 different lesson plans and resources for conducting “privilege walks” and more than 100 lessons and resources on “preferred pronouns” at Teachers Pay Teachers, which is another lesson-sharing website.

    Additionally, the advocacy group Parents Defending Education has created an Indoctrination Map, which documents countless incidents of “schools teaching lessons on race, gender, or other hot-button issues that parents deemed inappropriate or upsetting.”

    Mark Tapson, Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and culture warrior, along with his wife, homeschool four of their five kids. (Number five will join the others when he is of age.) Tapson asserts that the “aim of the neo-Marxist Left is to break down the family unit by de-legitimizing parents’ legal and moral right to determine how their own children are raised. The Left wants to take your children and grandchildren and raise them as loyal, dependent subjects of the atheistic State, disconnected from their own history and culture, and devoid of critical thinking skills, intellectual independence, or a spiritual dimension.”

    Tapson is absolutely correct. The godfather of communism, Karl Marx, taught his followers that the world was divided into two categories—oppressors and oppressed. Marx despised the nuclear family, which he claimed “performs ideological functions for capitalism” and teaches “passive acceptance of hierarchy.” He thought that the destruction of the family model would make it easier to abolish private property.

    Sending your kid to school these days is risky business, and parents need to step up and take on that responsibility if at all possible.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 17:40

  • "Feels Like September": Atlantic Disturbance Could Be Upgraded To Tropical Storm Beryl This Weekend
    “Feels Like September”: Atlantic Disturbance Could Be Upgraded To Tropical Storm Beryl This Weekend

    The National Hurricane Center is tracking three tropical waves, one of which could develop into Tropical Storm Beryl this weekend.

    As of 0800 ET, NHC said the tropical wave about 1500 miles east-southeast of Windward Island is “gradually becoming better defined,” indicating a 90% chance of strengthening into a tropical depression or storm over the next 48 hours.

    The two other storms, one a low-pressure system over the western Caribbean Sea and the second several hundred miles south-southwest of the Cabo Verde Islands, both have a low probability of developing over the next two days. 

    Here’s a map of all three systems NHC watches into this weekend:

    Global weather models show that the tropical wave with the highest probability of forming 1500 miles east-southeast of Windward Island could end up in the southern Caribbean Sea. 

    Tampa’s FOX 13 Meteorologist Dave Osterberg said, “We don’t typically track storms like this in late June, but record high temperatures in the western Atlantic are leading to more tropical activity.” 

    “It feels like it’s September to the water down here, rather than late June,” Osterberg said, adding, “And that’s why this is beginning to develop, and it’s going to develop as it moves into the eastern Caribbean.”

    Osterberg added that several computer models have this system developing into hurricane status. 

    While the models don’t show any of the three systems threatening the US Gulf Coast, we have outlined that the Biden administration must contend with the La Nina weather phenomenon, which is expected to fuel an active Atlantic hurricane season. These storms could disrupt major Gulf Coat refineries, driving average gasoline prices at the pump to the politically sensitive $4 a gallon. 

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 17:20

  • Zelensky Gets More Realistic: 'We Don't Have A Lot of Time'
    Zelensky Gets More Realistic: ‘We Don’t Have A Lot of Time’

    Authored by Kyle Anzalone via AntiWar.com,

    Speaking to journalists in Brussels on Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned “We don’t have much time. We have a lot of injured, killed, both military and civilians. So we do not want this war to last for years. Therefore, we have to prepare this plan and put it on the table at the second peace summit.”

    Zelensky stressed the need for a peace process that would bring an end to the war with Russia, citing Ukraine’s mounting casualties.

    Since 2022, Zelensky has pushed a 10-point peace plan that would see Russia withdraw from all of Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory. The Kremlin has outright rejected that proposal, insisting it will not give up several formerly Ukrainian regions it has annexed.

    Still, Zelensky proposed his formula to other world leaders at a peace summit that was held in Switzerland earlier this month, although no Russian officials were invited.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has articulated a potential peace deal that would see Ukraine agree to denuclearization, neutrality toward NATO, and recognition of territory annexed by Moscow since 2014.

    As the war has progressed, the West has struggled to maintain the flow of weapons to Kiev, and Ukraine has been unable to replace its battlefield casualties with newly trained soldiers.

    The Kremlin has adjusted to a wartime economy and has a larger number of young men to serve in the military, giving Moscow a distinct advantage as the conflict has become a war of attrition.

    While Kiev and Moscow have been tight-lipped about their own causality figures, estimates for both sides range in the hundreds of thousands. To fill its ranks, Ukraine has recently expanded its conscription laws and cracked down on those seeking to avoid the draft.

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    The ex-head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Yuriy Lutsenko, estimated the number of dead or seriously wounded Ukrainian soldiers was over 500,000 in January.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 17:00

  • Ahead Of Stress-Tests, Banks Saw Big (Adjusted) Deposit Inflows, But…
    Ahead Of Stress-Tests, Banks Saw Big (Adjusted) Deposit Inflows, But…

    Money market funds saw modest inflows last week (up around $5BN) as bank deposits (NSA) saw $25.7BN outflows…

    Source: Bloomberg

    However, on a seasonally-adjusted basis, total bank deposits rose by $38BN last week to their highest since SVB’s collapse…

    Source: Bloomberg

    And, excluding foreign deposits, domestic banks saw seasonally-adjusted deposits rise $57.7BN (large banks +$55.5, small banks +$2.2BN), while on an NSA basis, domestic deposits tumbles $4.3BN (large banks +8.4BN, small banks -$12.7BN)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    On the other side of the ledger, loan volumes increased on the week, driven by a $11.8BN rise at small banks (while large banks saw loan volumes shrink by $255MM), which is weird given the massive SA rise in large bank deposits….

    Source: Bloomberg

    Usage of The Fed’s Reverse Repo facility soared across quarter-/month-end (as it tends to do)…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Finally, US equity market capitalization remains drastically decoupled from its historically tight relationship with bank reserves at The Fed…

    Source: Bloomberg

    But globally, central bank balance sheet shrinkage continues as stocks soar…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Now that would be quite recoupling.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 16:40

  • Biden's 'Blue Screen Of Death': They Knew, They All Knew…
    Biden’s ‘Blue Screen Of Death’: They Knew, They All Knew…

    Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

    Joe Biden Catches Cold

    “Biden’s entire closing statement is the political equivalent of the blue screen of death. It’s just one long frozen glitch.”

    -Sean Davis, the Federalist

    Maybe ninety-seconds into last night’s long-awaited debate spectacle, the consensus must have jelled among the woke-and-broken news media mavens that their champion, “Joe Biden,” was not quite killing it out there at the podium. CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash acted like witnesses at a ritual sacrifice. And afterward, the CNN post-mortem panel seemed genuinely shocked that months of playing pretend had skidded to such an ignominious finish.

    Which raises a great many questions, starting with: why on earth did the Democratic Party and its media handmaidens persist in pretending month-after-month that “Joe Biden” was a fit candidate for another four-year term?  Last night, he didn’t appear capable of even finishing the current term. Why did they usher him so jauntily into the nomination? And what are they going to do about that now? And what were their motives for all that pretending? “Joe Biden” circulates among scores of astute officials every day. Did they all fail to notice his incapacity? Or has the whole thing been a sham and a lie all along? Was this just the culminating hoax by the Party of Hoaxes of a long string of hoaxes against the nation going back to 2015?

    To the question of motives, the answer is obvious: the news networks have worked tirelessly (and with stunning dishonor) to hide their collusion with the government in gaslighting the public. More to the point, they’ve concealed the appalling truth that the CIA, DARPA, and their many intel blob subsidiaries conducted a silent coup over the USA and have been running our country’s affairs disastrously behind the “Joe Biden” façade — and that the coup actually started well before Mr. Trump’s 2016 inauguration. You know it, and they know that you know it.

    More acutely, now that “Joe Biden” has been revealed as a hoax president, whole legions of public officials appear liable to criminal charges of the most serious degree: sedition, treason, mass murder, fraud, malfeasance, and in the case of the president himself, influence peddling and bribery.

    They must be desperate to avoid accounting for all that, losing their accrued fortunes to legal fees and going to prison (or worse). For example, outed just this week: news that then-CIA Director in 2020, Gina Haspel, knew about and participated in the infamous operation using 51 former Intel officers to cover up the veracity of Hunter Biden’s laptop days before the election.

    They knew the laptop was real. Their colleagues over at the FBI knew it was real. They all knew it was stuffed with deal memos, legal memoranda, and emails that clearly laid out a long-running bribery operation among Biden family members and their lawyers. They knew it in 2019 when the Democratic Party moved to impeach Mr. Trump for inquiring about the Biden family’s money-grubbing activities in Ukraine — where, by the way, we may have fomented the war with Russia in part to cover up the culpability of all involved, including especially the State Department and their embassy staff in Kiev. The FBI and its bosses in the DOJ also withheld the laptop from Mr. Trump’s defense lawyers during the 2020 impeachment, though it contained massive exculpatory evidence to explain just why he made that fateful phone call to the newly elected Zelensky.

    It’s obvious that the ruling blob now has to deep-six “Joe Biden.” The problem is they must induce him to renounce the nomination of his own will. The party’s nominating process is so bizarrely complex that it would very difficult to just shove him out. Another problem is that the party had to peremptorily declare “JB” their legal nominee before the August convention in order to keep him on the ballot in Ohio with its 17 electoral votes (due to some arcane machinery in the state’s election laws).

    As per above, the debate fiasco calls into serious question whether “Joe Biden” is competent to even serve out this term. He (or shadowy figures pulling strings behind him) are making profoundly hazardous decisions right now, such as last week’s missile attack that killed and wounded civilians on the beach in Crimea. Are you seeing how easily “Joe Biden” might start World War Three? All of which is to say that pressure will soon rise to use the 25th amendment to relieve him of duty, leaving you-know-who in the oval office. If Joe Biden actually has to resign as president, he also loses the ability to pardon his son, Hunter, and peremptorily his other family members who shared bribery money received from China, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

    If he won’t resign, and the party can’t force him off the ticket, the blob could have no choice except to bump him off. I imagine they would get it done humanely, say late at night sometime, in bed, using the same method as for putting down an old dog who has peed on the carpet one too many times. Or, if that can’t be managed and he clings to his position, maybe the party could cobble up some new nominating rules impromptu. And then, who could they slot in from the bench?

    The usual suspects are like the cast of a freak show, each one displaying one grotesque deformity after another.

    Gavin Newsom we understand: the party’s base of batshit-crazy women may all want to bear his child, but that limbic instinct to mate with a six-foot-three haircut-in-search-of-a-brain might not work with any other voter demographic — and Newsom has the failed state of California hanging around his neck. All Mr. Trump would have to do is broadcast the scene from a San Francisco street-cam on “X” (Twitter) 24/7.

    Hillary has been stealthily flapping her leathery wings overhead for weeks as this debacle approached. She may still own the actual machinery of the Democratic Party — having purchased it through the Clinton Foundation some years back when the party was broke and needed a bailout. She could just command the nomination by screeching “Caw Caw” from the convention rostrum. Whatever happens, it will look terrible.

    Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan? An inveterate and notorious intel blob tool, Whitmer has allowed herself to be used repeatedly by the FBI to frame and persecute conservatives in her state as well as using her state AG Dana Nessel to go after political enemies there, especially poll workers who cried fraud in the sketchiest Michigan voting districts.

    Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. Like Dreamboat Newsom in California, Mr. Pritzker is busily running Illinois (and especially Chicago) into bankruptcy and chaos. Looks aren’t everything, but if Dreamboat gives the vapors to Karens across the land, the Illinois governor will get them shrieking in terror as from the sight of King Kong on Skull Island

    Who else is there? Michelle O, of course, who will be instantly branded as a catspaw for her husband seeking a fifth term — as Barack himself has averred in so many words: just hanging out in the background, managing things in his jogging suit. That would be the ultimate Banana Republic set-up for us and I don’t think the voters will go for it. It all boils down to the Party of Chaos being thrust into chaos. Can it even survive “Joe Biden?”

    Then there is Mr. Trump himself. He remains the object of widespread rabid loathing, yet more and more Americans are coming to appreciate his opposition to Woke Marxist chaos and intel blobbery-gone-wild in our land. His performance last night featured his usual jumpy locutions and incomplete sentences, but in contrast to the current president, he looked neither senile nor an agent of sinister forces dedicated to bringing our country to its knees.

    Had Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. been present both of the others would have been badly outclassed verbally and intellectually.

    If Mr. Trump survives the blob’s efforts to delete him before November, I’m sure Mr. Kennedy will play a prominent role in another Trump administration. He knows exactly where the rot is and how to roust it out.

    *  *  *

    Support this blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page or Substack

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 16:20

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jun 28

Today’s News 28th June 2024

  • German Politician Hit With Hate Crime Investigation For Demanding Migrant Criminals Be Deported
    German Politician Hit With Hate Crime Investigation For Demanding Migrant Criminals Be Deported

    Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Modernity.news,

    A CDU politician in Germany is under investigation for hate crimes after he reacted to a knife attack by an Afghan migrant by calling for the expulsion of foreign criminals from the country.

    On the opening day of the Euro 2024 football tournament, a knife-wielding Afghan migrant went on a stabbing spree in Wolmirstedt which left one person dead and multiple others injured.

    Detlef Gürth, a state lawmaker for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Saxony-Anhalt, reacted by posting on X, “This pack has to get out of Germany.”

    And that was literally it.

    That’s all he said before subsequently deleting the tweet.

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

    However, it was enough for left-wing state politician Henriette Quade to file a criminal complaint against Gürth for allegedly committing a hate crime, which is now being investigated by the Halle public prosecutor’s office

    “The description of Afghans as a ‘pack’ who are denied the right to live in Germany is an insult to parts of the population,” Quade ludicrously claimed.

    “Those designated in this way are denied their basic right to life as equal individuals in the community and their human dignity is thus attacked. Furthermore, the post cannot be interpreted with any understanding other than that all Afghans living in the country are (potential) murderers. The post also incites hatred against parts of the population,” she added.

    Gürth was clearly referring to migrants who engage in violence, not all Afghans, but his relatively tame comment was reported to authorities anyway in another stunning example of how many in the German political establishment are more concerned about not hurting the feelings of migrants than they are stopping the wave of migrant-driven violence that has plagued the country for years.

    Statistics released by the German government revealed that around 6 in 10 violent crimes recorded in Germany are committed by migrants.

    “According to some criminal statistics, Afghans are five times more likely to commit a criminal act than native Germans,” reports Remix News.

    “However, in some categories, such as sexual assaults, they are 12.5 times more likely to commit an offense than the rest of society. However, this is only a fraction of the problem that Germany has been forced to endure with regard to migrant crimes, many of which are committed by repeat offenders.”

    As we document in the video below, German authorities are now handing out prison time to people who insulted a bunch of convicted gang rapists, in at least one case giving a woman more prison time than almost all of the gang rapists themselves.

    Yesterday we highlighted another case of migrant violence where a 20-year-old man in the North Rhine-Westphalia town of Bad Oeynhausen was beaten into a coma by a migrant gang and later died from his injuries.

    *  *  *

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 06/28/2024 – 02:00

  • Japan Fires Its Top Currency Diplomat As Yen Disintegrates, Another Intervention Looms
    Japan Fires Its Top Currency Diplomat As Yen Disintegrates, Another Intervention Looms

    It is hardly a coincidence that literally minutes after the USDJPY hit 161 for the first time in almost two generations…

    … that Japan’s Nikkei reported the man who had been tasked to explain away Japan’s absolutely catastrophic currency policy, one which has made the yen the worst performing currency of the world and the envy of banana republics everywhere…

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

    … i.e., Japan’s top currency “diplomat”. Masato Kanda, has been fired.

    Kanda will be replaced with Atsushi Mimura, a director-general of the Finance Ministry’s international bureau, who will take over as vice finance minister for international affairs on July 31.

    Atsushi Mimura is set to take over as Japan’s top currency diplomat at the end of July

    Incumbent Kanda has been the main figure in handling the government’s catastrophic interventions in the foreign exchange market, which have been meant to arrest the yen’s slide against the dollar, yet despite spending a record $60+ billion two months ago on halting the yen’s implosion, the yen is now at the lowest level since the Plaza Accord.

    And while no amount of intervention will prevent the yen from imploding further – to do that the BOJ will have to raise rates to 4% or higher, setting of a cataclysmic collapse of the entire Japanese bond market – the outrage among the populace at the runaway inflation in Japan in large part due to the plunging currency, is finally being addressed now that Japan is facing election in a few months, and scapegoat time has arrived.

    We fully expect another intervention round in the coming days, one which sends USDJPY back to the low 150s before the pair resumes it trek higher until such time as Japan finally loses control over both its currency and bond markets. That will be the beginning of the end of the current doomed experiment in neoliberalism.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 23:40

  • CCP Hires Western Military Aviators To Prepare For War With Taiwan: Taiwanese Military Expert
    CCP Hires Western Military Aviators To Prepare For War With Taiwan: Taiwanese Military Expert

    Authored by Xin Ning and Cindy Li via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The Five Eyes (FVEY) alliance announced steps earlier in June to prevent Western military aviators from training Beijing’s military and naval aviators, capabilities that military experts say are key for Beijing to be able to attack Taiwan.

    A Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy J-11 fighter pilot performs an unsafe maneuver during an intercept of a U.S. Air Force RC-135 aircraft, which was lawfully conducting routine operations over the South China Sea in international airspace, on Dec. 21, 2022, in a still from video. (Courtesy of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command/Screenshot via The Epoch Times)

    On June 5, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), representing the FVEY (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), issued a joint bulletin warning evolving the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) efforts to recruit current and retired Western service members to train its military.

    “To overcome their shortcomings, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been aggressively recruiting Western military talent to train their aviators, using private firms around the globe that conceal their PLA ties and offer recruits exorbitant salaries,” said NCSC Director Michael C. Casey.

    Actions by the United States and its Western partners to counter this threat include commercial restrictions on the Test Flying Academy of South Africa (TFASA), Beijing China Aviation Technology Co. (BCAT), Stratos, and other PLA providers exploiting Western and NATO personnel, as well as legal and regulatory changes to prohibit former military members from engaging in post-service employment with China.

    Tony Xia, a military expert and commentator, noted that pilots with real combat experience are rare in China.

    “It takes at least five years to train a fighter pilot. In fact, the pilot is required to fly for the rest of his or her service life,” he told The Epoch Times.

    He added that the main reason for the CCP to hire experienced aviators from Western militaries is to plagiarise Western training systems, methods, and experience.

    “In the past few decades, China’s fourth-generation fighters have hardly experienced any real-world combat experience,” he said.

    CCP Preparation to Attack Taiwan

    Zhang Yanting, the former deputy commander of Taiwan’s Air Force and currently a professor at the Political Warfare College of Taiwan’s National Defense University, believes that these CCP actions are preparation for a real war in the Taiwan Strait.

    Retired pilots bring combat experience, which the PLA lacks. They can pass on to the CCP military their valuable experience of the whole real-world combat scenario, threats, and how to give full play to their combat power, he told The Epoch Times.

    Moreover, each of them has different expertise: some of them fly fighter planes, some fly anti-submarine warfare aircraft, and some fly carrier planes.

    Taiwan’s armed forces hold two days of routine drills to show combat readiness ahead of the Lunar New Year holidays at a military base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on Jan. 11, 2023. (Annabelle Chih/Getty Images)

    Qi Leyi, a senior media figure and military commentator in Taiwan, noted that the CCP values practical operational experience from recruited retired Western officers.

    The people on the front line are especially needed. Apart from acquiring skills, they can also get some intelligence and information, he told The Epoch Times.

    CCP’s History of Recruiting Western Military

    The CCP’s recruitment of Western retired pilots has been known since 2022, including cases such as the TFASA in South Africa, which was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Commerce in June 2023.

    While TFASA denied involvement in confidential military training and employing American and British citizens, Daniel Duggan, a former pilot for the U.S. Marine Corps and Australian citizen who would be extradited to the United States, was indeed a trainer for TFASA and trained Chinese pilots in the art of landing on aircraft carriers.

    Mr. Duggan moved to Australia after more than 10 years of service in the U.S. military and founded a company called Top Gun Tasmania, which employs former U.S. and British military pilots to provide tourists with jets for joyriding.

    Former U.S. military pilot Daniel Edmund Dugga is seen as a pilot in Tasmania, Australia, on Feb. 13, 2023. (AAP Image/Supplied by Duggan family)

    Mr. Duggan, with an Airline Transport Pilot’s Licence issued by the United States and Australia, has flown the AV-8B Harrier, T2C Buckeye, and A4J Skyhawk. In May, he admitted to working with Chinese spy Su Bin, who stole U.S. military secrets but denied knowing he was a spy.

    In the United Kingdom, it was exposed in 2022 that as many as 30 retired British pilots have been recruited by the Chinese military with high salaries (up to about $270,000 a year). The recruitment has been carried out through third parties, including a flying academy based in South Africa, and the pilots had served across the British military, not just in the Royal Air Force.

    France is also targeted by the CCP, which actively seeks skilled French instructors to guide Chinese pilots in carrier landings and learn NATO air force strategies. Other than the United States and China, France is among the few nations with catapult-equipped aircraft carriers.

    The CCP recruits retired Western carrier-based aircraft pilots to train its own carrier pilots and absorb the experience of carrier combat tactics from Western countries, Ou Si-Fu, who heads the Division of Chinese Politics, Military, and Warfighting Concepts at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan, told The Epoch Times.

    Landing a fighter jet on a narrow carrier deck is a highly challenging task. The CCP is starting from scratch in terms of combat operations, necessitating training from Western nations, he said. Carrier combat strategies are national secrets that no country is willing to teach Beijing directly, prompting the regime to entice retired Western pilots with hefty salaries.

    Mr. Xia said that in their pursuit of developing aircraft carriers, the CCP aims to realize its “Deep Blue Dream,” which is “a way to compete for regional and world hegemony.”

    “For the CCP, the training of carrier pilots is basically blank. Western experience is of course very important for it,” he said. “The U.S. Navy, when observing the take-off and landing of Chinese carrier aircraft, exclaimed about their dangerous [amateurish] maneuvers.”

    Mr. Ou believes that the CCP penetrates Taiwanese society with a similar approach, absorbing retired military personnel to steal Taiwan’s military secrets and enticing semiconductor professionals for advanced industrial secrets.

    Taiwan and democratic Western nations must remain vigilant against these illegal measures by the CCP to steal defense military and advanced industrial secrets, he said.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 23:35

  • Judge Awards Over $1 Million To 2 US Citizen Children Detained Crossing Border
    Judge Awards Over $1 Million To 2 US Citizen Children Detained Crossing Border

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

    Two American children who were detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents while trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border to go to school will be awarded over $1 million in compensation, a federal judge in California has ruled.

    Customs and Border Protection agents check pedestrians as they exit Mexico into the customs area of the United States on the east side of the San Ysidro port of entry in Tijuana, Mexico, on Nov. 19, 2018. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

    U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of California Gonzalo Curiel issued the order on June 21.

    The order stems from a lawsuit involving Oscar Amparo Medina and his sister Julia Isabel Amparo, who were 14 and nine years old, respectively, in March 2019, when they were detained by border patrol agents at the Tijuana-San Ysidro, California, border crossing.

    According to the lawsuit—filed by their parents on their behalf—the two children lived with their parents and siblings in Tijuana, Mexico, and had been on their way to school in San Ysidro when the incident occurred.

    Julia was detained by officers for approximately 34 hours, and Oscar for roughly 14 hours, because officers suspected them of lying about their identities, with officers initially believing Oscar may have been attempting to smuggle or traffic his younger sister.

    The plaintiffs in the lawsuit had sought to hold the United States liable under the FTCA for false imprisonment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligence.

    “Common sense and ordinary human experience indicate that it was not reasonable to detain Julia for 34 hours to determine her identity or to detain Oscar for about 14 hours to determine whether he was smuggling or trafficking his sister when multiple means of investigation were available and officers unreasonably failed to pursue them,” Judge Curiel wrote in his ruling.

    In a statement provided to media outlets, a CBP spokesperson said the agency “takes all complaints seriously and makes a good faith effort to resolve all complaints justly and fairly, including complying fully with orders issued by the federal district courts.”

    Identification Issues

    According to the lawsuit, both children were born in the United States and are U.S. citizens; however, their mother, Thelma, is a Mexican citizen who possesses a valid U.S. Border Crossing Card, and their father does not have the legal status or a visa to enter the United States.

    The two children showed their valid U.S. passport cards to agents when attempting to cross the border into the United States via the pedestrian border crossing in March 2019, the complaint states.

    However, when presenting their identification cards to border agents, one of the agents noticed a “dot on Julia’s photo that appeared to be a mole on her upper lip, which was not visible on Julia in person.”

    Julia also showed agents a school identification from her former elementary school in Mexico, which also “did not resemble Julia,” according to court documents.

    During further interrogation, an officer then allegedly “came up with the idea that Julia was her cousin Melany, and then pressured Julia into agreeing,” the lawsuit claims.

    Lawyers for the United States vehemently rejected that claim and argued that “Julia and Oscar stated that Julia was Melany unprompted and then continued to say that throughout their interviews.”

    A man crosses into the United States from Mexico into San Ysidro, Calif., on Feb. 2, 2024. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

    Conduct Was ‘Extreme and Outrageous’

    The mother of the two children was not contacted when they were detained, according to the lawsuit.

    After the children were released by border agents, they suffered mental stress, grief, anxiety, humiliation, and emotional distress, lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote in the lawsuit.

    In his ruling, Judge Curiel concluded that the United States’ conduct was “extreme and outrageous” and that it had violated the rights of the two children.

    The judge also noted that one of the CBP officers who interviewed Julia in private did so without a witness or a recording of the incident, violating CBP policy. This led to a “false confession,” he said.

    “Since the confession was not recorded, witnessed or even recounted in any written detail, it will never be known why a 9-year-old U.S. citizen falsely confessed to being someone she is not,” the judge wrote.

    “CBP violated the directive that its officers not interview minors alone,” he added.

    “Although reasonable suspicion may have existed initially to believe that Julia was making a false claim of citizenship by fraudulently using the passport card of another, the duration of her and Oscar’s detention was unreasonable and in violation of the Fourth Amendment because officers repeatedly failed to take available steps to investigate their suspicions and failed to follow CBP’s own policies and precautions regarding the treatment of detained minors,” the judge concluded.

    Judge Curiel awarded $1.1 million in damages for Julia, $175,000 for Oscar, and $250,000 for Thelma.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 23:10

  • Scholars To Study Milk's Ties To "Colonialism" In Tax-Funded Project
    Scholars To Study Milk’s Ties To “Colonialism” In Tax-Funded Project

    By Micaiah Bilger of The College Fix

    This one doesn’t appear to be a hoax.

    A new research project, “Milking it: colonialism, heritage and everyday engagement with dairy,” comes out of the University of Oxford’s History of Science Museum.

    Leading the project are JC Niala, head researcher of the museum, and Johanna Zetterström Sharp, associate professor of archaeology at the University College London, according to an announcement on the museum’s Facebook page.

    Their goal is to “examine the milk-related collections of the History of Science Museum to understand scientific knowledge production and the impact of colonial legacies on contemporary issues,” the announcement states.

    “Through milk diaries, archival research, and participatory podcasting, it will investigate historical engagement with milk, building networks with consumers and producers in Britain and Kenya,” it states.

    Niala and Sharp “will question both the imagined and real aspects of milk,” including the “political nature of this everyday substance,” according to the announcement.

    The research project is new, and it’s taxpayer funded through the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, The Telegraph reports.

    But the topic is not new to either scholar.

    In 2022, Sharp participated in a panel discussion on the topic of “Milk and Whiteness” hosted by the Wellcome Collection in London. The event “explor[ed] milk’s associations with purity and whiteness and the racialised politics of diet and nutrition,” according to the collection website.

    The Telegraph reports more:

    In the panel discussion, the professor outlined a “Northern European obsession with milk” which has led to an assumption that it is a “vital part of any human diet”, and should be produced and provided on a vast scale.

    Such an assumption, she argued, “may be understood as a white supremacist one”.

    She explained: “Northern European needs and the science the technology devised to address them are the needs that pertain and are most important for global majority populations.”

    Additionally, Niala lists “milk” as a key subject of her research work in her biography on the museum website.

    For their new project, “the ultimate goal is to develop new methodologies for investigating our relationship with milk over time” and to “learn from the histories and global forces shaping milk today to envision more sustainable futures,” according to the museum.

    Milk, coffee, and racism were the subject of a student’s hoax research essay in 2021.

    As The College Fix reported at the time, the Swedish university student wrote about “how the marketing of the coffee has been characterized by highlighting ‘black and exotic elements’ of the drink. When it comes to milk, it has instead been ‘the local and white’ that has been emphasized.”

    Arvid Haag said he wrote the paper as a joke for a class about critical race theory, and was surprised when people took it seriously.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 22:45

  • Supreme Court Blocks EPA's Plan To Limit Ozone Pollution From Power Plants
    Supreme Court Blocks EPA’s Plan To Limit Ozone Pollution From Power Plants

    The Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration “pollution-fighting” plan that would mean crippling new emissions requirements on power plants and pipelines in parts of the country to stem ozone pollution that wanders into downwind states.

    It would also mean choking off US power supply at a time when AI data centers are draining the electrical network at record levels with little pushback from the same Biden administration which is oh so very concerned about the environment… but not when ultra liberal corporations are to blame.

    The justices, voting 5-4, and which was split men vs women as Trump appointee Barrett voted along with socialists Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson, put the Environmental Protection Agency’s “good neighbor” rule on hold while courts consider challenges pressed by upwind states, industry groups and companies led by Kinder Morgan.

    In doing so, they rejected arguments by the Biden administration and Democratic-controlled states that the plan was cutting air pollution and saving lives in 11 blue states where it was being enforced and that the high court’s intervention was unwarranted.

    The rule is intended to restrict smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas with smog-causing pollution.

    It will remain on hold while the federal appeals court in Washington considers a challenge to the plan from industry and Republican-led states.

    The delay could be a lengthy one given that litigation over the rule is in its early stages. The focus now shifts to a federal appeals court, which will take the first look at the challenges.

    The Supreme Court order halts a rule that would have applied to 11 states, a number that had already been cut from 23 because of separate legal battles. A key issue in the fight was whether the EPA had adequately considered whether its approach was warranted even if it applied to only a subset of upwind states. The rule was originally scheduled to take effect last August.

    The challengers — Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia — contended the rule would impose billions of dollars in costs in the first year alone and threaten the reliability of the electricity grid by forcing generators into early retirement.

    The Biden administration said the rule would protect the health of people in downwind states suffering from emissions by their neighbors.

    The administration was backed by a group of downwind states led by New York.

    The rule is part of a two-pronged EPA approach that relies on the rejection of state plans to curb ozone followed by the imposition of a federal alternative.

    A number of states have managed to freeze the rejection component of EPA’s plan, reducing the reach of the alternative.

    The justices took the unusual step of holding an argument session in the case even though they were considering only a request for an interim order as part of the court’s emergency docket.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 22:20

  • With Rates Dropping, Operating Costs For Truckers Hit Record High In 2023
    With Rates Dropping, Operating Costs For Truckers Hit Record High In 2023

    By David Hollis of TruckersNews

    Operating expenses for trucking companies increased in 2023, according to the results of a new study released today.

    The American Transportation Research Institute’s 2024 Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking found the overall marginal costs of operating a truck hit $2.270 per mile in 2023, a new record high. While the increase was only 0.8 percent over the previous year, when surcharge-protected fuel costs are excluded, marginal costs rose 6.6 percent to $1.716 per mile, according to the study.

    ATRI’s annual report analyzes line-item costs, operating efficiencies, and revenue benchmarks by fleet sector and size.

    Overall, 2023 expenses rose moderately across most categories, with average costs across line-items increasing at less than half the rates experienced during 2021 and 2022, according to the study. It found:

    • Truck and trailer payments grew by 8.8 percent to $0.360 per mile

    • Driver wages grew by 7.6 percent to $0.779 per mile

    • Repair and maintenance costs grew by 3.1 percent to $0.202 per mile

    • Insurance premiums grew by 12.5 percent to $0.099 per mile after two years of negligible change

    ATRI said the soft 2023 freight market — which continues in 2024 — posed many challenges for operational efficiency. Deadhead mileage rose to an average of 16.3 percent for all non-tank operations, and driver turnover rose by five percentage points in the truckload sector.

    These pressures combined with low freight rates strained profitability across the industry, said ATRI in a statement announcing the release of its study.

    Average operating margins were 6 percent or lower in all fleet sizes and sectors other than LTL. The truckload and specialized sectors experienced drops in per-mile or per-truck revenue, and most saw “other costs” – expenses outside of the core marginal line-items – increase as a share of total revenue.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 21:55

  • Bill Gates Is Investing "Billions" In The New Wave Of Nuclear Power
    Bill Gates Is Investing “Billions” In The New Wave Of Nuclear Power

    It isn’t often Bill “Mr. I Know What’s Best For The Entire World” Gates comes up with an idea that we aren’t immediately skeptical of, but his recent pledge to promote next generation nuclear power sounds to us to be a common sense solution to multiple problems we’ll be facing in coming years. 

    Gates is pledging billions of dollars to promote nuclear through startup TerraPower LLC, OilPrice.com wrote this week. And it looks like that number could grow. 

    Gates recently told Bloomberg: “I put in over a billion, and I’ll put in billions more.”

    OilPrice.com notes that nuclear power is gaining global traction as a key player in decarbonization strategies. In addition to TerraPower, companies like Sam Altman-led Oklo are also focused on modernizing nuclear with small modular reactors. 

    Advocates emphasize its immense clean energy potential, proven technology, and existing infrastructure. Although not renewable, nuclear energy emits zero carbon and could help meet global emissions targets.

    As we have been noting for months, urgency for clean energy has intensified due to the tech sector, especially Artificial Intelligence, consuming massive amounts of energy. This surge in demand has reversed the trend, with developed countries now experiencing faster energy demand growth than developing nations.

    The IT industry currently accounts for about 2% of global CO2 emissions, according to Science Alert in 2023. Gartner predicts the AI sector alone will consume 3.5% of global electricity by 2030 without significant changes.

    In response, tech giants are seeking carbon-free energy sources, with many turning to nuclear power. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s TerraPower aims to supply nuclear energy for Microsoft’s AI needs and is developing safer, less controversial reactors using liquid sodium coolant, which reduces water usage and may recycle spent nuclear fuel, addressing hazardous waste concerns.

    Recall, at the start of April, we penned a lengthy report for premium subs discussing why artificial intelligence data centers, the electrification of the economy, and onshoring trends will result in a major upgrade of the nation’s power grid. We followed the note up on Monday with a report titled Everyone Is Piling Into The “Next AI Trade.” 

    In May, Larry Fink jumped on the trade: “I do believe to properly um build out AI. We’re talking about trillions of dollars of investing. So data centers today could be as much as 200 megahertz – and they’re now talking about data centers being one gigawatt. That powers a city.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 21:30

  • Enrollment Loss, Financial Woes An Increasing Problem At US Colleges
    Enrollment Loss, Financial Woes An Increasing Problem At US Colleges

    Authored by Aaron Gifford via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Before Cazenovia College in Upstate New York closed in May 2023 because of decreasing enrollment and financial problems, students were given a list of comparable schools in the same region with similar tuition fees, major courses of study, financial aid availability, and athletic programs.

    The administration building at Cazenovia College has remained vacant since the four-year school in Upstate New York closed in May 2023. A portion of the campus has since been leased to the New York State Police, which operate a training academy there. (Aaron Gifford / The Epoch Times)

    One of the schools on that list, Wells College, shut down one year later for the same reasons—low enrollment (354 students) and financial problems.

    “It’s pretty crazy when that happens with two schools in two years,” Carter Matus, who transferred to Elmira College from Cazenovia College, said. Some of his classmates had considered Wells but chose different schools.

    “Luckily they didn’t have to go through this again,” he said.

    What Mr. Matus went through was a brief but “semi-stressful” episode of finding another small higher learning institution at about the same costs that would accept his credits and allow him to continue playing varsity baseball. He changed his major from art to business and still maintains his custom trade and proprietorship, Art by Carter J. Matus.

    “It’s been an OK experience,” he told The Epoch Times on June 25, “but I do miss being closer to a city [Syracuse].

    “If I had to do it all over again, I probably would have stayed in Florida.”

    These are uncertain times for upstate colleges. Along with Wells, the College of Saint Rose in Albany and St. John’s University Staten Island campus also graduated their final classes in May. Medaille College in Buffalo shut its doors last summer. Clinton County Community College survived only by closing its campus and using space at neighboring SUNY Plattsburgh. And several other schools, private and public, made deep budget cuts.

    The decline is not limited to the Empire State.

    According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, college and university enrollment has decreased by about 1.5 million students, or 7.4 percent, in the past decade.

    Notable closings in other parts of the country this year include Notre Dame College in Ohio, Birmingham Southern University in Alabama, University of Saint Katherine in California, and Hodges University in Florida.

    The main reason is that, with declining birth rates, there won’t be enough students for every school, according to Adam Kissel, visiting fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

    College and university decision makers across the nation must have known about this population trend 20 years ago, he said, yet too few of those representing private schools had conversations about merging or sharing services to survive.

    “Too many colleges have their heads in the sand,” Mr. Kissel said.

    Other Contributing Factors

    Mr. Kissel added that there are a number of other factors contributing to these enrollment trends and the likelihood of more campus closings.

    Americans are increasingly questioning whether a college degree is worth the money at a time when interest is rising in vocational trades and career and technical education programs, which involve smaller commitments of time and money.

    “You hear about the massive student debt, and a lot of them [prospective students] are saying, ‘I could go into plumbing or electrical work,’“ Mr. Kissel said. ”Why would I need a bachelor’s for that?”

    There are also cultural changes across U.S. campuses. The college culture of drinking and partying isn’t as attractive as it used to be. As students become more serious about their courses of study when they realize the cost of attending colleges and universities, there’s also a growing distaste for progressive ideologies that have become commonplace in higher education, Mr. Kissel said.

    In 2022, the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported that 80 percent of school faculty identified themselves as politically liberal. In September 2023, Inside Higher Education published an opinion piece, “Higher Ed Can’t Afford its Left-Wing Bias Problem.”

    “Students ask themselves if they want to be in that environment,” Mr. Kissel said. “Many people no longer trust colleges to educate students well.”

    The “final jolt” was the much delayed release of the 2024–2025 federal student aid (FAFSA) application, which affected $1.8 billion in federal student aid and caused some students to not apply for college who otherwise would have. Mr. Kissel said this debacle will cause many more struggling higher learning institutions to close in 2025.

    Depending on the state and type of school, the total cost of annual tuition, room and board, and fees across the nation this past academic year ranged from $11,000 to more than $80,000, according to the College Board. However, the net cost that students pay after scholarships and work-study initiatives might be a fraction of that.

    National Conference of State Legislature (NCSL) Senior Policy Analyst Andrew Smalley estimates that the number of higher education institutions that closed in the United States this year was as high as “one a week,” though that would include even the smallest of online certificate or degree programs that don’t have a campus.

    Mr. Smalley, speaking during NCSL’s June 16 podcast “Making Higher Education Accountable,” said data still support that college graduates earn more than high school graduates, by an average of $30,000 a year.

    Mr. Smalley said the pressing concern is that fewer than 20 percent of students who attend an institution that closes will actually finish a degree or certificate program at another school.

    “This is a huge derailer for students, and there’s a lot states can consider around financial monitoring, mergers, consolidations, and closure procedures should an institution close,“ he said. ”And states are really considering how to think about those challenges, and what they can do to support students earning their credential or degree from those institutions.”

    Much like the students who were displaced by the recent closings of New York state colleges and universities, faculty and staff members also had to become mobile and flexible if they wanted to continue their passion for education.

    David Rufo was a childhood education professor at Cazenovia College before the announced closing. He had hoped to obtain tenure and thought he’d finally found the perfect fit in a tight-knit community with plenty of academic freedom following prior jobs at Syracuse University and Fordham University in New York City.

    Within a matter of weeks, Mr. Rufo secured a tenure-track teaching position at Utica University. The move increased his commute from two minutes to one hour, but the trade-off is job security in an institution where enrollment is growing and more support staff are there to help him with research and publications.

    “Both places seemed to really appreciate innovation,” Mr. Rufo told The Epoch Times on June 25. “Cazenovia was really rewarding, but this has been rewarding so far as well. New challenges can be part of the experience.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 21:05

  • "My Retribution Is Going To Be Success" – 'Presidential' Trump Dominates Stuttering Biden In Debate
    “My Retribution Is Going To Be Success” – ‘Presidential’ Trump Dominates Stuttering Biden In Debate

    Well that backfired on the Democrats…

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    You know it’s bad when you lose Brian Stelter:

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    And others…

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    All the restrictions, all the hiding Biden away, all the bias… and all it did was help Trump and hurt Biden. Former President Trump was forced to be disciplined and precise, as his son noted on X:

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    President Biden was exposed as a frail old man, stuttering and stumbling through various faux pas…

    “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence — I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

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    …falling back on propaganda lies to attack his opponent.

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    Whatever he was on, they needed more of it…

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    …and not just water, Jack!

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    And against all odds, the CNN moderators were surprisingly good (although there were a couple of very odd cuts early on in the debate as Biden stammered):

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    There are too many moments of note so we will cherry pick a few here:

    He did keep reaching for his ear…

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    Biden repeated the claim that Trump slandered dead veterans, turning to him and saying:

    “You’re the sucker, you’re the loser.”

    Trump did not rise to the bait and responded calmly.

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    Biden claimed the border was secure and that Border Patrol endorsed him… they responded…

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    President Biden kept repeating some claim about ‘nazis coming out of the woods holding torches’ and claimed that Trump said “Hitler did some good things.”

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    Biden on the economy:

    “We provided thousands of millions of jobs.”

    Oh and Biden claimed he “inherited 9% inflation”… Nope!

    On taxes, yes he said it: “fair share”…

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    President Biden claimed that America is the “most admired” nation under him… well no…

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    Trump was the “grown up” when they discussed Biden’s age and fragility:

    Biden: “Look I’d be happy to have a driving contest with him. I got my handicap when I was vice president down to a six. By the way, I told you before I’m happy to play golf with you if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?”

    Trump: “That’s the biggest lie, that he’s a six handicap, of all.”

    Biden: “I was a eight handicap–“

    Trump: “Let’s not act like children.”

    Biden: “You are a child.”

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    Trump’s best line of the night when confronted with the ‘projection’ that he will weaponize the government against his opponents:

    “My retribution is going to be success.”

    Finally, as Rogan O’Handley noted on X,

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    And the market knows it, with stocks and the dollar bid and bonds selling off (as Goldman suggested) as PredictIt’s odds soared for Trump and crashed for Biden…

    Source: Bloomberg

    …and cue the excuses for Biden’s performance? A cold or COVID?

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    Working so much for the American people? Or will we get pure gaslit: “Actually, we think Biden killed it in the debate…and Trump sucked”. But hey if by victory you mean he stood up for 90 minutes, you’re right, well done (well there was a half-time break)

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    We doubt anyone is falling for that shit…

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    Paging Gavin Newsom!!

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    *  *  *

    Watch live

    * * *

    So, here we go, Trump-hating-CNN-anchor-hosted ‘debate’ in a TV studio with a one-to-two-minute (not 7 second) delay on the feed, with no audience, no press allowed in (seriously), and outside of the boundaries of the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates… what could possibly go right?

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    Here’s where the odds lay before the debate started…

    It sounds like some of the Biden team are getting nervous. Former Obama Advisor David Axelrod on Joe Biden:

    “If he spends the whole night extolling his record… he will lose this debate, and he may lose this election.”

    Here’s some last minute tips:

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    Oh, and we suspect you’re going to need a drink to get through this one.

    Here’s the best drinking game rules that we have found, courtesy of Matt Taibbi:

    TAKE A SIP ONLY WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORD/WORDS:

    1.    Felon.
    2.    Insurrection.
    3.    “Christians.” Double for “Persecuted Christians.”
    4.    Any of: Rigged, Crooked, Marxist, “Religions Freedom,” “Weaponizing,” “World war.”
    5.    Any of: Existential, Threat, “Our Democracy,” “At Stake,” or “Soul of a Nation.”
    6.    Any of: “C’mon, man,” MAGA, “Not a Joke,” “We’re the United States of America,” “President Obama and I.”

    As for the rest: look, this game is not going to be for the faint of heart. I’m not doing shots for this (I’ll be going with a beverage, man, i.e. a pitcher of White Russians) and strongly recommend everyone stick to beer or even weed, because if you actually play by these rules, you’ll get into a medical situation quickly. “Felon” alone is a hospital rule. So, watch responsibly.

    One evergreen rule is that YOU MUST DRINK EVERY TIME A CANDIDATE LIES.

    Beyond that, DRINK EVERY TIME:

    7.    Either CNN host brings up January 6th. If they use the word “insurrection,” you don’t have to drink twice.
    8.    Trump says he won in 2020 or warns that 2024 will not be honest, e.g. “If I knew there would be no corruption, I’d stop campaigning now.”
    9.    Biden says something unintelligible, turns his back on the camera, begins undressing, or generally does anything suggesting he’s forgotten where he is.
    10.    Trump accuses Biden of being on performance-enhancing drugs. Double shot if he sniffles while doing it.
    11.    Trump brings up Hunter.
    12.    Biden says, in response, “I love my son.” Double if he non-answers the actual question about Hunter.
    13.    Trump compares himself to a great president or unassailable historical figure: Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Joan of Arc, etc. A double if it’s Jesus, or a long-incarcerated political prisoner like Mandela, Sakharov, or Solzhenitsyn.
    14.    On the ropes, Biden evokes Beau.
    15.    Trump mentions “Al Capone” or someone who is “my friend.”
    16.    “You’re fired, Joe.”
    17.    Biden evokes “Detention camps.”
    18.    Biden pulls a J.J. Redick and drops a quasi-profanity in there, e.g. “We got to remember who the hell we are.”
    19.    Trump brings up someone who was killed by “Biden migrant crime.”

    Finally – If the debate has to be halted for medical reasons, FINISH YOUR BEVERAGE.

    We’d take the over on ‘dementia’…

    Enjoy! (due to start at 2100ET):

    There is, of course, one man missing from tonight’s debate… and RFK Jr decided to host a ‘real debate’ here on Rumble instead.

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    *  *  *

    In a highly anticipated showdown, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump square off tonight in the first of two scheduled debates. The battle of wits comes extraordinarily early in the campaign, which — as we’ll explain below — could be something the Trump campaign regrets. 

    This combination of photos shows Donald Trump, left, and Joe Biden during the first general-election presidential debate in 2020, on Sept. 29 in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

    Here are the essentials: 

    • The debate in Atlanta will air at 9 pm ET on CNN and on the streaming platform Max. If you don’t have either of those, you can watch without a cable log-in at CNN.com  

    • Moderators are Jake Tapper and Dana Bash

    • The contest will last 90 minutes, and have two commercial/rest breaks. Candidates are not allowed to interact with their staff during the breaks

    • No prepared notes are allowed, but will have pads for making notes during the debate.

    • The contenders’ microphones will be muted when it’s not their turn to talk

    That last wrinkle could be a major help for the challenger: Trump’s performance in the crucial first debate of the 2020 election was a certified disaster, thanks to his incessant interruptions of Biden, which only served to annoy audiences and reinforce Trump’s reputation for supposedly “lacking civility.”  

    In anticipation of a train wreck on either side, will tonight’s debate viewership top 2016’s Clinton/Trump battle?

    Infographic: Which Presidential Debates Drew The Biggest TV Audiences? | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Then again, the muted microphones may be a redundancy, as Trump is reportedly well aware that his tactics backfired in the last election. “He has said to people, multiple times, that he knows that he interrupted too much in the first debate with Biden in 2020,” the New York Times‘ Maggie Haberman told CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week. In any event, here’s a CNN demonstration of what it will sound like if a muted candidate tries to speak during the opponent’s turn: 

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    With the latest New York Times/Siena College poll showing Trump leading Biden in all seven battleground states, the pressure is clearly on the incumbent. At the same time, Biden’s increasing pace of verbal miscues makes the debate a risky proposition for him. Rather than closing the gap, a performance that confirms the public’s worst beliefs about Biden’s mental acuity could spell disaster. 

    That’s why Trump may come to regret agreeing to a debate that’s far earlier in the presidential election calendar than normal — indeed, before either party has even had its nominating convention. If tonight’s debate puts Biden’s mental decline under the national spotlight, the Democratic Party — already deeply worried about Trump outperforming among blacks, Hispanics and young people — may scramble to persuade Biden to leave the race with dignity and replace him with someone else.

    Of course, Biden has the uncanny ability to go from confused nursing home patient to invigorated octogenarian – which has prompted Trump and many others to suggest they take blood tests before the debate. Of course, that’s not going to happen.

    As Andrew Ross Sorkin notes in the NY Times dealbook, the economy will be a big topic of debate.

    The economy is the big question. Various measures show strong growth under Biden, but many voters feel differently. What will Biden and Trump say about some of the key issues?

    • Inflation: This is clearly a challenge for the president, as Americans complain about what they’re paying in the grocery store, at the pump and on their rent. Biden can say that price increases are slowing down, and will most likely emphasize his administration’s efforts to crack down on “corporate greed,” like taking on so-called junk fees. Trump will probably stress how good things were when he took office in 2017 — an economy many Americans want back.

    • Taxes: Biden’s proposals for higher corporate taxes will hit profits: “It’s simple math,” David Bahnsen, the founder and chief investment officer of the Bahnsen Group, told DealBook. Many business leaders don’t like Biden’s plan to increase taxes on the wealthy, either. Trump will probably stress his desire to extend his 2017 tax cuts and lower the corporate rate to 20 percent. But questions about corporate earnings and the economy may eclipse those concerns.

    • Protectionism: Both candidates want to increase tariffs on Chinese goods, but Biden has been more targeted in how he has done it during his presidency. Trump has proposed significantly higher across-the-board levies, though it’s unclear how serious he is about it. Economists have warned that Trump’s potential approach could aggravate inflation and hurt the economy.

    • Markets: The S&P 500 set 31 records this year; investors will hope neither party messes with that momentum. In tonight’s debate, “markets probably care more about presentation than policy pledges,” Paul Donovan, an economist at UBS, wrote in a client note. Biden may have a slight edge, he added, since investors would prefer keeping “some continuity.”

    The Democratic convention in Chicago is set for Aug. 19 to 22; however, there are plans to nominate Biden ahead of time via a “virtual” online roll call, but the party has not yet announced a date. The Republican convention in Milwaukee will run from July 15 to 18. The second debate, will be hosted by ABC News on Sept. 10.

    Two of Trump’s three opponents tonight: CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash (via The Hill)

    And with expectations for Biden so low, the Trump campaign has been working to shape the evaluation framework ahead of time. “We believe that many in the media are already prepared to give Joe Biden a participation trophy if he can simply stand upright for 90 minutes,” senior Trump campaign advisor Jason Miller told reporters. 

    Trump will be in hostile territory tonight, with the risk of it becoming a de facto 3-v-1 battle. Not only is it being hosted by CNN, but moderators Tapper and Bash are some of the network’s harshest critics of Trump.

    As if we needed a reminder of the extent to which CNN is an extension of the Biden campaign, over the weekend Kasie Hunt kicked Trump 2024 press secretary Karoline Leavitt off her show when she dared to call out Tapper’s obvious animus against the former president: 

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    Biden’s handlers cleared his schedule for the week, so he could focus on debate prep at the Camp David presidential retreat. Speaking in Philadelphia, Trump said much of the prep was likely coming in the form of “sleeping…because they want to get him good and strong.” While Biden’s prep includes mock debates with a Trump stand-in, Trump’s preparation has centered on receiving policy briefings from a variety of allies. 

    Oh, and posting hilarious clips to his Instagram channel, like this one made by Jimmy Failla (@jimmyfailla):

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    Part of the debate set-up was decided by a coin toss, in which the winning campaign earned the privilege of choosing either their podium location or the sequence of closing statements. The Biden campaign won, and elected to choose the podium on the right side of viewer screens. The Trump campaign then opted to have the last word.  

    Speaking of last words, if history is any guide, no matter how terrible Biden may look tonight, we can expect major media outlets to gush about him beating expectations. However, having seen one Biden gaffe after another, the American people are increasingly less likely to fall for that kind of orchestrated snow job.

    Will Biden go full mask-off?

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 20:40

  • New U Of Arizona DEI Course Requirement Hit With Criticism: "Academically Unserious"
    New U Of Arizona DEI Course Requirement Hit With Criticism: “Academically Unserious”

    By Ellie Cameron of The College Fix

    As universities nationwide scale back diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Arizona’s flagship public institution is preparing to implement a new mandate for students — two courses with a DEI emphasis as a graduation requirement.

    Through the two courses, students will focus on themes of diversity, power, equity, privilege, oppression and marginalization, learn “how historical and contemporary populations have experienced inequality,” and “theorize how to create a more equitable society,” the university’s website states.

    “…Classes with the Diversity & Equity Attribute will focus on issues such as racism, classism, sexism, ableism, imperialism, colonialism, transphobia, xenophobia, and other structured inequities,” the university states.

    The DEI mandate is part of a general education curriculum update at the University of Arizona and takes effect in fall 2026. In the meantime, it has prompted criticisms from a high-profile conservative think tank in the state.

    Students “will be forced to take courses with academically unserious content that adds nothing to their education,” Timothy Minella, a researcher with the Goldwater Institute, told The College Fix.

    Minella authored the institute’s report criticizing the DEI mandate. Published this month, it argues “general education programs were originally intended to help students gain knowledge and skills essential for thoughtful citizenship and successful careers.”

    But the new DEI requirements “instead promote politically activist ideologies to a captive audience of students, who must complete the programs in order to receive a degree,” it adds.

    Susan Miller-Cochran, professor of English and executive director of UA’s general education, said the courses are in response to an Arizona Board of Regents policy “to contribute to a society that values ‘equality under the law, diversity, inclusion, and constructive dialogue through civil discourse.’”

    She said she strongly disagrees with the institute’s report.

    “It’s about reflection and theorization. Understanding theories about diversity and equity, and to cultivate habits of mind that help to meet the requirements that the Arizona Board of Regents gave us in their general education policy,” she told The College Fix in a telephone interview.

    The Goldwater report was the result of a wide-ranging public records act request from last fall, and it picks apart several courses that meet the DEI focus after obtaining about 1,000 pages of syllabi.

    Among the classes it highlights is one that requires students to “live like a bug” in “ENTO 160D1: Busy Bees and Fancy Fleas: How Insects Shaped Human History.” In one assignment, students will create “tissue paper wings” to understand the experience of “immigrants” or people “from a different social class.”

    Minella told The Fix that UA students “could graduate having ‘lived like a bug,’ but without learning about the Constitution, the Civil War, or landmark Supreme Court cases.”

    “This isn’t just bad policy. It’s a blatant violation of a clear directive to educate students in American civics from the Arizona Board of Regents, the body that oversees Arizona public universities,” he said via email.

    Another DEI class highlighted in the report is an anthropology one called “Race, Ethnicity, and the American Dream.”

    “Racism is deeply embedded in US history, society, and institutions. It is systemic,” the syllabus states. “You’ll learn [in] this unit that racism is a system of advantage, and disadvantage, based on race. White people hold unearned privilege while people of color have not had equal access to the ‘American Dream.’”

    Another DEI class includes “Constructions of Gender,” where students have the opportunity to participate in a “Safe Zone Training” through the campus LGBTQ center for extra credit.

    Minella called the courses “emblematic of the broader academic failings” of the DEI requirement.

    Mieczyslaw Zak, a spokesman for the university, said Minella did not discuss the courses with UA scholars and his report misses the mark.

    “The goal is absolutely not activism,” he told The Fix. “The goal is understanding, so that students can develop their own perspective and decide how they want to move forward.”

    Zak and Miller-Cochran also said they disagree the general education requirement runs afoul of Board of Regents policy. They said the regents acknowledged their curriculum policy does not provide a specific list of courses, and leaves the decision to the state universities.

    Asked about the entomology course highlighted in the Goldwater report, Miller-Cochran said “I’m not an entomologist.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 20:20

  • Atrial Fibrillation, Eliquis, And The Inflation Reduction Act
    Atrial Fibrillation, Eliquis, And The Inflation Reduction Act

    Authored by Allison DeMajistre via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Atrial fibrillation, often referred to as “AFib,” is the most commonly treated type of heart arrhythmia. This condition is now considered the new cardiovascular disease epidemic. In the United States, an estimated 3 to 6 million people have AFib, with projections suggesting that this number could reach 16 million by 2050.

    (Raihana Asral/Shutterstock)

    AFib is an irregular, sometimes rapid heart rhythm that occurs when abnormal electrical impulses override the heart’s natural pacemaker. Having AFib puts people at a three-to-five-times greater risk for ischemic stroke from a blood clot traveling from the heart to the brain. One of the primary ways to prevent a clot is to take an anticoagulant or blood-thinning medication.

    “AFib contributes to turbulent flow inside the heart. The irregularity of the blood flow allows for a pause in the blood flowing through the heart, allowing the blood to clot. This then can be sent to the brain[,] causing strokes,” Dr. Ken Perry, an emergency physician in Charleston, South Carolina, told The Epoch Times via email.

    The 2023 published clinical guideline for anticoagulant therapy to prevent stroke for AFib patients recommends a direct oral anticoagulant (DOAC), specifically the medication Eliquis (apixaban), because it has a lower risk of gastrointestinal bleeding than other DOACs.

    Patients taking Eliquis for AFib must continue taking the medication if they’re experiencing an abnormal rhythm or at risk of going back into it. Missing even one dose could significantly increase the risk of having a stroke.

    Unfortunately, for many people in the United States with AFib, Eliquis, the most commonly prescribed anticoagulant to prevent blood clots, can cost a patient up to $594 per month, depending on their insurance, Medicare Part D plan, or other type of coverage.

    In 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which includes several provisions to help lower prescription drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries. One of those provisions allows the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to negotiate the prices of some medications with drug manufacturers. In August 2023, CMS selected 10 Medicare Part D drugs for negotiation, and Eliquis was first on the list.

    CMS Negotiations

    According to a CMS factsheet, about 3.7 million Medicare Part D enrollees used Eliquis from June 2022 to May 2023. The total Part D gross covered prescription cost to Medicare for the same period was $16.5 billion.

    A CMS representative told The Epoch Times via email that “The IRA helps people who take anticoagulant medications through Medicare Negotiation. Any negotiated prices agreed to between Medicare and participating drug companies will be announced by September 1, 2024, and become effective beginning in 2026.”

    However, many AFib patients and health professionals believe the IRA will have several unintended consequences, including higher prescription costs and limited access to medications. They argue for oversight of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), as these managers have the authority to remove drugs from formularies or switch them to higher-cost tiers while securing larger rebates from more expensive drugs.

    Who Are the Pharmacy Benefit Managers?

    Pharmacy benefit managers are often overlooked intermediaries between drug and insurance companies. Three major PBMs—CVS Caremark, Optum RX, and Express Scripts—account for approximately 80 percent of medication fulfillment in the United States. They play a central role in pricing drugs for insurers, deciding which drugs will be most accessible to consumers, and determining how much pharmacies are paid for these medications.

    Mellanie True Hills, a patient advocate and the founder and CEO of the American Foundation for Women’s Health and StopAfib.org, spoke at the CMS Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program Patient-Focused Listening Session in October 2023. She and many others voiced concerns about the impact of the IRA and CMS drug negotiations on the pricing and accessibility of Eliquis.

    “There is a misperception by the White House and patients that the problem is the drug companies. What they don’t realize is the pharma companies are over the barrel, just like we are,” Ms. Hills told The Epoch Times.

    However, J.C. Scott, president and CEO of the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, stated in an op-ed titled “Elevating the Value of the Employer-PBM Relationship” that “Contrary to the narrative that some pharmaceutical companies want policymakers to believe, employers and health plan sponsors hire PBMs because they provide a wide range of pharmacy benefit options that help payers offer high-quality, cost-effective prescription drug benefits.”

    Drug pricing in the United States is complex. It begins with the drug companies developing a drug and making a list price. The drug wholesalers make the drugs and transport them to the pharmacies. The patient pays a copay, and the pharmacy sends a bill the insurance company pays. Although the flow sounds simple, it doesn’t account for the PBMs, which add further complexity to the chain.

    PBM Rebates

    PBMs work on behalf of insurance companies, large employers, and government agencies. One of their main responsibilities is lowering drug costs for these organizations. They achieve this by negotiating rebates with drug manufacturers. The rebates are paid to the PBMs, who retain a portion of the savings and pass the remainder on to the insurance companies or employers.

    In exchange for rebates, PBMs include a drug on their formulary, the list of drugs that pharmacies offer. PBMs utilize a tiered system to manage these drugs. Medications with a higher tier typically have a lower patient copay, motivating drug companies to provide higher rebates in exchange for a favorable tier placement. PBMs can remove a drug from the formulary altogether, potentially limiting patient access to that drug.

    Theoretically, rebates and formulary placement should lower drug costs for consumers, yet unfortunately, the opposite often occurs. According to an issue brief published by the Commonwealth Fund, PBMs report that 90 percent of rebates are passed on to health plans and payers. However, small payers and employers often report that they don’t receive these savings, and the drug-specific rebates are kept confidential between manufacturers and PBMs, making it difficult for commercial plans to assess the actual cost savings for their members.

    In a 2023 Congressional Oversight Committee hearing addressing the role of PBMs in prescription drug pricing, members and witnesses highlighted how PBMs monopolize the drug market to drive up prices. Despite bipartisan agreement that PBMs increase consumer costs and adversely affect patient care, no decisive action was taken against them. In December 2023, a Senate bill with only a few provisions was introduced.

    “Congress cannot risk leaving employers to fend for themselves against pharmaceutical giants or restrict flexibility, options and savings that help businesses design benefits that work best for their unique needs, achieve savings that supports [sic] their ability to sponsor, and invest in high-quality benefits and unlock better health outcomes for their employees,” Mr. Scott stated in his op-ed.

    PBMs and Drug Access

    When PBMs have to pay more for a drug without receiving a substantial rebate from the drug manufacturer, it negatively affects their margins. According to the Alliance for Patient Access, the PBMs will sometimes remove the drug from their formulary, forcing patients to either pay the total price out-of-pocket or switch to a different drug that may be similar but not the one prescribed by their doctor.

    Ms. Hills said a similar situation happened in December 2021, when many patients received word that CVS Caremark was dropping Eliquis from its formulary. This allowed patients to either take another anticoagulant—rivaroxaban or warfarin—or pay the total out-of-pocket cost for Eliquis.

    The American College of Cardiology and patient advocacy groups pressured CVS Caremark to reverse its decision. In July 2022, CVS Caremark reinstated Eliquis on its formularies, stating that the drug was re-added after securing a lower net cost from the drug manufacturer.

    Despite CVS Caremark’s decision to reinstate Eliquis, concerns persist about the potential loss of affordable access to the medication. These concerns are fueled by the possibility that CMS negotiations might force drug companies to lower prices, resulting in inadequate rebates for PBMs and potentially affecting the drug’s formulary status.

    Nonmedical Drug Switching Risks

    Nonmedical switching, especially with a medication like Eliquis, can be harmful to patients.

    “One of the problems is that patients taking Eliquis twice a day, switching to Xarelto (rivaroxaban), which is only taken once a day, could cause confusion and a potential overdose, putting them at risk for bleeding. When a patient is stable, they should be left on that medication,” Ms. Hills said.

    An article published in Research and Practice in Thrombosis and Haemostasis detailed a letter from CVS Caremark to Beth Waldron, a patient advocate for the National Blood Clot Alliance, who also takes Eliquis. The letter informed her that they were removing Eliquis from the formulary.

    “The stated approval criteria required that I first take and fail Xarelto or have another clinical indication, which was undefined,” Ms. Waldron wrote. “And if the exemption was approved, it would be at a higher coverage tier, making it subject to coinsurance and deductible. For me, this would mean an additional US$2400 a year.” The failure of Xarelto could also result in developing a potentially deadly blood clot.

    According to Ms. Hills, when a medication is removed from the formulary and a patient is forced to switch medications, they can ask their doctor to submit a prior authorization to the insurance company stating the patient’s need for one medication over another. However, some patients don’t have time for the prior authorization process.

    The American Society for Preventive Cardiology published a 2022 report on the impact of nonmedical switching on patients taking a blood thinner. According to the report, patients forced into nonmedical switching by health insurers indicated that the switch took a toll on their overall health. Specifically, 28 percent reported side effects, 22 percent reported resurfacing of symptoms, 7 percent had a heart attack, and 4 percent had a stroke.

    CMS Initiatives and Updates

    The Epoch Times emailed CMS and asked if any stipulations would be in place to ensure that PBMs don’t interfere with Eliquis’ accessibility and pricing for Medicare beneficiaries and people with private insurance.

    CMS did not answer the question about PBMs. However, it did offer specific details about the IRA price negotiations and the Extra Help program, available for people with incomes up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level. The IRA has expanded eligibility for the program, which can lower premiums and reduce out-of-pocket costs for prescription drug coverage.

    Ms. Hills said she recently received encouraging news from CMS. The agency has asked patients for comments about incorporating patient input into revising the negotiation process for the second round of talks with drug companies to ensure patient access to medications under Part D.

    “Within that, there are two things they’re asking about,” said Ms. Hills. “No. 1 is considering concerns around patient access disruption under Part D due to the combination Part D redesign would lead to coverage restrictions.”

    CMS also wants patient input about reviewing Part D sponsor formularies annually to evaluate and address instances where selected drugs are unfavorably placed on tiers or subjected to more restrictive utilization management than nonselected drugs in the same class. “CMS is actually recognizing that this is a problem, and they’re asking for input on it,” she said. “Apparently, they heard us.”

    The pharmaceutical industry is currently engaged in a legal battle with the federal government, attempting to block the negotiations by alleging that the program violates federal law and is unconstitutional. Despite these efforts, negotiations are ongoing and are expected to continue until August 1. The maximum fair price for the first 10 drugs, including Eliquis, will be announced on Sept. 1 and will take effect at the beginning of 2026.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 20:00

  • Russia Appears To Be Amassing A Dark Fleet To Ship LNG
    Russia Appears To Be Amassing A Dark Fleet To Ship LNG

    By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

    Russia appears to have started to amass a dark fleet of tankers to ship its LNG in vessel ownership transfers similar to the moves that Moscow began after the invasion of Ukraine to create a shadow fleet to export oil and products in the face of Western sanctions.

    Russia has already amassed a large shadow fleet of oil tankers, and it’s now working on a similar plan for LNG to circumvent current and future sanctions on its LNG, according to data from shipping database providers cited by Bloomberg.

    The analysis by Bloomberg has found that little-known shipping firms operating from Dubai’s free trade zone have assumed ownership of at least eight vessels in the past three months, per data from shipping database Equasis. Of these, four ice-class LNG carriers have already received approval from Russia’s authorities to pass through the Arctic route in Russia this summer. Moscow also appears to have issued a record number of permits for this route, the Northern Sea route. Some of the tankers with new ownership don’t have listed insurers—another sign of a vessel now part of a “dark fleet.”.

    “There are several indications pointing to efforts by Russia to create a dark fleet for LNG,” Malte Humpert, founder of the Washington D.C.-based think tank Arctic Institute, told Bloomberg.

    The transfer of ownership of vessels to little-known entities in little transparent jurisdictions outside Russia bears a striking resemblance to the Russian moves from two years ago when Moscow started amassing the dark fleet for its oil, Bloomberg notes.

    Russia has been seeking a larger share of the global LNG market, but U.S. sanctions have delayed the start-up of the Arctic LNG 2 project, while the EU just this week banned new investments, as well as the provision of goods, technology, and services for the completion of LNG projects under construction, such as Arctic LNG 2 and Murmansk LNG.

    The EU is also banning transshipment operations of Russian LNG to third countries in EU territory after a transition period of 9 months. This first EU move against Russia’s LNG could speed up the creation of a shadow Russian LNG fleet.  

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 19:40

  • Arby's Franchisee Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
    Arby’s Franchisee Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy

    By Julie LIttman of RestaurantDive

    • Miracle Restaurant Group, a 25-unit Arby’s franchisee, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 20, according to court filings.

    • The company, which has been an Arby’s operator since 2005, has restaurants in Illinois, Indiana, Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana, Donald Moore, manager and member of Miracle Restaurant Group, said in a court filing.

    • In addition to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the operator cited inflationary pressures, negative same-store sales, an inability to sell underperforming locations and the failure of the IRS to timely refund over $3 million to the company as part of Employee Retention Tax Credits as reasons for filing for bankruptcy protections, Moore said.

    This isn’t the first time the chain has filed for Chapter 11. In 2010, the company operated over 60 stores, but filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11, leading to closures of a number of stores. Creditors were paid in full under its restructuring plan, Moore said in the court filing. 

    Economic conditions appear to be more dynamic this time around for the operator. Negative same-store sales compressed profit margins that have not helped cover fixed costs. Price increases also couldn’t adequately compensate for a rise in labor and commodity expenses, resulting in an erosion of its cash position, Moore said. 

    Restaurants developed over the last three years also have had disappointing store sales.

    “The negative same store sales and lower than anticipated sales from newer stores have resulted in certain stores that operate at extremely low or (at times) negative cash flow on a weekly and monthly basis,” Moore said. 

    To help offset its declining financial situation, the operator approached its landlords and Arby’s for relief, but the responses were not enough to keep the franchisee from bankruptcy, Moore said. 

    Miracle also tried to sell some of its Texas and Chicago-land area locations, but has not been able to secure offers. Moore said overall declines in Arby’s systemwide same-store sales and low sales to fixed cost ratios of certain Miracle restaurants contributed to the bankruptcy. Last September, it sold three stores in Indiana and used those proceeds to pay down debt. 

    As part of its bankruptcy filing, the operator plans to sell seven Texas stores, eight Illinois stores and two Indiana stores and to focus on operating its Louisiana and Mississippi stores leaving it with eight remaining locations, Moore said. Miracle has retained Peak Franchise Capital to advise in marketing the sale of these restaurants. 

    The company said it has 200 to 999 estimated number of creditors, $1 million to $10 million in assets and $1 million to $10 million in liabilities in a court filing. 

    Bankruptcies have been on the rise among QSR franchisees. Since the start of 2023, franchisees of Burger King, CKE, McDonald’s, Popeyes, Subway and Wendy’s have sought bankruptcy protection. Operators have been under increased financial pressure due to rising labor and food costs, difficulty raising capital to fund expansions or remodels to help drive sales and falling consumer traffic, among other factors.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 19:20

  • What Are Libraries For?
    What Are Libraries For?

    Authored by Roger L. Simon via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    When I was a kid in New York, the 96th Street library was a focal point of my life. Even though I was perpetually losing my library card and amassing fines for overdue books I didn’t want my parents to know about, it (as well as the movie theaters on 86th) was my home away from home.

    People work at desks in the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library in New York City on Oct. 5, 2016. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

    It had also, I was given to understand, served the same function for the young James Baldwin (although Wikipedia cites the 135th Street library in Harlem) and other esteemed writers of the past and had a history of spawning authors, something even then I dreamed of being.

    It was also a place for stimulating the mind as only books can.

    According to its website, the 96th is currently undergoing a rehab. Simultaneously, I was interested to read, a new library here in my present hometown—six years now—of Nashville is opening.

    From Axios Nashville: “Musical performances, a puppet show and appearances from Nashville political leaders marked the long-awaited grand opening of the Donelson library branch Monday.”

    But wait, as they say, there’s more: “The new 24,000-square-foot library has three dedicated spaces to host community events, six study rooms, artwork by local artists and a mobile kitchen on wheels sponsored by the Stones River Woman’s Club.”

    They also do vehicle registrations. Seriously. No word on a bowling alley.

    The local official who has been sponsoring this project for years said: “Libraries are not about just going to check out a book. They’re modern multimedia centers and places for all kinds of community programming.”

    I disagree. Libraries should be primarily about the one thing that is among the most sorely missed in contemporary society—books, books, books, and more books.

    Now, I have to admit something: Though I am an author now working on his 15th book, I have rarely been in a library in recent years, except to give an occasional talk to promote my work.

    This aversion began several years ago when we had a second home in the Seattle area. I watched with interest, even excitement, as a new city library was erected. Designed by highly regarded Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, it was certainly stylistically cutting edge, utilizing all sorts of geometric shapes and colors.

    But when I first entered the new edifice shortly after opening, what seemed to dominate the building, beyond the trendy architecture—you could barely see any bookshelves—were computer banks. Seated at those banks were, largely, the homeless. What they had up on their screens wasn’t Dostoevsky.

    Not to overly disparage the well-meaning local official quoted above, but the one thing libraries should not be is a “modern multimedia center.” We, especially our children, get enough of that virtually everywhere else. In fact, we can hardly escape it. Nor should libraries be centers of  “community programming” that invite their use for ideological or lifestyle purposes that are inherently exclusionist. (These last have become all too common, with librarians too often the culprits.)

    Libraries should be what they were always intended to be, what the first ones were—temples of books.

    I assume that those who are expanding the concept of a library are doing so, in their minds, to induce people to read books. My guess is they are unwittingly doing the reverse. They are implying that reading a book is not sufficient unto itself, virtually the opposite of the truth.

    Reading a book is the point. It is the brain’s best food, no matter the topic, since the days of the Bible and even before. That is the message a library should deliver.

    What reading a book does for us as nothing else is create a mind-meld with the author or authors and, especially when it is good, allows us, whether fictionally or non-fictionally, to examine its subject in all its complexities and draw sophisticated conclusions. In short, we grow from the experience.

    Largely because of the internet and the ADHD that it so often causes, people are losing the attention span it takes to read a book through. Though I write them myself, I read fewer than I did at 25 when there were no computers or cell phones to distract me. Has this technology rotted my brain? I think, to some degree, yes.

    Having noticed this, I am making an effort to put away the phone—the latest from Ukraine can wait—and read some of a book every night. I don’t always succeed, but I’m trying. I recommend this, if you’re not already doing so. You will find it is also an antidote to the stress of these times.

    Meanwhile, I wish we could get some help in this by making libraries what they used to be—monuments to books and therefore public inspirations for a lifetime of learning.

    Roger Simon’s latest book is “American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Migration from Blue States to Red States.” He is currently working on a novel.

    Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 19:00

  • Nike Shares Crash Near COVID Lows After Warning Sales Slump Is Worsening
    Nike Shares Crash Near COVID Lows After Warning Sales Slump Is Worsening

    Nike shares are down over 11% after-hours following an ugly earnings picture that saw Q4 revenues disappoint and more notably, a sizable cut in guidance for the first half of this fiscal year.

    Building on a slew of reports that suggest pain is finally hitting the consumer’s wallet, Nike’s revenue for Q4 fell 1.7% YoY to $12.61 billion (notably below the $12.86 billion consensus estimate).

    • Direct Revenue (via the company’s website, app and stores) $5.1 billion, -7.3% y/y, well below the estimate of $5.68 billion

    • Wholesale revenue $7.1 billion, +6% y/y, estimate $6.6 billion

    Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Poonam Goyal said the underperformance at Nike’s own sales channels “comes by surprise and is a reason for concern, as the activewear giant could be turning its core shoppers away due to lack of newness.”

    She added that the performance in wholesale, which beat estimates, is a “positive indicator for its revived and existing wholesale relationships.”

    Geographically, Asia was steady while European revenues fell. North America saw the biggest disappointment to expectations:

    • North America revenue $5.28 billion, -1.4% y/y, weaker than the estimated $5.44 billion

    • EMEA revenue $3.29 billion, -1.7% y/y, estimate $3.31 billion

    • Greater China rev. $1.86 billion, +2.9% y/y, estimate $1.83 billion

    • Asia Pacific & Latin America rev. $1.71 billion, +0.5% y/y, estimate $1.74 billion

    Across the product-lines, footwear and most notably ‘Chuck Taylor’ brand Converse saw revenues plunge…

    • Converse revenue $480 million, -18% y/y, estimate $545.6 million

    • Footwear revenue $8.24 billion, -3.6% y/y, estimate $8.64 billion

    • Apparel revenue $3.32 billion, +2.8% y/y, estimate $3.25 billion

    • Equipment revenue $578 million, +34% y/y, estimate $446.4 million

    But then, during the earnings calls, Nike management said that it sees 1Q revenue down about 10% (dramatically worse than the 3% decline consensus had expected).

    This comes after Nike said in March that it expected revenue to fall by a low-single-digit percentage in the first half of its fiscal year.

    “A comeback at this scale takes time,” Chief Financial Officer Matt Friend said during the company’s call with analysts.

    He added the company is transitioning its product lineup to reignite consumer interest. 

    NKE shares are trading down almost 12% in the after hours, almost back to COVID lockdown levels…

    …almost back to COVID lockdown levels…

    Nike Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe is cutting $2 billion in costs and slashing 2% of the workforce, with layoffs recently hitting the company’s European headquarters near Amsterdam and its Boston-based Converse brand.

    “We are taking our near-term challenges head-on, while making continued progress in the areas that matter most to NIKE’s future – serving the athlete through performance innovation, moving at the pace of the consumer and growing the complete marketplace,” said John Donahoe, President & CEO, NIKE, Inc.

    “I’m confident that our teams are lining up our competitive advantages to create greater impact for our business.”

    If Americans can’t afford a new set of sneakers – despite the record number of jobs that Joe Biden has ‘created’, then maybe, just maybe, those jobs weren’t as ‘created’ or ‘well paid’ as some would like you to believe… and maybe, just maybe, the sentiment signals and poll numbers are true about the state of the economy, no matter what all those Nobel laureate economists would prefer that you think.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 18:40

  • Odds Are High You're Going To Need Your Survival Supplies In The Next Few Years
    Odds Are High You’re Going To Need Your Survival Supplies In The Next Few Years

    Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

    In 2020 at the onset of the covid pandemic scare and right before the lockdowns I’ll never forget going on a grocery run on a Friday afternoon only to find near empty roads and near empty stores. The few other people shopping had a glassy stare in their eyes, like they were dazed or shell-shocked. For me and those I know that prep, it was just another day; for those that hadn’t prepped it was a nightmare of uncertainty.

    In Montana we didn’t pay much heed to the lockdowns after the first month.  In three months everything was basically back to normal except for the mask mandates which most people ignored. With more data available on the virus it was clear that the chance of death was greatly exaggerated. What scared us far more was the pervasive talk of vaccine passports in 2021. The proposed state and federal restrictions on people that refused to take the jab were familiar – This was the beginning of full blown tyranny unless we stood firm.

    In the meantime there was a public rush to buy up as many necessities as they could afford. And of course, the covid stimulus measures helped to trigger a stagflationary crisis that had already been building in the US for many years.

    In the face of so many potential threats, preppers were still well protected. If vaccine passports became the norm and access to public places was blocked then we had food storage to get us through for a long time to come. If the buying panic and inflation led to a supply chain disaster then we were ready, along with the guns and ammo and training needed to keep what we had. If a fight was coming then we had the means to defend ourselves.

    I have long been convinced that it was the prepper factor that caused the government to rethink their strategy of perpetual medical lockdowns and give up on vaccine passports. Recent surveys show that over 30% of the adult population of the US is involved in prepping.  We’re an unknown element, something they can’t predict, a possible monkey-wrench in the gears of the machine.

    With our own supplies we are not dependent on the system to keep us alive, and the harder they push the more we are compelled to organize into an even greater obstacle. Just as NATO sanctions have pushed Russia, China and the BRICS closer together, openly authoritarian policies in the west during covid have pushed liberty movement people together. The establishment backed away because they had to.

    That’s why I have to laugh whenever I see some idiot online say: “What’s the point of prepping when nothing ever happens?”

    These people must have been living under a rock since 2020. 

    We just dodged one of the biggest Orwellian bullets in our nation’s history with the defeat of the pandemic mandates. Or, maybe they don’t realize that the pandemic was just the beginning.

    If that’s the case then it pains me to remind everyone that nothing has fundamentally changed. Yes, we beat back the mandates but all the same elites are still in power, all the same globalist institutions that exploited covid to create a panic still exist, and the event has acted as a domino in a chain leading to other crises. Here’s just a few reasons why you’re definitely going to need your survival preps in the next few years…

    The Stagflation Crisis That Wouldn’t Die

    The stagflationary problem is persistent despite all the media claims that it’s under control. Readers familiar with my economic analysis know that I predicted stagflation several years ago as the inevitable outcome of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing and near-zero interest rates (See my article published in 2018 titled ‘Stagflationary Crisis: Understanding The Cause Of America’s Ongoing Collapse’ for reference). I also predicted the Catch-22 problem of rate hikes vs inflation and debt (read my my article from 2021 titled ‘The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error’). And when I said a couple years ago that the Fed wasn’t going to return to rate cuts for some time, I was right about that too.

    Given this track record, trust me when I say that stagflation is here to stay. Any move to cut rates will automatically trigger an even worse resurgence of inflation and the fed will be forced to hike once again. And, high interest rates will continue to create a national debt crisis as debt payments skyrocket.

    In other words, the economic situation is getting exponentially worse with each passing year. The US National debt was $28 trillion in 2021; by the end of 2024 it will be well over $35 trillion.  That’s $7 trillion added in four-years time.  There is already breakage in the system, but that’s nothing compared to what we face in the next four years. Any preparedness items you buy today should be considered an investment, because there’s no doubt all of those items will be far more expensive or harder to find in the future.

    Political Riots Are Assured

    Recent campus protests over Gaza (and the riots in France over gains by conservatives in government) have reminded people that they shouldn’t get too comfortable with the fading influence of BLM. The same leftists that rode the wave of racial division back in 2020 are going out and finding new causes to co-opt. They’re looking for any excuse to riot, even if it has nothing to do with them personally.

    With the 2024 election incoming we all know civil unrest will be the norm once again no matter who ends up in the White House. With riots follow the threat of looting, property destruction, political violence and even martial law. Then there is the public reaction to those circumstances, including the possibility of civil war. Don’t assume the country will calm down after the election. In fact, assume the opposite.

    The War In Ukraine Is About To Become A World War

    Again, I have mentioned in multiple articles the danger of western involvement in the war in Ukraine including the danger of a wider world war should NATO directly enter the fray. As I write this, France is pressing for “military advisers” to go to Ukraine to train recruits, which is exactly what the US did in Vietnam right before we officially went to war.

    Multiple NATO countries have also given Ukraine the green light to use long range NATO missiles against targets deep in Russia. If you are an avid student of history you know as I do that this only goes one way.

    That’s probably why officials in the US and in Europe are suddenly talking about draft procedures and forced conscription laws in order to shore up their ranks. How many people will actually submit to a draft? I don’t know, but I do know this is not the kind of talk that governments engage in when their goal is diplomacy. It’s the kind of talk they engage in when they’re getting ready to antagonize the enemy.

    A larger war with Russia comes with a host of difficulties that would take me too many pages to cover here. To summarize, war with Russia means war with China, war with North Korea, war with Iran and most of the Middle East, tragic supply chain disruptions, the end of the dollar’s world reserve status and a good chance of a limited (false flag) or regional nuclear exchange.

    I have serious doubts that global nuclear war is on the table because the establishment has nothing to gain and everything to lose from it. However, a war between East and West is more than enough to cause absolute havoc in every nation on the planet.

    The War Over Gaza Is Quickly Leading To A War For The Middle East

    I’m not going to cheer for either side in this conflict. My concern is America and Americans. That said, it’s clear that actions on both sides are forcing the war to expand well beyond Gaza. Recent Israeli strikes on Syria and scuffles with Egyptian troops are concerning. Lebanon is highly involved and Iran has already traded missiles with Israel. Israel has stated their offensive will continue through at least the end of 2024, and now they may be shifting to all out war on Lebanon.

    In terms of how this all affects the US or Europe, the immediate consequence will be a shut down of oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea. That’s 30% or more of the world’s oil trade slowed down or eliminated. Energy prices will explode along with prices on everything else. The price of all the goods you buy daily is affected by the price of oil.

    Agriculture, for example, relies heavily on fuel and oil based fertilizers. This means high oil prices will trigger high food prices, and food supplies will be key in the next few years.

    Prepping Isn’t A Hobby, It’s A Duty

    Frankly, preparedness should be a social mainstay – An integral part of American life. It’s not a hobby, it’s a duty. The more prepared people there are the safer every American will be. Most prepared people don’t panic because there’s no need. And people who don’t panic are less likely to harm others out of fear and desperation.

    Think of food storage like a big battery. A battery is energy storage for later when you need it. Think about how much time and work and energy goes into growing just one month of food for your family. Isn’t it far better to store all that work in long term foods so that you don’t have to worry about it later during the worst of conditions? Every bucket of stored food is a battery that saves you precious time and labor.

    Growing food and living sustainably is great in peacetime or in the middle of a large, well organized community. Growing food at the onset of a national crisis in a place where too many people are unprepared is almost impossible. If a breakdown occurs then your best bet is to hunker down, work with family, friends and neighbors, and live on your preps until there is a large enough community in place to securely restart agriculture again.

    There are too many variables right now around the world that can cause catastrophe, and even events on the other side of the globe can cause serious problems for you at home. I see very little chance of the situation improving in the next few years and a very high chance of things spiraling out of control. Take your prepping seriously, even when oblivious naysayers claim “nothing’s going to happen.” Those will be the same people crying for help before long, and you don’t want to share their fate.

    *  *  *

    One survival food company, Prepper All-Naturals, has proactively dropped prices to allow Americans to stock up ahead of projected hikes in beef prices. Their 25-year shelf life steaks currently come at a 25% discount with promo code “invest25”.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 18:20

  • US Readies To Evacuate Americans From Lebanon If War Erupts, Marines En Route
    US Readies To Evacuate Americans From Lebanon If War Erupts, Marines En Route

    With Israel-Hezbollah tensions soaring and the US and European countries urging both sides against an all-out war, the US Embassy in Beirut has issued a new travel advisory warning American citizens to stay away from Lebanon. “We remind US citizens to strongly reconsider travel to Lebanon,” said the fresh notice which follows prior similar alerts. It warned in particular about travel to the south of Lebanon and in border areas with Syria, and to also avoid refugee settlements.

    In the event of a “sudden outbreaks of violence and armed conflict” the Lebanese government nor the US Embassy can ensure US citizens’ safety, the notice warned further. Some European countries have issued similar alerts, with the Netherlands and Germany being the latest to warn their nationals to evacuate the country.

    US Navy via AP

    Throughout more than eight months of war, both sides have kept the engagement ‘limited’ – but the last weeks have seen bigger and bigger tit-for-tat strikes conducted along the border. Israeli attacks are also reaching deeper into Lebanon, and are occurring more frequently.

    But the Pentagon clearly believes a big escalation is imminent, and has moved assets off the coast in preparation for a potential emergency evacuation of Americans in the event of all-out war:

    The Pentagon is moving U.S. military assets closer to Israel and Lebanon to be ready to evacuate Americans as fighting between Israel and Hezbollah intensifies, according to three U.S. defense officials and a former U.S. official familiar with the plans.

    The USS Wasp, an amphibious assault ship, and Marines from the 24th Expeditionary Unit, which is special operations capable, moved into the Mediterranean on Wednesday to join the dock landing ship USS Oak Hill and another ship in their amphibious ready group, according to the Marine Corps. The Wasp will operate in the eastern Mediterranean to be ready for a Military Assisted Departure and other missions, the officials said.

    Meanwhile, the Israeli military (IDF) is conducting major drills along its northern border with Lebanon, in some significant signaling just days after the Netanyahu government approved potential war plans against Hezbollah.

    The drills which simulate combat began last week, with the IDF only now publishing videos and photos of the exercises, which also feature scenarios of a bigger offensive.

    The IDF said the drills are for “responding to various threats with the cooperation of the infantry, armor and fire forces” – at a moment there continues to be daily Hezbollah drone and rocket launches into northern Israel.

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    IDF forces also practiced combat scenarios “in a tangled terrain that simulates combat on a northern route, progress along a mountain route and the use of gradual fire,” the statement said further.

    Among the units present for the drill included the 55th Reserve Paratroopers Brigade, which strongly points to Israel gearing up for a major invasion of south Lebanon.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 18:00

  • Justice Alito Dissent Says Majority "Shirks" Duty in Free Speech Case
    Justice Alito Dissent Says Majority “Shirks” Duty in Free Speech Case

    Authored by Sam Dorman via The Epoch Times,

    Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said the high court shirked its duty in rejecting a challenge brought over the White House’s communications with social media companies over political content, a case he described as “one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.”

    Justices Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas, dissented from the majority in the June 26 decision while six justices held that the state and individual plaintiffs involved lacked standing to even bring speech-related claims to the court.

    The plaintiffs had claimed, among other things, that the Biden administration illegally coerced social media platforms to moderate certain election-related content and posts related to COVID-19.

    Justice Alito’s dissent disputed the majority’s arguments about standing while detailing communications between the Biden administration and Facebook. He said administration officials’ actions were “blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”

    Majority ‘Shirks’ Its Duty: Alito

    Alito wrote that there was “more than sufficient” evidence that Jill Hines, one of the plaintiffs, had standing to sue “and consequently, we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents.”

    “The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think,” Justice Alito added.

    The dissent warned that the majority, whose opinion was written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, sent a message to government officials that if a “coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by.”

    He suggested the outcome should have been the same as in National Rifle Association v. Vullo, which was heard on the same day as Murthy and ultimately held that New York state’s government plausibly violated the First Amendment by pressuring companies to cut ties with the gun rights group.

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Court ruled last year that the administration’s communications constituted the type of coercion of social media companies that betrayed its duty not to violate the First Amendment.

    Three judges signed onto the September 2023 opinion that cited communications in detail. For example, it pointed to how a White House official “responded to a moderation report by flagging a user’s account and saying it is ‘[h]ard to take any of this seriously when you’re actively promoting anti-vaccine pages.’ The platform subsequently ’removed‘ the account ’entirely‘ from its site, detailed new changes to the company’s moderation policies, and told the official that ’[w]e clearly still have work to do.’”

    “The official responded that ’removing bad information‘ is ’one of the easy, low-bar things you guys [can] do to make people like me think you’re taking action.‘ The official emphasized that other platforms had ’done pretty well‘ at demoting non-sanctioned information, and said ’I don’t know why you guys can’t figure this out.’”

    Facebook

    In his June 26 opinion, Justice Alito described tech platforms as “critically dependent on the protection provided by §230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 … which shields them from civil liability for content they spread.”

    He added that Facebook faced a regulatory environment that incentivized the company to “please important federal officials and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability.”

    The administration, he said, “continuously and persistently hectored Facebook” while the platform’s “reactions to these efforts were not what one would expect from an independent news source or a journalistic entity dedicated to holding the Government accountable for its actions.”

    “Instead,” he added, “Facebook’s responses resembled that of a subservient entity determined to stay in the good graces of a powerful taskmaster.” He later said: “Internal Facebook emails paint a clear picture of subservience.”

    A smartphone and a computer screen displaying the logos of the social network Facebook and its parent company Meta in Toulouse, southwestern France, on Jan. 12, 2023. (Lionel Bonaventure/AFP via Getty Images)

    The dissent also considered a variety of communications between White House officials Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty. For example, it noted how Mr. Flaherty, who served as White House Director of Digital Strategy, accused Facebook of “hiding the ball” and suggested they were “playing a shell game.”

    Justice Alito also pointed to Facebook’s changing policy amid White House criticism. Facebook representatives, he said, “whimpered that they ’thought we were doing a better job’ but promised to do more going forward.”

    Meta, Facebook’s parent company, did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

    Brian Fletcher, principal deputy solicitor general of the United States, acknowledged that the government “may not use coercive threats to suppress speech,” but argued it was “entitled to speak for itself by informing, persuading, or criticizing private speakers.”

    There is a “fundamental distinction between persuasion and coercion,” he said.

    Justice Alito disagreed and argued that the administration was doing more than exercising its power in the bully pulpit.

    “In sum, the officials wielded potent authority,” he said. “Their communications with Facebook were virtual demands. And Facebook’s quavering responses to those demands show that it felt a strong need to yield.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 17:40

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jun 27

Today’s News 27th June 2024

  • World Dangerously Headed For 'Food Wars', Top Commodity Trader Warns
    World Dangerously Headed For ‘Food Wars’, Top Commodity Trader Warns

    Sunny Verghese, CEO of Olam Agri, a Singapore-based agricultural trading firm, spoke at the Redburn Atlantic and Rothschild consumer conference last week, warned the audience that the world is heading towards a period of “food wars” as geopolitical wildfires spread across the globe. 

    “We have fought many wars over oil. We will fight bigger wars over food and water,” Verghese said, quoted by the Financial Times, adding that food protectionism has forced some governments to boost domestic food supplies, exacerbating food inflation.

    He pointed out that a surge in non-tariff trade barriers in 2022 in response to the war in Ukraine—1,266 from 154 countries by his count—had sparked “an exaggerated demand-supply imbalance.” 

    Food prices have soared in recent years, whether due to adverse weather conditions (sparked by El Nino) or the war in Ukraine. These prices are likely to remain elevated for years to come.

    Verghese said wealthier countries have been building surpluses of strategic commodities due to global uncertainty, which has helped push food prices higher.

    “India, China, everybody has got buffer stocks,” he said, adding, “That is only exacerbating the global problem.” 

    The latest data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations shows that global food prices are beginning to rise once again and remain well above pre-Covid levels. 

    What’s clear is that the most impoverished countries are extremely vulnerable to surging food prices and shortages, and these areas are at the highest risk of social unrest.

    However, wealthier economies aren’t immune, as we’ve seen evidence with US consumers pulling back on food spending while complaining about the failure of Bidenomics.

    FT provided two recent examples of food protectionism that is likely to continue in the years ahead, exacerbating food security risks for the world’s most vulnerable: 

    In 2022, Indonesia banned palm oil exports to protect the local market while last year India imposed export restrictions on certain types of rice in an effort to curb rising domestic prices ahead of parliamentary elections, after a volatile monsoon disrupted production and spurred fears of a supply shortage.

    The risks are skewed toward more food export curbs as the world splinters into a multipolar state full of conflict and chaos. Protectionism might be the worst thing for food security and yet another reason why prices will linger at elevated levels for the years to come.

    This is yet more evidence that Americans need to ditch Walmart and the food-industrial complex and support local farmers so they can beef up local supply chains to minimize risks abroad.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 02:45

  • Russia's Response To Ukraine's US-Backed Bombing Of Beachgoers Wasn't What Many Expected
    Russia’s Response To Ukraine’s US-Backed Bombing Of Beachgoers Wasn’t What Many Expected

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

    President Putin proved once again that he’s mature enough of a leader to make tough decisions that disregard public opinion following his government’s tepid response to Ukraine’s US-backed bombing of beachgoers in Sevastopol over the weekend. It was predicted that “Russia Probably Won’t Impose A No-Fly Zone Over The Black Sea After The Sevastopol Attack”, which explained why it was unlikely to capitulate to the public’s demand due to worries about accidentally sparking World War III.

    Instead of shooting down or otherwise neutralizing American reconnaissance drones over international waters in the Black Sea, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed that President Putin’s ceasefire proposal still stands. Shortly afterwards, Peskov also expressed Russia’s continued openness to talks with France after Emmanuel Macron publicly said that he’s interested in them the other day while also walking back his earlier rhetoric about wanting to conventionally intervene in Ukraine.

    These two developments were then followed by new Defense Minister Andrey Belousov talking to his American counterpart in a call where “they exchanged views about the situation around Ukraine”. He also warned him about “the dangers of further escalation in terms of the continuing deliveries of American weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” Taken together, it’s clearly the case that Russia’s response was once again conciliatory and not escalatory, exactly as the earlier cited analysis predicted.

    Interestingly, these developments were interspersed with the viral fake news claim that Russia had already supposedly downed an American drone over the Black Sea in revenge, which was introduced into the information ecosystem here but was then quickly walked back by its originator here. Nevertheless, this claim wildly proliferated across social media because it conformed to many wishful thinking observers’ expectations, most of whom never came across the follow-up post walking it back.

    The reason why it’s so important to clarify exactly what Russia’s response to last weekend’s provocation was, namely to continue its conciliatory approach for de-escalation purposes as opposed to risking World War III by miscalculation if it reacted as the public demanded, is to prevent false expectations. Those who get their hopes unrealistically high will inevitably experience deep disappointment, after which some might become susceptible to hostile narratives that Russia “sold out” or whatever.

    Whether one agrees with the merits of its saintly restraint or not, the fact of the matter is that this is indeed the policy that President Putin has decided to promulgate for the reasons that were explained. While it’s possible that he might order a symbolic show of force by authorizing the shooting down or neutralization of an American drone in the coming future, his tepid response thus far suggests that he’s disinclined to do so, or that it would solely be a one-off in the unlikely event that it happens.

    President Putin isn’t a “madman”, “monster”, or “mastermind” like many imagine that he is, but is a consummate pragmatist at least as how he sees himself and is therefore unlikely to ever do anything that could be spun as emotional or radical. He always takes a long time before making major decisions, with the proof being how long it took for him to commence Russia’s aerial intervention in Syria and the ongoing special operation, usually waiting till the last possible moment.

    Likewise, if Russia does indeed decide to seriously escalate against the West, then the track record suggests that it would be a seemingly abrupt game-changer but preceded by clear statements of intent that could be seen in hindsight as “ultimatums” (despite being described differently by its diplomats). Some might interpret a few of its recent signals as hinting at that scenario, but the substance of its response thus far as was explained dispels that notion and suggests that the current policy will continue.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 06/27/2024 – 02:00

  • Electing The Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won't Hear From Trump Or Biden
    Electing The Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear From Trump Or Biden

    Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

    – George Orwell

    No matter what carefully crafted sound bites and political spin get trotted out by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in advance of the 2024 presidential election, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible, helpful way by either candidate, despite the dire state of our nation.

    Certainly not if doing so might jeopardize their standing with the unions, corporations or the moneyed elite bankrolling their campaigns.

    Indeed, the 2024 elections will not do much to alter our present course towards a police state.

    Nor will the popularity contest for the new occupant of the White House significantly alter the day-to-day life of the average American greatly at all. Those life-changing decisions are made elsewhere, by nameless, unelected government officials who have turned bureaucracy into a full-time and profitable business.

    In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few uncomfortable truths about life in the American police state that we will not be hearing from either of the two leading presidential candidates.

    1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.” Our so-called government representatives do not actually represent us, the citizenry. We are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests whose main interest is in perpetuating power and control.

    2. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

    3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.

    4. Presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.

    5. The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on foreign aid programs it can’t afford, all the while the national debt continues to grow, our domestic infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached. What is going on? It’s obvious that a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy is running the country.

    6. Forty years past the time that George Orwell envisioned the stomping boot of Big Brother, the police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state. For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government. This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC. The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins. They have become one and the same entity.

    7. When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.” The government’s list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing by the day. What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.

    8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it. Americans only think they’re choosing the next president. In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another manufactured illusion conjured up in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.

    9. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    10. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance. This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding. This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    11. The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State. America’s shadow government—which is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now and operates beyond the reach of the Constitution with no real accountability to the citizenry—is the real reason why “we the people” have no control over our government.

    12. Every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.

    13. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.

    14. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops. Government eyes are watching you. They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet. Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

    15. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes. Likewise, private property means little at a time when SWAT teams and other government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, wound or kill you, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family.

    16. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. The government’s schemes to swindle, cheat, scam, and generally defraud taxpayers of their hard-earned dollars have run the gamut from wasteful pork barrel legislation, cronyism and graft to asset forfeiture, costly stimulus packages, and a national security complex that continues to undermine our freedoms while failing to making us any safer. Americans have also been made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, military empire, welfare state, roads to nowhere, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the taxpayers.

    17. From the moment they are born to the time they legally come of age, young people are now wards of the state. Parents no longer have the final say over what their kids are taught, how they are disciplined, or what kinds of medical care they need.

    18. All you need to do in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

    19. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

    20. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation. Forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.

    These are not problems that can be glibly dismissed with a few well-chosen words, as most politicians are inclined to do.

    No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need to own up to the fact that there can be no police state—no tyranny—no routine violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion—without our turning a blind eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness diluted.

    Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. After all, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”

    There is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

    We are the government.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 23:40

  • White House Warns Lebanon: US Can't Control Or Restrain Israel If Offensive Starts
    White House Warns Lebanon: US Can’t Control Or Restrain Israel If Offensive Starts

    Among the more interesting positions which the Biden White House has recently articulated to Arab allies in the Middle East is that the Untied States cannot restrain Israel if it decides to launch new offensives, namely against Lebanon.

    Axios has revealed that during his trip to Beirut last week, Biden’s special envoy Amos Hochstein warned the Lebanese government, “The US won’t be able to hold Israel back if the situation on the border continues to escalate and that Hezbollah needs to indirectly negotiate with Israel instead of ratcheting up tensions.”

    DoD image

    “The situation is serious. What President Biden wants to do is to avoid a further escalation to a greater war,” Hochstein had additionally said. “It will take everyone’s interest in ending this conflict now. And we believe that there is a pathway diplomatically to do it. If the sides agree to it.”

    But what do the Lebanese see of US foreign policy? And what do Arab leaders and their population see? Israel has for decades topped the list of US foreign aid recipients, receiving a consistent $3+ billion annually. Washington regularly makes arms deals with Tel Aviv to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars as well.

    Some Israeli leaders have lately gone so far as to admit that Israel’s military might not be able to persist in its Gaza operations without the steady flow of US arms and ammo.

    But the US has even reached out to Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, via intermediaries, to warn that it can’t hold Israel back in the event of escalation.

    “During his meeting with Berri in Beirut, Hochsteim asked the speaker of the Lebanese Parliament to pass a message to Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, that his assumption that the U.S. controls Israel is wrong, the sources said,” Axios wrote.

    “According to the sources, Hochstein said the U.S. won’t be able to hold Israel back if the situation on the border continues to escalate and that Hezbollah needs to indirectly negotiate with Israel instead of ratcheting up tensions,” the report continued.

    The US and European partners, especially France, have recently sought to entice and pressure the Lebanese government to reign in Hezbollah, something it has very limited capability in doing. The Lebanese Army is in reality almost powerless in dealing with Hezbollah, also as it has no air force to speak of. 

    The US itself has imposed sanctions and limits on what aircraft Lebanon can obtain, fearing that it could be used in a conflict with Israel.

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    This week, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is in Washington meeting with top US officials. On Monday he met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken wherein the top US diplomat reaffirmed that the US will continue aiding Israel’s military. “He also underscored the importance of avoiding further escalation of the conflict and reaching a diplomatic resolution that allows both Israeli and Lebanese families to return to their homes,” a State Department press release indicated. “Secretary Blinken reaffirmed the United States’ ironclad commitment to Israel’s security.”

    And Tuesday, upon a meeting with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the Pentagon chief said, “I am extremely concerned about the rise in rocket attacks on Israel’s north from Lebanese Hezbollah.” He emphasized that “Another war between Israel and Hezbollah could easily become a regional war with terrible consequences for the Middle East, and so diplomacy is by far the best way to prevent more escalation.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 23:20

  • How Vulnerable Are Our Digital Systems?
    How Vulnerable Are Our Digital Systems?

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

    Last week a cyberattack hit a huge number of car dealers in the United States. The software designed by the company CDK was completely disabled, affecting the whole of an integrated process of purchasing and processing. Sellers could not process sales, loans, insurance, registrations, and much more. It happened suddenly, lasted two and a half days, came back, then went down again.

    How did car dealers function? They wrote it all out on paper and pledged to complete the process after the systems came back. They are back and all seems well but the experience is a warning sign. These systems are far more vulnerable than anyone normally assumes. All it takes to shut down the modern world as we know it is a hack here and there. That’s an alarming realization.

    The problem is that the technological revolution as we fashioned it 30 years ago gradually evolved in an ever more centralized way, wholly dependent on a weak and old-fashioned electrical grid of networks without much duplication or backstopping. The software too has become centralized for each industrial purpose. If one thing goes wrong in any system with a single point of failure, the whole comes to a grinding halt.

    It’s amazing to consider that the old analogue world that lasted from the ancient world until the 21st century did not have this problem. It was more durable, physically anchored, fixable by human hands, comprehensible, and manageable. The move to digital everything introduced a fragility to the whole that we are only now discovering.

    This is not only a problem for whole industries. It affects individuals too. A friend of mine recently came back to his car to discover that his iPad had snapped and curled up as a crumpled piece of metal in the heat, something completely unexpected. The same day, the screen on his laptop split from top to bottom, likely due to some physical impact. Bad luck but out of nowhere, his life came to a grinding halt, left only with a phone that was on its last legs anyway.

    There are always answers here but everything involves a sudden expenditure of a thousand or two dollars plus many days wait. And getting back old material requires tapping back into a single account on a proprietary cloud that is itself vulnerable to hacking and leaks. And this is how we all live. We are dazzled and thrilled by all the snazzy things we can do with all our new toys but blissfully unaware of just how fragile the entire system is to technological contingencies.

    This has all come as a bit of a shock to me, a person who came of age with the claim that the internet is forever and more durable than anything that came before. With search engines ever more curated according to stakeholder priorities, and sites dying the death of neglect and old code every day, we’ve come to discover the opposite. Links and sites that were essential only five years ago seem to have been zapped out of existence, by the many millions.

    You know this if you have been posting articles for a long time. I can go back to an article I wrote ten years ago, if I can find it and it is still there, and try out the links therein. Most of them are dead now, meaning that the main way in which writers once documented their claims is completely unworkable now. And then it all happened in such a short period of time. In the “world wide web” it turns out that most of the strands of the web are as vulnerable as a spider’s own construction in a storm. It falls apart under the slightest stress.

    This leads to an astonishing realization. It is easier to dig up an article written in the 1920s or 1930s, or the 1880s for that matter, than anything posted online after 1995. In practice, the internet is not forever. It is temporary, gauzy, ephemeral, changing, and forever replacing the old with the new. This means that digital technology enables the constant replacing of one reality for another, which is amazing.

    Some years ago, I wrote something like 300 articles and 30 book introductions for a company I assumed would be around forever. The company was not able to make it according to profitability metrics and was replaced.

    I watched from one instant to the next with amazement as the entire infrastructure flipped from one domain to another that did not carry any of it over, and all the accounts where the books lived were suddenly deleted from one minute to the next. Two years of my own work was suddenly vaporized. This was not malice at work. It was just the reality of business: maintaining the legacy simply did not pay.

    I’m not bitter about this. It’s just business. Plus the same thing has happened to millions and billions of other pieces of content. Here today, gone tomorrow. This is the nature of the digital world. We’ve marveled at the cost savings of publishing and information distribution. It turns out that what you save out of pocket is paid for in other ways. You may never see it again.

    Yes, there are ways to preserve content on the web, such as the brilliant service offered by Archive.org but this one service cannot be expected to uphold the whole. It’s also extremely difficult to use. You have to know precisely what you are looking for before you can find it. Even then, it is hit or miss.

    We may all somehow rue the day that we gave up our physical libraries and replaced them with digital readers. We believed we were modernizing and improving our lives, and increasing our physical mobility. No one ever enjoyed moving books from one place to another. But now we find that even our access to learning and wisdom is highly contingent and dependent on centralized systems that can be taken down in an instant.

    It’s a terrifying thought that the whole of modern life hinges on such a thin foundation that can crack at any time, wholly changing reality in front of our eyes, taking down whole sectors, and disabling all functionality. We look back at the old days of analogue everything and consider it primitive but maybe that is completely untrue. Maybe it was far wiser to rely on systems that cannot break en masse and can be fixed by actual human beings when they break.

    Many people worry about the implications of solar flares that can take down the internet in a flash. That is a legitimate concern. But the real threat is far more pressing and real. It is how any system can be hacked and compromised in any sector: car sales, real estate management, delivery systems, banking and finance, and payment processing.

    t can all be here today and gone tomorrow.

    All these systems claim to have redundancies but we have no guarantees of that. And we’ll never really know until they are really tested. Redundancy is just a management slogan. It might be real but most likely is not.

    In fact, there have been very few serious stress tests of anything built over the last several decades. We’ve just barreled ahead, piling digit upon digit and trusting that everything is going to work just fine forever. We have no assurance of that.

    You know who will thrive if the nightmare scenario actually comes to pass? The Amish, the Mennonities, family farms in rural areas, and other small communities that never went all-in with digital adoption. Maybe it was a mistake to toss out everything we knew from the industrial age and convert the whole world so suddenly to an ephemeral world built of 1s and 0s.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 23:00

  • Watch: Leftist Georgia Judge Arrested And Dismissed From Bench After Assaulting Police
    Watch: Leftist Georgia Judge Arrested And Dismissed From Bench After Assaulting Police

    Maybe it’s time for America to reconsider the ugly trend of bringing the ghetto into politics and the courtroom?  The list of leftist politicians and judges in trouble for corruption and belligerent low-class behavior is growing long.  It’s painful for many Americans to think about how this reflects on the country overall.  If anyone was unsure about our status as an idiocracy, we certainly look like one now.

    Case in point, one of Georgia’s highest paid (and most infamous) Democrat judges, Christina Peterson, has recently been arrested for assault on a police officer outside a nightclub in Atlanta.  Peterson has subsequently been dismissed from the bench, but not just for allegedly striking an officer during the arrest of another woman.  She was also investigated and disciplined for dozens of professional violations.  Seeing her personal conduct when interacting with police, one wonders how it was possible for such a woman to be in the position to become a judge.

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    The Atlanta Police Department said Peterson repeatedly brushed the officer’s arms away and pushed him twice before he detained her outside the Red Martini Restaurant and Lounge on Peachtree Road.  She refused to give officers her name for hours after the arrest. 

    She now claims that the officer didn’t identify himself and that he was engaged in a “coverup” of his “improper acts.”  The officer’s body cam footage appears to indicate otherwise.

    An investigation was already underway into 28 accusations of misconduct against Peterson when the incident occurred. 

    This week, the Georgia Supreme Court issued a decision removing her from office early, with her original term due to end later this year.

    The Supreme Court said the most troubling allegation against Peterson had to do with her treatment of a woman who appeared before her while trying to correct an error on her marriage certificate. Peterson held the woman in criminal contempt and imposed the maximum jail term of 20 days and a fine “without explanation or justification,” the panel found.

    Peterson is also alleged to have allowed people to enter the county courthouse after hours without ensuring proper security screening and then made unjustified requests for deputies to work overtime at taxpayer expense when her after-hours access was limited as a result, the high court opinion says. She also pressed a panic button in her chambers when the deputy assigned to escort her to court did not arrive on time. Those actions “did not demonstrate the decorum and temperament required of a judge,” the opinion says.

    As the childish nature of the political left seeps into every facet of American society there will be inevitable abuses of power on a scale consistent with the worst kinds of third-world cesspools.  Positions of authority requiring a high level of decorum are now being populated with low-IQ, impulse driven adolescents trapped inside adult bodies.  It’s a bad look, but also a poisonous condition for fairness or justice.  DEI strikes again, and the lowest common denominator continues to cut in line ahead of people with much greater merit and far better aptitude.   

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 22:40

  • James Clapper, Mr. October Surprise: How Obama's Intel Czar Rigged 2016 And 2020 Debates Against Trump
    James Clapper, Mr. October Surprise: How Obama’s Intel Czar Rigged 2016 And 2020 Debates Against Trump

    Authored by Paul Sperry via RealClearInvestigations.com,

    Just before Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off in their second presidential debate, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper met in the White House with a small group of advisers to President Obama to hatch a plan to put out a first-of-its-kind intelligence report warning the voting public that “the Russian government” was interfering in the election by allegedly breaching the Clinton campaign’s email system.

    On Oct. 7, 2016 – just two days before the presidential debate between Trump and Clinton – Clapper issued the unprecedented intelligence advisory with Obama’s personal blessing. It seemed to lend credence to what the Clinton camp was telling the media — that Trump was working with Russian President Vladimir Putin through a secret back channel to steal the election. Sure enough, the Democratic nominee pounced on it to smear Trump at the debate.

    And that wouldn’t be the only historically consequential maneuver for Clapper, whose role in skewing presidential campaigns might deserve a special place in the annals of nefarious election meddling – by, in this case, a domestic, not foreign, intelligence service.

    In 2020, he was the lead signatory on the “intelligence” statement that discredited the New York Post’s October bombshell exposing emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which documented how Hunter’s corrupt Burisma paymasters had met with Joe Biden when he was vice president. It was released Oct. 19, just three days before Trump and Biden debated each other in Nashville. Fifty other U.S. “Intelligence Community” officials and experts signed the seven-page document, which claimed “the arrival on the U.S. political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

    In hindsight, Clapper’s well-timed pseudo-intelligence in 2016 and 2020 helped Clinton and Biden make the case against Trump as a potentially Kremlin-compromised figure, charges that crippled his presidency and later arguably denied him reelection.

    The phony laptop letter actually helped Biden seal his narrow victory since many of his voters in the close election told pollsters they would have had second thoughts about backing him had they known of the damning materials contradicting his denials he knew anything about his son’s shady foreign dealings.

    A post-election survey by The Polling Company, for one, found that thanks to the discrediting and suppression of the laptop story, 45% of Biden voters in swing states said they were “unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son” and that full awareness of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal would have led more than 9% of these Biden voters to abandon their vote for him – thereby flipping all six of the swing states he won over to Trump and giving Trump the victory.

    In effect, Joe Biden was elected president because millions of voters were steered away by Clapper and his intelligence colleagues from learning about the damning contents on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

    In the Beginning, Disinformation

    In 2016, Clapper appeared to use his authority as Obama’s chief of intelligence to try to trip up Trump on behalf of Clinton.

    But not everyone in the administration was on board with releasing his official statement about supposed Kremlin meddling.

    Then-FBI Director James Comey had also met in the Situation Room in early October to discuss the plan. But Comey balked at accusing “Russia’s senior-most officials” of authorizing the “alleged hack” of the Clinton campaign and trying “to interfere in the U.S. election process,” as the two-page document claimed. Conspicuously, the FBI did not sign on to the intelligence.

    Still, Clapper implied in his statement that this was the finding of the entire “U.S. Intelligence Community” and that it was “confident the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails.” Aside from Clapper’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the only other agency that attached its name to the assessment was the Department of Homeland Security. Also remarkable was the paucity of underlying evidence. The joint ODNI-DHS statement based its conclusion primarily on a report by a cybersecurity contractor hired by the Clinton campaign’s law firm, who later walked back his finding in a sworn congressional deposition, allowing: “We did not have concrete evidence [Russian agents stole campaign emails].” 

    At best, Clapper’s finding was shoddy tradecraft. At worst, it was manufactured, or simply “dreamed up,” as one former FBI counterintelligence official described it to RealClearInvestigations.

    Either way, it came at a highly opportune time for Clinton. The Democratic nominee seized on the intelligence report during her debate with Trump in St. Louis on Oct. 9 to tarnish her Republican opponent as some kind of Russian agent.

    “You know, let’s talk about what’s really going on here, because our intelligence community just came out and said in the last few days that the Kremlin – meaning Putin and the Russian government – are directing the attacks, the hacking on American accounts to influence our election,” Clinton asserted, citing Clapper’s warning. “We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election.”

    “And believe me, they’re not doing it to get me elected,” she continued. “They’re doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump.”

    “Now, maybe because he has praised Putin, maybe because he says he agrees with a lot of what Putin wants to do, maybe because he wants to do business in Moscow, I don’t know the reasons. But we deserve answers,” Clinton went on, clearly reciting a prepared talking point. “And we should demand that Donald release all of his tax returns so that people can see what are the entanglements and the financial relationships that he has with the Russians and other foreign powers.”

    Some former U.S. intelligence officials say the Oct. 7 intelligence assessment appears to have been cooked up for the benefit of Clinton.

    “There was no evidence to support it,” said retired U.S. Army Col. Derek Harvey, who investigated the origins of the assessment for the House Intelligence Committee. “It was a political diversion to help Clinton.”

    He pointed out that the specious sourcing behind the intelligence violated Clapper’s own 2015 Intelligence Community directive outlining analytical standards for such assessments. What’s more, his directive prohibited any political bias in intelligence reporting, warning that assessments must be “independent of political consideration.”

    “Analytic assessments must not be distorted by, nor shaped for, advocacy of a particular audience, agenda or policy viewpoint,” according to the six-page document, which was signed by Clapper himself.

    Former FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker said Clapper’s Oct. 7 assessment is another example of the many covert ops the Intelligence Community ran against Trump to try to keep him from power or to minimize his effectiveness while in office. By pre-cooking the conclusion about the Russian government targeting Clinton, he said, Clapper abused the U.S. government’s awesome intelligence powers to intervene in a U.S. election.

    “In hindsight, it is now clear that the leaders of our intelligence agencies directed their immense powers towards all things Trump,” he said in an RCI interview.

    Swecker added that Clapper, now 83, was easily manipulated by Obama and then-CIA Director John Brennan, even though Clapper oversaw the CIA. “James Clapper was the Barney Fife of the Intelligence Community,” he said.

    The CIA and other American intelligence agencies are prohibited from getting involved in domestic affairs, Swecker noted, and certainly not American elections.

    Attempts to seek comment from Clapper, now retired, were unsuccessful. But in his 2018 memoir, “Facts and Fears,” Clapper revealed that he and then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, another Obama appointee, “agonized over the precise wording” in the Oct. 7 intelligence release, ostensibly because the linkages to the Kremlin were gauzy at best.

    “We didn’t see any hard evidence of political collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government,” Clapper admitted on page 349, “but as I said at the time, my dashboard warning lights were all lit.”

    He also suggested he was looking out for Clinton – whom his boss, President Obama, had publicly endorsed and was actively campaigning for at the time.

    “Both the Russians and the Trump campaign were, in parallel, pushing conspiracy theories against Secretary Clinton,” Clapper complained, namely that “she was corrupt.”

    Added the former intel chief: “Jeh and I felt strongly that we should inform the electorate,” and “President Obama assented.” In doing so, Clapper confessed they “pushed the boundaries” of what they could say about the purported “Russian activities.” As much as they juiced the intel, though, they agreed to stop short of blaming Putin directly.

    While Clapper, in his book, mentioned the presidential debate that took place two days later, he did so only in passing and failed to note the key fact that Clinton cited his ginned-up intelligence during the televised event, almost on cue.

    The Clinton campaign’s foreign policy adviser later gloated about the Clapper statement, showing how important it was to the campaign.

    “The fact is that the entire Intelligence Community stood behind a statement in October that the Russian campaign had hacked the DNC and released their emails,” Jake Sullivan testified in a closed-door December 2017 interview with the House Intelligence Committee. “We feared that we were under attack, not just by the Russians, but by a coordinated [sic] with the Trump campaign as well.”

    Sullivan was mistaken, of course. The entire Intelligence Community did not stand behind the statement, which was backed by no real evidence. At the time, according to internal documents, the FBI called the notion that the Russian government was behind the alleged hack “speculation.”

    And nothing the Russians may have done was coordinated with the Trump campaign, as multiple investigations have concluded.

    The ‘Laptop Op’

    Having been nearly charged with perjury in 2013 for lying to Congress about intelligence gathering before apologizing, Clapper appeared to politicize intelligence ahead of the 2020 presidential debate as well.

    In an Oct. 19, 2020, formal statement, Obama’s and Biden’s old intelligence czar falsely implied damning emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop were Russian disinformation. The “intelligence” came just in time for Biden, who would be squaring off with Trump in three days, just like it did for Clinton in October 2016.

    “Clapper didn’t know the Russians were involved. He was just spitballing. His pre-debate guesswork was similar to his pre-debate so-called intelligence on Russia in 2016,” said the former senior FBI counterintelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

    Although the statement declared the Hunter Biden laptop “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” it provided no actual evidence of Russian involvement. Clapper and his colleagues asserted that they strongly suspected “the Russian government played a significant role in the case.” Later in the statement, they went further to state “our view” shared by the Intelligence Community — not merely a suspicion anymore — “that the Russians are involved in the Hunter Biden email issue.”

    “There is incentive for Moscow to pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and-or to weaken Biden should he win,” they speculated. “A ‘laptop op’ fits the bill, as the publication of the emails are clearly designed to discredit Biden.”

    But Clapper was dead wrong. There was no Russian “op.” And the laptop and its contents — including the damning emails published by the Post — were 100% real and authentic, as Special Counsel David Weiss confirmed during the recent trial of Hunter Biden on three felony gun charges, for which he was convicted earlier this month. The Russian government had nothing to do with any of it.

    In retrospect, many political analysts agree Clapper’s intel statement was designed not to inform the electorate but to mislead it. But more significantly, the timing of its release suggests it was meant to help Biden in the next presidential debate, which was scheduled just three days later in Nashville.

    During that final presidential debate, held on Oct. 22, 2020, Biden dismissed concerns about his son’s laptop emails and family foreign influence-peddling as part of a “Russian plant” after Trump lit into him about the laptop story. “Joe, they’re calling you a corrupt politician,” Trump said. “Take a look at the laptop from Hell.” Leaning on Clapper’s intel statement, Biden flatly denied knowing anything about Hunter’s foreign business dealings.

    “Look, there are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant,” Biden shot back. “They have said this is, has all the characteristics — four, five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except him and his good friend Rudy Giuliani.”

    The intel provided a much-needed lifeline for the former vice president.

    It were as if Clapper had teed up the perfect talking point for Biden.

    As it turns out, Biden campaign officials had worked with Clapper’s team prior to the release of the intel statement accusing Putin of planting the laptop story.

    In a House deposition, former deputy CIA Director Mike Morell, a Clapper confidant and one of the 51 signatories of the letter, testified that around Oct. 17, top Biden campaign aide Antony Blinken, now Biden’s Secretary of State, reached out to him to discuss the Hunter Biden laptop story.

    Morell revealed that one of the goals in releasing the letter two days later “was to help then-Vice President Biden in the debate,” according to an April 20, 2023, letter House investigators sent to Blinken. The day after speaking with the Biden campaign, Morell blasted out an email to former intelligence officials to recruit them to sign the Oct. 19 intel letter. “We want to give the VP a talking point to use in response” to Trump in the event he attacks Biden over the laptop revelations during the upcoming debate, Morell wrote his colleagues. After the Oct. 22 debate, Morell testified that Biden campaign chairman Steve Ricchetti called him to thank him “for putting the statement out.” Morell said former CIA chief of staff Jeremy Bash was also involved in the coordination effort. Bash happens to be the ex-husband of Dana Bash, who will be one of the CNN moderators questioning Trump and Biden at Thursday night’s debate in Atlanta.

    In effect, the Intelligence Community conspired with the Biden campaign to deceive the electorate by creating a false talking point for Biden in the presidential debate, which some government watchdogs say constituted an unreported campaign contribution and a potential violation of federal campaign finance laws.

    On the same day that Clapper released the statement, then-Politico reporter Natasha Bertrand hyped it in a story with the conclusive headline: “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.” During the earlier frenzied coverage of Russiagate, Bertrand, who now works for CNN, acted as a go-to reporter for leaks from intelligence officials about Trump. She quoted one signatory to the letter as being confident that “once again the Russians are interfering” in U.S. elections. About 15 minutes after Politico published its story, Jen Psaki tweeted a link to the Politico article. Psaki was named Biden’s press secretary the next month. The Biden campaign repeatedly cited Clapper’s statement to dismiss the allegations against Hunter and Joe Biden. Clapper played his part by jumping on CNN to claim the laptop was “textbook Soviet tradecraft.”

    It’s clear Clapper was rooting for Biden to win. Three days before Clapper released his all-too-convenient intelligence letter, he had donated $1,000 to Biden’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records. He had given another $250 to Biden For President the previous October. In the current election cycle, records show Clapper has contributed at least $300 so far to Biden.

    RealClearInvestigations reached out to Clapper for comment but did not hear back. However, in a previous statement, he was unapologetic. “I stand by the statement made at the time,” he told the New York Post. “I think sounding such a cautionary note at the time was appropriate.”

    Clapper and Tapper

    Clapper’s history of intrigue against Trump includes leaking damaging classified information about him to the media.

    CNN anchor Jake Tapper thought he had the scoop of his career when, on Jan. 10, 2017, he reported that President-elect Trump had been briefed by the FBI about “classified documents” containing information from a “credible” intelligence source that the Russians had “compromising” dirt on him. Citing unnamed “U.S. officials,” the report, co-bylined with Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, also falsely claimed that the Trump campaign and the Russian government had “exchange[d] information” throughout the election and that these allegations had been verified. Tapper failed to note that the supposedly “classified” information came from political opposition research funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign, otherwise known as the Steele dossier, compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.

    As flawed as the story was, it triggered a feeding frenzy in the national media, which up to that point backed off from covering the wild and unsubstantiated allegations contained in the Steele dossier. But after they learned from Tapper – by way of Clapper – that the U.S. Intelligence Community itself had taken a keen interest in the dossier and appeared to be taking it seriously, they reported the allegations against Trump nonstop for several years as if the dossier reports were the Pentagon Papers.

    When congressional investigators first asked Clapper about the CNN leak in a July 2017 deposition, Clapper “flatly denied ‘discuss[ing] the dossier [compiled by Steele] or any other intelligence related to Russia hacking of the 2016 election with journalists,’” according to a report issued by the House Intelligence Committee. But Clapper changed his story upon further questioning. “Clapper subsequently acknowledged discussing the ‘dossier with CNN journalist Jake Tapper.’” The report added that Clapper secretly spoke with Tapper in early January 2017 and that on Jan. 10, CNN published Tapper’s story about the dossier allegations, for which he won the Merriman Smith Award for broadcast journalism in 2018.

    The next day, Clapper issued a statement describing a call with Trump in which Clapper “expressed my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press” and stressed that “I do not believe the leaks came from within the IC,” or Intelligence Community.

    Clapper, who was later hired by CNN as an official “national security analyst,” had blatantly lied not only to the incoming president but also to the public. Again. And in effect, he had used Tapper, who’s not only failed to correct the record at CNN, but finds himself in the position to grill Trump on Thursday night as co-moderator with Bash of the first 2024 presidential debate in Atlanta.

    *  *  *

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 22:20

  • North Korean Troops Will Be 'Cannon Fodder' If Sent To Ukraine, Pentagon Says
    North Korean Troops Will Be ‘Cannon Fodder’ If Sent To Ukraine, Pentagon Says

    Following on the heels of Putin’s visit to Pyongyang last week where he inked a strategic defense cooperation agreement with Kim Jong Un, North Korea is reportedly sending a contingency of troops to assist in Russia’s military operations in Ukraine.

    South Korea’s TV Chosun cited a Seoul official to say specifically the north will send construction and engineering units to Ukraine as soon as next month, according to Reuters. They will reportedly assist in rebuilding efforts for areas under Russian control.

    It true this could further ‘internationalize’ the conflict and might in turn trigger greater NATO involvement, possibly even the deployment of Western troops. 

    However, the news of Pyongyang deploying engineering troops is anything but confirmed at this point, given it appears to have originated in South Korean media:

    Those forces, working overseas under the disguise of construction workers to earn hard currency for the regime, would be moved from China to those Russia-held regions, the network said.

    Asked about the TV Chosun reports, South Korea’s foreign ministry said it was continuing monitoring the situation.

    But the reports were noticed by the Pentagon, which put Moscow and North Korea on notice. Pentagon press secretary Gen. Pat Ryder said in a briefing on Tuesday.

    “If I were North Korean military personnel management, I would be questioning my choice of sending my forces to be cannon fodder in an illegal war against Ukraine. And we’ve seen the kinds of casualties that Russian forces.”

    Ryder didn’t confirm whether the reports were accurate, but only said that it’s “certainly something to keep an eye on.”

    Likely if the US does observe or confirm that North Korean troops are in Ukraine the White House will directly address it, and issue threats.

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    North Korea has been arming Russia with artillery shells and possibly other military items since 2023 for the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Both countries are under far-reaching US sanctions. This means Russia has increasingly relied on other ‘pariah’ states to meet its military supply needs.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 22:00

  • CBP Officers Seize Truckload Of Marijuana Worth $5.2 Million At Laredo Bridge
    CBP Officers Seize Truckload Of Marijuana Worth $5.2 Million At Laredo Bridge

    Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

    U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said on Monday that its officers at the World Trade Bridge in Laredo, Texas, thwarted an attempt to smuggle a cache of marijuana worth nearly $5.2 million.

    The seizure occurred on June 23 when an officer flagged a tractor hauling a commercial shipment for secondary inspection, according to a CBP press release.

    The tractor was driven by a 38-year-old Mexican citizen, accompanied by a 33-year-old Mexican citizen. Both of them have been arrested, the agency stated.

    CBP officers conducted a canine inspection and other examinations and found 98 packages containing about 2,323 pounds of alleged marijuana inside the trailer.

    The agency seized both the tractor and trailer, as well as the drugs, which had a street value of $5,198,328.

    “Frontline officers at the World Trade Bridge demonstrated exceptional effort in successfully disrupting this drug smuggling attempt,” Alberto Flores, port director for Laredo Port of Entry, said in a press release.

    “This large drug bust is a prime example of the efficient targeting strategies utilized in the cargo environment to help combat the flow of narcotics seeping into our communities,” Mr. Flores said.

    CBP officers assigned to the World Trade Bridge made a similar seizure in September last year, when a Freightliner tractor trailer hauling home goods was referred for secondary inspection. The agency seized 177 packages containing 4,466 pounds of marijuana, estimated to be worth over $9.9 million.

    The Department of Justice announced on May 16 that it is formally moving to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act. So far, 38 states have legalized marijuana for medical use and another 24 have legalized it for recreational use.

    The Justice Department acknowledged the medical uses of marijuana, or cannabis, in a proposed rule it sent to the federal register while emphasizing the plant’s lower potential for abuse compared with other Schedule I drugs. By design, the Drug Enforcement Administration classifies drugs as Schedule I if the agency believes they have no medical value.

    This followed a recommendation from the Department of Health and Human Services after President Joe Biden urged the agency to review the drug’s status in 2022.

    While moving marijuana to Schedule III could affect future federal policy on the plant, drugs in that category are still considered controlled substances and subject to regulations. Anyone found guilty of selling them without proper authorization could still be federally prosecuted.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 21:40

  • Court Orders Israel Army To Start Drafting Ultra-Orthodox, Compounding Internal Tensions
    Court Orders Israel Army To Start Drafting Ultra-Orthodox, Compounding Internal Tensions

    In an historic development that promises to fuel friction between different elements of the country’s society, the Israeli high court on Tuesday unanimously ruled that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) must start drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish students. 

    Until now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to maintaining the decades-long draft exemption has been a key means of earning the support of two ultra-Orthodox parties that are building blocks of his ruling coalition. While there’s nowhere for those two parties to flee in pursuit of restoring the exemption, the ruling seemingly removes one of the ties that binds the parties to Netanyahu. 

    Outside an IDF induction center, protesters of Haredim draft exemptions push mock coffins (Mothers at the Front)

    In their 9-0 ruling, the court noted the ongoing demands of Israel’s 8-month-old war on Gaza in retaliation for the Oct. 7 invasion of southern Israel. “In the middle of a difficult war, the burden of inequality is felt more acutely than ever—and it requires advancing a sustainable solution to this issue,” the justices wrote. 

    As casualties have mounted in Gaza, long-simmering resentment of the exemption that covers some 1.3 million ultra-Orthodox Jews — or Haredi — has only grown. In addition to protests in the streets, high-ranking Israeli officials have called for an end to the special treatment. 

    “The war and the challenges placed before us… require us to share the burden of military service,” said Defense Minister Yoav Gallant in March. “Everyone must carry the burden, all sectors of the nation.”At the same event, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi declared that the Haredi exemption was undermining Israel’s “social cohesion.” 

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    The draft is just one facet of the Haredi’s special treatment in Israel. Haredi men who are enrolled in Yeshiva schools — to study the Torah — have also received public subsidies that keep going all the way until they reach the country’s standard retirement age of 67. 

    That’s makes these men doubly detractive: They’re economically unproductive, while also draining resources from those who contribute to the country’s economy. Meanwhile, Haredi children are exempt from Israel’s educational standards. Since they don’t have to study core topics like math, science and English, they offer lesser skills to would-be employers. 

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    Tuesday’s court ruling also landed a broadside hit on the wealth transfers, declaring that funding of students who don’t have a bona fide military exemption are illegal too. Responding to the high court’s ruling, the chairman of one of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties reiterated the argument that Haredi men’s full-time study of Judaism’s holy books makes an important contribution to Israel: 

    “The Jewish people survived persecutions, pogroms and wars only thanks to maintaining their uniqueness, the Torah and the commandments. This is our secret weapon against all enemies, as promised by the Creator of the universe,” Shas chair Aryeh Deri told the Times of Israel. “[Yeshiva students] preserve our special power and generate miracles in the [military] campaign.”

    Rather than resolving the issue, the ruling will likely inflame tension. “[It] creates an ongoing, endemic crisis that will probably continue to escalate,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, told the Wall Street Journal.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 21:20

  • Supreme Court Inadvertently Releases 'Idaho Emergency Abortion' Opinion
    Supreme Court Inadvertently Releases ‘Idaho Emergency Abortion’ Opinion

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The U.S. Supreme Court released an opinion in an abortion case on June 26 but quickly unpublished the ruling, in what a spokesperson described as a mistake.

    Members of the Supreme Court pose for a group photo at the Supreme Court in Washington on April 23, 2021. Standing from left: Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett. (Erin Schaff/Getty Images)

    The opinion involves a case against an Idaho law that bans most abortions.

    The opinion “has not been released,” Patricia McCabe, a spokesperson for the Supreme Court, told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement.

    “The court’s publications unit inadvertently and briefly uploaded a document to the court’s website.”

    She said the opinion will be published “in due course.”

    The nation’s top court had an opinion release day on Wednesday and is scheduled to publish additional opinions on Thursday and Friday.

    A draft opinion in a separate case that challenged the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade was leaked in 2022, setting off protests against justices believed to be backing the opinion. The final ruling, when issued, struck down Roe v. Wade.

    The Idaho case deals with a law that prohibits doctors from performing abortions, with exceptions in any trimester in cases where doctors believe abortions are necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or unborn child. The law also contains exceptions during the first trimester for women who were the victims of rape or incest.

    The law enables felony charges to be brought against doctors who violate the statute.

    Before the Idaho law took effect in August 2022, though, it was blocked by a federal judge. Judge Lynn Winmill said the state law clashed with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), a federal law that requires emergency room doctors at hospitals that receive Medicare funds to offer treatments to stabilize patients who arrive with emergency conditions.

    Judge Winmell pointed to the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

    “At its core, the Supremacy Clause says state law must yield to federal law when it’s impossible to comply with both,” he wrote as he entered a preliminary injunction.

    A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2023 stayed the ruling. EMTALA “does not require abortions, and even if it did in some circumstances, that requirement would not directly conflict with” the Idaho law, U.S. Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke, writing for the panel, said. The full court later vacated the stay, but the Supreme Court reimposed it while it considered the case.

    In the opinion briefly published on Wednesday, which was obtained by Bloomberg News, justices ordered the injunction put back in place and said they should have not granted Idaho’s emergency request to review the case.

    Justice Elena Kagan said in a concurring opinion that Idaho’s arguments “do not justify, and have never justified, either emergency relief or our early consideration of this dispute.” She wrote that “EMTALA requires hospitals to provide abortions that Idaho’s law prohibits” and that “Idaho’s law is preempted.” She was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

    Justice Jackson said in a separate partial concurrence and partial dissent that because the court already acted in the matter, it should not back away from it and should instead proceed to its merits. “There is simply no good reason not to resolve this conflict now,” she said.

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett said in a concurring opinion that she’s become convinced by more detailed information presented in the case, including at oral argument, that the case is not appropriate for resolution by the court before the full Ninth Circuit takes up the matter.

    “Based on the parties’ representations, it appears that the injunction will not stop Idaho from enforcing its law in the vast majority of circumstances,” she said. Judge Barrett was joined by Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh.

    Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a dissent that EMTALA requires Medicare-funded hospitals to care for pregnant women and their unborn children, which is an ambiguity that the court should resolve.

    “No one who has any respect for statutory language can plausibly say that the government’s interpretation is unambiguously correct,” he said. “And in any event, Idaho never consented to any conditions imposed by EMTALA and certainly did not surrender control of the practice of medicine and the resolution of abortions within its territory.”

    Justice Alito was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Neil Gorsuch.

    The case will now move forward in the Ninth Circuit, although it could be taken to the Supreme Court again at a later stage.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 21:00

  • Suspected Hypersonic Missile Fired By North Korea Explodes Midair
    Suspected Hypersonic Missile Fired By North Korea Explodes Midair

    North Korea is suspected of having launched a hypersonic missile as part of an apparently failed test early Wednesday. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said the launch originated outside Pyongyang, and Japan’s defense ministry also said it detected a launch.

    The south’s intelligence agencies are reportedly investigating, with officials saying it may have been a hypersonic missile that exploded midair. 

    Yonhap via AFP: A vapour trail believed to have been created by the North Korean missile.

    “The launch from near the capital, Pyongyang, ended in failure as the missile blew up over the eastern coastal waters near the North Korean city of Wonsan,” the JCS said in a statement. 

    While there are no reports of damage, missile fragments were scattered up to 250 kilometers away, regional reports say.

    Japan said that before it failed the missile reached an altitude just over 60 miles and traveled a distance of 124 miles.

    An official was cited in Yonhap news agency as saying “there appeared to be more smoke than during previous launches, raising the possibility of combustion issues” and it “appeared to be a solid-fueled missile.”

    This latest test comes soon on the heels of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s official visit to Pyongyang where he met with Kim Jong Un and inked a comprehensive strategic cooperation treaty.

    Both countries which are under US-led sanctions have pledged greater cooperation on the defense technology front.

    Washington is alarmed given that Russia does possess capable hypersonic missiles, which have reportedly at times already been used in Ukraine.

    These missiles are much harder to intercept or even to detect given they are capable of hitting speeds in excess of five times the speed of sound.

    Recent footage of some of Kim’s new hypersonic “toys”…

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    From the West’s perspective and Seoul’s perspective, if Kim’s government ever achieved provable hypersonics and they were regularly deployed, it would be a nightmare.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 20:40

  • US Army Revises Standards On Prohibited Extremist Activity
    US Army Revises Standards On Prohibited Extremist Activity

    Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    The U.S. Army issued new, more specific guidance on Wednesday to address extremism within its ranks and ensure disciplinary action against those who engage with or promote extremist views.

    Secretary of the Army, Hon. Christine Wormuth, visits U.S. soldiers in Guam on July 25, 2023. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. David Resnick)

    Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth signed off on a pair of memos, published on June 26, that refine how the service will handle protests and extremist or gang activity within the ranks, and report suspected prohibited behavior. One memo a directive for “Handling Protest, Extremist, and Criminal Gang Activities“ and the other is a directive for ”Reporting Prohibited Activities.”

    The memo on Handling Protest, Extremist, and Criminal Gang Activities states that prohibited activity within the Army can include distributing extremist materials online. This new Army memo reinforces a policy approach articulated by the U.S. Department of Defense in a November 2021 memo, which states that “an action taken to replicate content from one online location to another” can qualify as distributing extremist content online. The new Army memo now states the prohibited online distribution of extremist activity can include liking, sharing, and “re-tweeting” said content.

    “Military personnel are responsible for the content they publish on all personal and public internet domains, including social media platforms, blogs, websites, and applications,” the memo states.

    The Army’s existing policy, updated in July of 2020, had previously said prohibited online conduct could include “hazing, bullying, harassment, discriminatory harassment, stalking, retaliation, or any other types of misconduct that undermines dignity and respect” but was less specific about online extremist activity, stating only that “military personnel must reject participation in extremist organizations and associated cyber activities.”

    The new memo on Handling Protest, Extremist, and Criminal Gang Activities also states soldiers who “knowingly” display paraphernalia, words, or symbols in support of extremist activity, including on flags, clothing, tattoos, and bumper stickers—whether on or off a military installation—can run afoul of the Army’s prohibitions on extremist behavior.

    The new memo does not provide an exhaustive list of what paraphernalia, words, or symbols may meet their definition of extremist material but does offer a definition of views and activities the Army includes in its definition of extremism:

    1. Advocating or engaging in the use of unlawful force or other illegal means to deprive individuals of their rights under the U.S. Constitution or in any states, territories or political subdivisions thereof.
    2. Advocating or engaging in unlawful force to achieve goals that are political, religious, discriminatory, or otherwise ideological in nature.
    3. Advocating, engaging in, or supporting terrorism.
    4. Advocating, engaging in, or supporting the overthrow of the federal government, or state, territory, and local governments using force, violence, or unconstitutional or other unlawful means.
    5. Advocating or encouraging military, civilian, or contractor personnel within the [Department of Defense] DOD or U.S. Coast Guard to violate laws or disobey lawful orders.
    6. Advocating widespread unlawful discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including pregnancy), gender identity, or sexual orientation.

    The memo states that Army commands have several options for recourse against soldiers promoting those views. They include legal action under the military justice system, known as the uniformed code of military justice. Commands may also choose adverse administrative actions against soldiers alleged to have violated these prohibitions on extremist activity, including involuntary separating of soldiers, reassigning soldiers, revoking their security clearances, barring soldiers from continued service, or “other administrative or disciplinary action deemed appropriate by the commander, based on the specific facts and circumstances of the particular case.”

    The Second Memo

    The second memo, regarding how military officials should report suspected prohibited activity, seeks to establish a process for reporting suspicious activity to the DOD Deputy Inspector General (DIG) for Diversity and Inclusion and Extremism in the Military.

    Appropriate Army authorities who receive an allegation that a soldier engaged in a prohibited activity must notify the soldier’s commander or another appropriate authority and the appropriate Army inspector general within 30 calendar days if that soldier is in the active component and within 60 calendar days if that soldier is in the Army’s reserve component. The Army inspector generals must then forward information they receive along to the DOD Deputy Inspector General for Diversity and Inclusion and Extremism in the Military within another 15 calendar days of receiving said notification.

    Commanders are also instructed that they must ensure that a soldier’s permanent record in the Army Military Human Resource Record (AMHRR) is annotated if that soldier has received a court-martial conviction, nonjudicial punishment, or general officer’s memorandum of reprimand for actively participating in extremist activities.

    The reporting memo instructs Army commanders to periodically remind soldiers to avoid engaging in extremist activity.

    The memo also advises Army commanders that they should consider command-directed mental health evaluations and financial counseling sessions for soldiers showing signs of potential involvement in extremist activities.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 20:20

  • Watch Live "The Border Debate": Pundits Clash Over Illegal Immigration
    Watch Live “The Border Debate”: Pundits Clash Over Illegal Immigration

    Watch Live on X, YouTube and Rumble

    ZeroHedge is bringing together four prominent pundits to debate one of the most combustible topics of the day: illegal immigration across the porous US border.

    Immigration is the most important political problem facing the US today according to Gallup and about a half-dozen other pollsters, not to mention at least half of America.

    To debate this issue, we are joined by former Navy intel officer Jack Posobiec and author Ryan Girdusky, who will make the case in favor of a border crackdown and even an all-out immigration moratorium.

    Debating against them will be The Hill‘s Robby Soave and Libertarian presidential Candidate Chase Oliver; they will argue that our economy needs immigrants and that our government should admit more of them.

    The debate will be moderated by The Intercept’s Ryan Grim and Unherd’s Emily Jashinsky who host the Counter Points show on YouTube.

    And so, without further ado, let’s get ready to rumble. 

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 20:11

  • "Disgusting Discovery": Cali Beach Closures Prompt Questions Of Whether Mexico Is Dumping Sewage In U.S. Waters
    “Disgusting Discovery”: Cali Beach Closures Prompt Questions Of Whether Mexico Is Dumping Sewage In U.S. Waters

    Just when you thought the wave of illegal immigration coming from the U.S.’s southern border was demoralizing enough, it appears that something else may be drifting its way up from Mexico.

    According to a new report from the Daily Mail, beaches in San Diego have been shut down due to a “disgusting discovery”, which it described as “sewage creating frighteningly high levels of bacteria in the open waters”. 

    The report says that water contact closures have been issued for Silver Strand Shoreline, Imperial Beach Shorelines, and the Tijuana Slough Shoreline along the U.S.-Mexico border.

    Additionally, advisories were issued for La Jolla, Children’s Pool, Coronado, Coronado Lifeguard Tower, Ocean Beach, Dog Beach, San Diego River outlet, Mission Bay, North Cove, and Vacation Isle, the Mail reported.

    Imperial Beach, ranked as the dirtiest beach in the U.S., has bright yellow warning signs due to sewage flowing in from Tijuana, the Mail said, citing KGTV.

    Dr. Marvel Harrison was quoted as saying: “The level of stress when you smell the stench, when you get sick and you worry about your children, and the level of stress and the depression is real.”

    “We need our state and federal governments to declare a state of emergency,” added San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer. “Our community deserves clean air and clean water, and we will not rest until this is resolved.”

    The report noted that out of “thousands” of water samples from “across the nation” tested by The Surfrider Foundation, every single sample from Imperial Beach turned up “bacteria counts that exceeded the state’s health standard for recreational waters”. 

    City officials plan to gather data and secure funding to address the sewage problem affecting the beach city.

    The Surfrider Foundation reported that 64% of tested sites had unsafe bacteria levels, with California accounting for a quarter of these samples. Other polluted locations include Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica and the mouth of San Luis Obispo Creek.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 20:00

  • Bolivian Coup Averted, Top General Arrested After Short-Lived Rebellion
    Bolivian Coup Averted, Top General Arrested After Short-Lived Rebellion

    Update(1950ET): It appears the short-lived coup attempt is over, with reports of the following: The President of Bolivia, Luis Arce has just stated during a Press Conference that the Leader of the Coup d’état in the Capital of La Paz, General Juan José Zúñiga has been arrested by his own Troops after they realized he was conducting a Coup against the Government; with all remaining Troops currently Returning to their Bases. News wires are also confirming:

    BOLIVIA’S EX-ARMY GENERAL ZUNIGA ARRESTED AFTER COUP ATTEMPT

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    Now begins the speculation over whether there was any external state backer or hidden hand in this brief episode.

    It also seems that for now at least, Arce’s supporters were able to present enough of a showing to get the military leadership to back off.

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    * * *

    There are emerging reports of a military coup going down in Bolivia on Wednesday, with embattled President Luis Arce denouncing the “irregular mobilization” of some units of the national army.

    He has accused the country’s top general, Gen. Juan Jose Zuniga,of plotting a coup, and warned “You need to respect democracy.”

    According to Reuters, “Heavily armed soldiers and armored vehicles were seen gathering in the capital’s Plaza Murillo, according to videos shared on social media.”

    “Former President Evo Morales, who has publicly split with Arce even though both belong to same socialist movement, announced a national mobilization of his supporters to support democracy in a separate post on X,” the report continues.

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    There are widespread reports that armored vehicles are destroying the door of the Presidential Palace, and that armed troops are breaking in.

    Bolivia state TV is airing the following dramatic footage…

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    Amid road blockages and works stoppages across the capital, each side is urging their forces and supporters to urgently assist: 

    Presidential Minister María Nela Prada said military and tanks were taking over Plaza Murillo in La Paz, calling it an “attempted coup d’état.” The people are “on alert to defend democracy,” she said to local television station Red Uno.

    The general commander of the army, Juan José Zúñiga, present in the same square, confirmed that there was a movement of uniformed officers, and said: “We are upset by the affront, enough is enough.”

    Currently protesters supporting Arce are filling up some of the streets leading to the square while chanting pro-Arce slogans and on their way to confront the mutiny.

    The following widely circulating and astounding photograph shows President Arce meeting the leader of the attempted military coup face-to-face at the doors of the Presidential Palace:

    developing…

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 19:50

  • Banning Fossil Fuels Will Make Heat Waves More Dangerous, Not Less
    Banning Fossil Fuels Will Make Heat Waves More Dangerous, Not Less

    Authored by Connor O’Keefe via The Mises Institute,

    On Sunday, activists from the environmentalist organization Extinction Rebellion stormed the green in the final, pivotal moments of the Travelers Championship, a professional golf tournament. The protesters tossed red and white chalk and smoke bombs before being tackled to the ground by police. The stunt came days after two protesters with the group Just Stop Oil, a youth-led offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, sprayed orange paint on Stonehenge.

    The environmentalist protesters who do stunts like this are refreshingly honest about the destructive nature of their ambitions.

    They see the comforts and leisures of modern life as maladies to be eradicated in the name of saving the climate.

    But while the means these protesters used in the two high-profile stunts last week have come under wide condemnation, the environmentalist ends of such groups enjoyed blind acceptance in the news media amid a couple dramatic heat waves playing out around the world.

    Temperatures rose to record-breaking heights for June across the eastern United States late last week and over the weekend. The United Kingdom experienced a heat wave that, while mocked by many in the US for being laughably mild, brought temperatures far higher than the region is used to. Most dramatically, extreme heat killed over a thousand people during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Overall, more than fourteen hundred temperature records were broken around the world last week.

    The media has had a field day showing scary red maps and bringing on hysterical “experts” to terrify audiences into thinking it’s only a matter of time before we’re all roasting to death. Unless, we’re told, we “stop putting carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere,” as Bill Nye said in the clip linked above and the Extinction Rebellion protesters demanded on the eighteenth green on Sunday.

    But if the goal is to avoid heat-related deaths, the worst thing to do is ban fossil fuels.

    Fossil fuels, through technologies like air conditioning and refrigeration, make us safer from heat waves like those experienced last week.

    Air conditioning is an incredible invention that is too often taken for granted. Back in the 1840s, long before air conditioning, a Florida doctor named John Gorrie found that his patients recovered better from disease when placed in a cool room. Gorrie developed a system to cool hospital rooms, but it required huge blocks of ice to be cut and transported from frozen lakes and rivers in the northern states. Gorrie’s system made no sense logistically, but his method for cooling a room laid the foundation for what would become modern air conditioning.

    Sixty years later, a New York engineer named Willis Carrier expanded upon Gorrie’s design by utilizing cooling coils to heat and cool air. These first air conditioning units took up an entire room and cost as much as $1.5 million each in today’s dollars. But as Carrier and his competitors raced to improve upon their designs, air conditioning units became smaller, more efficient, and more affordable.

    A big problem with early air conditioning units was that the compounds they used as refrigerants, such as ammonia and propane, were toxic, flammable, explosive, and not very effective. Then, in 1928, Thomas Midgley Jr. and his team in the Frigidaire division of General Motors synthesized the first chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), which they named Freon.

    The adoption of CFCs like Freon provided a major boost to air conditioning. In the 1930s, when the US experienced the most severe heat waves in its history, air conditioning units began to be installed in movie theaters. Around the same time, the first window-mounted units were developed. But it wasn’t until after World War II that air conditioning started to become affordable and compact enough to become a common fixture in American homes. By the 1960s, most new homes in the US had central air conditioning.

    Air conditioning did not merely make life more comfortable; it saved lives. Heat-related deaths fell by 80 percent after the adoption of air conditioning. Regions like the arid Southwest and the humid Southeast became more inhabitable for more people.

    But as Mark Thornton has pointed out, the benefits of air conditioning extend far beyond staying cool on a hot day.

    Because architects no longer needed to rely on windows for ventilation, air conditioning allowed for larger, sturdier buildings that could extend higher than had ever been possible. These skyscrapers significantly increased the supply of housing and office space in urban areas without requiring more land. That meant the air conditioning making residences and offices more comfortable was also making them more affordable.

    The cooling and dehumidifying effects of air conditioning also help conserve things like books and historical artifacts. Thanks to modern HVAC systems, every major city in the country can have libraries, archives, and museums. That wasn’t true before. In fact, Willis Carrier first invented air conditioning not to cool hot rooms but to prevent magazine pages from wrinkling for a Brooklyn publishing company.

    Air conditioning has helped enormously with textile production, surgeries, plant and animal breeding, pharmaceuticals, and transportation—not to mention the preservation and transportation of food through refrigeration. It is also crucial for cooling the vast data centers that, together, power the internet.

    That’s all to say that it’s hard to overstate how much the world we all live in depends on our ability to control our indoor climates, regardless of the outdoor temperatures. But these systems rely on two central components: energy and refrigerants. And both of these components have come under attack from environmentalists and their allies in government.

    Environmentalists are very clear that they want the world’s governments to force their populations off fossil fuels. They fantasize about a world where, after a few cleverly concocted government policies are enacted, the world transitions to energy sources like solar and wind, the weather improves, and we all get to live in an egalitarian, plant-filled, postscarcity utopia.

    But those ambitions will never leave the realm of fantasy. So-called renewable sources like solar and wind power cannot support the world’s population at the current level of development. At best, things like air conditioning—which requires a lot of energy—will become more expensive.

    More likely, modern HVAC systems will become unavailable for large swaths of the population. Because, in addition to the effort to ban fossil fuels, today’s environmentalists have also set their sights on the refrigerants these systems rely on.

    It began in the nineties when the world’s governments seized on a scare that CFCs were causing a hole in the ozone layer (which was essentially a complete hoax) to ban the refrigerant and force a transition to a worse alternative called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). The coerced adoption of HFCs made refrigerators, air conditioning systems, and even asthma inhalers more expensive and less effective. That’s the big reason why, as Thornton pointed out in the article linked above, air conditioning’s march to affordability reversed course in the 1990s and now costs so much.

    But it gets worse. The US government has already passed legislation to phase in a total ban on HFCs. Most bans are set to kick in over the next couple of years, but unlike the CFC ban thirty years ago, there is no clear alternative this time around. If it’s mentioned at all, the other options presented are the same toxic, flammable, inefficient compounds like ammonia and propane that were used in the early air conditioning units ninety-five years ago. Companies have begun hoarding HFCs as the phaseout progresses and, earlier this year, the first arrest was made for smuggling the refrigerant into the country.

    As air conditioning becomes even less affordable and available, all the benefits outlined above begin to slip out of reach as well. Life grows more expensive because internet, food, and rent prices will rise as the supply of data centers, refrigeration systems, and urban housing takes a hit. And, ironically, the warmest parts of the country will become less inhabitable, not because of a change in the climate, but because so-called green policies are destroying our ability to make them livable.

    So, in a sense, environmentalists are right when they warn that heat waves will become more dangerous. But it’s not because of small increases in their average peak temperature. It’s because of the environmentalists themselves.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 19:40

  • Austin & Russia's New Defense Chief Speak For 1st Time After Crimea Beach Attack
    Austin & Russia’s New Defense Chief Speak For 1st Time After Crimea Beach Attack

    In a rare moment which appears a somewhat positive development (or at least it’s not more immediate escalation), the US and Russian defense chiefs spoke by phone Tuesday for the first time since March 2023.

    US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin initiated the call, and the timing is important given it comes following Sunday’s deadly Ukraine missile attack on a crowded Sevastopol beach which killed five people and injured 124 more, including children.

    Moscow has blamed Washington for providing the long-range MGM-140 ATACMS systems used in the attack, and has even said Kiev likely had satellite and targeting help from the Pentagon.

    The Guardian noted that “The two sides gave widely divergent accounts of the discussion – the first between US defense secretary Lloyd Austin and Russia’s defense minister Andrei Belousov.”

    Russian defense chief Belousov warned Austin against continued arms supplies to Kiev, citing the dangers of serious escalation. 

    As for the US version of the call, the Pentagon readout was scant, only saying that Austin “emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.”

    The Kremlin is still pointing to Washington actions as being behind an ongoing escalation:

    Russia’s defense ministry said Washington and Kyiv bore “responsibility for a deliberate missile strike on peaceful residents,” which it said used US-supplied ATACMS missiles.

    Russia further called it a “terrorist act” and according to more details:

    Videos posted on social media showed people running from the beach as explosions went off and people in swimming outfits carrying a stretcher. AFP could not verify their authenticity.

    A local news channel on Telegram, ChP Sevastopol, cited witnesses as saying that an elderly woman was killed as she swam in the sea.

    But despite this, elsewhere there were other rare positives. On Tuesday Russia and Ukraine conducted a prisoner swap involving 90 total POWs.

    Sunday’s strike involved cluster munitions dropping on men, women, and children at a Sevastopol beach…

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    This was the second biggest swap since May 31st, when the two sides returned 75 captives each. That exchange had come after a long lull in exchanges, and there is likely more to come this summer.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 19:20

  • US Admits Allies In Syria Using Child Soldiers
    US Admits Allies In Syria Using Child Soldiers

    Authored by Will Porter via The Libertarian Institute,

    The State Department has acknowledged that America’s top partner in Syria, the Kurdish-led “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF), is still using underage fighters after more than 10 years of similar allegations. The Pentagon continues to work closely with the group regardless, as US troops illegally occupy large swaths of territory in northeastern Syria.

    Published Tuesday, the department’s 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report highlighted a number of armed factions employing child soldiers in Syria, among them notorious terrorist outfits like ISIS and al-Qaeda as well as more US-friendly groups.

    Fighters with the Syria-based People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia, via Wiki Commons

    “The recruitment or use of children in combat and support roles in Syria remains common, and since the beginning of 2018 international observers reported continued incidents of recruitment and use by armed groups,” the report said.

    Those include several Kurdish militias, such as the People’s Protection Units (YPG), an affiliated all-female brigade known as the YPJ, as well as the US-backed and armed SDF. The latter org is an umbrella group containing several others, including the YPG, and has long served as Washington’s main proxy force in Syria.

    Another related Kurdish faction, the Revolutionary Youth Movement, was said to have tricked minors into joining up using “fraudulent announcements for educational courses in northeast Syria.”

    Although the State Department said the SDF was implementing a 2019 UN-mandated “action plan” to end the practice, it noted reports that “SDF-affiliated armed groups recruited and used children in 2022 and 2023.”

    Allegations of child trafficking and military recruitment have dogged the YPG for more than a decade, with rights groups reporting cases as far back as 2013. While YPG leadership claims to have ordered an end to the practice that year, the problem has only worsened since.

    In 2020, the United Nations found the YPG, “under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces,” was the top recruiter of child fighters in Syria with 283 documented cases the prior year – even beating out the local al-Qaeda affiliate. While the UN later acknowledged SDF efforts to crack down on the use of underage fighters, it still recorded dozens of cases in April 2021.

    Despite the official admission in the new State Department review, the US military continues a close partnership with the SDF and, by extension, the YPG. On Tuesday, the Pentagon deployed 40 vehicles and other hardware to reinforce a base in northwestern Syria, where US troops are embedded with Kurdish fighters. That move followed a similar deployment to Hasakah reported last April.

    Throughout a decade of external efforts to topple Assad, the West and Gulf states facilitated the entry of tens of thousands of foreign jihadist fighters…

    Via The Washington Post

    American forces have illegally occupied Syria for years despite repeated objections from the government in Damascus. While Washington insists the presence is necessary to ensure the lasting defeat of the Islamic State, US troops continue to hold significant energy resources in the oil-rich northeast, effectively controlling one-third of the country with the help of its Kurdish allies.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 19:00

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Jun 26

Today’s News 26th June 2024

  • They Are Using Lab-Grown Human Brains Called "Organoids" To Run Computers
    They Are Using Lab-Grown Human Brains Called “Organoids” To Run Computers

    Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

    When I first started researching this, I could hardly believe that it was true. A company in Switzerland known as “Final Spark” has constructed a bizarre hybrid biocomputer that combines lab-grown miniature human brains with conventional electronic circuits.  This approach saves an extraordinary amount of energy compared to normal computers, but there is a big problem.  The lab-grown miniature human brains keep wearing out and dying, and so scientists have to keep growing new ones to replace them. 

    Stem cells that are derived from human skin tissue are used to create the 16 spherical brain “organoids” that the system depends upon.  I realize that this sounds like something straight out of a really bad science fiction movie, but it is actually happening.

    Scientists at Final Spark are calling their hybrid computer “the Neuroplatform”, and it is being reported that it only uses “a fraction of the energy required to power a traditional set up”…

    Swiss tech startup FinalSpark is now selling access to biocomputers that combine up to four tiny lab-grown human brains with silicon chips.

    This new bioprocessing platform, called the Neuroplatform, uses small versions of human brains to do computer work instead of silicon chips. The company says it can fit 16 of these mini-brains onto the Neuroplatform and use a fraction of the energy required to power a traditional set up.

    The platform, currently adopted by nine institutions, integrates hardware, software and biology to construct a processing system that is energy-efficient and high-performing.

    This “breakthrough” is being hailed as a way to save a gigantic amount of energy.

    But what about the lab-grown human brains that are being enslaved to run the Neuroplatform?

    Each of the 16 mini-brains is made up of approximately 10,000 living neurons, and they are kept alive by a “microfluidics system that supplies water and nutrients for the cells”…

    Rather than merely integrating biological concepts into computing, FinalSpark’s online platform ‘taps’ into spherical clusters of lab-grown human brain cells called organoids. A total of 16 organoids are housed within four arrays that connect to eight electrodes each and a microfluidics system that supplies water and nutrients for the cells.

    The approach, known as wetware computing, in this case harnesses researchers’ abilities to culture organoids in the lab, a fairly new technology that allows scientists to study what are essentially mini replicas of individual organs.

    During their short lives, the mini-brains are literally trained to perform certain tasks using a reward and punishment system…

    Researchers do this by training the organoids through a reward system. The organoids are rewarded with dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for pleasure (and addiction).

    Meanwhile, as “punishment,” the organoids are exposed to chaotic stimuli, such as irregular electrical activity.

    If the enslaved mini-brains do what they are supposed to do, they are rewarded with lots of pleasure.

    If the enslaved mini-brains do not do what they are supposed to do, they are hit with lots of “irregular electrical activity”.

    In other words, these miniature human brains are tortured until they learn to obey.

    Reading that should literally make you sick.

    What these scientists are doing is so incredibly evil.

    Final Spark claims that the miniature human brains use “a million times less power than their silicon counterparts”…

    Swiss technology firm Final Spark has successfully launched Neuroplatform, the world’s first bioprocessing platform where human brain organoids (lab-grown miniaturized versions of organs) perform computational tasks instead of silicon chips.

    The first such facility hosts the processing prowess of 16 brain organoids, which the company claims uses a million times less power than their silicon counterparts.

    Final Spark hopes that their new “technology” will become the primary energy source for the AI revolution.

    Because at this point training AI models uses a colossal amount of conventional energy…

    According to Final Spark’s estimates, training the popular large language model GPT-3 that powered ChatGPT in its initial days alone consumed 10 GWh of energy. This is a whopping 6,000 times more energy than an average European city consumes in an entire year.

    Replacing silicon chips with bioprocessors could lead to drastic energy savings. Final Spark allows research labs to experience the power of biological processors on the Neuroplatform.

    To a lot of people out there, this is going to sound really great.

    Final Spark insists that the processor that it has created will use a million times less energy compared to a normal silicon chip.

    There is just one enormous problem.

    The mini-brains keep dying and must be regularly replaced.

    At first they would die “in just a few hours”, but now they are apparently living for up to 100 days…

    Final Spark faced many challenges in its early years since the organoids would die in just a few hours. The company has worked on this shortcoming and improved its MEA systems to ensure that organoids live for 100 days.

    These “organoids” are literally worked to death.

    They are hooked up to electrodes and worked until they can work no more…

    Final Spark has made working these varied components possible through an innovative setup called Multi-Electrode Arrays (MEAs), where the three-dimensional masses of brain tissue are placed.

    Each MEA has four brain organoids that interface with eight electrodes. These electrodes perform the dual role of stimulating the organoids and recording the data they process.

    Data transfer is done through digital analog converters with a 16-bit resolution and a 30 kHz frequency. A microfluidic system provides life support for the MEAs, and cameras can monitor their overall operation.

    Have you ever seen “The Matrix”?

    I was reminded of that film as I researched all of this.

    Just like in that movie, human energy powers the entire system.

    And just like in that movie, those that power the system are enslaved.

    The creators of “the Neuroplatform” insist that this is perfectly okay because the mini-brains are not sentient beings.

    Whether that is true or not, what they are doing is still very wrong.

    Creating miniature human brains and using them to power a computer may be a way to save a lot of energy, but it also perfectly illustrates how far our society has fallen.

    We are crossing lines that should never be crossed, and eventually we will pay a very great price for the crimes that our scientists are committing.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack  newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 06/26/2024 – 02:00

  • Surgeon-General Declares Firearm-Violence Is An Urgent Public Health-Crisis
    Surgeon-General Declares Firearm-Violence Is An Urgent Public Health-Crisis

    Authored by Chase Smith via The Epoch Times,

    U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued the first-ever surgeon general’s advisory on firearm violence on June 25, saying that it poses an urgent threat to the nation’s health and well-being.

    The unprecedented advisory calls for a public health approach to address what Dr. Murthy describes as a “moral crisis” that demands immediate and decisive action.

    A surgeon general’s advisory is a public statement that calls the American people’s attention to urgent public health issues and is reserved for significant public health challenges that require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.

    “Today, for the first time in the history of our office, I am issuing a Surgeon General’s Advisory on firearm violence,” Dr. Murthy said in a video statement.

    “It outlines the urgent threat firearm violence poses to the health and well-being of our country. As a doctor, I’ve seen the consequences of firearm violence up close and the lives of the patients that cared for over the years. These are moms and dads, sons and daughters, all of whom were robbed of their physical and mental health by senseless acts of violence.”

    The announcement on firearms comes a little over a week after the surgeon general called for a warning label to be placed on social media platforms, stating the potential mental health harms for children using them.

    Opponents of the action argue that the surgeon general’s advisory could potentially infringe on Second Amendment rights if enforced improperly, while proponents say it could have a similar impact on public policy and perception as similar advisories, such as those on the dangers of smoking.

    Rise in Firearm-related Injuries

    Dr. Murthy’s announcement included statistics and personal experiences. According to the advisory, firearm-related injuries have become the leading cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents, surpassing motor vehicle crashes, cancer, and drug overdoses.

    In 2022 alone, 48,204 people died from firearm-related injuries, marking a significant increase compared to previous years, according to the advisory.

    “Fifty-four percent of adults in America report that they or family members have experienced a firearm-related incident, whether they’ve been personally threatened with or injured by a firearm, lost a family member, witnessed a shooting, or shot a firearm in self-defense,” Dr. Murthy said.

    The advisory states that black individuals suffer the highest rates of firearm homicides, while suicide rates are highest among veterans, older white individuals, and younger American Indian or Alaska Native people.

    “What is especially devastating is how this has affected our children,” Dr. Murthy said.

    Dr. Murthy shared his personal experiences as a doctor, recounting the stories of patients and families affected.

    “I’ve sat with parents who’ve lost their child to firearm violence. I’ve listened to their stories and felt their pain as they describe the holes in their hearts,” he said. “As a father, I know a parent’s worst nightmare is to lose a child, to feel like you can’t protect your child from harm.”

    Criticism of Policy

    Second Amendment advocates with The Heller Foundation have voiced strong criticisms of the approach by America’s chief public health figure.

    Kristie Tertel, national director of Legislative Policy for The Heller Foundation warns that the advisory could unlawfully infringe on Second Amendment rights.

    “The U.S. Surgeon General is using the guise of a ‘public health emergency’ as an unlawful and unconstitutional means of circumventing the Heller decision,” she told The Epoch Times.

    Ms. Tertel emphasizes that the Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller established a binding precedent affirming an individual’s right to possess firearms for self-defense.

    She noted Justice Scalia’s majority opinion which stated, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense.”

    She added her own personal experience where having a firearm would have helped her avoid being the victim of a crime.

    “A firearm is the great equalizer,” she told The Epoch Times. “I am Australian-American and thought guns were dumb—until I needed one. I have over 30 stalkers nationwide. My ex-boyfriend beat me into a coma seven times and left me for dead in a Baltimore dumpster. Two years ago I was brutally drugged and raped and we are now prosecuting him for attempted murder. Had I been armed and trained, it would have all been prevented.”

    Dick Heller, the lead plaintiff in the landmark DC v. Heller case and executive director of The Heller Foundation, also dismissed the advisory’s potential impact on the Second Amendment, suggesting that the real issue lies with criminal behavior, not firearms.

    “The only effect the advisory will have on the Second Amendment is the fake news trying to blame ‘helpless’ firearms for what people do,” he said in an interview with The Epoch Times. Heller argued that firearms themselves are incapable of committing crimes, which are actions performed by individuals, often criminals.

    “Life is simple, the only helpful use of an advisory would be to have the government keep the killer-animal-violent criminals out of society and locked up in a maximum security jail,” he said. “Of course, this will not happen under the current administration as it does not fit their ‘gun control’ agenda, painting the false picture of ‘It’s Guns Doing Bad Things.’”

    lan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation, echoed the focus on criminals themselves in an interview with The Epoch Times.

    “Criminals break laws. That’s why they’re called criminals,” he said.

    “When you have open borders and people coming in and committing violent acts all over the country, this is where your problems are.”

    Mr. Gottlieb also took issue with the data behind the Surgeon General’s action.

    “First of all, let me say that the data they’re using, saying gun violence is an ‘epidemic’, so to speak, is totally off base,” he asserted.

    “Quite honestly, that the Surgeon General is pushing this as a public health crisis really bothers me. Because it’s not a public health crisis. I mean, gun ownership is not a contagious disease.”

    Policy Support

    Proponents of the advisory argue however that the advisory and proposed actions of the Surgeon General are long overdue.

    The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence said the report comes weeks after their own advisory council called on such action from the Surgeon General and the White House.

    Brady’s Board Chair and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Joseph V Sakran, said in a statement after the announcement that will “create a seachange in the fight to free America from gun violence.”

    “Surgeon General reports are renowned publications that take an evidence-based approach to our nation’s most urgent public health issues. Seeing as firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and teens in the U.S., there’s arguably no public health issue that’s more urgent or that warrants the commission of a Surgeon General report more than gun violence,” Dr. Sakran said. “This advisory not only sounds the alarm for all Americans, but it signals there must be greater investments in research and violence prevention solutions.”

    He continued by noting how previous reports on public health issues such as the dangers of smoking ignited a slew of initiatives to tackle the issue and they hope the gun-related report will have the same impact.

    “As a survivor of gun violence and a trauma surgeon who treats firearm injuries, I am appreciative of both the Surgeon General and the Biden-Harris administration,” continued Sakran. “The best medical treatment is prevention and we are grateful for the advocates who have been calling for this report and the experts who set it into motion, we will finally turn the tides in the fight against gun violence.”

    Surgeon General’s Recommendations

    The surgeon general’s advisory lays out a comprehensive approach to address firearm violence as a public health crisis.

    Key strategies include implementing community violence prevention programs, enhancing firearm risk reduction strategies, improving access to mental health care, and expanding research funding to inform and evaluate prevention efforts.

    “Firearm violence is a public health crisis. Our failure to address it is a moral crisis,” Dr. Murthy said. “To protect the health and well-being of Americans, especially our children, we must now act with the clarity, courage, and urgency that this moment demands.”

    By adopting a public health approach, similar to those used for other significant health issues like tobacco use and motor vehicle safety, he argues the nation can work toward reducing the impact of firearm violence on communities and future generations.

    “Our children should not have to live in fear that they are going to get shot if they go to school,” Dr. Murthy said. “None of us should have to worry that going to the mall or concert, or house of worship means putting our lives at risk, or that we’ll get a call that a loved one in a moment of crisis has taken their own life with a firearm.”

    The Epoch Times has reached out to Second Amendment advocates and gun control supporters for comment.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 23:40

  • Attacks On 'Cheap Fakes' Extend Biden Administration’s War On Free Speech
    Attacks On ‘Cheap Fakes’ Extend Biden Administration’s War On Free Speech

    Authored by Kenin M. Spivak via RealClearPolitics,

    There were two astonishing developments this week in the Biden administration’s continuing attack on free speech. First, just days ahead of the Supreme Court’s decision on whether to uphold the Fifth Circuit’s injunction against the administration’s extensive censorship enterprise, a second White House press secretary strongly encouraged the media to chill political debate. Second, Karine Jean-Pierre was masterful in her delivery of the new Biden attack line on “cheap fakes.”

    To set the stage: last year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a federal district court’s finding that the evidence likely established that the Biden Administration, including then spokesperson Jen Psaki, had engaged in a broad attack on free speech in violation of the First Amendment. It issued an injunction prohibiting the White House and other federal agencies from taking “actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce… social-media content containing protected free speech.”

    The government appealed to the Supreme Court, which stayed enforcement of the injunction, pending its review. The Court heard oral argument in March. The administration might prevail, despite browbeating social media into blocking core political speech, including criticism of Biden, humor, and discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop. Yes, that same laptop the Justice Department and FBI just admitted were legitimate and tamper-free. A decision is expected within 10 days.

    Now, KJP and the administration are doubling down. Attacking a new category of “cheap fake” videos, KJP blasted the media for publishing unaltered video of the president’s frailties. Her objection appears to be that by presenting information about the president out of the context preferred by the administration, this video is, in effect, fake. See here.

    While the administration was unclear about the missing context, I infer that it prefers a focus on the presumed majority of the president’s 10 AM to 4 pm, Monday-to-Friday workday during which he is not frozen, wandering aimlessly, mumbling incoherently, or blanking out. I understand that preference, but it is unseemly, and depending on next steps, may be unconstitutional, for a government official, speaking from the White House, to seek to chill free speech.

    KJP claimed these videos are “misleading,” “manipulated” and “deep fakes.” A deep fake is false. But, what KJP really means is to falsely allege that the videos are out of context. As such, her attack has all the earmarks of the administration’s censorship campaign against “malinformation.” The administration defines three categories of speech it asserts should be censored, misinformation and disinformation, which include falsehoods, and “malinformation,” which is used out of context, specifically, truthful information that does not have a progressive spin.

    Aside from the misinformation in KJP’s attack – the videos presented by mainstream media and respected conservative online publications are revealing, unedited windows into a physically and cognitively impaired president; they are neither out of a context necessary to understand what we are seeing, nor manipulated. Regardless, the White House press secretary (as contrasted to a campaign spokesperson), has no business demanding censorship of videos that paint the president in a bad light. Actions like this led two federal courts to issue injunctions against the White House.

    The Supreme Court explained in W. Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette (1943) that “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.” In Ashcroft v. ACLU (2002), the Court declared that with few exceptions, “the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.”

    Labeling speech as “misinformation” does not strip it of protection. In United States v. Alvarez (2012), Justice Anthony Kennedy explained that even “false statements” may not be censored, writing “some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views….Our constitutional tradition stands against the idea that we need Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.”

    Speaking directly to KJP’s demands, Justice Kennedy added: “The mere potential for the exercise of that [censorship] power casts… a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are to remain a foundation of our freedom….The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed, the enlightened; to the straight-out lie, the simple truth…Society has the right and civic duty to engage in open, dynamic, rational discourse. These ends are not well served when the government seeks to orchestrate public discussion through content-based mandates.”

    It is irrelevant that the publishers or social media companies will be the instrument of suppression. As Justice Clarence Thomas summarized in 2021, “The government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly.”

    The administration is afraid that voters will learn the truth. It is now up to a free media and the Republican candidate for president to make certain that voters know how to apply that fear.

    Kenin M. Spivak is founder and chairman of SMI Group LLC, an international consulting firm and investment bank. He is the author of fiction and non-fiction books and a frequent speaker and contributor to media, including The American Mind, National Review, the National Association of Scholars, television, radio and podcasts. He received his A.B., M.B.A., and J.D. from Columbia University.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 23:20

  • Supreme Court Turns Away COVID-19 Vaccine Appeals
    Supreme Court Turns Away COVID-19 Vaccine Appeals

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    U.S. Supreme Court justices on June 24 rejected appeals brought over COVID-19 vaccines by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), a nonprofit founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate running for president.

    A nurse administers a pediatric dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to a girl in Los Angeles on Jan. 19, 2022. (ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

    The nation’s top court rejected an appeal seeking to overturn lower court rulings that found that CHD and its members lacked standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over its emergency authorizations of COVID-19 vaccines for minors.

    The justices also rebuffed another CHD appeal in a case that challenged the COVID-19 vaccine mandate imposed on students at Rutgers University, a public college in New Jersey.

    The Supreme Court did not comment on either denial. It included them in a lengthy list dealing with dozens of cases.

    “Disappointing that the courts are closed to FDA fraud harming millions of Americans,” Robert Barnes, an attorney representing CHD in the FDA case, told The Epoch Times in an email.

    He called for Congress to pass reforms.

    Julio Gomez, an attorney representing CHD in the Rutgers case, told The Epoch Times in an email that the Supreme Court’s denials marked a sad day because clarity is needed on vaccines and the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, which upheld a city’s law requiring vaccination against smallpox.

    Mr. Gomez pointed to a recent federal appeals court ruling that determined that Jacobson did not apply to a case filed against a vaccine mandate in California because plaintiffs had produced evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent the spread of COVID-19.

    Lawyers for Rutgers and the government did not return requests for comment.

    In the FDA case, CHD and parents in Texas and Florida argued that the regulatory agency cleared COVID-19 vaccines under emergency authorization despite COVID-19 posing less risk than influenza to children and without adequate clinical testing. The FDA also wrongly promoted the vaccines, the plaintiffs alleged.

    U.S. District Judge Alan Albright tossed out the lawsuit in 2023, finding that CHD and the parents did not meet the requirements for standing, or the ability to sue over the actions, under Article III of the U.S. Constitution.

    While the parents said their children were at risk of being vaccinated by other people, they did not show that they faced imminent harm because of the FDA issuing emergency authorization for COVID-19 vaccines, the judge said. Imminent harm is one requirement for standing.

    The judge also said CHD had not shown that its resources were drained in responding to the FDA’s conduct and that it was airing a “generalized grievance,” which is not allowed under Supreme Court precedent.

    A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in January upheld the ruling.

    “Plaintiffs contend that the injury-in-fact element is satisfied because a third party might vaccinate their children over their objections, and that such vaccine could allegedly injure them and their children,” the panel stated. “Be that as it may, we agree with the district court that Plaintiffs fail to demonstrate an injury in fact because the alleged injury is neither concrete nor imminent.”

    Mr. Barnes had urged the Supreme Court to look at the case.

    “Can no one sue the FDA? Is that what Article III means?” he wrote in a filing

    Government lawyers waived their right to file a brief to the court.

    In the case against Rutgers, CHD and some of its members said the vaccine mandate was unconstitutional in part because the Constitution’s due process clause enables people to refuse medical treatment.

    U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi ruled against the plaintiffs in 2022, finding that Rutgers mandated vaccination as part of a legitimate goal of protecting the school community from COVID-19 and that the students either brought claims that had become moot because they were granted religious exemptions to the mandate or failed to state a claim.

    A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld the decision in February.

    In a filing to the Supreme Court, lawyers for CHD said the lower courts erred and that the justices should intervene.

    “If government is allowed to mandate experimental vaccines that do not prevent transmission against a person’s right to freely exercise informed consent, then COVID-19 will have eroded one of our most basic liberties—the right to refuse a medical experiment,” they wrote.

    Rutgers declined to file a brief with the court.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 23:00

  • 'Squad'-Member Jamaal Bowman Loses Primary Race To Moderate
    ‘Squad’-Member Jamaal Bowman Loses Primary Race To Moderate

    So much for “showing f**king AIPAC the power of the mother-f**king South Bronx”…

    Fire alarm specialist Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York just became the first member of the far-left ‘Squad’ to be unseated as he lost his primary battle to ‘moderate’ Westchester County executive George Latimer.

    Mr. Latimer leads Mr. Bowman 54.5 percent to 45.5 percentage points, with 53 percent reporting.

    The Associated Press called the race at 9:38 p.m ET.

    The two-term congressman is also the first Democratic incumbent to lose their primary this year, capping off a contest that laid bare divisions within the Democratic party that have ruptured over the Israel-Hamas war.

    As The Epoch Times’ Michael Washburn reports, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a major pro-Israel group, emerges as another winner from the race after it poured $14 million in ads to boost Mr. Latimer, helping to make this primary the most expensive House race ever, according to ad tracker AdImpact.

    Mr. Bowman’s District 16, which covers the northern Bronx and Westchester County, is solidly blue, so Mr. Latimer is likely to win the seat in November.

    Bowman’s Two Terms

    Washburn goes on to point out that, in 2020, Mr. Bowman unseated longtime incumbent Democrat Rep. Eliot Engel in the primary and then easily crushed his Republican challenger in the fall general election. Mr. Bowman won a second term in 2022, during which he consolidated his reputation as one of the most outspokenly progressive members of the Squad, with a message of antiracism, social justice, and economic equity.

    In the race that just concluded, he enjoyed the endorsement of fellow Squad members such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Rep. Cori Bush (R-Mo.), along with powerful Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.).

    Mr. Bowman has courted controversy over his staunch pro-Palestinian stance, and by calling accounts of the sexual abuse of Israeli hostages “propaganda,” for which he later apologized.

    Last year, he also pulled a fire alarm inside a congressional building during a House vote, for which he pled guilty to misdemeanor charges. He maintains it was an accident.

    Middle East in Focus

    The congressman’s defeat is consistent with predictions in the run-up to the June 25 election from pollsters, as well as establishment Democrats.

    FiveThirtyEight polls gave Mr. Latimer double-digit leads, while prominent Democrats, ranging from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to former state Gov. Andrew Cuomo, had signaled their support for the challenger, who enjoys a reputation of being more in touch with the mainstream sentiment on the Gaza conflict and support for Israel’s war on Hamas.

    “The message is clear: antisemitism in any and all forms will not be tolerated in New York. And you can’t call yourself a progressive without making progress,” Mr. Cuomo wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on the morning of June 25, predicting Mr. Bowman’s defeat.

    David Carlucci, a former New York state senator who ran in the District 17 primary, north of District 16, in 2020, and who worked for Mr. Engel two decades ago, acknowledged that many voters in Tuesday’s election considered first and foremost where the two candidates stood on Middle East policy.

    “The contrast between Latimer’s pro-Israel stance and Bowman’s more critical perspective on U.S.-Israel relations has sharpened the divide among voters with strong opinions on this issue, and has been front and center in this race,” Mr. Carlucci told The Epoch Times.

    Democratic candidate for New York’s 16th District George Latimer speaks during a press conference at the Mount Vernon Democratic headquarters on June 24, 2024, in Mount Vernon, N.Y. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

    At the same time, some voters made choices based on Rep. Bowman’s and Mr. Latimer’s respective positions on such issues as criminal justice reform, policing and public safety, climate action, and environmental sustainability, Mr. Carlucci said.

    Hence, while the Middle East loomed large in this race, many voters’ decisions signify a wide schism between the radical and centrist factions of the Democratic Party, a divide that could grow still further in the months and years to come, he observed.

    “This race could reflect broader national trends within the Democratic Party, regarding its diverse opinions and large tent,” he said.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 22:40

  • Is The Global Inflationary Depression Already Here?
    Is The Global Inflationary Depression Already Here?

    Authored by Peter St. Onge and Jeffrey A. Tucker via the Brownstone Institute,

    There was an oblique message buried in a New York Times story on the growing crisis in commercial real estate in cities. Yes, this is exactly the kind of article that people pass over because it seems like it doesn’t have broad application. In fact, it does. It affects the core of issues like our city skylines, how we think about urbanism and progress, where we vacation and work, and whether the big cities are drivers or drains on national productivity. 

    The note mentions the “broader distress brewing in the commercial real estate market, which is hurting from the twin punches of high interest rates, which make it harder to refinance loans, and low occupancy rates for office buildings — an outcome of the pandemic.”

    We are used to this kind of language blaming the pandemic for the results of lockdowns. Of course, it was a man-made decision to turn a respiratory virus into an excuse to shut down the world. The lockdowns blew up all economic data, generating seesawing graphs on every indicator never seen in industrial history. They also made before/after comparison extremely difficult.

    The consequences will echo long into the future. The high interest rates are a result of trying to slow down the money spigot unleashed in March 2020, in which more than $6 trillion in new cash appeared out of nowhere and was distributed as if by helicopter. 

    What did the money injection do? It generated inflation. How much? Sadly, we do not know. The Bureau of Labor Statistics simply cannot keep up, partially because the Consumer Price Index does not calculate the following: interest on anything, taxes, housing, health insurance (accurately), homeowners insurance, car insurance, government services like public schools, shrinkflation, quality declines, substitutions due to price, or additional service fees. 

    That’s a major part of what has gone up, which is why data on particular industries shows a huge gap (groceries up 35% over four years) and why ShadowStats estimates inflation in double digits two years running, having peaked at 17%. Just adding in interest, a paper from NBER estimates, takes 2023 inflation to 19%.

    Various studies have shown that since 2019 fast food prices — a gold standard in financial markets for measuring true inflation — have outpaced official CPI by between 25% and 50%.

    Getting the inflation data wrong is only the start of the problem. We are lucky if any government data even adjusts for the wrong numbers. Consider retail sales as just one example. Let’s say you bought a hamburger last year for $10 and you bought one this week for $15. Would you say that your retail spending is up 50%? No, you just spent more on the same thing. Well, guess what? All retail sales are calculated this way. 

    It’s the same with factory orders. You have to do the inflation adjustments yourself. Even using conventional data, which are wildly underestimated, wipes out all gains of the last several years. EJ Antoni is one of the few economists actually keeping up with this stuff, and he produces the following two charts. 

    As EJ writes: “This is factory orders before and after adjusting for inflation: what looks like a 21.1% increase from Jan ’21 to Mar ’24 is only a 1.8% increase – the rest is just higher prices, not more physical stuff; worse yet, real orders are down 6.9% since their highwater mark in June ’22.”

    Imagine the same charts but with more realistic adjustments. Are you getting the picture? The mainstream data being dished out daily by the business press is fake. And imagine the same charts above redone with inflation in the double digits as it should be. We’ve got a serious problem. 

    The problems with the employment data are getting to be more well-known. Essentially, the establishment data that is normally reported is double-counting or just plain inaccurate, and there is a huge divergence with the other method of counting jobs via household surveys. EJ again offers this look. 

    In addition, neither worker/population ratios nor the labor participation rate are back to pre-lockdown levels. 

    Now consider GDP. In the old formula hammered out in the 1930s, government spending adds to the GDP while cuts subtract from it, just as exports add and imports subtract. Why? It’s an old theory rooted in a kind of Keynesian/mercantilism that no one seems ever to change. But the bias is profound these days with explosive government spending. 

    To calculate whether and to what extent we are in recession, we look not at nominal GDP but real GDP; that is, adjusted for inflation. Two down quarters are considered recessionary. What if we adjust pathetic and seriously mis-estimated output numbers by a realistic understanding of inflation over the last few years? 

    We don’t have the numbers but a back-of-the-envelope suggests that we never left the recession of March 2020 and that everything has been getting gradually worse. 

    That appears to fit with every single consumer sentiment survey. It seems likely that people themselves are better observers of reality than government data collectors and statisticians. 

    So far, we’ve dealt briefly with inflation, output, sales, and output, and find that none of the official data is reliable. One mistake bleeds to others, such as adjusting output for inflation or adjusting sales for increased prices. The jobs data is particularly problematic because of the problem of double-counting. 

    What to know about household finance? The flipping of savings rates and credit card debt tell the story. 

    When you add it all up, you get a strange sense that nothing we are being told is real. According to official data, the dollar has lost about 23 cents in purchasing power over the last four years. Absolutely no one believes this. Depending on what you actually spend money on, the real answer is closer to 35 cents or 50 cents or even 75 cents…or more. We do not know what we cannot know. 

    We are left to speculate. And this problem is combined with the reality that this is not just a US problem. The increase in inflation and the decline in output is truly global. We might call this an inflationary recession or high inflationary depression, all over the world.  

    Consider that most economic models used through the 1970s, and still today, postulate that there is a forever tradeoff between output (with employment as a proxy) and inflation, such that when one is up, the other is down (Phillips curve). 

    Now we face a situation where the jobs data are profoundly affected by bad surveys and labor dropouts, output data is distorted by history-making levels of government spending and debt, and no one is even trying anymore to provide a realistic accounting of inflation. 

    What the heck is really going on? We live in data-obsessed times with seemingly magical abilities to know and calculate everything. And yet even now, we seem to be more blind than ever before. The difference is that nowadays, we are supposed to trust and rely on data that no one even believes is real. 

    Going back to that commercial real estate crisis, for the New York Times story, the large banks would not even talk to the reporters doing the story. That should tell you something.

    We live with a don’t-ask-don’t-tell economy. No one wants to say hyperinflation. No one wants to say economic depression. Above all else, never admit the truth: the turning point in our lives and the precipitating event to the whole calamity for the world were the lockdowns themselves. All else follows. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 22:20

  • Federal Judges Block Parts Of Student Loan Repayment Plan
    Federal Judges Block Parts Of Student Loan Repayment Plan

    Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Federal judges in Missouri and Kansas issued separate rulings on June 24 blocking key sections of the Biden administration’s Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program, which is designed to lower student loan payments and forgive debts.

    President Joe Biden speaks in Washington, on April 10, 2024. (Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times)

    A new version of the program that would reduce payments and shorten maximum repayment periods was set to take effect in July.

    U.S. District Judge Michael Crabtree for the District of Kansas ruled that the Republican states were likely to succeed in their claim that the department lacked explicit congressional authority to enact this portion of the program.

    “Defendants have offered colorable, plausible interpretations of the Higher Education Act that could authorize the SAVE Plan, but those interpretations fall short of clear congressional authorization,” Judge Crabtree, who was appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote on Monday.

    However, he declined to block the program entirely, expressing concerns about the practicality of reversing parts of the plan that had already been implemented. He also said that Republicans’ delay in filing their lawsuits undermined their arguments that there was an immediate need to halt the entire program.

    The ruling noted the judge’s reluctance to issue a nationwide injunction.

    In a separate decision on the same day, U.S. District Judge Judge John Ross for the Eastern District of Missouri, also a President Obama appointee, blocked the department from forgiving “any further loan[s]” under SAVE until he decides the full case. His order said that such actions would likely strip state loan operators of revenue.

    Judge Ross also suggested that the SAVE program might have exceeded the authority of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and that Missouri would likely be harmed by the program.

    Attorneys General Welcome Rulings

    Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who spearheaded one of the legal challenges, issued a statement celebrating the ruling as a victory.

    “As the court correctly held, whether to forgive billions of dollars of student debt is a major question that only Congress can answer,” he said. “This is not only unconstitutional, it’s unfair. Blue collar Kansas workers who didn’t go to college shouldn’t have to pay off the student loans of New Yorkers with gender studies degrees.”

    The Kansas challenge was supported by 11 other Republican states. Of these 12 states, only four—Alaska, Texas, and South Carolina—were found to have standing.

    Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey also hailed the ruling, calling it a “huge win for the rule of law and Americans who would have been forced ”to pay off someone else’s debt.”

    “Only Congress has the power of the purse, not the President,” Mr. Bailey said in a statement on Monday.

    SAVE Plan

    The SAVE plan, a reworking of a previous plan, aims to halve the required payment on student loans from 10 percent to 5 percent of discretionary income and shorten the repayment period for those with lower initial loan balances. This means that borrowers with smaller loan balances could have their loans forgiven in just 10 years instead of 20.

    Some parts of the plan have already been implemented, resulting in the forgiveness of loan balances for hundreds of thousands of individuals.

    President Biden created the SAVE program after the Supreme Court rejected his plan to forgive broader debts. Following that decision, the Education Department pursued another way to provide debt relief under the Higher Education Act.

    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in April that the plans would “fully eliminate” accrued interest for 23 million borrowers, cancel the full amount of debt for over 4 million borrowers, and give over 10 million borrowers around $5,000 in debt relief or more.

    25 million borrowers owe more than the amount they originally borrowed due to accruing interest. Currently, nearly 8 million people are enrolled in the program, according to the White House.

    The Biden administration, as of April, touted that it had provided around $146 billion in student debt relief via more than two dozen executive actions.

    Normally, federal student loan borrowers must repay their debts for around 20 years to qualify for forgiveness under the Education Department’s income-driven repayment plans. The SAVE plan offered a shorter timeline for forgiveness, canceling debt after just 10 years for borrowers who initially took out less than $12,000.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 22:00

  • Is China Hiding How Much Gold It Really Has?
    Is China Hiding How Much Gold It Really Has?

    Authored by Mike Maharrey via Money Metals,

    A few weeks ago, gold sold off on news that the People’s Bank of China didn’t add any gold to its reserves in May.

    At the time, I called it a “kneejerk reaction,” and said the news wasn’t “a particularly good reason to sell gold.”

    “The fact the PBoC didn’t buy any gold in May is certainly interesting, but it hardly counts as earthshaking news. Standing pat for one month doesn’t mean “China has stopped buying gold” as some news outlets framed it.” 

    Before the news, China had bought gold for 18 straight months. It ranked as the biggest central bank gold buyer in 2023. Officially, the People’s Bank of China added more than 300 tons of gold to its reserves during its buying spree.

    “Officially” is the keyword. 

    Many analysts have long thought that China has far more gold than it officially reports. 

    Jim Rickards pointed out on Mises Daily back in 2015 that many analysts believe that China keeps several thousand tons of gold “off the books” in a separate entity called the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE). 

    The Official Chinese Gold Numbers Don’t Add Up 

    Chen Long is the founder and lead economist for Plenum. He’s also a respected journalist who writes extensively about China’s economy, financial markets, and government policies. Long recently wrote a piece for ThinkChina, a Singapore-based news site, after he ran the numbers on China’s gold holdings.

    He found the official numbers simply don’t line up.  

    Long starts by pointing out that Chinese central bank gold purchases are a drop in the bucket compared to the country’s gold imports. The country imported over 1,400 tons of gold in 2023. This is despite the fact that China ranks as the world’s largest gold producer. Chinese mines dug up 375 tons of gold in 2023. 

    In other words, there is a lot of gold flowing into China, and the country exports very little.

    Only a handful of commercial banks hold licenses to import gold due to the PBoC’s tight regulation of the market. According to Long, 17 banks, including four state-owned institutions, reported gold holding of about 1,016 tons as of the end of 2023. 

    Interestingly, gold holdings by these commercial banks have been falling since around 2016.

    Meanwhile, many commercial banks in China no longer sell gold to the public due to a commodities scandal a few years ago.

    When you dig into the numbers, total official gold holdings by the PBoC, retail buyers, and the big commercial banks only rose by 431 tons last year. Total gold imports and production came in at 1,775 tons. That’s a gap of more than 1,300 tons.

    Over the last two years, there have been about 2,700 tons of gold that is unaccounted for.

    So, where in the world did that gold go?

    Long said, “It is common to see gaps between these figures, but they are usually within a few hundred tons at most. Such a huge gap is rare.”  

    Where Is the Chinese Gold?

    How do we account for this “missing” gold?

    Long offered three possibilities.

    Number one is that the People’s Bank of China bought more gold than it reported.

    “If the PBoC has massively increased its gold position, it may want to withhold a full disclosure in order to avoid shocking the market.”

    If all that missing gold is being held by the central bank, it would double its stated gold reserves to around 5,000 tons. 

    Long notes that the Chinese central bank has delayed reporting before. In June 2015, the PBoC disclosed a one-off increase in gold reserves of 621 tons. It’s highly unlikely the central bank bought all that gold in a single month.

    A second possibility is China’s sovereign wealth fund holds some of that missing gold.

    A sovereign wealth fund is a state-owned investment fund that holds surplus government revenues.

    “After all, the sovereign wealth fund may not want to put all its money in U.S. dollars either, but the China Investment Corporation does not disclose how much gold it owns,” Long said.

    A third possibility is that other numbers have been fudged. Chinese commercial banks may have overstated the reduction in their gold holdings while household gold purchases were understated.

    “While the domestic banks have reported a big reduction of gold assets, some investors may have turned to the foreign banks who also have gold import licenses. They may have increased their gold holdings without making disclosures, although we doubt that such increases could completely offset the decline of gold holdings at the Chinese banks.”

    With the lack of transparency in China, we’ll probably never know exactly where the gold went.

    As Chris Powell recently wrote, “Mainstream financial news organizations don’t yet seem to notice that official statements about gold reserves are, to put it politely, not reliable.”

    That means we’ll never know for sure just how much gold the Chinese government and its central bank hold. But you don’t have to be a wild conspiracy theorist to think they probably have far more gold than they’re letting on.

    Mike Maharrey is a journalist and market analyst for MoneyMetals.com with over a decade of experience in precious metals. He holds a BS in accounting from the University of Kentucky and a BA in journalism from the University of South Florida.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 21:40

  • Oakland Mayor Raided By FBI Claims She Is Being Targeted By 'Radical Right Wing Forces'
    Oakland Mayor Raided By FBI Claims She Is Being Targeted By ‘Radical Right Wing Forces’

    Oakland, California Mayor Sheng Thao is well known for her woke activist policies; policies that have led to a severe spike in property crime (17%) and violent crime (21%) within the first year of her administration.  The problem has become so overwhelming that Thao and Alameda District Attorney Pamela Price are both facing potential recall.  One has to wonder if leftist politicians are so lax on criminal prosecution because they are engaging in the same kind of activities?

    An FBI raid on Sheng Thao’s residence last week may help to answer this question.  Though she has not yet been arrested or charged, accusations indicate a corrupt web of illegal campaign finance and “pay to play” favors for special donors.  The investigation is allegedly focused on Thao’s boyfriend, Andre Jones, as well as specific donors. 

    Also targeted in the raids were two other houses in the Oakland Hills and a business office along the city’s waterfront. All three are tied to Andy Duong and his father, David, who owns the Oakland-based company California Waste Solutions, the city’s curbside recycling provider.

    Authorities claimed the Duongs spent years illegally funneling thousands of dollars using third-party entities to disguise political contributions and flout campaign-donation limits to several City Council candidates, including Thao.  In one instance, the Fair Political Practices Commission cited an internal email for Thao’s campaign in 2018 that laid out exactly how important the Duongs’ donations could be for political newcomers, such as herself.

    In it, a staff member asked, “Have you spoke with Andy Duong about $20,000 by June 30th? let me know when I should follow up with him, please,” a complaint alleges.  Within a week, Thao’s campaign received 14 contributions — seven of which were believed to have come from Duong himself through his network of “straw donors,” the complaint alleges.

    Campaign finance corruption and donations for favors aside, Mayor Thao’s dismal management of Oakland could also be considered a crime.  The criminal investigation is simply a reflection of a much deeper problem.  However, as we all know, leftists never admit fault they only double down.  In a surreal press conference replete with tears, Thao declared her innocence while hinting at an insidious conspiracy of unnamed ‘radical right wing forces’ determined to sabotage her activist reforms and maintain their power within the greater Oakland area.

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    So, now the radical right wing controls FBI investigations in Oakland, California?  Accusations of “lawfare” only make sense when the other side has control over the alphabet agency apparatus.  Thao seems to be confused about which party has the most influence over the FBI right now. 

    Thao asserted that the FBI raid never would have happened ‘if she was rich’ and that the agency should have given her a warning.  The FBI is not required to give any mayor a heads up about potential raids on their home or office. Thao’s communications chief has resigned in the wake of the investigation. 

    Her attorney, Tony Brass, has also parted ways with the mayor, noting that he was not informed of Thao’s press conference plans, nor did he advise her on interactions with the press.  Thao claims Brass did not leave and was instead “replaced.”  Brass stated that Thao is lying and that he received no communication from her about changing attorneys.  

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 21:20

  • IRS Hammers US Taxpayers With Record Penalties In FY-23
    IRS Hammers US Taxpayers With Record Penalties In FY-23

    Authored by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics,

    The government has become desperate for funding, seeking out money from their own citizens through taxation.

    Not only have they raised taxes for every bracket, but the IRS managed to squeeze more money out of Americans through audits for fiscal year 2023 than any year on record. In fact, the IRS shook down Americans for an additional $7 billion in tax penalties alone – a 300% increase from FY22.

    These funds are mere chump change as we send out far more than this to Ukraine on a regular basis. The people do not vote on how their taxes are frivolously spent, but they are responsible for the government’s spending. Biden claimed he would target the hated “rich” but reports have found that the majority of those targeted were gig economy workers and freelancers. Biden has done everything in his power to kill the gig economy. The IRS hates the gig economy because they believe those workers are stealing from Uncle Sam.

    The average penalty for underestimating taxes was around $150 in 2022. This year, the average penalty was around $500.

    The IRS also ramped up its campaign to fine anyone who missed the tax deadline. Late payment fees increased to $485 or 100% of the tax owed if that amount is less. Then there is the question of “How much do I owe?” The tax system in the US is so complex that there are careers dedicated toward figuring out that predicament. Every citizen and business would prefer if the government simply told them how much they needed to pay. Instead, they deliberately make the tax code vague in order to penalize everyone and anyone.

    The penalty for underpayment rose in the past year from 3% to 8%. There is no grace for those who cannot afford to pay their due amount as the IRS charges interest on all payments that are not made in full. Those who intentionally disregarded their payments faced a $630 penalty or 10% of the amount owed.

    Yet, the Biden Administration wants you to believe they care deeply about the working man. Biden wanted to hire far more IRS agents this year to raise these penalties. Public confidence dissolves when the state begins to hunt their own citizens for taxes. The government becomes the clear enemy. We have seen it happen countless times throughout history when citizens flee and later protest or revolt over absurdly high taxes. The fact that the Biden Administration has been using US taxpayer funds for foreign causes only adds insult to injury.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 21:00

  • Holding The Line: Texas Rangers Sole MLB Team Without 'Pride Night'
    Holding The Line: Texas Rangers Sole MLB Team Without ‘Pride Night’

    Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers may be four games under .500, but they’re high atop the league in refusing to bow to America’s woke overlords: Extending an enviable several-year record, they’re once again the only MLB team that won’t host an LGBT “Pride Night” in 2024. The practice was supposedly pioneered by the Chicago Cubs, who first came out with it in 2001.

    Rangers majority owner Ray Davis (left) accepting the MLB Commissioner’s Trophy in 2023. The billionaire built his fortune in the natural gas business. (Sean M. Haffey/Getty via Forbes)

    When asked the Rangers to justify their position, the team points to its history of sending volunteers to the Resource Center, an organization that serves the “LGBTQIA+ and HIV/AIDS communities in Dallas-Fort Worth.”  This week, responding to an inquiry from Associated Press, the Rangers said: 

    “Our longstanding commitment remains the same: To make everyone feel welcome and included in Rangers baseball — in our ballpark, at every game, and in all we do — for both our fans and our employees. We deliver on that promise across our many programs to have a positive impact across our entire community.”

    On Monday, former Texas Rangers pitcher Derek Holland applauded the team’s status as the league’s sole holdout against overlaying a night at the ballpark with a celebration of people’s varied sexual preferences. Holland, who was on the Rangers’ 2010 and 2011 World Series squads, responded to a tweeted report on the team’s unique “Pride Night” refusal with a GIF of the Texas Rangers mascot with the words “That’s a Rangers win.” 

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    When another Twitter user asked Holland why he “[felt] the need to go out of [his] way to put other people down,” Holland replied, “Why do we need to celebrate them choosing to be the way they are. Nobody cares if you’re gay or lesbian or whatever. Don’t need a whole month to celebrate. Have a day and move on.” Holland added that military service members and veterans — “real heroes!” — are more worthy of a month-long salute. 

    Meanwhile, Will Davis, who recently traveled 200 miles from Marble Falls, Texas to see a game with his son’s youth team, spoke for many in endorsing the Rangers’ refusal to have Pride Night, telling AP: 

    “It’s a private organization. And if they don’t want to have it, I don’t think they should be forced to have it. In something like this, this is a way for people to go as a state. We don’t want the political stuff shoved down our throats one way or the other, left or right. We’re coming out here to have a good time with friends or family and let it be.”

    The LGBT crowd was already sensitive to the Rangers Pride-less status as the month began. Some were promptly triggered when the team chose the beginning of Pride month to rotate the slogan that appears in the banner atop the team’s official website. In a nod to its pursuit of back-to-back World Series titles, the website had used “Run It Back” for the past few months. As Pride month began, it changed to “Straight Up Texas.” 

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    The team insists the change to a slogan the team has used for four seasons was not meant to troll the Pride crowd or (God forbid) celebrate heterosexuality — without which there would be no humanity on Earth. “It certainly wasn’t done intentionally or to make some sort of statement,” an unidentified team executive told Inside the Rangers. “That’s ridiculous.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 20:40

  • Port Maintenance Drags Russia's Oil Shipments Down To Three-Month Low
    Port Maintenance Drags Russia’s Oil Shipments Down To Three-Month Low

    By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com

    Maintenance works at Russia’s busiest oil ports dragged down weekly crude oil shipments to the lowest level in over three months as the ports of Primorsk on the Baltic Sea and Kozmino in the Far East halted vessel departures for four days each in the week to June 23.

    Port of Kozmino

    Last week, Russian crude oil exports by sea fell by 660,000 barrels per day (bpd) from the previous week, to the lowest level in more than three months – 3.04 million bpd, vessel-tracking data monitored by Bloomberg showed on Tuesday.

    The four-week average exports also dropped, by around 45,000 bpd to 3.37 million bpd, according to the data reported by Bloomberg’s Julian Lee.

    In the previous week to June 16, before the port maintenance, Bloomberg’s data showed that Russia continued to raise its crude oil exports by sea for a second consecutive week despite promising to stick strictly to its OPEC+ output target in June.

    In the four weeks to June 16, Russian crude oil shipments jumped by some 80,000 bpd to 3.42 million bpd. The week to June 16 was the second consecutive week in which the four-week average of Russia’s crude export volumes increased compared to the prior four-week average.

    Russia’s crude exports hit the highest level in 11 months in the week to April 14, as export terminals likely shipped more crude that couldn’t be processed at refineries knocked offline by Ukrainian drone attacks.

    Between the middle of April and the beginning of June, crude flows out of Russia’s ports were trending down, according to the data analyzed by Bloomberg.

    But in June, seaborne crude exports started rising again, and the volumes have recovered about one-third of their recent decline.

    This came even as Russia’s Energy Ministry pledged earlier this month that Russia would reach its oil production quota in June after exceeding its target output under the OPEC+ deal in May.  

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 20:20

  • Reminder: The Insidious Propaganda Campaign To Shame America Into Jabbing Up
    Reminder: The Insidious Propaganda Campaign To Shame America Into Jabbing Up

    The top-down propaganda campaign to inject every American with experimental mRNA vaccines was truly unprecedented.

    It was a highly coordinated effort to shame and vilify those who were skeptical of taking a vaccine, that didn’t work, caused untold side-effects, and divided friends and families – all over a virus that kills less than 1% of those who get it (mostly the old, fat, and those with comorbidities).

    If you have 11 minutes to set aside, watch the below 2023 compilation from Matt Orfalea of politicians and talking heads using insidious tactics to help Pfizer and Moderna, and push Orwellian compliance tactics that demanded one thing: Obey or be outcast.

    Watch:

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 20:00

  • Rivian Soars 50% After $1 Billion Investment From Volkswagen, Record Shorts Squeezed
    Rivian Soars 50% After $1 Billion Investment From Volkswagen, Record Shorts Squeezed

    After soaring to a record high just days after its November ’21 IPO (at $78/share), the fate of EV maker Rivian had been a brutal one-way masterclass in disappointment after disappointment, with the price trading near record lows in recent months, and flirting with single digits, down 93% from the all time high of $172 hit in November 2021.

    So one can almost feel happy for the long-suffering RIVN longs who saw their stock price surge more than 50% after hours when Germany’s largest car company Volkswagen announced it would invest $5 billion to form a joint venture with Rivian, throwing a lifeline to the struggling startup and giving the German automaker access to the American EV company’s technology.

    As part of the investment, VW said it will invest $1 billion immediately in Rivian and an additional $4 billion over time. The new venture will be “equally controlled and owned” and aims to develop “next generation” battery-powered vehicles and software, VW and Rivian said in a joint statement..

    The strategic alliance provides the cash incinerating Rivian with a much-needed source of new capital after the company has struggled to ramp up production and deliveries of its electric pickup and SUV models. It comes ahead of Rivian’s previously-scheduled investor day on Thursday.  For VW, the German car giant gets access to the EV startup’s software and EV architecture after years struggling to roll out plug-in vehicles with efficiency and functionality on par with those from Tesla.

    As part of the deal, Volkswagen will take an initial $1 billion equity stake in Rivian through an unsecured convertible note that will exchange into Rivian shares on or after Dec. 1. That would make Volkswagen the company’s second largest shareholder after Amazon.com, which will remain Rivian’s largest investor with a 16% stake valued at nearly $2 billion as of Tuesday’s close (and $3 billion following news of the venture).

    VW will then invest an additional $2 billion in Rivian shares via two equal tranches in 2025 and 2026, and will put an additional $2 billion into the joint venture through a payment at the venture’s inception and a loan available in 2026.

    On a conference call, Rivian Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe said he and VW CEO Oliver Blume, shared an “immediate realization” the two were aligned on product strategy soon after they initially met. That led to conversations about working together, he said.

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    “Through our cooperation, we will bring the best solutions to our vehicles faster and at lower cost,” Blume said in the companies’ statement. “We are strengthening our technology profile and our competitiveness.”

    Rivian went public in November 2021 at the peak of enthusiasm for the speedy arrival of the EV future, seen as a potentially competitor to Tesla. Sure enough, an early rise in Rivian shares briefly gave it a market value exceeding that of Ford and General Motors, but since then, many of its fellow EV startups have fallen by the wayside as mainstream car buyers turned away from pricey EVs. Rivian has struggled to find a path to profitability and generate enough cash flow to fund its future.

    That said, one would not be shocked if today’s tie up ends up in flames similar to the catastrophic JV between GM and the fraud that was Tesla, where Mary Barra did precisely zero diligence before investing millions in the soon to be defunct company.  And indeed, Rivian has seen attempted partnerships with established automakers collapse before. In November 2021, it abandoned plans to jointly develop EVs with Ford, an early investor. And in December 2022, it shelved a deal to build electric vans with Mercedes-Benz AG.

    For VW, the German automotive giant gets access to the EV startup’s software and EV architecture after years struggling to roll out plug-in vehicles with efficiency and functionality on par with those from Tesla Inc.

    Both companies plan to introduce vehicles featuring technology created by the joint venture in the second half of this decade, according to the companies’ joint statement.

    Rivian stock exploded after hours, surging as much as 55%…

    … on what is as much a kneejerk response to the news, as an epic short squeeze. As we noted earlier, some 133 million RIVN shares are currently short, just shy of the all time high, and some 16.4% of the float.

    And if indeed Germany’s largest carmaker is aggressively expanding into EVs in the US, then is it time to look at downstream beneficiaries, where one name sticks out: with a record short interest of 112 million, or a whopping 28% of the float short, is Chargepoint, another name that has been largely left for dead (market cap of only $500 million), about to squeeze into the stratosphere next?

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 19:43

  • Trump Peace Plan Will Withhold Weapons From Zelensky Unless He Agrees To Negotiate
    Trump Peace Plan Will Withhold Weapons From Zelensky Unless He Agrees To Negotiate

    Details of a potential Trump peace plan for Ukraine have been revealed, according to a Tuesday Reuters report, which could be formally unveiled if he wins the November 5th presidential election. The plan centers on giving an ultimatum to Ukraine – that it will only receive more American weapons and defense aid if it agrees to enter peace talks with Moscow.

    The proposal has been presented to Trump by advisers on his national security team, retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, and Fred Fleitz. Both men had served as chiefs of staff Trump’s National Security Council during his first term in office. A key ‘controversial’ part of the plan is to freeze battle lines where they are during the progression of peace talks, something which is likely to be unpopular among Ukrainian and NATO officials.

    While the Zelensky government could face the withholding of badly needed Washington aid, Moscow would simultaneously be warned that the US would increase its support for Ukraine if Putin refuses to enter the negotiations. However, this point presents a possible incentive for both sides to simply keep refusing talks (and each side could simply keep blaming the other for lack of dialogue).

    Fleitz told Reuters that so far there’s been a favorable reaction after Trump was briefed on the plan:

    They have presented their strategy to Trump, and the Republican presidential candidate responded favorably, Fleitz added. “I’m not claiming he agreed with it or agreed with every word of it, but we were pleased to get the feedback we did,” he said.

    …The strategy outlined by Kellogg and Fleitz is the most detailed plan yet by associates of Trump, who has said he could quickly settle the war in Ukraine if he beats President Joe Biden in the Nov. 5 election, though he has not said how he would do that.

    The Trump campaign noted that nothing is official until it is issued from a designated campaign spokesperson.

    The Biden White House has repeatedly said that the ball is entirely in Kiev’s court. Only Ukrainian leadership can decide the when and where of ceasefire talks. Zelensky has repeatedly said he will not contemplate sitting at the table with Moscow representatives so long as Putin is in power. Tens of billions continue flowing into Kiev’s coffers from Western backers.

    Zelensky’s office has already reacted negatively to news of the potential Trump peace plan, with presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak saying Tuesday that freezing current battle lines would be “strange” given that Russia is the invader and illegal occupier of Ukraine territory.

    “Ukraine has an absolutely clear understanding and it is spelled out in the peace formula proposed by President (Volodymyr) Zelenskiy, it is clearly stated there – peace can only be fair and peace can only be based on international law,” he said to Reuters. Zelensky’s 10-point plan centers on Russian troops withdrawing from all Ukrainian territory before there can be peace. Putin has at the same time vowed to never give up the four annexed eastern territories which have since last year been declared absorbed into the Russian Federation.

    Last year Zelensky in a CNN interview posed the following: “We’re not ready [to give up territory to Russia]. But the question for Trump – or to someone else, maybe it’s not his idea – is ‘is the United States ready to give up territory after Putin has said he would use nuclear weapons?”

    Meanwhile, the Kremlin has reacted somewhat positively. “The value of any plan lies in the nuances and in taking into account the real state of affairs on the ground,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response. “President Putin has repeatedly said that Russia has been and remains open to negotiations, taking into account the real state of affairs on the ground,” he said.

    Back in April, Zelensky issued his own conditions in a Meet the Press appearance:

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    It appears the Trump campaign is fully aware of the general war weariness that long ago took hold of the American public and even much of Europe. Trump has previously vowed to kick-start negotiations ‘within 24 hours’ if he enters the White House again. He has accused Biden and his policy of simply fueling an endless war. According to more fresh statements from team Trump: 

    Fleitz said Ukraine need not formally cede territory to Russia under their plan. Still, he said, Ukraine was unlikely to regain effective control of all its territory in the near term.

    “Our concern is that this has become a war of attrition that’s going to kill a whole generation of young men,” he said.

    A lasting peace in Ukraine would require additional security guarantees for Ukraine, Kellogg and Fleitz said. Fleitz added that “arming Ukraine to the teeth” was likely to be a key element of that.

    “President Trump has repeatedly stated that a top priority in his second term will be to quickly negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war,” Trump spokesperson Cheung said.

    To be expected, the White House and the Biden campaign are already charging Trump with an unwillingness to ‘stand up’ to Putin. This will also likely be used as another talking point to claim that Trump is playing softball with Putin as he’s somehow ‘compromised’ (cue Russiagate etc…)

    And yet, for there to ever be peace, significant concessions will have to be made, something which the Biden administration has utterly failed in. Instead it has only continued to escalate with policies like greenlighting strikes inside Russian territory using American weapons.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 19:20

  • Netanyahu's Wife Accuses Army Leaders Of Planning Coup
    Netanyahu’s Wife Accuses Army Leaders Of Planning Coup

    Via The Cradle

    Sarah Netanyahu accused Israel’s army chiefs of seeking to carry out a coup against her husband, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Haaretz reported on Tuesday, based on leaked audio obtained by the newspaper.

    In a meeting last week with families of some of the captives held by Hamas in Gaza, Sarah Netanyahu stated several times in the tape that she has no confidence in the army’s senior officers. The families became upset by Mrs Netanyahu’s comments, saying the fate of their captive family members depended on the army.

    In response, Mrs Netanyahu clarified her comments. She said that her lack of confidence is not in the army as a whole but in its senior commanders. Haaretz adds that she “vehemently claimed that they are interested in carrying out a coup” and repeated the claim multiple times.

    The meeting was also attended by army officers, including Colonel (Ret.) Verda Pomerantz, formerly head of the casualty division, and Gal Hirsch, a former army commander tasked by the prime minister to coordinate the government’s effort to free the captives. Sarah’s statements were brought to the attention of senior officers in the army.

    The meeting took place a few days after the Prime Minister’s son, Yair Netanyahu, attacked the army chiefs as well, accusing them of treason.

    On Saturday, Yair shared a video in which Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, Shin Bet Chief Ronan Bar, and retired Army military intelligence chief Aharon Haleva were called “fatal failures” for not preventing the 7 October Hamas attack. 

    After that, Yair also posted on the social media site X, writing, “What are they (army chiefs) trying to hide? If there was no treason, why are they so afraid that external and independent parties will check what happened?”

    A statement issued by the prime minister’s office on behalf of Sarah Netanyahu said she had been “working on her own initiative for the families of the abducted, the bereaved families, the families of the murdered and all the circles of pain associated with this difficult war, and helps as much as she can.”

    The statement then called the leak of the audio a “heinous injustice. Despite the voices that try to harm her and loosen her hands, Mrs Netanyahu will continue her activities for those who were harmed in the war and prays for the speedy return home of all 120 abductees.”

    On 7 October, members of the Hamas wing, the Qassam Brigades, crossed through the Gaza border fence to attack Israeli military bases and settlements. In the process, they took some 240 Israeli soldiers and civilians as captives.

    Some captives were released in a temporary ceasefire deal in November, while many others have been killed by the same Israeli bombing of Gaza that has killed a reported over 37,000 Palestinians. It is estimated that 120 remain captives of Hamas and other groups such as Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

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    Roughly 1,200 Israelis were killed during the 7 October Hamas attack, known as Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Some were killed by Qassam fighters. Others were killed by Israeli forces, which responded to the attack using heavy weapons from helicopters, drones, and tanks.

    The Israeli army issued the Hannibal Directive, ordering its forces to kill Israelis to prevent them from being taken captive by Hamas. As a result, Israeli forces themselves may have killed many of the Israelis who died on 7 October.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 19:00

  • Shocking New Video Shows ATACMS Bomblets Raining Down On Russian Beachgoers
    Shocking New Video Shows ATACMS Bomblets Raining Down On Russian Beachgoers

    Unbelievable new footage has emerged of the Sunday Ukrainian missile strike on a busy Sevastopol, Crimea beach as tourists were lounging in the sun. 

    Russian authorities said that a missile launched from a US-supplied MGM-140 ATACMS system by Ukrainian forces exploded overhead and released bomblets across the area – in the water and on land – killing five and injuring 124 people, including children. The CCTV footage captures the moment when the missile’s submunitions rain down over the crowded beach, appearing to confirm Russia’s allegation that a cluster bomb warhead was used. Watch:

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    Hundreds of people can be seen fleeing for their lives, and some are still in the water, when the bomblets start to impact both the water and the beach. One bomblet is seen almost scoring a direct hit on the lifeguard stand.

    “According to latest reports, as a result of the shelling attack on Sevastopol by Ukrainian nationalists, 124 people, including 27 children, received wounds or injuries,” Russian health minister Alexey Kuznetsov had announced.

    Newsweek summarizes of Crimean official statements of the deadly attack:

    The event was caused by Russian air defenses shooting down a series of cluster warhead missiles, one of which altered course as a result. The Russian ministry of defense said that four out of the five missiles launched were shot down, adding: “Another missile, as a result of the impact of air defense systems at the final stage, deviated from the flight path with the warhead exploding in the air over the city.”

    “The detonation of the fragmentation warhead of the fifth American missile in the air led to numerous casualties among civilians in Sevastopol.”

    A Kremlin spokesman subsequently laid blame squarely on Washington: “The involvement of the United States, the direct involvement, as a result of which Russian civilians are killed, cannot be without consequences.”

    Stillframe: Daily Mail

    Mikhail Podoliak, a Ukrainian presidential spokesman downplayed the mass casualty event, saying that “civilian occupiers” should know better than to vacation on the Crimean peninsula, which Ukraine claims as its own.

    Commenting on the incident, Ron Paul has pointed out of Moscow, “They can’t not respond” at this moment of ultra-dangerous escalation.

    “What’s Russia going to do about this?” Paul asked in his latest Liberty Report. “Are they going to twiddle their thumbs and walk away? They might – for a day or two – ponder it, but there will be something that they’re going to do.”

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 18:40

  • FBI Wants 20 Years To Produce Records On Its Involvement W/ OKC Bombing
    FBI Wants 20 Years To Produce Records On Its Involvement W/ OKC Bombing

    Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

    It’s been about nine years since Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records about a CIA asset and FBI informant who helped fund the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as for records about a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.

    Aftermath of the OKC bombing. PHOTO: FBI

    Tired of waiting, Trentaudue sued the FBI over the matter in February, demanding the bureau to produce the 69,375 pages of documents that it’s holding. But now, the FBI wants to take another nearly 12 years to fork over those documents to him, which means that it would take at least 20 years for the bureau to comply with his initial FOIA request.

    Such a slow production rate is unacceptable, Trentadue said in a Tuesday court filing.

    “The FBI proposes to process these records/documents for release to Plaintiff in monthly increments of 500 pages over a period of 11.5 years!” he said.

    “If the Court accepts the FBI’s proposed snail-pace processing of these materials, Plaintiff will be close to 90-years of age when he finally receives all of them,” he said.

    “He has already waited almost a decade for these documents/records, with the FBI having made no effort during the interim to produce them, and should not have to wait another 11.5 years to receive them.”

    Trentadue has been suing the U.S. government for OKC bomb-related records for nearly 30 years, ever since his brother was murdered in a federal penitentiary. The complex story of how the death of Trentadue’s brother relates to the OKC bombing can be read in this Mother Jones article.

    Trentadue’s latest lawsuit seeks records on FBI informant and CIA asset Roger Moore (not the James Bond actor), and the bank-robbery gang, the Aryan Republican Army, which he says was an FBI front group.

    According to Trentadue’s lawsuit, Moore was an FBI informant as part of the bureau’s 1980s- and early 90s-era Operation Punchout, which was designed to identify and apprehend surplus dealers that bought and sold government property stolen from Department of Defense facilities in Utah.

    Furthermore, Moore build patrol boats for use by the US Navy in the Vietnam War, as well as speedboats for the CIA, according to Aberration in the Heartland of the Real—historian Wendy Painting’s PhD thesis-turned-book about OKC bomber Tim McVeigh.

    As for the Aryan Republican Army, Trentadue believes that was an FBI front group that also helped fund the bombing.

    Trentadue’s Tuesday filing elaborated further on the ARA’s connection to McVeigh.

    “During 1993, 1994 and 1995, a gang known as the Aryan Republican Army or “ARA” robbed banks and armored cars in the mid-west. Timothy McVeigh participated in some of those robberies and is reported to have used money obtained from these crimes to help fund the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995,” he said.

    “According to Peter Langan, several members of the ARA assisted McVeigh in carrying out the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building.”

    No hearings have been set yet in Trentadue’s lawsuit.

    Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 18:20

  • WTI Holds Losses After API Reports Large Surprise Gasoline Inventrory Build
    WTI Holds Losses After API Reports Large Surprise Gasoline Inventrory Build

    Crude prices slipped back lower today from two-month highs, testing back into the range of the last couple of days after rallying hard on increasing geopolitical tensions.

    A series of drone attacks last week on Russian oil infrastructure by Ukraine, combined with escalating tensions between Iran-backed Hezbollah and Israel have buoyed crude prices, Claudio Galimberti, director of global market analysis at Rystad Energy, said in a note.

    “Against a backdrop of escalating geopolitical tensions, including conflicts in the Middle East and the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, Brent surpassing $85 per barrel could be the start of more upward pressure on prices,” he said.

    Today’s decline (perhaps driven by weaker sentiment and confidence data) did not appear to change the trend, but tomorrow’s official inventory data (which we get a hint at tonight from, API) may change things…

    API

    • Crude +914k (-200k exp)

    • Cushing -350k

    • Gasoline +3.84mm (-900k exp) – biggest build since Jan 2024

    • Distillates -1.18mm

    Crude stocks rose modestly last week, against expectations of a small draw but gasoline stocks surged according to API…

    Source: Bloomberg

    WTI was trading around be $80.80 ahead of the API data and dipped on the crude build before coming back…

    Source: Bloomberg

    Finally, despite the decline and the builds, there are signs of strong summer demand in the Northern Hemisphere (after earlier jitters over a shaky start to the U.S. summer driving season, which runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day).

    Galimberti said expectations for a summer surge in fuel demand have been aided by strong growth in aviation. Jet fuel is expected to see an increase in demand of 550,000 barrels a day, according to Rystad, after a 1.2 million barrel-a-day jump last year.

    “For the time being, this strength in aviation activity signals a positive trend for oil demand, particularly in the context of summer travel, economic recovery and consumer optimism,” he wrote.

    Analysts at JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Tuesday maintained a forecast that Brent would average $84 a barrel in the third quarter and hit $90 by August or September, “underpinned by our expectations that global demand will outpace supply in the summer quarter.”

    Meanwhile, analysts at Macquarie revised their Brent third-quarter forecast up to $86 per barrel, from $83, on projections of rising demand.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 18:00

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jun 25

Today’s News 25th June 2024

  • Fossil Fuel, CO2 Emissions Hit Record High In 2023
    Fossil Fuel, CO2 Emissions Hit Record High In 2023

    Don’t tell Greta, or her much easier on the eyes replacement, Sophia.

    At a time when the peak of “green” virtue signaling has come and gone, we regret to inform you that all that jawboning and posturing has achieved… absolutely nothing because according to the Statistical Review of World Energy report released on Thursday, global fossil fuel consumption and energy emissions hit all-time highs in 2023 (even as fossil fuels’ share of the global energy mix decreased slightly on the year).

    Growing demand for fossil fuel despite the scaling up of renewables could be a sticking point for the transition to lower carbon energy as climate alarmist scream and rage that global temperature increases are set to reach 1.5C (2.7F), the threshold beyond which scientists say impacts such as temperature rise, drought and flooding will become more extreme; then again these are the same shrill activists who predicted in 2018 that the world would end unless we stop using fossil fuels by 2023. Not only has that not happened, but fossil fuel use is hitting annual records!

    “We hope that this report will help governments, world leaders and analysts move forward, clear-eyed about the challenge that lies ahead,” Romain Debarre of consultancy Kearney said, realizing with even clearer-eyes that absolutely nothing will change since the bulk of fossil fuel consumption now comes from China and India, both of which could give a rat’s ass what some woke liberal kitten-hoarding, purple-haired screaming freak thinks.

    Last year was the first full year of rerouted Russian energy flows away from the West following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and also the first full year without major movement restrictions linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, it confirms that attempts to throttle Russian sales of fossil fuels have been a total fiasco.

    It gets better (or worse if you are a green lunatic): overall global primary energy consumption hit an all-time high of 620 Exajoules (EJ), the report said…

    … as CO2 emissions exceeded 40 gigatonnes of CO2 for the first time.

    “In a year where we have seen the contribution of renewables reaching a new record high, ever increasing global energy demand means the share coming from fossil fuels has remained virtually unchanged,” Simon Virley of consultancy KPMG said.

    The report recorded shifting trends in fossil fuel use in different regions. In Europe, for example, the fossil fuel share of energy fell below 70% for the first time since the industrial revolution.

    “In advanced economies, we observe signs of demand for fossil fuels peaking, contrasting with economies in the Global South for whom economic development and improvements in quality of life continue to drive fossil growth,” Energy Institute Chief Executive Nick Wayth said.

    And since nobody dares to dictate conditions to the “global south” lest they stop producing the cheap crap demanded by the “global north” (to feed their ravenous consumerist habits) sparking epic inflation, nothing will change.

    Industry body the Energy Institute, together with consultancies KPMG and Kearney, has published the annual report since 2023. They took over from BP which had authored the report, a benchmark for energy professionals, since the 1950s.

    It will come as no surprise to anyone that fossil fuel accounted for almost all demand growth in India in 2023, the report said, while in China fossil fuel use rose 6% to a new high

    Here are some highlights from the report on 2023:

    CONSUMPTION

    • Global primary energy demand rose by 2% in 2023 from 2022, to 620 EJ.
    • Fossil fuel use rose 1.5% to 505 EJ, which accounted for 81.5% of the overall energy mix, down by 0.5% from 2022.
    • Fossil fuel use did not increase in a single European country in 2023.
    • Electricity generation rose by 2.5% in 2023, up slightly from 2.3% of growth the previous year.
    • Renewable fuel generation (excluding hydro) gained 13% to a new record high of 4,748 terawatt-hours (TWh).
    • Renewables’ share of the overall energy mix excluding hydro was 8%, up from 7.5% in the 2022 report.
    • Including hydro renewables accounted for 15% of the global mix.

    OIL

    • Oil consumption exceeded 100 million bpd in 2023 for the first time ever, following a 2% year-on-year rise.
    • Oil supply growth was met by non-OPEC+ producers, with U.S. output gaining 9% on the year.
    • China overtook the U.S. as the country with the largest refining capacity in the world last year at 18.5 million bpd, though refining volumes still lagged behind at 82% utilisation vs the U.S.’ 87%.
    • Global gasoline consumption hit 25 million bpd last year, just above its 2019 pre-pandemic level.
    • Biofuels production increased by 8% to 2.1 million bpd in 2023, driven by gains in the U.S. and Brazil.
    • The U.S., Brazil, and Europe accounted for 80% of global biofuels consumption.

    NATURAL GAS

    • Global gas production and consumption remained relatively flat on the year in 2023.
    • LNG supply rose by almost 2% to 549 billion cubic metres (bcm).
    • The U.S. overtook Qatar as the leading global supplier of LNG after a 10% rise in production.
    • Overall European gas demand was down 7% on the year in 2023.
    • Russia’s share of European gas supply was just 15% in 2023, from 45% in 2021.

    COAL

    • Coal consumption hit a new high of 164 EJ in 2023, up 1.6% on the year, driven by China and India.
    • India’s coal consumption exceeded that of Europe and North America combined.
    • U.S. coal consumption fell by 17% in 2023 and has halved in the last decade.

    RENEWABLES

    • The record high in renewable generation was driven by higher wind and solar capacity, with 67% more additions in those two categories in 2023 than 2022.
    • As much as 74% of net growth in overall power generation came from renewables.
    • China accounted for 55% of all renewable generation additions in 2023, and was responsible for 63% of new global wind and solar capacity.

    EMISSIONS

    • Emissions grew by 2% on the year to exceed 40 gigatonnes.
    • Emissions rose despite the slight drop in fossil fuels’ share of the energy mix, because emissions within the fossil fuels category became more intense as oil and coal use rose and gas held steady.
    • The report notes that since 2000, emissions from energy have increased by 50%.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 02:45

  • Diplomats Tour Beirut Airport After UK Media Alleges Presence Of Hezbollah Weapons
    Diplomats Tour Beirut Airport After UK Media Alleges Presence Of Hezbollah Weapons

    Via The Cradle

    Diplomatic and media delegations toured Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport on Monday, one day after UK newspaper The Telegraph released a report claiming that Hezbollah had hidden weapons inside the facility. 

    Lebanon’s Information Minister Ziad al-Makari, Foreign Minister Abdullah Bou Habib, Tourism Minister Walid Nassar, and other officials attended the airport tour. Several ambassadors and media correspondents, including one from The Cradle, were also present. 

    Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport, file image

    They were shown the main cargo centers, a site storing imported goods, and several locations in the vicinity of the airport. 

    “The British Department of Transport is an official body concerned with transport. It visited Beirut Airport six months ago and viewed all its corners. It would have been more effective for this newspaper to rely on the Authority as a source in its article and not to unknown people and unknown parties,” Lebanese Transport Minister Ali Hamieh said during a press conference after the tour. 

    He also reiterated what he said a day earlier, on Sunday, about consultations being held with Lebanon’s prime minister and legal teams to file a lawsuit against The Telegraph, adding: “What is happening is a psychological war against Lebanon… we have proven that the article is ridiculous.”

    The UK newspaper cited “whistleblowers” from the airport on June 23 as saying they were concerned about increasing weapons deliveries coming into the country on direct flights from Iran, claiming they had seen “unusually big boxes” and the “increased presence of high-level Hezbollah commanders.”

    The Telegraph quoted Lebanon’s International Air Transport Association (IATA) as saying that it has been aware of Hezbollah weapons at the airport “for years” but is unable to do anything about it. 

    After the IATA announced that the quote was completely false, the daily edited the article, attributing the same quote to an unnamed “major international aviation body.”

    Commenting on the allegations, a high-ranking Lebanese security official told The Cradle on Sunday: “They spread lies to later justify any Israeli attack against Beirut airport because they want to isolate Lebanon. The enemy spreads these rumors as a kind of psychological warfare.”

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    A large group of foreign ambassadors toured several sites in the vicinity of Beirut airport in 2018 to refute Israeli claims about missile depots in the area. In 2020, after Benjamin Netanyahu claimed a residential area in the Lebanese capital was being used to store weapons, Hezbollah invited international and local media to visit the site, and no such weaponry was found.

    Israel bombed Beirut’s Rafic Hariri International Airport at the start of the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 06/25/2024 – 02:00

  • Putin's "War" To Re-Shape The American Zeitgeist
    Putin’s “War” To Re-Shape The American Zeitgeist

    Submitted by Alastair Crooke

    The G7 and the subsequent Swiss ‘Bürgenstock Conference’ can – in retrospect – be understood as preparation for a prolonged Ukraine war. The three centrepiece announcements emerging from the G7 – the 10 year Ukraine security pact; the $50 ‘billion Ukraine loan’; and the seizing of interest on Russian frozen funds – make the point. The war is about to escalate.

    These stances were intended as preparation of the western public ahead of events. And in case of any doubts, the blistering belligerency towards Russia emerging from the European election leaders was plain enough: They sought to convey a clear impression of Europe preparing for war.

    What then lies ahead? According to White House Spokesman John Kirby: “Washington’s position on Kiev is “absolutely clear”:

    “First, they’ve got to win this war”.

    “They gotta win the war first. So, number one: We’re doing everything we can to make sure they can do that. Then when the war’s over … Washington will assist in building up Ukraine’s military industrial base”.

    If that was not plain, the U.S. intent to prolong and take the war deep into Russia was underlined by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan: “Authorization for Ukrainian use of American weapons for cross-border attacks extends to anywhere [from which] Russian forces are coming across the border”. He affirmed, too, that Ukraine can use F-16s to attack Russia and use U.S. supplied air defence systems “to take down Russian planes – even if in Russian airspace – if they’re about to fire into Ukrainian airspace”.

    Ukrainian pilots have the latitude to judge ‘the intent’ of Russian fighter aircraft? Expect the parameters of this ‘authorisation’ to widen quickly – deeper to air bases from which Russian fighter bombers launch.

    Understanding that the war is about to transform radically – and extremely dangerously – President Putin (in his speech to the Foreign Ministry Board) detailed just how the world had arrived at this pivotal juncture – one which could extend to nuclear exchanges.

    The gravity of the situation itself demanded the making of one ‘last chance’ offer to the West, which Putin emphatically said was “no temporary ceasefire for Kiev to prepare a new offensive; nor was it about freezing the conflict”; but rather, his proposals were about the war’s final completion.

    “If, as before, Kiev and western capitals refuse it – then at the end, that’s their business”, Putin said.

    Just to be clear, Putin almost certainly never expected the proposals to be received in the West other than by the scorn and derision with which they, in fact, were met. Nor would Putin trust – for a moment – the West not to renege on an agreement, were some arrangement to be reached on these lines.

    If so, why then did President Putin make such a proposal last weekend, if the West cannot be trusted and its reaction was so predictable?

    Well, maybe we need to search for the nesting inner Matryoshka doll, rather than fix on the outer casing: Putin’s ‘final completion’ likely will not credibly be achieved through some itinerant peace broker. In his Foreign Ministry address, Putin dismisses devices such as ‘ceasefires’ or ‘freezes’. He is seeking something permanent: An arrangement that has ‘solid legs’; one that has durability.

    Such a solution – as Putin before has hinted – requires a new world security architecture to come into being; and were that to happen, then a complete solution for Ukraine would flow as an implicit part to a new world order. That is to say, with the microcosm of a Ukraine solution flowing implicitly from the macrocosm agreement between the U.S. and the ‘Heartland’ powers – settling the borders to their respective security interests.

    This clearly is impossible now, with the U.S. in its psychological mindset stuck in the Cold War era of the 1970s and 1980s. The end to that war – the seeming U.S. victory – set the foundation to the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine which underscored American supremacy at all costs in a post-Soviet world, together with “stamping out rivals, wherever they may emerge”.

    “In conjunction with this, the Wolfowitz Doctrine stipulated that the U.S. would … [inaugurate] a U.S.-led system of collective security and the creation of a democratic zone of peace”. Russia, on the other hand, was dealt with differently—the country fell off the radar. It became insignificant as a geopolitical competitor in the eyes of the West, as its gestures of peaceful offerings were rebuffed – and guarantees given to it regarding NATO’s expansion forfeited”.

    “Moscow could do nothing to prevent such an endeavour. The successor state of the mighty Soviet Union was not its equal, and thus not considered important enough to be involved in global decision-making. Yet, despite its reduced size and sphere of influence, Russia has persisted in being considered a key player in international affairs”.

    Russia today is a preeminent global actor in both the economic and political spheres. Yet for the Ruling Strata in the U.S., equal status between Moscow and Washington is out of the question. The Cold War mentality still infuses the Beltway with the unwarranted confidence that the Ukraine conflict might somehow result in Russian collapse and dismemberment.

    Putin in his address, by contrast, looked ahead to the collapse of the Euro-Atlantic security system – and of a new architecture emerging. “The world will never be the same again”, Putin said.

    Implicitly, he hints that such a radical shift would be the only way credibly to end the Ukraine war. An agreement emerging from the wider framework of consensus on the division of interests between the Rimland and the Heartland (in Mackinder-esque language) would reflect the security interests of each party – and not be achieved at the expense of others’ security.

    And to be clear: If this analysis is correct, Russia may not be in such a hurry to conclude matters in Ukraine. The prospect of such a ‘global’ negotiation between Russia-China and the U.S. is still far off.

    The point here is that the collective western psyche has not been transformed sufficiently. Treating Moscow with equal esteem remains out of the question for Washington.

    The new American narrative is no negotiations with Moscow now, but maybe it will become possible sometime early in the new year – after the U.S. elections.

    Well, Putin might surprise again – by not jumping at the prospect, but rebuffing it; assessing that the Americans still are not ready for negotiations for a ‘complete end’ to the war – especially as this latest narrative runs concurrently with talk of a new Ukraine offensive shaping up for 2025. Of course, much is likely to change over the coming year.

    The documents outlining a putative new security order however, were already drafted by Russia in 2021 – and duly ignored in the West. Russia perhaps can afford to wait out military events in Ukraine, in Israel, and in the financial sphere.

    They are all, in any event, trending Putin’s way. They are all inter-connected and have the potential for wide metamorphosis.

    Put plainly: Putin is waiting on the shaping of the American Zeitgeist. He seemed very confident both at St Petersburg and last week at the Foreign Ministry.

    The backdrop to the G7’s Ukraine preoccupation seemed to be more U.S. elections-related, than real: This implies that the priority in Italy was election optics, rather than a desire to start a full-blown hot war. But this may be wrong.

    Russian speakers during these recent gatherings – notably Sergei Lavrov – hinted broadly that the order already had come down for war with Russia. Europe seems, however improbably, to be gearing up for war – with much chatter about military conscription.

    Will it all blow away with the passing of a hot summer of elections? Maybe.

    The coming phase seems likely to entail western escalation, with provocations occurring inside Russia. The latter will react strongly to any crossing of (real) red lines by NATO, or any false flag provocation (now widely expected by Russiam military bloggers).

    And herein lies the greatest danger: In the context of escalation, American disdain for Russia poses the greatest danger. The West now says it treats notions of putative nuclear exchange as Putin’s ‘bluff’. The Financial Times tells us that Russia’s nuclear warnings are ‘wearing thin’ in the West.

    If this is true, western officials utterly misconceive the reality. It is only by understanding and taking the Russian nuclear warnings seriously that we may exclude the risk of nuclear weapons coming into play, as we move up the escalatory ladder with tit-for-tat measures.

    Even though they say they believe them to be bluff, U.S. figures nonetheless hype the risk of a nuclear exchange. If they think it to be a bluff, it appears to be based on the presumption that Russia has few other options.

    This would be wrong: There are several escalatory steps that Russia can take up the ladder, before reaching the tactical nuclear weapon stage: Trade and financial counter-attack; symmetrical provision of advanced weaponry to western adversaries (corresponding to U.S. supplies to Ukraine); cutting the electricity branch distribution coming from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania; strikes on border munition crossings; and taking a leaf from the Houthis who have knocked down several sophisticated and costly U.S. drones, disabling America’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) infrastructure.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 23:40

  • Visualizing How Long Each Generation Can Survive Without Income?
    Visualizing How Long Each Generation Can Survive Without Income?

    With nearly half of people under 34 worldwide unable to cover their needs for a month or less without income, it is no surprise that financial resiliency is a hot topic.

    So, for this graphic, Visual Capitalist has partnered with Lloyd’s Register Foundation to explore economic resilience further and determine how long the average person can afford to cover their needs without income.

    World Risk Poll 2024 Report: Economic Resilience

    Lloyd’s Register Foundation produces the World Risk Poll every two years in partnership with Gallup, and the World Risk Poll 2024 report explores the everyday risks of 147,000 people from 142 nations.

    They asked respondents how long they could afford to cover basic needs, such as food, transport, and shelter, if they lost all income. 

    Here’s what they found:

    The results reveal a distinct trend across all age groups, with respondents typically falling into two categories: those with one month or less of financial runway, and those with more than four months. Relatively fewer respondents reported being able to survive two to three months.

    National Economic Resilience

    The nation where a person lives also significantly contributes to their ability to cover their basic needs.

    The divide is particularly sharp between the percentage of respondents who could only cover their needs for a week or less and those who could cover their needs for a month or more—a tiny minority in developed economies, but a significant share of respondents from some developing nations.

    Engineering a Safer World

    The World Risk Poll 2024 report has revealed a weakness in global economic resilience. Younger individuals and those in developing countries are at higher risk than older individuals or those in developed countries.

    The report shines a light on the risks ordinary people face, such as how long they can cover their needs without income. However, the World Risk Poll 2024 report also highlights many more risks, such as global plastic waste, people’s safety at work, and the threat of climate change.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 23:20

  • Would Russia Aid China In An Invasion Of Taiwan?
    Would Russia Aid China In An Invasion Of Taiwan?

    Authored by Audrey Oien via RealClearDefense,

    If China were to invade Taiwan, it is likely that Russia would provide Beijing with military, economic, or political assistance. While some experts have argued Ukraine and Taiwan are not the same situation, there are nonetheless lessons that can be drawn from Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as insight from U.S. officials that can be drawn upon to come to this conclusion. 

    Over the last several years, Russia and China have grown closer in many ways, including through increased military cooperation. Of the numerous joint exercises that have been held, ones that stand out are joint naval drills and air force patrols over the East China Sea. The naval drills began in 2022 and are the closest that joint drills have been held to the Taiwan Strait. Joint exercises are not a smoking gun, but concern from American officials may be a reliable indicator that this is worth paying attention to. 

    In early May, two American intelligence officials testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that increased Sino-Russian military cooperation has prompted new planning in the Department of Defense. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines stated that China and Russia are exercising together in relation to Taiwan for the first time, and that “China definitely wants Russia to be working with them.” She then said, “we see no reason why they wouldn’t” work together. Answering a follow-up question from Senator Mike Rounds, Haines confirmed that in the event of a conflict with Russia or China, a second front opening with the other is possible, with the likelihood depending on the scenario. U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse testified that Russian and Chinese military forces “would certainly be cooperative,” if not interoperable. 

    But on what grounds would Russia assist China? Why would it be willing to aid Beijing in an invasion that would likely be met with a response from the United States and its allies? The most simple answer is because China did it for Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin is now indebted to Chinese President Xi Jinping, whether he realizes it or not. And no, the debt is not payable by monetary means. Putin will be able to pay his debts to Xi for his assistance in a war that has turned Chinese public opinion toward Ukraine, led to sanctions, and affected Xi’s image by providing assistance if, or when, China invades Taiwan.

    To get a better idea of what this assistance could look like, one can take a look at how China has aided Russia’s war in Ukraine. According to U.S. officials, China has helped supply Russia with dual-use material like optics, microelectronics, and drone engines to boost Moscow’s arms production, as well as provided Moscow with cruise missiles and machine tools for ballistic missiles. U.S. intelligence claims that Russian and Chinese groups have worked together to jointly produce drones inside Russia. It was also reported that a Chinese government agency established to promote trade with Russia has been attempting to source drone detectors and jammers, likely to supply Moscow with. U.S. officials further claimed that China helped Russia improve satellite and other space-based capabilities, as well as provided satellite imagery. Additionally, it was reported that China supplied Russia with 90% of the chips it imported in 2023 which were used to make missiles, tanks, and aircraft. The British Defense Minister has also accused China of providing or preparing to provide Russia with lethal aid. 

    Beyond providing this military equipment, China has continued support for Russia in its wartime by working together to avoid taxes and evade Western sanctions on goods like copper. And, China has increased imports of Russian gas and oil since the war began, as imports from the US, UK, and EU have dropped due to sanctions. Politically, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused China of using its influence and diplomats to help Russia disrupt the 15-16 June peace summit on Ukraine in Switzerland by encouraging other countries not to attend.

    Russian support during a Chinese invasion of Taiwan could follow in a similar vein. Or, Xi may be able to pressure Putin into providing something more than what Beijing has done for Moscow. Analysts have maintained that Beijing holds the upper hand in the Sino-Russian partnership. While the relationship has been described as having no limits, it is not a relationship between two equals. Russia’s economic dependence on China puts Putin in a vulnerable position, with little room to say “no.” 

    The capacity in which Russia may offer China assistance during an invasion of Taiwan can be debated. Several factors would come into play, including the length of the conflict and those involved, specifically the degree to which the US would respond. Would the invasion take less than an hour, as one expert claims? Or would the conflict become drawn out and turn into a hot war with the US? Regardless of the exact scenario that could play out, Russia would most likely aid China in some capacity. Whether its military support during the invasion, economic assistance and support following an invasion, or political and diplomatic support, China’s role in the Sino-Russian partnership and demonstrated support for Russia during the war in Ukraine places it in a position to solicit some form of assistance from Moscow during an invasion of Taiwan. While this reasoning could stand on its own, it is supported by U.S. officials’ testimony that the U.S. Department of Defense is reconsidering its planning and preparedness to account for cooperation between Russia and China during a conflict.

    Audrey Oien is a Research Analyst at RANE, primarily focusing on the Asia-Pacific. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 23:00

  • Americans And Their Passwords: It's Complicated!
    Americans And Their Passwords: It’s Complicated!

    Aside from presenting its big push into AI, Apple also unveiled a new Passwords app as part of its upcoming software releases. Built on the foundation of Keychain, the new app will enable users to store and access passwords, passkeys and other login credentials across Apple devices and on Windows PCs, helping them manage the multitude of logins that our digital lives require.

    As Statista’s Felix Richter notes, with the new tool, Apple is addressing a problem that many people have these days, as they’re forced to perform a balancing act between picking passwords that are safe and still somehow easy enough to remember.

    Infographic: Americans and Their Passwords: It's Complicated! | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 69 percent of U.S. adults feel overwhelmed by the numbers of passwords they have to keep track of, and 41 percent always or often write down their passwords – a practice that is not recommended by security experts.

    Password managers such as Apple’s new app can help address this problem, but so far they’re not so far spread.

    According to Pew’s findings, just 32 percent of respondents used a password manager at the time of the survey in May 2023, up from 20 percent in 2019.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 22:40

  • Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth Continues To Embarrass And Humiliate Herself
    Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth Continues To Embarrass And Humiliate Herself

    Authored by Paul D. Thacker via The Disinformation Chronicle,

    Scientific American’s Laura Helmuth remains one of the most ridiculous dunderheads in science writing, a journalism adjacent field of writing that many reporters refer to with derision as “scicomm.” Earlier this week, a reader sent me this post on Blue Sky, with Helmuth promoting an article falsely claiming there was evidence to support six-feet social distancing during COVID.

    There isn’t. Former NIH Director Francis Collins and Tony Fauci have both testified to Congress that this evidence doesn’t exist.

    Helmuth shoehorns this narrative into Scientific American by ignoring Tony Fauci’s congressional testimony that six feet social distancing was “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data” and then insisting it’s actually just a political fight between Fauci and Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican Congresswoman long known for making outlandish statements that often stretch the fabric of reality.

    Just like Laura Helmuth.

    Fauci’s admission to Congress that the six feet rule was not based on science and that “it sort of just appeared” was backed up his boss, former NIH Director Francis Collins.

    In a transcribed interview with Congress, Collins also added that he was not aware of evidence behind the social distancing recommendation and he has not seen any evidence supporting six feet social distancing since the rule was dismissed.

    But it’s not just Fauci and Collins.

    Former FDA Director Scott Gottlieb told reporters back in 2021 that the six feet rule was never based on science. “The six feet rule was arbitrary in and of itself,” Gottlieb said in a September 2021 “Face the Nation” appearance. “Nobody knows where it came from. The six feet is a perfect example of sort of the lack of rigor of how CDC made recommendations.”

    The Washington Post reported that persistent frustrations over social distancing and other measures might lead Americans to ignore public health advice during the next crisis.

    Four years later, visible reminders of the six-foot rule remain with us, particularly in cities that rushed to adopt the CDC’s guidelines hoping to protect residents and keep businesses open. D.C. is dotted with signs in stores and schools — even on sidewalks or in government buildings — urging people to stand six feet apart.

    This is just the latest example in a long history of Laura Helmuth screwups.

    A recent BMJ investigation documented over a dozen social media posts by Helmuth promoting transgender care for children, despite scientific evidence showing such treatment has had “devastating consequences” for minors. And after she posted last year on X that “sparrows have four different chromosomally distinct sexes” the Wall Street Journal reported that X’s community notes had to correct Helmuth’s error.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 22:20

  • Waste Of The Day: Newsom Wants Stronghold Over California Taxes
    Waste Of The Day: Newsom Wants Stronghold Over California Taxes

    Authored by Adam Andrzejewski via RealClearInvestigations,

    Topline: California voters may soon have a more direct voice in approving their sky-high tax rates — unless Gov. Gavin Newsom and other top Democratic lawmakers have something to say about it.

    Newsom’s attorneys are asking the state Supreme Court to remove an upcoming ballot measure that would require new taxes to be approved by voters, not just lawmakers.

    Key facts: The proposed Taxpayer Protection and Government Accountability Act would stop new state taxes from being enacted without support from two thirds of the Legislature and a majority of voters. New local taxes would need approval from two thirds of city voters.

    Democrats hold supermajorities in both houses of the California Legislature. Top politicians are backed by labor unions and big-city mayors in their effort to stop the ballot measure, according to Politico. Their attorneys say the proposal unconstitutionally removes elected officials’ ability to raise revenue.

    The campaign in support of the ballot measure is funded mostly by real estate moguls and the California Business Roundtable, which brings together executives from the largest employers in the state.

    The CA Supreme Court heard arguments in May, but Politico reports that justices seem willing to let the measure go to voters in November and then rule on its constitutionality if it passes.

    California collected $280.8 billion in taxes in 2022, more than double any other state. That’s $7,195 per person, also the most in the nation.

    Background: OpenTheBooks has spent years covering the questionable Newsom and his conflicts of interest or wasteful spending.

    It took OpenTheBooks.com ten years to force open the California state checkbook. Then, we found that Gov. Newsom solicited up to 1,000 state vendors, their key employees and executives, for $10.6 million in campaign donations. Those companies received $6.2 billion in state payments during FY2021.

    Newsom’s administration also sent $2.3 million to Gender Spectrum, a nonprofit that supports kindergarten students’ “gender journey” and encourages students to invent their own gender.

    Critical quote: Carolyn Coleman, CEO of the League of California Cities, told the Associated Press that the ballot measure puts 100 local taxes worth over $2 billion at risk.

    “We’re raising the resources to fill potholes, so that we can support affordable housing in our community, so we can work to address homelessness, so that when you dial 911 there’s somebody there to answer the phone — not in two minutes — but in 30 seconds,” Coleman said.

    Supporting quote: Lawyers supporting the ballot measure told justices, “Our constitution, since its inception, has stated that all political power is inherent in the people. It has stated that the people have the power to reform and alter their government whenever they decide it needs reform … The people have the last word.”

    Summary: America was founded on the with three important word, “We The People…” California must allow that to happen.

    The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 22:00

  • Widely Used And Deemed Safe, These Food Additives Are More Harmful Than Thought
    Widely Used And Deemed Safe, These Food Additives Are More Harmful Than Thought

    Authored by Flora Zhao via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    On her first day after moving from Australia to the United States, Elizabeth Dunford walked into a supermarket to buy bread. As a researcher of food additives, she instinctively glanced at the ingredients label.

    “Why are there so many additives?” she exclaimed in surprise. Nearly every loaf she picked up contained ingredients that made her uneasy. After lingering by the shelves, she reluctantly chose a bag.

    “At that moment, I thought: It looks like I will have to choose the best from the worst when shopping in the future,” Ms. Dunford, project consultant for The George Institute for Global Health and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina, told The Epoch Times.

    (Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock)

    Today, over 73 percent of the U.S. food supply is ultra-processed. While both natural and ultra-processed foods are referred to as “food,” there is a vast difference between them. For instance, ultra-processed foods are not grown in soil but manufactured in factories, using many ingredients that cannot be found in the average home pantry.

    Beyond conventional additives such as preservatives, colors, and flavorings, many new additives are emerging. Stabilizers, emulsifiers, firming agents, leavening agents, anti-caking agents, humectants, and more have been invented to modify and improve the taste and texture of food.

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lists at least 3,972 substances added to food.

    Perhaps driven by a growing desire for richer and more varied flavors or by the pressures of fast-paced living, people have become accustomed to these substances, even considering them a natural part of the modern diet.

    Then and Now

    In the old days, families used salt and vinegar to preserve food. But with the advent of the industrial age, people became increasingly reliant on ready-made foods available on supermarket shelves.

    “By the mid-20th century, more and more food additives were being used,” said Mona Calvo, who has a doctorate in nutritional sciences and is an adjunct professor in the Department of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Only recently have people begun to pay closer attention to what goes into the foods they eat.

    People have become increasingly reliant on ready-made foods. Employees supervise chicken pieces being processed into nuggets on a conveyer belt. (Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images)

    In the 1950s to 1970s, the FDA began evaluating the safety of common food additives, Ms. Calvo told The Epoch Times.

    “A safety assessment involves the scientific review of all relevant data, including toxicology and dietary exposure information,” an FDA spokesperson told The Epoch Times. These include tests conducted on rodents and cells. The ingredients will be added to food after the FDA gives its approval.

    Consumers can identify what is in their packaged foods by the nutrition facts and ingredient labels, said Ms. Calvo.

    Among the most widely used FDA-approved substances added to food, many have a safety classification known as “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) based on their extensive historical use before 1958 or their safety evaluation in the 1970s or more recently.

    However, many people may not realize that substances classified as GRAS often lack an upper limit on the amount that can be added to food. In many cases, the quantity added is based on Current Good Manufacturing Practice (CGMP) guidelines. Ms. Calvo explained that if a manufacturer adds an excessive amount of an additive during production, which makes it unpopular among consumers, it could affect product sales. In other words, the amount of substances added is left to the manufacturer’s discretion.

    Over time, GRAS classification may be withdrawn for certain substances if the FDA is presented with compelling evidence of safety concerns associated with its use. A notable example is the official removal of trans fats from the GRAS list in 2015.

    Ms. Calvo pointed out another unresolved issue: There is no oversight on how much of these additive-containing foods people actually consume.

    “Many of the commonly used food additives were granted GRAS approval between 1970 and 1975, when people could not foresee the situation today,” she said. During that era, fewer women worked outside the home, and people consumed more home-cooked meals made from natural ingredients. With the prevalence of ultra-processed foods in today’s diet, the consumption of certain additives has naturally exceeded initial expectations.

    The FDA officially removed trans fats from the GRAS list in 2015. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

    After an additive is approved for a specific function, food manufacturers often quickly incorporate it into a wide range of products, including breads, cookies, instant soups, sausages, and frozen, prepackaged meals.

    Dr. Jaime Uribarri, a nephrology specialist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who has long been concerned about specific food additives, told The Epoch Times that “once an additive-containing packaged food is in the marketplace, the FDA does not have a mechanism for regularly testing its safety, such as through periodic sampling checks.”

    The Useful and the Unnecessary

    Objectively speaking, some food additives may offer more benefits than drawbacks, said Ms. Dunford.

    Preservatives, for example, help extend the shelf life of food. Adding a moderate amount of nitrites to cured meats can prevent botulism, a serious condition.

    However, she pointed out that many additives that enhance color, flavor, and other sensory aspects are “essentially not necessary.”

    Scientists have demonstrated in various studies the health hazards of consuming ultra-processed foods, including their close association with early death, cardiovascular diseases, mental disorders, respiratory diseases, metabolic syndrome, and cancer.

    Specifically, a cohort study involving nearly 45,000 middle-aged and older individuals in France found that for every 10 percent increase in the intake of ultra-processed foods, the risk of all-cause mortality increased by 14 percent. According to a 2024 umbrella review published in the BMJ, convincing evidence has been found linking ultra-processed food to a 50 percent increase in cardiovascular disease mortality, a 53 percent increase in common mental disorder outcomes, and a dose-dependent 12 percent increase in diabetes risk.

    Ultra-processed food is linked to significant increases in cardiovascular disease mortality, mental disorder outcomes, and diabetes risks. (The Epoch Times)

    While part of the increased risks can be attributed to the use of high-sugar, high-salt, high-fat, and low-fiber ingredients, some additives previously thought to be safe also warrant attention.

    “Phosphate additives is one that I’m very wary of,” said Ms. Dunford.

    Phosphate Additives

    A 2023 study published in the Journal of Renal Nutrition found that of all the 3,466 U.S. packaged foods tested, over half contained phosphate additives.

    Phosphate additives encompass a range of substances with various functions, such as stabilizing, thickening, emulsifying, adjusting acidity and alkalinity, improving texture, enhancing flavor, providing antioxidant properties, preserving, and coloring. Some phosphates serve multiple functions simultaneously.

    Multiple studies have shown that the health hazards associated with consuming ultra-processed foods are linked to a high intake of inorganic phosphates.

    The body’s absorption rate and utilization efficiency for phosphorus vary depending on the source. When a person eats natural foods, the release of phosphorus is relatively slow, and not all of it is absorbed. In contrast, inorganic phosphate food additives are quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, significantly increasing blood phosphate levels and releasing hormones that promote phosphate excretion. These hormones can have a range of adverse effects on the cardiovascular system, kidneys, and bones, resulting in reduced vitamin D levels, bone loss, vascular calcification, and impaired kidney filtration capacity.

    Using inorganic phosphate additives in animal or cell experiments results in immediate side effects. “That gives you enough rationale to suspect that these may happen also in humans,” said Dr. Uribarri.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 21:40

  • "Julian Is Free!" Assange Released After 'Time Served' Plea Deal With DOJ, Departs For Home
    “Julian Is Free!” Assange Released After ‘Time Served’ Plea Deal With DOJ, Departs For Home

    Update(2124ET): WikiLeaks has released its first footage showing Julian Assange as a free man, emerging from Belmarsh prison looking triumphant and joyous, and soon after boarding a plane to his native Australia…

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

    Below is the official statement from WikiLeaks:

    JULIAN ASSANGE IS FREE Julian Assange is free. He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK. This is the result of a global campaign that spanned grass-roots organisers, press freedom campaigners, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations.

    This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised. We will provide more information as soon as possible. After more than five years in a 2×3 metre cell, isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon reunite with his wife Stella Assange, and their children, who have only known their father from behind bars.

    WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions. As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know. As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom. Julian’s freedom is our freedom.

    Below is a video statement from his wife, Stella Assange:

    * * *

    In a shocking turn of events, Julian Assange will plead guilty to leaking US national security secrets and return to his native Australia, under a deal with Biden’s DoJ that ends a nearly 15-year battle nightmare for the WikiLeaks founder.

    After spending more than a decade holed up and imprisoned in London – mainly to avoid being sent to the US – Assange, 52, is expected to be sentenced to time served (62 months in a Belmarsh prison – a high security facility in South-East London) during a court appearance Wednesday in Saipan, in the US Northern Mariana Islands, avoiding a potentially lengthy sentence in an American prison.

    Prosecutors had been in talks with Assange to resolve the 2019 case, The Wall Street Journal reported in March, with one sticking point being Assange’s desire to never set foot in the United States.

    To enter a felony plea, defendants generally have to show up in person in court. 

    Assange’s team had floated the possibility of pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, the Journal reported, which would mean Assange could enter the plea remotely.

    The Justice Department and Assange’s legal team reached a compromise under which Assange wouldn’t have to travel to suburban Virginia, where the original case is filed, and prosecutors could still get a felony plea, the people said.  

    As The FT reports, the agreement aims to resolve what has been a remarkable stand-off between the DoJ and Assange, who has become one of the world’s most controversial advocates for government transparency and whose legal troubles have spanned multiple countries. 

    The plea deal also offers a neat solution to what was becoming an increasing political headache for the U.S. government. 

    Earlier this year, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he hoped the U.S. could find a way to conclude the case against Assange, and lawmakers there passed a motion calling for Assange to be allowed to return to his native home. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has also weighed in, saying that the British courts should not extradite Assange to the U.S. In February, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Alice Jill Edwards, said Assange shouldn’t be extradited to the U.S. to face trial, saying he suffered from “depressive disorder” and was at risk of being placed in solitary confinement.

    Finally, while this is excellent news for Assange and his family – and journalistic freedom everywhere – we can’t help but wonder if this outstanding result would have occurred were it not for Biden heading into the first debate with Trump with his poll numbers in the toilet…

    Who cares! They are; and Julian is free…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 21:24

  • Domino's Still Dominates The US Pizza Market
    Domino’s Still Dominates The US Pizza Market

    About 3 billion pizzas are sold annually in the United States. In 2022, pizza restaurant sales in the U.S. reached an all-time high of $46.9 billion, an increase of roughly $10 billion compared to just a decade prior.

    This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu, lists the top 10 U.S. pizza chains based on 2022 sales figures.

    This data was accessed via Statista (published June 2023).

    Domino’s Domination

    Domino’s is the biggest pizza chain in the U.S. by sales, reaching $8.6 billion in revenue in 2022. The brand is also found in 90 other countries around the globe, including stores on every continent except Antarctica.

    According to Domino’s main website, there are over 20,500 locations worldwide, which collectively serve over 1 million customers per day.

    Domino’s is followed by Pizza Hut with $5.3 billion in revenue. Little Caesars, with $4.7 billion, completes the top three.

    The top end of this ranking contains household names, but regional pizza chains also make the cut. Jet’s Pizza is popular in the Great Lakes region, and most Hungry Howie’s locations can be found in Michigan and Florida.

    The overall number of pizza restaurants in the U.S. has been on the rise, reaching more than 80,000 units in 2022.

    If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out this graphic, which visualizes the change in market share of U.S. carbonated soft drinks between 1995 and 2023.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 21:20

  • Playing Politics With Crime In California
    Playing Politics With Crime In California

    Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

    California’s fierce political battle over crime and retail theft faces a key test this week as divided Democrats in the legislature address efforts by Gov. Gavin Newsom and his allies to undermine a public-safety ballot initiative.

    The ballot initiative would overhaul Proposition 47, a law voters approved in 2014 that lowered certain theft and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors partly as a way of reducing prison overcrowding.

    Newsom was among the first elected officials to support Proposition 47, a ballot initiative written by reform-minded George Gascon, who was then the district attorney in San Francisco. (In an unusual move, Gascon is now the DA in Los Angeles.)

    But the pendulum has now swung in the other direction, with critics blaming Prop 47 for the steep rise in retail theft and smash-and-grab “mob” robberies of both high-end department stores and convenience stores that have plagued retailers across the state.

    Californians for Safer Communities, a bipartisan group made up of law enforcement officials, elected officials, and businesses, including Walmart and Target, collected more than 900,000 signatures in support of a ballot initiative that would reform Prop 47 by increasing penalties for criminals. In early June, the initiative qualified for the November ballot, a move Newsom and liberal supporters in the state legislature opposed.

    Instead of letting voters decide its fate, Newsom and his allies, which includes Assembly and Senate leaders, pushed a raft of public safety bills aimed at addressing organized retail theft, car break-ins, and other crimes. They are also working hard to thwart a separate ballot initiative sponsored by the California District Attorneys Association, which has attracted widespread Republican and law enforcement support.

    Democrats in the state Assembly added “inoperability” clauses to the proposed public safety bills to prevent them from going into effect if voters approve the ballot initiative aimed at reforming Prop 47. They contend that such clauses are needed to ensure that the law is consistent.

    Critics of the move argue that the Democrats’ “poison pill” measure is designed solely to circumvent California’s storied referendum process. Instead of letting voters determine the ballot initiative’s fate, Newsom and his allies are trying to undermine it apparently because they fear it could attract strong support – with the added impact of helping Republicans in key Congressional races this fall.

    “Democrats need to stop playing politics with public safety and let voters decide on fixing Prop. 47,” Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher said in a statement. “These poison pills show that Democrats aren’t serious about ending the crime wave – they just want to look like they’re doing something because their years-long support for criminals has become a political liability.”

    The machinations to undermine a ballot initiative on crime came the same week the California Supreme Court unexpectedly rejected another referendum that had attained enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot but which Democrats opposed. The court stopped a sweeping proposal that would have made it far more difficult for lawmakers to raise taxes and fees across the state. The justices unanimously ordered that the measure be kept off the ballot, finding it unconstitutional – even though it was an effort to amend California’s Constitution.

    Republicans and conservative activists who backed and financed the initiative, which they say had collected more than 1.4 million signatures, are fuming over the move. Carl DeMaio, a candidate for state Assembly and chairman of the group that helped collect the anti-tax initiative signatures, said the state liberal justices sided with “corrupt politicians” to strip citizens of their rights to qualify propositions for the ballot.

    Several other ballot initiatives aimed at increasing taxes are slated for the November ballot, and now citizens won’t have a countermeasure to vote on, he said. “The bottom-line remains: Californians cannot afford our state’s high taxes and cost of living – and until we fix the cost crisis, Californians will continue to flee this state,” DeMaio tweeted.

    Regarding Democratic leaders’ efforts to thwart the Prop 47 reform measures, Republicans got a surprise assist from several normally skeptical journalists. George Skelton, the longtime Los Angeles Times columnist and dean of the California press corps, wrote a column last week headlined: “Stop playing politics on retail theft.”

    “…Democrats cynically intend to insert a ‘poison bill’ that would automatically kill their own legislation if a rival tough-on-crime ballot measure is approved by voters in November,” he wrote. “To normal people, that must seem bizarre.”

     “Democrats fear the ballot measure so much they’re offering its backers an offer they can’t refuse,” Skelton added. “At least that’s the Democrats’ hope. The message: Take what you can get immediately from the legislation – or risk losing it if the ballot measure passes.”

    Criticism only increased over the week after CBS New California broke a story revealing that Newsom’s chief of staff would not negotiate to strengthen the Democratic package of crime bills unless the coalition backing the Prop 47 reform ballot initiative agreed to postpone that effort.

    In leaked emails, Newsom Chief of Staff Dana Williamson told Greg Totten, the coalition’s lead negotiator, that Democrats would be willing to negotiate on its package of crime bills – but only if the matter was tabled until 2026. “As I noted previously, our focus is on amending Proposition 47 on the 2024 ballot,” Totten replied. “If the administration is prepared to consider an amendment of Proposition 47 on the 2024 ballot, then we are happy to meet.”

    Williamson then abruptly cut Totten off. “If that’s your position, then I agree, there’s nothing to talk about.” She added, “It’s really amazing how you are incapable of taking a win. And the consultants you’re working with haven’t won anything in a decade. Good luck.”

    Republicans and journalists aren’t the only ones who find the inoperability clauses disingenuous. At least three Democratic state lawmakers removed their names from retail theft bills included in the package after the clauses were added, and district attorneys and law enforcement associations in their districts pulled their support.

    Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, yanked his support from the retail theft bill package because of the added inoperability clauses.

    “Unfortunately, I can’t support the retail theft package, which contains my Retail Theft Accountability bill, AB 1794, with the poison pill non-operative amendments included,” McCarty noted. McCarty is running for mayor of Sacramento and has positioned himself more to the center while facing a progressive opponent.

    Democratic state Sen. Alvarado-Gil and Assemblywoman Esmeralda Soria, who both represent the more conservative Central Valley, also withdrew their names as co-authors of retail theft bills included in the package.

    “I oppose the amendments to these two bills, and I was not consulted about them prior,” Alvarado-Gil said in her weekly newsletter to constituents. “Let me be clear – I do support the Prop 47 reform initiative and believe the voters have the right to vote on this. This is not about the policy; it’s about the politics.”

    Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership also faces opposition to both the retail theft legislative package and the ballot initiative from the progressive wing of the party, which opposes any criminal justice reforms that will result in increased incarceration.

    “The [Democratic] leadership here has gotten a little bit too far out front of their troops,” GOP Sen. Roger Niello told RealClearPolitics in an interview Friday. “I know a lot of members of their caucus didn’t even know about this amendment move and only heard about it over the [previous] weekend.”

    A spokeswoman for Speaker of the Assembly Robert Rivas did not respond to a request for comment about the level of Democratic support for the amended legislative package. This bill was also amended to include an urgency clause, which means it goes into effect immediately. Yet to do so would require a two-thirds majority of the Assembly and Senate. Sacramento insiders say the urgency is needed because of another deadline.

    Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta faces a Thursday deadline to provide a title and summary for the ballot initiative and is poised to characterize the proposition as one that would kill the legislature’s anti-crime reform bills. He can only do so, however, if the retail theft package with the inoperability clauses passes with a supermajority this week before the deadline.

    Some California political observers assume Newsom is trying to keep Prop 47 intact to protect his political legacy for any future White House run. But others believe Democratic leaders fear the more immediate political fallout – that the tough-on-crime ballot initiative could help turn out more Republican voters this fall, giving GOP candidates for the House of Representatives an edge in tight election contests that could determine which party holds the majority.

    “What the Democrats are doing has gotten the Sacramento Bee editorial board, which is to the left of Mao, to agree with Republicans in the legislature,” Rob Stutzman told RCP. “This is absolutely raw politics. This is all about Democrats doing everything in the world to keep this issue off the ballot in November because of how it could affect congressional races and, therefore, the balance of who controls the House of Representatives.”

    This past week, Dave Min, a state senator running in a tight battleground contest to replace Rep. Katie Porter this fall, joined his party’s push to undercut the ballot initiative by supporting the addition of the “poison-pill” amendments. Min, who authored a piece of the public safety package, has joined the Democratic leadership in a press conference in which they unveiled their strategy to add the inoperability clause to the legislation.

    Over the last week, Min also twice said he didn’t have a position on the Prop 47 reform ballot initiative because he had been too busy to read it.

    “I’m sorry, and I’ll be honest, I have not had time to review the initiative,” Min said during an Appropriations Committee meeting while the amendments were being added. “I’ve got a lot on my plate these days. At the point in time when the ballot is finalized, I’m going to take a look at all the initiatives on the ballot and take a look at them.”

    Min’s position is a hire-wire act in his Orange County district, where prominent law enforcement officials, including Sheriff Don Barnes, vigorously back the ballot initiative. It also risks highlighting Min’s DUI conviction last year.

    “Dangerous Dave Min puts criminals ahead of victims because he is a criminal,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Ben Petersen said in a statement. “Min earns a special spot in the hall of shame shilling for these poison pills while on probation himself.”

    If the Democratic retail theft package with the amendments manages to pass this week, Skelton says Bonta has a tough decision to make – whether or not to “doctor up” the bill title and summary to undermine its ability to pass and risk “tarnishing his image by looking like just another hack politician.”

    Niello is watching Bonta closely because he has long tried to transfer the responsibility of writing proposition titles and summary statements from the attorney general to an independent legislative analyst.

    “There’s been so many blatantly biased statements made, and this whole strategy that [Democratic leaders] are pursuing is dependent upon the attorney general rewriting it in a negative light,” Niello said.

    Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 21:00

  • Study Finds Alarming Surge In Deaths From Neurological Disease Among Young Adults
    Study Finds Alarming Surge In Deaths From Neurological Disease Among Young Adults

    A recent preprint study which relies on extensive data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) paints a concerning picture of the neurological health landscape in the United States. The study, which focuses on those aged 15-44, reveals a disturbing increase in deaths from neurological diseases both as the primary cause and among multiple contributing factors.

    This uptick in mortality rates, which is particularly significant among younger adults, could have profound implications for the nation’s public health policies, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Perhaps most concerning, the study found an increase in neurological complications following COVID-19 vaccinations, including conditions such as Guillain-Barré syndrome and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis.

    According to Phinance principal Ed Dowd, “The results show a clear break from the prior historical trend in death rates from neurological diseases.”

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

    The Study: Methodology and Key Findings

    Researchers Carlos Alegria and Yuri Nunes of Phinance Technologies conducted a deep dive looking at neurological disease-related mortality across various age groups from 2000 to 2023.

    Their study distinguishes between deaths where neurological conditions were the underlying cause (UC) and instances where these diseases were listed among multiple causes (MC) on death certificates, and compares death rates against a baseline to identify excess deaths.

    Key findings from the study include:

    • A notable rise in excess mortality from neurological diseases reported as the underlying cause of death among individuals aged 15 to 44, with increases of 4.4% in 2020, 10.0% in 2021, 9.9% in 2022, and 8.1% in 2023.
    • Excess deaths from neurological conditions as part of multiple causes tracked overall mortality rises and were significant even after removing deaths where COVID-19 was also reported.

    Via Phinance Technologies

    As Phinance notes, “The strength of the statistical significance of the excess deaths from neurological diseases was very high, being considered extreme events, indicating a clear change from the prior 2010-2019 trend.”

    The intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic with the rise in neurological disease deaths adds layers of complexity to the analysis – including the notion that various medical interventions and societal disruptions might have exacerbated underlying neurological vulnerabilities:

    • Notably, the study points to an increased risk of developing severe neurological conditions following COVID-19 vaccinations, with specific vaccines linked to higher risks of serious ailments such as the aforementioned Guillain-Barré syndrome.
    • Some cases of long covid have been associated with long-term neurological complications.

    Perhaps most alarming is the impact on younger individuals. Those aged 15-44, typically considered in the prime of life, exhibited a stark increase in neurological disease-related deaths. This raises serious questions about potential environmental, biological, or social factors that are disproportionately affecting younger populations.

    The authors conclude:

    How can we explain the excess UC deaths from neurological diseases in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023? In 2020, this could be explained by deaths from health effects related to the pandemic management measures such lockdowns and lack of medical care, or other related factors such as stress, less exercise, worse food habits, or from under-diagnosed COVID-19 itself, or related side effects. The acceleration in excess death rates from neurological diseases in 2021, 2022 and 2023 is more difficult to explain due to COVID-19 on its own. Given the case studies of neurological adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination cited in the literature, one possible factor could be adverse effects of the COVID-19 vaccines. Furthermore, one must also account for the possibility of continuous COVID-19 infections or Long COVID…

    Implications for Public Health

    The implications of these findings extend far beyond the immediate health of the young adult population – and pose serious questions about the readiness of the U.S. healthcare system to handle a potential influx of neurological health needs and the potential need for sweeping changes in public health policy:

    • There is a clear call for focused research to unravel the factors driving this surge in neurological deaths.
    • Public health strategies may need to pivot towards enhancing neurological health services and preventive care, particularly for younger populations.
    • Understanding the full impact of COVID-19 on long-term health outcomes will be crucial in shaping future healthcare initiatives.

    The study raises concerning and considerations – between the social impact of waves of potential neurological disease and the woefully underprepared healthcare system, health priorities in the coming decades will need to be analyzed and addressed.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 20:40

  • ESG And Stakeholder Capitalism: A Necessary Deconstruction
    ESG And Stakeholder Capitalism: A Necessary Deconstruction

    Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearEnergy,

    The Following is Book Reviews of:

    The Case for Shareholder Capitalism: How the Pursuit of Profit Benefits All, by R. David McLean (Cato Institute, 2023)

    The Race to Zero: How ESG Investing Will Crater the Global Financial System, by Paul H. Tice (Encounter Books, 2024)

    May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—and What We Can Do About It, by Alex Edmans (Penguin Random House, 2024)

    *  *  *

    “I’m not going to use the word ‘ESG’ because it’s been misused by the far left and the far right,” Larry Fink, chairman and chief executive of BlackRock, declared a year ago. The far left, Fink complained, wanted BlackRock to use other people’s money to decarbonize the economy. As for what Fink presumably regards as the “far right,” BlackRock had lost $4 billion in mandates as a result of the political debate on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, which he called “90% misinformation.”

    The chief executive of the world’s largest fund manager was speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival to fellow billionaire David Rubenstein, co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. At one point, Fink confessed to being ashamed of being part of the public conversation on ESG brought on by the annual letters that he writes to CEOs of BlackRock’s investee companies. “When I write these letters, it was never meant to be a political statement,” Fink told Rubenstein. “They were written to identify long-term issues.”

    Moments later, Fink backtracked. “I write about stakeholder capitalism, and I’m a big believer that you have to focus on all of your stakeholders,” Fink said. “So there’s nothing to be ashamed about. I just don’t use the word ‘ESG’ anymore.” Confused? You’re meant to be. BlackRock has been put on the defensive by red-state blowback to the anti-fossil-fuel positions adopted by BlackRock in its embrace of stakeholder capitalism and ESG. The debate on stakeholder capitalism and ESG is too important to be left with BlackRock and its CEO’s less than candid, but nonetheless revealing, attempt to find a way out of BlackRock’s self-inflicted ESG difficulties.

    That’s why the three books reviewed here are so important. Taken together, they constitute a comprehensive refutation of ESG and stakeholder capitalism. In The Case for Shareholder Capitalism, R. David McLean takes the argument back to first principles—indeed, back some 320,000 years and archaeological evidence that some of our earliest African ancestors engaged in trade. Moving to Europe, Homo sapiens outcompeted physically stronger Neanderthals because we traded and they did not. “Why would trading help us survive? Trade enables specialization,” McLean writes. Trade also enabled the formation of towns and cities, i.e., civilization.

    People trade with other people only when both sides gain. This axiom of human behavior applies to shareholder capitalism: a corporation is a legal entity through which customers, suppliers, and employees trade with the business’s shareholders. “You cannot expect businesses to keep trading with you unless the trading also makes the businesses’ owners better off,” McLean writes. “Profits reflect the business owner’s gain from trading.”

    Profit—the economic value accruing to shareholders—also indicates whether a business makes an economic contribution to society. When a mature firm or product is chronically loss-making, “it likely signals that the resources it is using could be put to better use elsewhere.” It makes society, as well as shareholders, poorer because it consumes resources that could have gone to more valuable use elsewhere.

    McLean’s reasoning leads to two powerful insights. The first involves what he calls the “stakeholder fallacy,” which says that shareholders should be put on an equal footing with other stakeholders: “This overlooks the fact that they already are on an equal footing. If a customer or an employee in a capitalist economy doesn’t find it beneficial to transact with a firm, then she isn’t required to do so. By the same token, if a transaction doesn’t benefit the firm’s shareholders, then the firm shouldn’t engage in the transaction. That is all shareholder capitalism requires.”

    This links to the second insight. When a manager spends the corporation’s money on things that cannot reasonably be expected to create shareholder value, the manager is expropriating the corporation’s assets. Either corporate spending is undertaken with the intention of increasing shareholder value, or it expropriates the firm’s resources. “There is no third category.” Whether spending in the second category is labeled “socially responsible,” or to improve an ESG rating, is entirely subjective, McLean argues: “Labels reflect what the labelers like or dislike. That is all. They have no higher meaning. Labeling an expropriation ‘socially responsible’ does not change the fact that it is an expropriation.”

    McLean is a professor of finance at Georgetown University. His writing has the virtue of bringing crystalline brilliance to a subject distorted by willful obfuscation and misleading claims. Paul H. Tice, author of The Race to Zero, spent 40 years on Wall Street, including spells at J. P. Morgan, Lehman Brothers, and BlackRock. Tice’s practitioner experience and the granularity of the evidence that he presents make for a perfect complement to McLean’s more theoretical treatment.

    Like McLean, Tice is unsparing in his criticism. ESG, he writes, is the latest fraud being perpetrated on the financial markets, and sustainable investment is a scam that aims to determine the allocation of capital in the economy: “[I]t is socialism disguised as a new form of capitalism.” As a former Wall Streeter, Tice follows in the footsteps of Terrence Keeley and his pathbreaking 2022 book Sustainable: Moving Beyond ESG to Impact Investing, for which Keeley sacrificed his senior role at BlackRock. Like Keeley, Tice advocates segregating ESG funds, or impact funds, as Keeley calls them, and takes the case against ESG several stages further.

    Tice writes of how Wall Street bosses embraced ESG as a path back to social acceptability after the financial crisis. Despite empirical studies demonstrating a tenuous link, at best, between ESG factors and corporate performance, Wall Street’s analytical defenses were dulled by the Fed-induced trance of near-zero interest rates. Tice contrasts the objectivity and reproducibility of credit ratings with the subjectivity and non-comparability of ESG ratings, as different ESG raters have their own methodologies delivering vastly different results on the same company. According to Michael Jantzi, founder of ESG rater Sustainalytics (now owned by Morningstar), the diversity of ESG ratings is a sign of a healthy market. This is like saying that schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder are “signs of a healthy mind,” Tice comments.

    ESG is fundamentally about getting capital providers (debt and equity) to use their financial leverage and institutional power to frog-march the corporate sector into the front line of the war against climate change. As Tice notes, apart from climate change, ESG is “just a ragtag collection of liberal policy wants” sponsored by the United Nations—diversity, union power, gender pay equality, executive compensation, and “fair” corporate taxes. The UN attempts to justify the prioritization of climate change over the other 16 of its sustainable development goals (the first of which is ending world poverty), on the spurious grounds that tackling climate change drives attainment of all the rest. In the world according to the UN, there are no costs or trade-offs when it comes to cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

    When companies set net zero targets, they expropriate value from their shareholders. Where does this shareholder wealth go? The recent scandal at Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which companies use to validate corporate net zero targets, illustrates the truth of McLean’s proposition on shareholder expropriation. Under pressure from John Kerry and lubricated by a large donation from the Bezos Earth Fund, SBTi decided to support the use of carbon credits to finance the energy transition in the Global South. Thus, net zero targets are a non-legislated tax on shareholders to fund the goals of the Paris climate agreement. This was too much for many of SBTi’s staff and advisers, one of whom denounced carbon credits as “scientifically, socially and from a climate perspective a hoax.”

    The first step in getting companies to set decarbonization targets is forcing them to report their greenhouse gas emissions. Three years ago, Follow This, a Dutch nonprofit—more accurately, an anti-profit—tabled a shareholder resolution that would require Chevron to reduce its Scope 3 emissions, defined as those emitted across the company’s entire value chain. As McLean writes, “Chevron is an oil company. It can reduce its customers’ CO2 emissions only by getting its customers to use less oil. The purpose of this resolution, therefore, was to get Chevron to destroy itself.”

    A majority of Chevron’s shareholders voted for the resolution, including the Big Three index providers: BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. The Chevron resolution is a clear example of investment managers using other people’s money to destroy the value of their investments. On Larry Fink’s own definition, this puts BlackRock and the other two index providers on the far left of American politics.

    Shareholder capitalism depends on a chain of principal–agent relationships that runs from savers, investors, and pension plan beneficiaries through investment managers to corporate boards and CEOs. The first-round principal–agent relationship is generally governed by the legal duties that investment managers, as fiduciaries, owe their clients because, as Fink puts it, they’re managing other people’s money and shouldn’t pursue other objectives. ESG advocates try to square the circle by claiming that investing according to ESG precepts boosts—or, at minimum, does not sacrifice—investor returns (“doing well by doing good”). This won’t wash. McLean quotes Cliff Asness, cofounder and chief investment officer of AQR Capital Management, who points out that if one investor mandates an investment to maximize return for the risk taken, and a second says to do that, subject to the following constraints, “it is simply false and irresponsible for the asset manager to assert that the second investor should expect to do as well as the first, except in the case where those constraints are non-binding (and therefore not relevant).”

    Evidence that advocates of ESG investing don’t believe their own arguments for ESG boosting risk-adjusted returns is shown by their campaign to destroy fiduciary duty as a binding constraint on investment managers. Tice is superb on this, writing that rules on the duties of fiduciaries are being rewritten to “not just allow but require an ESG approach by fund managers.” Thus the UN-sponsored Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) states that fiduciary duty exists to ensure that those managing other people’s money act in the interests of beneficiaries—the omission of “sole” pointing to PRI’s sleight of hand, which comes next—requiring “investors to incorporate all value drivers, including environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors, in investment decision making.”

    Tice charts how PRI, together with its sibling the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), has become increasingly prescriptive. In 2015, PRI and UNEP FI published Fiduciary Duty in the 21st Century (foreword by Al Gore and his investment partner David Blood), with the intent of eviscerating fiduciary duty as a constraint on investment managers by, as Tice puts it, requiring fiduciaries to “consider the long-term interests of their beneficiaries, both financial and nonfinancial, whether known to them or not.” With its detailed demands addressed to individual financial regulators around the world to write its proposals into law and regulation, PRI’s Fiduciary Duty in the 21st Century is a lobbying manual to end fiduciary duty in the 21st century.

    PRI’s 5,336 signatories include BlackRock, which signed on October 7, 2008, State Street (May 2012), and Vanguard (November 2014). BlackRock states that it is committed to supporting PRI’s principles “where consistent with our fiduciary duties.” This is thoroughly disingenuous, as PRI continues its campaign to weaken, and ultimately destroy, the fiduciary duties that BlackRock professes to maintain. Fink’s protestations that BlackRock does not seek to play politics with other people’s money have little credibility for as long as BlackRock remains a PRI signatory.

    PRI has conquered Europe and the UK, which together account for about 75% of the 868 pro-ESG regulations tracked by PRI. In Britain, shareholder capitalism perished under a nominally Conservative government. At the COP26 Glasgow climate conference in 2021, Rishi Sunak as Chancellor of the Exchequer spoke of a $130 trillion wall of capital—the amount of other people’s money managed by the members of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero—to be deployed to finance the net zero transition. Sunak went on to say that the entire global financial system needed to be rewired for net zero. “Investors need to have as much clarity and confidence in the climate impact of their investments as they do in the traditional financial metrics of profit and loss,” Sunak told the COP. As a result, the UK is the first country in the world to have incorporated the framework drawn up by Michael Bloomberg’s Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures into its disclosure requirements for listed companies and large asset managers.

    Britain formally left the EU in January 2020. In practical terms, it remains fully aligned with the EU on ESG and sustainability. Eight months after Brexit, the City minister, John Glen, told an ESG conference that Britain would, at the very least, match the EU’s Sustainable Finance Action Plan. “We are working hard to support the sustainability and responsible investing agenda,” Glen said. These were not empty words. That year, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the regulator overseeing corporate governance, reporting, and auditing, issued a revision of its investment managers’ stewardship code.

    Tice observes that the revised code has the PRI’s fingerprints all over it. All 12 of the FRC’s “stewardship” (a word that has been twisted to mean the opposite of what it should) principles embed a sustainable approach to investing, requiring investors to identify and respond to supposed systemic risks, including climate change, and to integrate ESG and climate change into their investment processes. UK-listed companies operating mainly in the UK are required to produce net zero transition plans that are to be vetted by a Transition Plan Taskforce, cochaired by the CEO of one of Britain’s largest insurers and a Treasury minister.

    While Britain killed off shareholder capitalism through regulatory fiat, minimal legislative change, and no public debate, at least the EU’s effort involved legislative change and due consideration by the European Parliament. Under the 2020 Taxonomy Regulation, large publicly listed companies and all financial-market participants must report the proportion of their activities that meet the standards of environmental sustainability set out in the regulation and further the goals of the European Green Deal and those that do not. The 2022 Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires, among other things, sustainability to be embedded into companies’ long-term strategic planning. The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation of the same year penetrates deep into how investment managers should consider and disclose sustainability risks and creates three classes of investment funds: Article 6 for non-ESG funds; Article 8—funds integrating ESG and sustainability; and Article 9 funds—those with sustainable investment as their core objective.

    The sustainability regimes adopted by Britain and the EU are more than a license for shareholder expropriation; they are instructions for systematic shareholder expropriation. It shows that the “S” in ESG really stands for socialization of people’s savings, to be deployed to meet governmental objectives denoted by “E,” principally decarbonization, thereby exposing “G,” notionally about protecting shareholders, as a sham designed to con institutional shareholders into wholesale adoption of ESG. However, neither Britain nor the EU took on board the adverse macroeconomic consequences of transitioning from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism. Asness’s logic shows why savings earn a lower return under ESG. Lower returns require a higher quantum of savings to generate the same future income stream. Having to save more means lower consumption and living standards today and in the future.

    Asness’s logic on the outperformance of the unconstrained versus the constrained investor also applies to economies. An economy constrained by a net zero mandate has fewer choices than an unconstrained one; in particular, it is precluded from using the most efficient sources of energy. Given the high transitional costs of net zero, it is condemned to perform worse than it would without the net zero constraint. (For this reason, the UN’s claim that net zero promotes achievement of other sustainable development goals, including poverty eradication, is not just illogical; it is immoral.) By directing capital into less productive assets, the economy produces less. Lower returns on productive assets imply lower stock-market valuations, and reduced returns on new investment cascade through the economy into weaker economic growth.

    Empirical data on Britain’s efforts to decarbonize power generation with heavy investment in wind and solar capacity bear this out. In my 2023 RealClearFoundation report “The Folly of Climate Leadership: Net Zero and Britain’s Disastrous Energy Policies,” I show that between 2009 and 2020, a 15.5% increase in nameplate electrical generating capacity produced 17.1% less electricity, caused by a 28.3% decline in output per unit of generating capacity over those 11 years.

    The negative microeconomic impacts of the transition from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism aggregating into anemic macroeconomic performance bring to mind Frédéric Bastiat’s warning in That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen: “It often happens, that the sweeter the first fruit of a habit is, the more bitter are the consequences.” Conservative ministers appear perplexed that they adopt antigrowth policies like net zero and mandatory ESG and then find themselves presiding over an ex-growth economy and cruising towards a catastrophic defeat at the general election on July 4.

    Although shareholder capitalism has come under sustained attack from the Biden administration, so far, the US has escaped the fate of Britain and Europe. The Department of Labor’s 2022 ERISA “Prudence and Loyalty” rule attempts to force pension fiduciaries to incorporate ESG factors into investment decision-making. The SEC’s recently finalized climate disclosure rule aims to inculcate climate-consciousness into corporate decision-making and requires companies to make standardized emissions disclosures, so that climate activists can compare and then coerce them into adopting costly decarbonization targets, notwithstanding the fact that, regarding climate disclosures and materiality, the SEC had fulfilled its legislative mandate with its February 2010 guidance on climate disclosures.

    Litigation fears likely led the SEC to drop mandatory Scope 3 emissions disclosures and the withdrawal of some heavyweight financial institutions from net zero investment groups likely reflects fear of potential suits alleging infringement of antitrust law. However, the most effective opposition to ESG has been at the state level, where red states have pushed back against ESG by legislative and legal action as well as by simply taking their business elsewhere.

    This resistance has lead the executive branch, in league with its allies on Wall Street, to greater reliance on informal or soft power to bring about the transition from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism: create the impression of the inevitable triumph of net zero; harness market momentum from the Big Three index providers and massive blue-state pension funds to provoke investor herding; and, with the help of an ideologically aligned media, foster a pro–net zero climate of opinion, in which dissenting opinions and contrary narratives are not tolerated—in short, the weaponization of information.

    It is on this battlefield that the third in the trio of books reviewed here is so valuable. Rather than directly confronting ESG and stakeholder capitalism head-on, in May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—and What We Can Do About It, Alex Edmans provides the tools and, perhaps more importantly, the skeptical mind-set to unpick common ESG claims. Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School, recently wrote two important papers on ESG: “The End of ESG” (2022); and “Applying Economics—Not Gut Feel—to ESG” (2023), which overturn conventional thinking on ten key ESG issues.

    Edmans reviewed an early draft of McLean’s book. “What better person to get feedback from?” McLean asks. Yet they are on different sides when it comes to sustainability. All businesses in a capitalist economy are subject to Schumpeter’s perennial gale of creative destruction: “We can have sustainable economic growth, but if we do, then nothing is sustainable at the level of the individual business,” McLean writes. On the other hand, Edmans is a self-described sustainability advocate. Far from blinding him to problems arising out of concept of sustainability, Edmans says that he seeks out well-informed critiques and views disagreement as valuable.

    Twenty years of research have taught Edmans the lesson of rigorously testing claims. May Contain Lies is elegantly structured around an ascent up the ladder of “misinference,” an ideologically neutral term that does not give off the stench of censorship that often accompanies usage of misinformation and, especially, disinformation:

    • A statement is not fact.
    • A fact is not data.
    • Data are not evidence.
    • Evidence is not proof.

    When it comes to claims about ESG, Edmans provides examples that suggest that the book’s title is underdone. It’s a pretty safe bet that a pro-ESG statement will contain lies, a carve-out being made for best employee-rated companies, which Edmans’s research shows are associated with stronger stock-market performance. Edmans relates that a House of Commons committee asserted that an academic paper found that high wage disparities damage corporate performance, despite Edmans telling the clerk to the committee that the conclusion had been from a preprint that, post–peer review, came to the opposite conclusion.

    Then there is the case of the “world-famous” investor who invites Edmans to partner in a new fund focused on pro-gender-diversity companies—if he could come up with supportive research. Edmans and a colleague crunch 24 relevant measures; 22 are negatively associated with company performance; one has a statistically insignificant relationship, leaving only one (fewer media reports on diversity controversies are linked to stronger corporate performance). Six months later, the investor launches a diversity fund backed by other research claiming that female-friendly firms perform better. Data mining, Edmans says. Even by Wall Street standards, pushing ESG investment products demands unusual levels of cynicism.

    Edmans’s guiding star is falsifiability: “The only way to support your theory is to try to disprove it…. [F]inding out what’s wrong is the only way to find out what’s right.” Missing, though, is the bigger picture in which opinion diversity is suppressed, and attempts at falsification, or even modification, of dominant consensus narratives are dismissed as actions of bad actors.

    Edmans rightly stresses the necessity of having a scientific culture: “an environment where people put out bold and innovative ideas, actively seek dissenting opinions.” On climate change, such a culture does not exist in science or finance. In 2022, Stuart Kirk, head of sustainability at HSBC, gave a presentation arguing that investors did not need to worry about climate change. “The speech did an important service by providing a contrasting opinion,” Edmans writes, while acknowledging that performing this valuable service cost Kirk his job. It is left to Tice to draw the conclusion that Kirk’s termination shows that no one on Wall Street is free to speak out against sustainability “for fear of being personally attacked and likely fired or calling down the ESG gods on their firm.”

    Edmans uncritically cites the famous 97% scientific consensus on climate change, which, Tice shows, was originally derived from a sift of climate research papers, two-thirds of which expressed no opinion on anthropogenic climate change. Sir David Attenborough’s warning that climate change is our greatest threat—greater than pandemics and nuclear war—is “not clearly incorrect,” Edmans says. Neither is it obviously correct; yet Edmans offers no means of choosing between these two mutually exclusive speculations about the future. Fact-checking, which Edmans suggests elsewhere, won’t do. Facts exist only in the past. There is no such thing as a future “fact,” a word derived from the Latin factum, meaning “thing done,” the past participle of the verb facere, “to do.”

    One way of assessing the credibility of statements about the future is to examine the track record of past predictions against what actually happened. In 1953, Sir Richard Doll, one of the pioneering epidemiologists who uncovered the link between tobacco smoking and lung cancer, predicted that in 1973 there would be 25,000 lung cancer deaths in Britain. In fact, there were 26,000. The science of smoking and lung cancer had passed a sharp predictive test with flying colors.

    It is reasonable to put greater weight on the science behind a forecast that under-predicts a large rise and to put less reliance on the science that over-predicts. Such is the case with climate science. A year after the 1988 Toronto climate change conference, which declared the danger of climate change second only to a global nuclear war, a Commonwealth group of climate experts produced a 140-page report in which they made a supposedly conservative prediction of global temperature increase of 0.24°C–0.48°C per decade. This compares with an average rise of 0.21°C per decade derived from the Met Office’s global temperature data set from 1989 to 2023 (five-year trailing average) and a linear warming trend from January 1979 to March 2024 in the satellite temperature record of 0.15°C per decade, implying that the Commonwealth experts’ forecast ran 1.7–2.4 times hotter than observations.

    No reasonable person could claim that in the 36 years since the Toronto climate conference, humanity has experienced anything close to the death and destruction of a global nuclear war. As Tice points out, the number of disaster-related deaths globally has dropped by a factor of ten over the past 100 years. In terms of lives lost, no recent natural disaster has been as devastating as the central China flood of 1931, in which as many as 2 million people lost their lives and affected the lives of 52 million more. Nonetheless, 36 years after the Toronto conference, climate change is portrayed as a catastrophe of existential proportions, one still lurking over the horizon, despite a near-contemporaneous temperature forecast running far ahead of observed warming and even upgraded to being more destructive than nuclear war.

    It’s not only temperature forecasts that were overheated. Six years ago, Manhattan Contrarian Francis Menton posted a catalog of failed climate tipping-point predictions. In 1988, the year of his famous congressional testimony, NASA climate scientist James Hansen told a journalist that Manhattan’s West Side Highway would be under water in either 20 years or 40 years (the record is unclear). In 2018, ten years after or ten years before the expiry of Hansen’s prediction, Menton went down the highway. To no one’s surprise, except possibly Hansen’s, “the water didn’t appear any closer to swamping it than it was back in 1988.”

    Despite the impacts of climate change being far less severe than initially believed nearly four decades ago, climate change has to be catastrophic to justify the profound (and unachievable) economic and societal transformations demanded by net zero. Were people to start believing that its effects are mild or even benign, climate change’s potency to move policy mountains would evaporate. For this reason, querying the catastrophist narrative is not permitted. It’s here that Edmans’s belief in the importance of opinion diversity and actively seeking dissenting views runs into the over-heated reality of today’s world.

    As a newspaper reader, Edmans subscribes to both the conservative Daily Telegraph and the left-wing Guardian. Twinning opposing op-eds is the formula behind RealClearPolitics (RCP) that publisher David DesRosiers sees as an antidote to polarization and hyper-partisanship. This led to RCP’s blacklisting by the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British NGO, which last year labeled RCP a high-risk news site for disinformation (the author is a senior fellow of a foundation that works with RCP).

    GDI describes its role as disrupting the business models of news and opinion sites that it deems disseminators of disinformation. Because climate catastrophe is a non-fact that belongs to the category of an unverifiable speculation about the future, fact-checking climate change quickly morphs into opinion censorship. Thus, GDI’s definition of disinformation encompasses what it calls “adversarial narratives,” i.e., opinions—whether or not supported by scientifically sound analysis—that it disagrees with.

    The weaponization of information was discussed by Dr. Scott Atlas, who served as President Trump’s scientific adviser on Covid for part of 2020, in a recent interview with PragerU’s Marissa Streit. What he has to say about censorship has a direct read-across to climate. Censorship worked, Atlas told Streit. Dissenters were demonized, and a cancel culture blocked people from speaking and blocked people from hearing. “The solution to misinformation is more information. There is no one who should be trusted with the power to determine truth versus not.”

    Atlas also spoke of the funding webs that distort academic research in a pattern similar to that in climate science. The federal government, in the form of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is the main funder of medical science. A cabal of powerful, politically connected people are chairs of departments in medical schools and also reviewers or editors-in-chief of medical publications. There’s an added twist: in response to FOIA requests, OpenTheBooks found that individual NIH employees received $325 million from the pharmaceutical industry over an 11-year period, which looks very much like legalized corruption.

    Atlas and Edmans offer similar advice on what Atlas calls a “crisis of trust,”Atlas telling Streit:

    “We now know the responsibility is on us as individuals in a free society to know what we’re talking about; to go investigate the source and the data because the era of trusting people solely on the basis of their credentials is over … They’re incompetent. But also, they’re not to be trusted. They manipulated the public instead of g[iving] us information and let[ting] us decide.”

    Unsurprisingly, GDI holds the opposite view. In a February 2022 interview, Daniel Rogers, GDI’s cofounder and executive director, speaks of the societal function of information that requires deference to politically approved science:

    “People have been convinced through the online disinformation ecosystem not to get vaccinated, becoming eventually sick and causing more harm. In that sense, while the number of websites acting as purveyors of disinformation isn’t that big, it’s an enormous problem in terms of impact, to the point that it poses a threat to democracy…. This is a true cultural malignancy.”

    Rogers’s is an authoritarian, top-down model of information dissemination and control. Yet, almost in the same breath, Rogers expresses alarm that “around the world, authoritarian regimes are increasingly coming into power, which I see as a direct result of the collective information environment poisoned by these toxic business models.” He might as well have been talking about GDI as a toxic business model. In a crisis of trust, it is organizations such as his that act as malignant nodes in the spread of distrust.

    Ultimately, the crisis of trust is a crisis of civilization. In May Contain Lies, Edmans recounts an experiment in which subjects are invited to drink apple juice from a bedpan that they know is perfectly clean; 72% of them flatly refuse. This is rational behavior. Heuristics, or rules of thumb, obviate thinking and enable us to live fuller lives. And, as McLean shows, trade is a supremely human activity. Trade enables specialization, and specialization enables the development of knowledge expertise. We all lose when expertise is discredited by being politicized and harnessed to a public policy agenda.

    A necessary condition for restoring trust in expertise is free expression by experts and nonexperts alike free of intimidation. This condition was absent during the pandemic and continues to this day. It has been absent for many years in discussions on climate change, as both Stuart Kirk and climate scientist Judith Curry, drummed out of her position at Georgia Tech, can testify.

    Despite the weight of the forces arrayed against them and the power of climate catastrophism to silence dissent, opponents of ESG and stakeholder capitalism have succeeded in checking its advance. True, the battle is lost in the EU and, for the time being, in Britain, but the fact that the CEO of the world’s largest investment manager refrains from using the word “ESG” says something, as does the withdrawal of a number of large financial institutions from climate action groups. The two Republican SEC commissioners remind its chair of the limits of the authority delegated to it by Congress (Hester Peirce: “We are Not the Securities and Environment Commission – At Least Not Yet”) – and Scope 3 emissions fall away from the SEC climate disclosure rule. ExxonMobil has filed a suit against Follow This, the climate activist that BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street had supported against Chevron management, and publicly states that it does not care about growing shareholder value.

    Financial markets speak in prices. Tice points out that in 2022, the S&P 500 Energy subindex rose by 59.05%, while the broader equity market sank by 19.44%. As McLean demonstrates, if there is any free lunch in investment, it is diversification by lowering risk but not returns. By restricting their universe of investment possibilities, ESG investors increase risk without improving their chances of return. Investors have noticed. The battle to save shareholder capitalism can be won. These three books help bring that victory closer.

    My advice? Read them.

    Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClearFoundation and author of  The Folly of Climate Leadership: Net Zero and Britain’s Disastrous Energy Policies.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 20:20

  • Deadly Blaze Rips Through US-Sanctioned Moscow Electronics Research Building
    Deadly Blaze Rips Through US-Sanctioned Moscow Electronics Research Building

    A huge and deadly fire is raging at a defense technology research center outside of Moscow, which has so far reportedly taken the lives of at least eight people (per BBC citing state media updates, though the casualty count is conflicting).

    A building of the Platan Research Institute has been engulfed in flames, widespread social media videos show. It is located in the town of Fryazino in the Moscow region. Importantly, Platan develops radio-electronic systems for Russia’s Defense Ministry, raising suspicion that this could be the result of sabotage or covert attack connected to the war in Ukraine.

    Governor Moscow oblast, Andrei Vorobyov, confirmed in a Monday statement that three floors of the building have been overwhelmed by flames. “The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth floors are on fire,” Mash said Monday.

    TASS has cited an eyewitness who saw two people tragically fall to their deaths after they jumped from a window trying to escape the flames and thick smoke. BBC writes:

    There are conflicting reports about the building’s purpose. It once homed the Platan Research Institute and defence industry, according to Tass.

    A statement to the agency from Ruselectronics, a Russia-owned electronics organisation, said the building has been privately owned since the 1990s. However, opposition media outlets recently reported that Platan was based in the building as late as 2023.

    It is not immediately clear what caused the fire, but one eyewitness told Tass that it broke out on the sixth floor before spreading.

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    Over 130 fire and emergency services personnel, two helicopters, and 50 vehicles are engaged in fighting the blaze, which has spread to a whopping 5,000 square meters.

    “The fire area has increased to 5,000 square meters. The extinguishing operation is complicated by the presence of gas-air mix canisters inside the building. The firefighters continue working to eliminate the fire,” a statement given to TASS indicated.

    Once again we are left with the question: accident or covert sabotage?

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    Local authorities have already announced a criminal case connected the deaths, possibly due to arson or else negligence. 

    Platan Research Institute is among many defense ministry-linked firms currently under US-led sanctions.

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    We previously outlined recent mysterious industrial fires and possible sabotage incidents across Europe, the UK, and inside Russia… a trend which has left many observers speculating this could be part of an ongoing covert ‘dirty war’ in the shadows of the Ukraine conflict.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 20:00

  • Visualizing Saudi Aramco's Massive Oil Reserves
    Visualizing Saudi Aramco’s Massive Oil Reserves

    Saudi Aramco controls 259 billion barrels worth of oil and gas reserves, which is unmatched by any other company globally. This is a key factor in the company’s massive $1.8 trillion valuation.

    To illustrate that, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu created this chart to compare the proved reserves of major oil companies as of 2022.

    Data was compiled by Statista from various company reports.

    Crown Jewel

    Saudi Aramco is the national oil company of Saudi Arabia. As of 2024, it is the sixth-largest company in the world by market capitalization.

    Its oil reserves are over four times bigger than the reserves of all the other six companies on our list combined.

    Behind Saudi Aramco, American company ExxonMobil comes in second with 17.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent, followed by another American company, Chevron, with 11.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

    Saudi Aramco produces 9 million barrels of oil a day, more than any other firm and nearly a tenth of the world’s total.

    In addition, the state-run oil giant is the world’s most profitable company, generating $722 billion in profits between 2016 and 2023.

    Saudi Aramco is also expected to play a big part in Saudi Arabia’s plans to diversify its economy and reduce oil dependence. Recently, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman confirmed that the kingdom is in talks to sell a 1% stake in the state oil giant, which could help fund the country’s projects in clean energy and technology.

    If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out this graphic, which ranks oil production by country.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 19:20

  • Fasting Boosts Cancer-Fighting Ability Of 'Natural Killer' Cells: Study
    Fasting Boosts Cancer-Fighting Ability Of ‘Natural Killer’ Cells: Study

    Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Fasting can program certain immunity cells in the body to fight cancer better and improve the cell’s ability to survive in a tumor environment, according to a recent study.

    A new study published in the Journal Immunity found that fasting can program certain immunity cells in the body to fight cancer better. (Nok Lek Travel Lifestyle/Shutterstock)

    The study, published in the journal Immunity on June 14, looked at how fasting affected natural killer (NK) cells, a type of white blood cell capable of killing damaged or abnormal cells like cancer and those infected by a virus. The presence of a higher number of killer cells within a tumor is usually seen as beneficial for a cancer patient. Researchers found that fasting can reprogram the metabolism of natural killer cells, improving their ability to fight cancer and enabling the cells to survive in the harsh environment within and around the tumors.

    “Our findings identify a link between dietary restriction and optimized innate immune responses, with the potential to enhance immunotherapy strategies” of cancer patients, the paper said.

    In the study, researchers analyzed cancer-infected mice that were not given food for a period of 24 hours, twice a week. As the mice were allowed to eat freely in between fasts, they did not lose any weight.

    During the fasting period, glucose levels in the mice dropped, similar to humans, along with a jump in free fatty acids. Meanwhile, the natural killer cells were observed to have undergone a major change.

    “During each of these fasting cycles, NK cells learned to use these fatty acids as an alternative fuel source to glucose,” said Rebecca Delconte, a co-author of the study.

    “This really optimizes their anti-cancer response because the tumor microenvironment contains a high concentration of lipids, and now they’re able to enter the tumor and survive better because of this metabolic training.”

    Fasting was also observed to have redistributed NK cells in the body. Some of the cells traveled into the bone marrow, getting exposed to high levels of a signaling protein. This led to NK cells producing more Interferon-gamma, a type of protein that plays a key role in the body’s anti-tumor response.

    NK cells in the spleen experienced a separate programming that allowed them to better use lipids as a source of fuel.

    “With both of these mechanisms put together, we find that NK cells are pre-primed to produce more cytokines within the tumor,” Ms. Delconte said.

    “And with the metabolic reprogramming, they’re more able to survive in the tumor environment, and specialized to have improved anti-cancer properties.”

    The research comes as clinical trials to study the safety and effectiveness of fasting together with standard cancer treatments are underway.

    The study was funded through multiple sources, including the National Institutes of Health, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, and the American Cancer Society. Authors declared no competing interests in the study.

    Fasting Risks

    While the June 14 study found positive links between fasting and fighting cancer, clinical dietitian Juhina Farooki says the safety of the process should only be determined on a case-by-case basis.

    “Every patient is different, and what could be safe for one patient is not necessarily safe for the other patient,” she said, according to a Jan. 29 post at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.

    Malnutrition is one of the risks of fasting while undergoing cancer treatment. A lack of proper nutrients can result in weight loss, slow down the healing process, and worsen fatigue, the post said. It can also add more stress during what is an already tense period for the individual.

    Ms. Farooki advises cancer patients who wish to fast to only do so after consulting with their physician. This ensures the patient gets sufficient nutrition.

    A February 2023 study that investigated the effect of skipping meals in mice found that there was a difference in the number of monocytes in the creatures. Monocytes are white blood cells made in the bone marrow that fight cancer.

    One group of mice were given breakfast while the other group was denied. After four hours of fasting, 90 percent of monocytes in the fasting mice were found to have disappeared from the bloodstream, which fell further at eight hours. In the non-fasting mice, monocyte levels remained unaffected.

    Meanwhile, a recent German study found intermittent fasting to have a protective effect against inflammation and cancer in the liver. The researchers conducted tests on mice already suffering from liver inflammation.

    After the mice were subjected to four months of intermittent fasting, their liver function tests improved. The mice were found to be less likely to develop liver cancer.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 19:00

  • It Took Nvidia 23 Days To Add $1 Trillion In Market Cap; Berkshire Hathaway Hasn't Managed That In 60 Years
    It Took Nvidia 23 Days To Add $1 Trillion In Market Cap; Berkshire Hathaway Hasn’t Managed That In 60 Years

    This morning, Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid published his latest chart book titled “Charts to make you go WOW” (available here to pro subs), which will prompt a few surprised exclamations even from the hardened cynics.

    And while there is an extensive selection to pick from – and we will go over the charts in more details shortly –  it’s hard to pick a more “wow” chart example than the recent developments involving Nvidia (there’s lots more beside in the pack from AI and industrial revolutions to debt, deficits, demographics, migration and housing).

    The chart below shows that it’s taken 60 years for the most famous and arguably successful investor in the world, Warren Buffet, to build Berkshire Hathaway up to just shy of a trillion-dollar company ($883bn at Friday’s close). Indeed the company’s origins began in the 19th century so the full journey has taken well over a century and it’s yet to hit a trillion dollars.

    Contrast that with Nvidia, which went from just below $2tn market cap for the last time on April 24th, to over $3tn just 30 trading days later. Even more impressively, at its record close last Tuesday, where it became the largest company in the world, the last trillion of market cap was added in only 23 trading days.

    Then again, the higher they rise… Nvidia opened on Thursday after the holiday another 3% higher, melting up on virtually no volume (and a brutal gamma squeeze). But since that intraday peak it has tumbled 13% in just three days, and slipped back to 3rd in the S&P 500 rankings. The move came as portfolio managers rebalanced portfolios at the end of the quarter, with JPM calculating some $50 billion in selling pressure from pension funds, to account for the surge in tech shares; the start of the buyback blackout period last week didn’t help either.

    So, as Jim Reid asks rhetorically, is this a pause for breath or signs the air is being let out of the balloon? He responds that while his chart book hints that he does believe in AI, there have been signs of over exuberance in the US market over the last month. Penny stock trading has soared and net call options on Mega Cap Growth and Tech has exploded in June.

    This, alongside positioning and the move into the buyback blackout period, has led DB strategist to suggest a “breather” is likely.

    More in the full DB Monthly Chartbook “Charts to make you go WOW” available to pro subs.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 18:40

  • Biden's Latest DEI Hire Deletes Past Anti-White And Anti-Police Tweets
    Biden’s Latest DEI Hire Deletes Past Anti-White And Anti-Police Tweets

    Authored by Steve Watson via modernity.news,

    In the latest clownworld development, the Biden Administration hired a man in a dress to be its new Associate Communications Director and it quickly emerged that the guy had a history of spicy tweets hating on white people, comparing police officers to ‘slave patrols’ and ‘lynch mobs’, and calling for ICE to be abolished.

    Here is who they hired. Tyler Cherry (left).

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    He looks like Mr Slave from South Park.

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    Or Weird Al Yankovic if you prefer:

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    He has a degree in gender studies. Of course he does.

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    He used to work for Media Matters. Of course he did.

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    He also thinks there are too many white people.

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    When people started to point all this out, Cherry apologised, and then started deleting all the old tweets.

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    He deleted every tweet with the word ‘white’ in it:

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    And restricted who can reply or comment:

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    There is no word yet on whether this guy likes to steal luggage or not.

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    Who is really running the country?

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 18:20

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Jun 24

Today’s News 24th June 2024

  • Mapping The World's Refugee Population
    Mapping The World’s Refugee Population

    According to a report by the UNHCR, the number of people fleeing war, persecution and conflict exceeded 117 million.

    This number is up eight percent from the year before and increased by 31 percent compared to 2021.

    As Statista’s Anna Fleck shows in the following chart, 62 percent of all refugees and people in need of internal protection originated from just five countries in late 2023, while the top 10 countries of origin accounted for more than 70 percent of the global total.

    Infographic: Mapping The World's Refugee Population | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    Afghanistan has the highest number of displaced people outside of their home country, at 6.40 million.

    Syrians are the second largest population displaced across borders, with 6.36 million living outside of the country. The latest count of displaced Ukrainians totaled 5.96 million people, the third-highest in the world.

    Meanwhile, violence, food shortages, and deteriorating conditions have been pushing South Sudanese to emigrate, their numbers rising from 2.2 million refugees in 2020 to 2.3 million at the end of 2023, almost all of whom are living in Uganda (923,607), Sudan (696,246), Ethiopia (418,231) and Kenya (171,233), according to the UNHCR.

    In addition to a rise in the number of people being forced to flee their homes, these figures increased in 2021 due to the registration of new births, new estimations of displacements, as well as updates following the backlog from 2020, as registration resumed in 2021 after being suspended due to Covid-19. The stark rise of Afghan refugees can possibly be attributed to the situation in the country after the Taliban rose to power again in August 2021.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 02:45

  • This Chinese Company's Compliance With Washington's Anti-Russian Sanctions Is Very Consequential
    This Chinese Company’s Compliance With Washington’s Anti-Russian Sanctions Is Very Consequential

    Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

    China’s Wison New Energies announced in a LinkedIn post on Friday that they’re immediately stopping all their Russian projects “in view of the strategic future of the company” following the latest imposition of US sanctions against that country’s LNG industry in mid-June. Oilprice.com wrote that this will “deal a blow” to Russia’s Arctic LNG 2 project after Wison was contracted to build its modules, “which are massive, prefabricated structures that facilitate the rapid construction of LNG processing plants.”

    They also reminded their audience that Arctic LNG 2 “has been considered key to Russia’s efforts to boost its global LNG market share from 8% to 20% by 2030-2035.” The EU’s US-pressured “decoupling” from Russia’s pipeline gas network compelled that country to ramp up its LNG projects in order to freely export this resource in the coming future so as to make up for tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue. These plans might therefore be further delayed by Wison’s compliance with US sanctions.

    RT reported in late December that two major Chinese energy companies had declared force majeure on their participation in Arctic LNG 2 after a prior round of US sanctions against that project, the significance of which was analyzed here at the time. To bring the reader up to speed for their convenience, the takeaway was that China’s complex economic interdependence with the West predisposes its national champions to complying with that bloc’s unilateral restrictions in order to not lose their market there.

    China is officially opposed to all sanctions that are imposed outside of the UNSC, but it also gives its companies the choice whether to voluntarily comply with them, even those that are state-owned enterprises such as the ones from RT’s report last December. Their decision to go along with these measures is respected by the state since they’re supposed to serve China’s interests, not Russia’s or anyone else’s, and this sometimes requires them to make tough decisions for the greater national good.

    Neither the Chinese state nor its companies should therefore be negatively judged for voluntarily complying with US sanctions, but the very fact that this compliance continues occurring should result in members of the Alt-Media Community (AMC) correcting their false perceptions about Russian-Chinese ties. Many top influencers adhere to the dogma that these two see eye-to-eye on everything and are jointly coordinating all their moves in order to accelerate multipolar processes, but that’s not true.

    While their strategic ties are closer than ever and can nowadays even be described as them having formed a Sino–Russo Entente, they still disagree on Kashmir and the East Sea/South China Sea issues since Russia fully supports India and Vietnam’s respective positions. Nevertheless, Russia and China responsibly manage these disagreements for the greater multipolar good, the same as they’re expected to do regarding Chinese companies’ compliance with US sanctions, including those against Arctic LNG 2.

    This insight is relevant with regards to the AMC since it’s important for top influencers to accurately reflect such facts in their work lest they inadvertently mislead their audience about those two’s ties.

    Russia and China aren’t “against” one another, but they still prioritize their corresponding national interests. These largely overlap, in which cases they cooperate to pursue their shared goals, but they sometimes diverge and thus lead to developments like Chinese companies complying with US sanctions.

    As regards this latest example, it’ll complicate Russia’s ambitious LNG plans and therefore risk slashing its future revenue flows, with the possible consequence being that it could also affect those two’s stalled talks on the Power of Siberia II pipeline. Russia might either concede to China’s reportedly requested basement-bottom prices out of financial desperation or it’ll refuse to do so out of resentment and thus leave this project in limbo indefinitely unless/until China eventually reconsiders its stance.

    The second scenario of China agreeing to pay higher but nonetheless still privileged prices for Russian gas could play out if US pressure upon it increases in the coming future as is expected following the Russian-North Korean mutual defense pact. The preceding hyperlinked analysis explains these dynamics more in detail, but in brief, those two’s new agreement will likely be exploited by the US to redouble its regional military presence at the expense of China’s objective national security interests.

    In that event, and if the abovementioned trend unfolds in parallel with the US applying more pressure upon China in the East Sea/South China Sea in ways that hint at a credible intent to blockade its energy shipments in case of crisis, then China might reconsider its stance and agree to Russia’s pipeline terms. The additional price would be well worth paying for receiving reliable gas from its neighbor instead of holding out for a better price and risking the US cutting off its LNG imports in the meantime.

    Returning to the lede, Wison’s compliance with US sanctions against Russia should prompt the AMC to finally correct its false perceptions about the Sino-Russo Entente, and it might also play a role in determining how the Power of Siberia II pricing dilemma is resolved as was just explained. Considering that it’ll also complicate Russia’s ambitious LNG plans, from which a lot of its future revenue is expected to be derived, this makes that company’s decision much more important than many might have thought.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 06/24/2024 – 02:00

  • Is Racism And Resentment Fueling The Caitlin Clark, Team USA Controversy?
    Is Racism And Resentment Fueling The Caitlin Clark, Team USA Controversy?

    Authored by Richard Truesdell via American Greatness,

    Once or twice in a generation, an athlete comes along who dominates and often redefines their sport. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was Muhammad Ali. In the 1980s, it was Martina Navratilova. In the 1990s, it was Michael Jordan. In the 2000s, it was Tom Brady and Michael Phelps. In the 2010s, it was Serena Williams. Clark now joins this roster as a generational talent.

    Since the beginning of June, you can’t turn on any broadcast or online sports channel and not hear the name Caitlin Clark. Her presence dominates the airwaves and coverage has crossed over to the mainstream with non-sports media and even late-night comedy shows like Saturday Night Live featuring Clark. This is especially true in the wake of the decision by the USA Basketball selection committee to exclude her from the team going to the Olympics in Paris next month.

    At this point, I think that even if she were selected as the first alternate, Clark should decline.

    It’s clearly obvious from their public statements that the closely-knit team of veterans doesn’t want her and the attention she will bring to the team’s effort to win a seventh straight Olympic gold medal.

    I think she should let her 22-year-old body heal during the Olympics, as she’s just gone from the NCAA Championship straight into the WNBA regular season.

    On June 1, on an off night from beyond the three-point arc against the rival Chicago Sky, which features another highly touted rookie, Angel Reese, Clark found other ways to contribute in front of a hometown crowd—11 points, eight rebounds, six assists, and one steal—by dishing off to her teammates and rebounding. During that game, Clark took a vicious away-from-the-ball hit from Chennedy Carter.

    That foul got a lot of media attention, given that, at the time, Carter received just a regular foul. After the game, it was upgraded to a flagrant foul (game highlights here). At the rematch in Indianapolis on June 16, Clark turned in a balanced, stellar performance—23 points, nine assists, and eight rebounds—helping her team to its second consecutive win over the Chicago Sky (game highlights here).

    These two fouls have been cited by many as evidence that Clark is being targeted by certain WNBA players.

    One thing that I’ve noticed is that Black NBA players and sports commentators have been among Clark’s most prominent supporters. On the popular Fox Sports Speak podcast, the panel brought the issue into clear focus and did not shy away from discussing racial issues. On a June 3, 2024 podcast former NFL wide receiver James Jones defended Clark, questioning why her teammates weren’t stepping up to support her on the court. If the women’s game is becoming more physical, then Clark’s teammates must rise to the occasion. That seemed a bit more apparent in the June 16th rematch.

    But let’s look at the racist attitude of a well-known, so-called journalist covering this story. In a piece that ran in the far-left propaganda outlet The Atlantic, well-known race-baiter and former ESPN reporter Jemelle Hill has written one derogatory and hate-filled story after another on Clark. This one was especially egregious. Thankfully, this is just one jealous woman’s opinion. (I believe the vast majority of Black WNBA fans respect Clark’s talents and recognize that she’s a positive influence on the sport.)

    Before this year’s WNBA draft, the only two WNBA players I recognized were Brittany Greiner because of her misadventure in Russia last year and Diana Taurasi, who has been a stalwart member of the US women’s basketball movement going back to her four years at the University of Connecticut when she was a member of three NCAA championship teams. Currently 42 years old, Taurasi was selected for her sixth national team to go to the Paris Olympics this summer.

    It turns out that Taurasi has been another one of Clark’s most vocal critics, saying that as a WNBA rookie, she needs more experience before she’s ready for the US National Team, “playing against grown women instead of college players.” This is funny given Taurasi’s selection to the 2004 National Team after she ended her career at the University of Connecticut and went on to participate in the Games held that year and four teams that followed. Isn’t it time to give a younger player a chance to contribute and gain experience?

    Caitlin Clark is the personification of everything great about women’s athletics and the character it builds in young women. Clark is respected by many of her peers but unfortunately, not all. These haters are objectively resentful of Clark’s success. It borders on reverse racism. For almost three decades, the WNBA has toiled in virtual anonymity. The composition of the players in the league is over 60 percent African-American and close to 40 percent openly identify as gay, although some surveys say it is higher. Either way, it really doesn’t matter.

    Now comes Clark, with prodigious talents and an outgoing personality, who happens not to fall into either category. Because of this, many of her competitors seem to resent her. They are asking themselves, “Why isn’t it me who got multi-million dollar endorsement deals with Nike, Wilson, Gatorade, State Farm, and others?”

    To answer that question, ask yourself this:. Who would you want your daughter or granddaughter to look up to, to emulate, to be inspired by? A young woman (no matter her color or sexual orientation) who has taken the country by storm with her engaging personality and who has brought attention, eyeballs, and possibly an unprecedented $250 million media rights deal to the doorstep of the WNBA?

    Or someone who stupidly attempted to smuggle a known banned substance into a totalitarian state and received a nine-month vacation in a Russian gulag before, in a move designed to pander to two important voting blocs (Blacks and LBGT advocates), the Biden Administration traded this player for a known terrorist and worldwide arms merchant while leaving several more deserving Americans behind.

    I think that’s a very simple question to answer. And it has very little to do with kneeling or staying behind in the locker room while the National Anthem is played.

    I’ve watched Clark perform in the NCAA Championship this year and in several WNBA games this year. The mugging she’s received on the court goes way beyond the “Welcome to the WNBA girl” stuff that is dished out to newcomers in any professional sport, male or female. And I couldn’t help but notice that the dishing out was usually being administered by a certain group of players (not really a surprise statistically given that the group in question constitutes 60 percent of the players in the league but seems disproportionate to my eyes).

    Need I say more? No.

    The WNBA needs Caitlin Clark much more than Caitlin Clark needs the WNBA. Her endorsement deals are based not only on her skills on the court but also on the young woman that her loving and supportive parents raised her to be and her engaging personality. She is a generational superstar and the lame reasons cited by USA Today journalist Christine Brennen for USA Basketball for not selecting her to represent the United States next month in Paris have damaged them, not her. She could have a career-ending injury in the next four years and may never get the opportunity to represent her country, for reasons that seem specious at best.

    If this treatment by her opponents and the WNBA continues after the Olympics, then Clark will be faced with a difficult decision. Should she continue to endure this nonsense or should she take her God-given talents and her fans to another competitive venue? Could it be Ice Cube’s BIG3 3-on-3 league (and get paid $5 million more than her $80,000 WNBA salary) and be welcomed there by the likes of women’s basketball legend Nancy Lieberman? Or should she take her talents overseas, where they will be more appreciated? Having coached competitive athletes—male and female—I think one side of her will say, “I’ll work through this; it will get better. I’ll earn their respect.” But the other inner voice will say, “I’ve had enough; I don’t need to prove myself to these petty and resentful people.”

    If she chooses option one, I applaud her because that’s what elite athletes do: they rise to the occasion. But if she chooses option two, who would blame her? Then the players in the WNBA will start flying commercially again and will only have themselves to blame. This is before the NBA decides to stop subsidizing the league to the tune of $50 million a year, with the WNBA fading back into the obscurity it so richly deserves and finally disappearing.

    Few sports fans will shed a tear if that happens.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 23:20

  • California Reveals All Job Gains In 2023 Were Fake
    California Reveals All Job Gains In 2023 Were Fake

    In the past year we have discussed on multiple occasions that US labor market data has been repeatedly doctored to artificially appear better than it really is (see “Here Is The “Unexpected” Reason Why The Fed Will Rush To Cut Rates As Soon As Possible“, “Philadelphia Fed Admits US Payrolls Overstated By At Least 800,000” and “Here Comes The Job Shock: Philadelphia Fed Admits US Jobs “Overstated” By At Least 1.1 Million“), although thanks to a quirk of BLS data revision reporting, we won’t have definitive proof of just how ugly the real job market has been in recent years until some time in 2025, well into Trump’s second administration.

    However, while the BLS will be able to maintain the facade of “strong job gains” lies into early 2025, the dismal reality has already made an appearance in America’s largest labor market.

    According to the latest report published by the non-partisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) which is an agency of the California government, is overseen by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California State Legislature, and performs and publishes extensive analyses of the state’s budget in addition to providing fiscal and policy advice to the California Legislature, contrary to prior reports of over substantial job gains in the deep blue state in 2023, the reality was far uglier.

    In a report titled “Newest Early Jobs Revision Shows No Net Job Growth During 2023” we learn just that: the Early Revisions to state-level data flagged here previously, suggests that California actually lost jobs during the fourth quarter of last year. As the report details, “based on the most recent release of the early benchmarks, payroll jobs declined by 32,000 from September 2023 through December 2023. On the contrary, the preliminary monthly reports showed a solid increase in job growth (+117,000 jobs) at the time.”

    This, according to the LAO, means that “with the fourth quarter revision, calendar year 2023 saw essentially no net job growth (+9,000 jobs overall).“

    For those unfamiliar with the sequence of revisions to the jobs data, here is a quick primer from the LAO:

    Monthly State Jobs Estimates Are Revised Annually. Each month our office publishes the most recent state employment figures from the the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey. State employment figures come from this monthly survey, which is based on a small sample of businesses in the state.  As a result, once per year the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does a benchmark revision, updating the monthly CES estimates to match more reliable administrative data from states’ Unemployment Insurance programs.

    Federal Researchers Now Publishing Quarterly Revisions. Although the BLS only revises the state-level CES once per year, the underlying data used to revise the CES survey is collected quarterly. Taking advantage of this asynchrony, in 2021, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia began publishing state-level “early revisions” based on the same underlying data but revised more frequently.

    In any event, the huge delta between the previously reported, CES survey-based fake Q4 numbers and the actual, post revision numbers is shown in the gray highlight in the chart below.

    The data since January 2024 has not yet been rebenched, which means that the figure includes the Early Benchmark Revision for these recent months are growing at the same rate as the official CES estimates. But one can be absolutely certain that once the next set of revisions come in, California will not have generated any actual job growth for the second year in a row. In fact, make that all of America.

    Of course, the shocking ‘realization’ that inflation-sparking Bidenomics was a complete disaster for the US labor market won’t be disclosed until well into Trump’s second (technically third) term. By then Biden, and his catastrophic economic policies, will be long forgotten.

    Source: Legislative Analyst’s Office

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 22:14

  • Rafah Crossing Now Completely Destroyed & No Longer Usable For Gazans Seeking Exit
    Rafah Crossing Now Completely Destroyed & No Longer Usable For Gazans Seeking Exit

    The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have announced that for the first time Gaza’s sole border crossing with Egypt has been completely destroyed to the point that it can no longer be used.

    Israeli Army Radio issued the following statement days ago: “This is how Rafah crossing looks today, completely destroyed and no longer usable, after being taken over by Brigade 401 in one night.” The statement added that “Due to its relative proximity to the border, the Israeli army used the crossing as a stopping point and resting area.”

    Throughout most of the conflict which goes back to Oct.7, Palestinian officials operated on one side and Egyptian border troops on the other. The government of Egypt has long been bracing for a possible flood of refugees especially after Israel’s ground offensive in Rafah kicked off.

    That Rafah crossing is now effectively closed and guarded by the IDF, which will only add to the unfolding humanitarian disaster as civilians are trapped with nowhere to go amid the Israel-Hamas battles raging on streets across southern Gaza.

    As for the physical state of the crossing itself, war correspondents have confirmed that the exterior of the structure was incinerated: “Occupation forces damaged Rafah crossing’s halls that were used by locals to exit the Strip,” according to an earlier report by Middle East Eye.

    Below is a statement by China’s CGTN:

    On June 19, a journalist filmed the scene from the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing after the Israeli army began its ground military operation in May. The crossing, located on the southern border with Egypt, is the main route for international humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip.

    Israeli forces have razed an umber of buildings here besides blocking humanitarian aid and personnel from entering Gaza. June 20 marks the World Refugee Day. However, many people displaced in the Gaza Strip and the living environment has been destroyed by the war.

    Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa Director, has directed angry words against Israel, saying last week that the government “claimed weeks ago that it would provide full humanitarian support and medical assistance to civilians it had told to move.”

    Video showing the status of the crossing now:

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    She added, “Not only is this not happening, its ongoing impunity, bombardment, and deliberate obstruction have created unprecedented and impossibly dangerous conditions for humanitarian agencies to operate.”

    Meanwhile, the US-built pier is not doing well either. It has been out of commission longer than it has been operational, due largely to choppy seas in the Eastern Mediterranean.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 21:35

  • Kennedy Supporters Protest Outside CNN Office In Burbank After He Is Excluded From Debate
    Kennedy Supporters Protest Outside CNN Office In Burbank After He Is Excluded From Debate

    Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

    Dozens of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters protested outside CNN’s western U.S. bureau in Burbank, California, June 21 after the news network announced that the independent candidate failed to meet the entry criteria for the upcoming presidential debate.

    “Let Bobby speak!” the group chanted outside the main office of Warner Bros. Discovery, the company that owns CNN.

    CNN announced Thursday that Mr. Kennedy fell short of benchmarks for state ballot qualification and necessary polling. The news network set criteria to include candidates only if they secured enough spots on state ballots to be eligible for at least 270 Electoral College votes, the minimum needed to win the presidency.

    Candidates also needed to get at least 15 percent of voters in four separate national polls of registered or likely voters to meet CNN’s standards.

    The decision means presumptive nominees Republican former President Donald Trump and Democrat President Joe Biden will duel on the debate stage on June 27 in Atlanta.

    The major party candidates have cleared CNN’s threshold but won’t be certified for the ballot until they are formally nominated by their party conventions later this summer.

    Mr. Kennedy, who lives in Malibu with his actress wife Cheryl Hines, thanked his supporters for rallying behind him at locations across the country and in California, including Burbank, San Francisco, and Sacramento.

    “Americans nationwide are protesting the channel’s undemocratic decision to exclude me from the first presidential debate next week,” Mr. Kennedy wrote on X. “Thank you to everyone who has come out or plans to come out today!”

    One campaign volunteer called the Kennedy exclusion “an insult to democracy.” Above, supporters rally in Burbank, Calif., on June 21, 2024. (Jill McLaughlin/The Epoch Times)

    Mr. Kennedy, who chose California attorney and entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan as his running mate, said June 20 the major party candidates didn’t want him on the debate stage.

    “Americans want an independent leader who will break apart the two-party duopoly. They want a President who will heal the divide, restore the middle class, unwind the war machine, and end the chronic disease epidemic,” he posted on X.

    Mr. Kennedy’s son Bobby Kennedy III, a writer and director who lives in the Los Angeles area, came out to support Friday’s rally in Burbank, saying the debate decision won’t affect the campaign. Mr. Kennedy planned to join the debate on X, instead.

    “We’re going to have our own debate,” his son told The Epoch Times. “Thanks to social media, and thanks to the internet, I wouldn’t be surprised if our version gets significantly more viewers … We have an army that backs us on the internet.”

    Several volunteers at the Burbank rally were disappointed by CNN’s decision, including campaign volunteer Ronnie Kroell, who held up a campaign sign and waved at cars passing by on South California Street.

    “It’s an insult to democracy. It’s an insult to the American people,” Mr. Kroell told The Epoch Times. “We need to take back our country. It’s the only way we’re going to solve any of our problems is to put the power back into the people.”

    Mr. Kennedy filed an election complaint May 28 with the Federal Election Commission, claiming the news network collaborated with the major party candidates to exclude him from the debate. He also claimed the network’s requirements were designed to ensure only President Biden and former President Trump were included.

    CNN released a statement saying that “the law in virtually every state provides that the nominee of a state-recognized political party will be allowed ballot access without petition.”

    “As the presumptive nominees of their parties, both Biden and Trump will satisfy this requirement,” the network added.

    “As an independent candidate, under applicable laws, RFK Jr. does not. The mere application for ballot access does not guarantee that he will appear on the ballot in any state. In addition, RFK Jr. does not currently meet our polling criteria, which, like other objective criteria, were set before issuing invitations to the debate.”

    Warner Bros. Discovery did not return a request for comment about Friday’s protests.

    Rancho Santa Fe resident Suzanne Finder came to the Burbank rally Friday, saying Mr. Kennedy’s background in environmental law and his record of fighting to solve chronic disease issues is what brought her there.

    The country needs clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean food, and clean medicine, she told The Epoch Times.

    The group planned to deliver a petition to CNN asserting Mr. Kennedy should be allowed to debate. Above, supporters rally in Burbank, Calif., on June 21, 2024. (Jill McLaughlin/The Epoch Times)

    “Mr. Kennedy has spent 40 years in his role as an environmental attorney to achieving those goals, and Americans deserve to hear his message,” she said. “I don’t know a single parent who doesn’t want their child to be healthy and well, and that’s what he stands for, for me.”

    Campaign volunteer Laura Jones was thrilled by the support of the Southern California residents who protested.

    “We’re absolutely thrilled that everyone has shown up to say to CNN, we want more voices, more choices in this election and in the debates,” Ms. Jones told The Epoch Times.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 21:00

  • Large Terror Attack On Synagogue & Orthodox Churches In Russia's Dagestan
    Large Terror Attack On Synagogue & Orthodox Churches In Russia’s Dagestan

    Unknown terrorists went on a rampage using automatic weapons against religious sited in Dagestan, Russia on Sunday night. Authorities in the southern Russian republic situated in the Caucuses say that police officers were killed and wounded as the gunman targeted a synagogue and an Orthodox church.

    At least nine are dead, and 25 injured. An Orthodox priest was also slain. A fire also resulted at the synagogue, with emergency response crews subsequently battling the blaze. Some reports say that two Orthodox churches were hit in the assault, and that a priest was killed.

    Building in Dagestan on fire, via RT/social media

    According to Russia’s state-run TASS: “At approximately 18:00 [Moscow time] in Derbent, unknown persons fired at a synagogue and a church with automatic weapons. According to preliminary information, one police officer was killed and one was wounded.”

    “The car in which the suspects fled was identified as a white Volkswagen Polo, license plate 921 The circumstances are being clarified. Information about the dead and wounded police officers is being clarified.”

    And a Russian Internal Affairs Ministry statement indicated: “In Makhachkala, unknown persons fired at a traffic police post on Ermoshkin Street.  The ‘Interception’ plan was announced. The identities of the attackers are being established.”

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    It appears that at least some of the attackers may have gotten away, with RT reporting the following statement:

    The suspects drove away in a white Volkswagen Polo, the police said, adding that they are currently searching for the vehicle.

    The below includes more details via state-backed RT:

    The assailants in Derbent reportedly broke into the Orthodox church and killed a local priest by slitting his throat, said Shamil Khadulaev, the head of the regional public oversight committee which monitors the observance of human rights in prisons. Other regional authorities have not commented on this information.

    The synagogue was reportedly set on fire. Videos and photos have surfaced on social media purporting to show the building engulfed in flames.

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    Judging from some of the details to have emerged thus far, this appears to have been an Islamist terror attack, possibly by ISIS or an affiliated group.

    The situation including efforts to apprehend the gunmen may have occurred over a period of hours.

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    Videos show large fires over the city of the attack and a heavy police response, with running street battles…

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    Potential Jewish casualties from the synagogue attack remain uncertain in the immediate aftermath, and as more details emerge.

    Russia has been on edge ever since the March 22, 2024 Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow, which killed at least 145 and wounded hundreds more after heavily armed gunmen stormed the mall and concert venue. ISIS-K took responsibility for the large-scall killings in the aftermath. This new Dagestan attack could be a copy-cat incident.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 20:25

  • "This Is Going To Be Far Worse Than The Great Depression…"
    “This Is Going To Be Far Worse Than The Great Depression…”

    Via Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com,

    Financial writer and precious metals broker Bill Holter has been documenting all the unpayable debt that has been building up in the financial system like cancer. 

    The latest black hole of default is coming from a big bank in Japan.  Norinchukin Bank is selling $63 billion in Treasuries and other sovereign bonds to stay afloat.  Then there is recent news announced by the FDIC that 63 US banks (the names are being kept secret) have more than $500 billion in losses, and let’s not forget about the trillions in losses sitting on the books of European banks ready to suck the world into a black debt hole.  This is just a few of many on a long list of destabilizing problems that can tank the entire over-indebted financial system. 

    Holter warns, “The list is so long…”

    “it could be a banking problem.  It could be a derivatives problem.  It could be a derivatives problem in the stock market, the bond market and you could see a failure to deliver in silver.  Some type of warfare could crash the system.  You could see warfare in Ukraine, Israel or Tiawan. 

    The system is so unstable, at this point, it could be anything that could bring it down. 

    Unpayable debt is not just a US problem.  This is all over the world.  Central banks are having to issue huge amounts of debt because we are in the exponential decay phase.  We are exactly where Richard Russell said we would be 20 years ago.  It’s inflate or die, and the only way to inflate is to create more money supply.”

    Add to that the $10 trillion in debt the US Government has to roll over by the end of the year.  Meanwhile, the US government piles on $1 trillion in new debt every 100 days.  What could go wrong?

    Holter said the last time he was on USAW that there was a little less than a 50% chance we would even have an election.  Now, he predicts it is more likely there will be no 2024 Presidential Election.  Holter says:

    “There is no way the system, as it is now, survives.  It’s mathematically impossible.  So, if it is mathematically impossible, are they going to blow smoke . . . up until the day it blows up?  Or are they going to do something to blow it up and then say our programs and policies were working except for XYZ this or whatever. 

    They have to kick the table over.  They cannot allow the table to fall over on its own because then there is going to be finger pointing.  To avoid the finger pointing, they have got to kick the table over.”

    Holter also thinks gold is going to exponential numbers to back all the debt the USA has. 

    If you go with the 8,030 tons of gold the government claims is in Fort Knox, you will need a dollar price of gold at “$125,000 per ounce for 100% gold backing of the dollar.”

    Holter also says, “The dollar is being pushed out of the global financial system…”

    “Demand for dollars is shrinking at a time when borrowing demand is rising.”  This is a going to be a disaster for America and anyone holding dollars in the future.

    In closing, Holter says, “The financial collapse that is coming will be worse than anything we have ever experienced…”

    “This is going to be far worse than the Great Depression simply because society itself is far worse. . . . Back in the Great Depression, you had neighbors helping neighbors.  Today you will have neighbors picking on other neighbors like vultures.”

    There is much more in the 51-minute interview.

    Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with financial writer and precious metals expert Bill Holter for 6.22.24.

    *  *  *

    To Donate to USAWatchdog.com Click Here

    Bill Holter’s website just keep getting more and more viewers, and it’s still free.  It’s called BillHolter.com.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 19:50

  • Maher Audience Silenced After Andrew Cuomo Admits NYC Trump Trial Should Have Never Happened
    Maher Audience Silenced After Andrew Cuomo Admits NYC Trump Trial Should Have Never Happened

    Former governor of New York from 2011 to 2021 Andrew Cuomo appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday where he discussed the implications of the New York City Trump trial with host Maher. 

    Maher’s mostly liberal audience is caught quiet when Maher and Cuomo start frankly discussing whether or not the trial was helpful for the Trump campaign. 

    “The trial in New York, the one he [Trump] got convicted for, was the greatest fundraising bonanza ever. He was lagging behind Biden, and now he’s pulled quite a bit ahead,” Maher said to Cuomo during the show. 

    “That trial was the greatest reason people had to send their checks for $5, $10, 2$5, whatever dollars to Donald Trump. So I was always with you [Andrew Cuomo] on the one in New York, the hush money trial. I don’t think they should have brought that one,” he continues. 

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    To which Cuomo, who was elected as New York State Attorney General in 2006, replied: “That case, the attorney general’s case in New York, frankly, should have never been brought.”

    Cuomo continued: “If his name was not Donald Trump and if he wasn’t running for president. I’m the former AG in New York. I’m telling you, that case would have never been brought. And that’s what is offensive to people. And it should be!”

    “Because if there’s anything left…it’s belief in the Justice system!”

    In the same episode, Maher also asks how Joe Biden could be ahead in the polls when he is losing votes with so many key demographics.

    “And yet I read in the polls he pulled ahead this week. Explain that to me,” Maher says.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 19:25

  • Declining Black Church Attendance Weakens Key Democratic Asset
    Declining Black Church Attendance Weakens Key Democratic Asset

    Where black voters are concerned, the bad news for Democrats keeps piling higher. First came a steady stream of polls showing Biden’s support among the Democrat cornerstone constituency keeps plummeting from the virtual monopoly he enjoyed in 2020. Now Democratic strategists are facing the reality that, thanks to falling attendance, the political potency of black churches is also tumbling. 

    An overwhelming 92% of black voters backed Biden in 2020. In one of the largest and most sudden demographic-political shifts you’ll witness in your lifetime, a recent New York Times/Siena poll found that only 42% of blacks in six key battleground states plan to vote for Biden in November. While he’ll be splitting the spoils with independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump is poised to post the strongest Republican presidential-candidate performance among blacks since at least 1964. 

    Thin turnout for an April service at Columbia, South Carolina’s Zion Baptist Church reflects a national trend (Jessie Wardarski/AP)

    The damage to Biden’s electoral prospects is being compounded as drooping black church attendance undercuts what has traditionally been one of Democrats’ most powerful voter registration and turnout weapons.  

    There’s an element of poetic justice to this development: Much of the trend can be attributed to Democrat-led Covid-era lockdowns and fearmongering. “Overall church membership has dropped precipitously in the U.S. since the last presidential cycle, as many churchgoers formed new habits during the pandemic and never made their way back to the pews,” writes Story Hinckley at the Christian Science Monitor. 

    Black churches have been a de facto, tax-advantaged Democratic Party auxiliary. In addition to coordinating voter registration, they’ve served as a formidable voter-turnout engine. Under the moniker “Souls to the Polls,” blacks churches have helped mobilize their congregations to vote following Sunday worship services.  

    The Souls to the Polls movement originated in Florida in the 1990s before becoming a black, nationwide phenomenon (via WGCU)

    Those church-based contributions to Democratic political forces are sure to sag mightily in 2024, as black attendance is leading the downward trend that crosses demographic lines. In pre-pandemic 2019, 61% of Black Protestants said they attended church at least monthly. By 2023, it had plummeted to just 46%.  

    In the battleground state of Michigan — which Hillary Clinton lost by just 10,704 votes in 2016 — the Monitor offers a vivid illustration of the dynamic. In the 1980s, New Grace Missionary Baptist Church in the 88% black Detroit enclave of Highland Park routinely had more than a thousand members show up on a typical Sunday. Attendance has now shriveled to somewhere between 125 and 175 people.

    Recently, despite weeks of promoting a “Lift Every Voice and Vote” voter-registration event at the church, fewer than three dozen people showed up. “This place should be full,” lamented Highland Park Mayor Glenda McDonald. 

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 19:15

  • Chemicals From East Palestine Train Disaster Spread To 16 States: Study
    Chemicals From East Palestine Train Disaster Spread To 16 States: Study

    Authored by Edward Carver via Common Dreams,

    Toxic chemicals released during fires following the Norfolk Southern train derailment in Ohio last year spread to 16 states and likely Canada, according to a study released Wednesday.

    The pollution, some of which came from the burning of vinyl chloride, a carcinogen, spread over 540,000 square miles, showing clearly that “the impacts of the fire were larger in scale and scope than the initial predictions,” the authors of the study, published in Environmental Research Letters, found.

    NTSB/Handout via Xinhua

    Lead author David Gay, coordinator of the National Atmospheric Deposition Program, said that he was very surprised by the way the chemicals had spread. “I didn’t expect to see an impact this far out,” he told The Washington Post.

    Gay said the results did not mean “death and destruction,” as concentrations were low on an absolute scale—”not melting steel or eating paint off buildings”—but that they were still “very extreme” compared to normal, with measurements higher than recorded in the previous ten years.

    “I think we should be concerned,” Juliane Beier, an expert on vinyl chloride effects who didn’t take part in the study, told the Post, citing the possibility of long-term environmental impacts on communities.

    A Norfolk Southern train crashed in East Palestine, Ohio, a village near the Pennsylvania border and the Appalachian foothills, on February 3, 2023. Dozens of train cars derailed, at least 11 of which were carrying hazardous materials, some of which caught fire after the accident and burned for days. Fearing a large-scale explosion, authorities drained the vinyl chloride from five cars into a trench and set it alight in a controlled burn.

    A former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency official later said that the controlled burn went against EPA rules; the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said the deliberate burning was unnecessary.

    The local impact of the fires was felt acutely in the month after the accident—a “potent chemical odor hung in the air for weeks,” according toThe Guardian, and people reported nausea, rashes, and headaches.

    The new study helps explain the wider environmental impact. The researchers looked at inorganic compound samples in rain and snow at 260 sites. The highest levels of chloride were found in northern Pennsylvania and near the Canada-New York border, which was downwind from the accident.

    The authors also found “exceptionally high” pH levels in rain as far away as northern Maine. They did not look at organic compounds such as dioxin or PFAS, which likely also spread following the accident, The Guardian reported. The elevated inorganic chemical levels dropped two to three weeks after the accident.

    Norfolk Southern has agreed to pay nearly $1 billion in damages following two settlements reached in recent months. In April, the company reached a $600 million deal with class action plaintiffs living within 20 miles of the derailment site. That deal won’t be finalized until the residents officially agree. In May, the company reached a separate $310 million settlement with the federal government. The company has said that it has already spent $107 million on community support and removed the impacted soil.

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    Norfolk Southern makes billions in profits every year, and the company gave its CEO a 37% pay hike last year, drawing widespread criticism. The company also spent $2.3 million on federal lobbying last year, according to OpenSecrets data reported by Roll Call.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 18:40

  • Biden Admin Asked Amazon To Hide Vaccine-Critical Books During Pandemic
    Biden Admin Asked Amazon To Hide Vaccine-Critical Books During Pandemic

    Authored by Steve Watson via modernity.news,

    The Biden Administration pressured Amazon to hide books for sale on its platform that were critical of vaccines during the pandemic, it has been revealed.

    The findings were presented by the House Judiciary Committee and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in documents that show Amazon reduced the visibility of titles that the government deemed overly critical of big pharma shots.

    The documents show that some books were simply generally critical of vaccines, with several written by medical professionals. Some were even just reviews of scientific studies.

    The Federal government compiled a “Do Not Promote” list, to which more than 40 titles were added.

    In a series of X posts, Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jim Jordan explained how internal emails from Amazon contain employees revealed that “the impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden Administration.”

    They even targeted a children’s book that they deemed to be too friendly toward the unvaccinated.

    “Don’t let the Biden Admin tell you that their censorship campaign was about concerns of misinformation going viral on social media,” Jordan wrote. 

    He further urged “They were going after BOOKS too. This is–and always has been–about suppressing difavored views, not purported challenges of new technologies.”

    There is a deep irony attached to this story in that the Biden Administration has repeatedly accused Republicans of trying to ‘ban’ books nationwide.

    While in almost all of these cases, the likes of Florida governor Ron DeSantis were expressing opposition to school libraries carrying sexually explicit books aimed at children, it turns out the Biden Administration was actively working to censor books for adults.

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 17:30

  • Snopes Finally Admits Trump Never Called Neo-Nazis 'Very Fine People'
    Snopes Finally Admits Trump Never Called Neo-Nazis ‘Very Fine People’

    One of the more common lies peddled by top Democrats, including of course President Joe Biden, is that former President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis ‘very fine people’ during his press conference following the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.

    Except, anyone who watched the full clip knows it’s bullshit, which is why anyone peddling the hoax has been operating in bad faith.

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    Now, after seven years, and days before the Trump-Biden debate in Atlanta, Snopes has finally admitted that Trump never called neo-Nazis ‘very fine people.’ 

    “While Trump did say that there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ he also specifically noted that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and White supremacists and said they should be ‘condemned totally.’ Therefore, we have rated this claim ‘False,” wrote Snopes.

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    Of note, Biden launched his his 2020 campaign based on this lie.

    “The president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” Biden claimed in his campaign announcement video. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I’d ever seen in my lifetime.“

    Amazing…

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 16:55

  • Children Among Mass Casualties After US-Supplied Missile Targets Crowded Crimean Beach
    Children Among Mass Casualties After US-Supplied Missile Targets Crowded Crimean Beach

    Russia on Sunday is reporting a mass casualty event in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, and is saying that a US long-range missile was behind it.

    The Russian Ministry of Health in a recent update said that five people were killed in a series of strikes from Ukraine, which injured 124 people including 27 children. Among the deceased, two were children, the ministry said. The casualty toll is likely to climb over the next hours amid the emergency response and as hospital data is reported.

    Image on Telegram showing wound civilians treated by emergency crews.

    Moscow is calling it a ‘terrorist missile strike’ on Sevastopol with five US-supplied ATACMS tactical missiles, carried out just after noon local time. What’s more is that Russia says they were equipped with cluster warheads, making for a bigger casualty strike zone.

    Crimean officials said that in once instance a missile exploded above a crowded beach, unleashing shrapnel on people who had been relaxing there.

    A separate Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) statement directly accused Washington. “Flight missions for ATACMS missiles are programmed by American specialists based on US satellite reconnaissance, making Washington primarily responsible for the deliberate missile strike on Sevastopol’s civilians,” the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) stated.

    Widely circulating brief video showing the moment a projectile exploded over beachgoers in Sevastopol…

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    “Therefore, the responsibility for the deliberate missile strike on Sevastopol’s civilians lies primarily with Washington, which supplied this weapon to Ukraine, as well as the Kiev regime, from whose territory the strike was launched,” the MoD statement added.

    The statement explained that while anti-air defenses were able to down four of the five inbound rockets, the fight changed trajectory due to the intercept attempts resulting in “its warhead exploding in the air over the city.”

    It emphasized this was “terrorist attack on the civilian infrastructure of Sevastopol with U.S.-supplied ATACMS tactical missiles loaded with cluster warheads.”

    Local video of the aftermath showing a largely deserted beach…

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    AFP writes of emerging unverified footage that “Videos posted on social media showed people running from the beach as explosions went off and people in swimming outfits carrying a stretcher.”

    Russia’s military warned that “Such actions will not be left without a response.” The Biden administration has regularly sought to claim that US-supplied weapons transferred to Ukraine can only be used to attack military targets and are “defensive” – even in the instance of cross-border attacks.

    Via The Telegraph

    Likely Russia is gearing up to pummel multiple sites across Ukraine, and will try to go after bases hosting foreign military equipment and arms storehouses. This event is a major escalation, and likely President Putin himself will address it in a statement at some point in the next 24 hours.

    Already Ukraine has been struggling through nationwide rolling blackouts due to stepped-up airstrikes and drone attacks primarily targeting the nation’s energy infrastructure, as its population braces for more.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 15:45

  • Fragility In A One Stock, Stock "Market"
    Fragility In A One Stock, Stock “Market”

    By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

    Ok, calling this a “one stock” stock “market” seems a bit extreme, but is it? On Thursday when stocks rolled over (the Nasdaq 100 started higher at the open and then dropped almost 300 points from there), virtually everyone I spoke to pointed to NVDA shares reversing as the main weight on the overall indices. Throughout much of Thursday and Friday, I was receiving many more notes on support/resistance related to NVDA than the indices, Treasuries, or anything else that could be whipping markets around. Yes, Friday was “triple witching,” which likely added to the volatility, but there was one stock that dominated all market conversation.

    I’m wondering if that is why it is so difficult to make sense of markets on many fronts? Why we seem to be getting a variety of indicators, all pointing in different directions?

    Breadth, one of the topics in last week’s Same But Different, is clearly front and center in this report.

    Breadth, along with the role that options are playing in the market, and a whirlwind of Geopolitical Risks, were discussed on Bloomberg TV on Tuesday (Academy’s segment starts at the 50-minute mark).

    Before Jumping into the “Macro”

    In case you missed it, Academy published our mid-month assessment of Geopolitical Risk – Perception vs Reality.

    • Wildcard Risk, a catch-all, rose the most. Partly because North Korea ratcheted up a notch or two on Putin’s visit (SITREP) and shots were fired along the DMZ. The escalation between China and the Philippines near the Second Thomas Shoal is also attracting our attention, as we have a Defense Treaty in place with the Philippines. This could get tricky and be very disruptive.

    • We also provided our updated views on what we see the market pricing in, versus what we think should be getting priced in for Russia, Trade Wars, the Middle East, Commodity Prices, and CYBER.

    The “One Stock” Stock Market at a Glance

    ETF Flows

    We start with 3 ETFs.

    • TQQQ, a 3x leveraged ETF on the Nasdaq 100 (with a $24 billion market cap), has been experiencing outflows for several weeks. While we didn’t include it here, SQQQ, a 3x inverse ETF on the Nasdaq 100, has been garnering some serious inflows (though only $3 billion). One way to interpret this data, is that “faster” money has been taking profits in the Nasdaq 100 and while still outright bullish (based on relative market caps), it shows signs that the market is tired.

    • QQQ is a Nasdaq 100 ETF. It is a whopping $284 billion, and I view it as a bellwether of flows from buy and hold “mom and pop” accounts, to hedge funds, to large asset managers adjusting their asset allocations. It has trickled higher in terms of flows since the start of the 2nd quarter, but had some meaningful outflows in the past few days. Again, more “trimming” than exiting risk, but an interesting development.

    • Which brings us to NVDL, an ETF that provides a 2x leveraged return on NVDA. It is $4.3 billion in size, so not big, but big enough for us to pay attention to. While investors were shedding risk in the Nasdaq 100, this ETF was getting large inflows! I still cannot understand why the regulators approve single stock ETFs of any sort (especially leveraged). There seem to be enough ways to invest in single stocks without needing an ETF. Let alone an ETF that is path dependent. The leveraged ETFs (unless a stock moves in one direction day after day) will always underperform the leveraged return of the stock from the initial investment date (it is a function of the rebalancing mechanism). Why this ETF exists, I don’t know, but it seems to give us a glimpse into the “one stock” nature of this market.

    We didn’t dare include XLK (a $71 billion ETF focused on the Tech Sector) in the chart, because it would have broken the chart. Since the start of the 2nd quarter, it has experienced mild outflows (consistent with profit taking), but it had a very large inflow on Tuesday and outflow on Friday, presumably associated with the rebalancing (MarketWatch Report). Our understanding is that the rules that this ETF follows only allow for 2 stocks to be weighted above 5% (at the time of the reweighting). Currently those two stocks are MSFT and AAPL (both a little over 20%). NVDA (at 5.8%) is expected to “flip flop” with AAPL as one of the two most weighted stocks. That seems to be setting up traders. As a quick test for Bloomberg users, pull up your “favorite” ETF and go to the Current News page (CN ). See how many stories are listed under the ETF of choice. My experience is that right now, XLK is attracting a lot of attention. Because of its size and the rebalancing, it is likely influencing individual stock prices in ways that are not intuitive for fans of passive investing. Needing to buy/sell $10 billion of some single stocks hardly seems “dignified” for a “passive” strategy, but it is what it is. Presumably, the rules were designed when megacaps didn’t grow by leaps and bounds on an almost daily basis.

    While we are not here to hammer on “passive,” it seems important to remember that every $100 that currently flows in or out of QQQ (for example) creates $45 of buying or selling for 7 companies (8 stocks but 7 companies as both GOOG and GOOGL are in the top 8).

    The trading related to ETF inflows and outflows is robotic. There are rules that are followed (daily and on rebalancing), but in an era where so many investors prefer index-based ETFs to individual stocks or managed mutual funds, I sometimes wonder if we truly “understand” what we are getting, and the ramifications of those investments, when the indices are so heavily skewed to a few stocks (this isn’t a new issue, but has risen to the top of conversations once again).

    Before finishing this section on some of the mixed signals in ETF flows and the “passivity” of these strategies, we’d be remiss not to include QQQE (a Nasdaq 100 equal weighted ETF). If you thought that investors would flock to an ETF where any “catch-up” rally will do well, you are wrong. Shares outstanding are still lower than they were last summer (when it seemed much easier to get on the “laggard” train) and the ETF is “only” $1.25 billion, a fraction of the size of NVDL despite, at least to me, being a product that gives access to something that would be difficult to replicate on your own. RSP, an S&P 500 equal weighted ETF, does have $54 billion in AUM, but has been experiencing outflows.

    I’m stuck seeing too much focus on a single stock and am concerned by the nature of passive funds impacting a variety of stocks. I cannot get behind the “catch up” rally, because unlike last fall, where you could bet that the data was improving and the average stock had not responded, we’ve had the “good” data and haven’t been able to get a strong response from much of the market.

    Riddle Me This – Investor Sentiment

    The first two things I look to when thinking about investor sentiment are:

    • The CNN Fear & Greed Index. It currently registers as “fear.” With the VIX at 13, that didn’t jump out as being an obvious place for this index to register. A month ago, the index was in “greed” mode, and I’m not really sure how it is coming up with “fear,” but I have to respect it (maybe it is picking up on some of the fund flows we’ve been seeing, which have shown reductions in risk taking). So, we have one measure saying “fear.”
    • The next stop is the AAII Investor Sentiment Survey. Lo and behold, 44.4% are bullish. Higher than a month ago. Only 22.5% are bearish, far lower than a month ago. This measure is telling me “greed.”

    While these two measures don’t always agree (and are generally good contrarian signals at the extremes), one is saying fear (though not at a “signal” strength), and the other is saying greed (at close to “signal” strength).

    “Clear as mud” is one possible explanation. One picks up surveys where investors can’t help thinking about the broad market and the economy overall, and the other picks up “hard data” where much of that hard data is influenced by all the changes in the options markets. We didn’t even talk about the option selling based ETFs or even the heavily skewed weightings in indices. Something to explore at the very least.

    Given those mixed signals, we can go back to my favorite fallback indicator – RSI. RSI (or Relative Strength Indicator) for the Nasdaq 100 is in overbought territory but has been coming down. At least this indicator makes some sense to me. Greedy, but less greedy than a few weeks ago.

    Rates

    The 10-year is still sitting below 4.3% (I continue to believe that 4.3% to 4.5% is the “right” range for now).

    • Inflation data is likely to continue softening, supporting Fed cut projections and helping yields across the curve.

    • European politics will add volatility. Last week, political news out of Europe seemed to help the bond market, but I’m not expecting that to be the norm.

    • Our Deficits. The CBO raised their estimates for this year’s deficit to just under $2 trillion (more than a 25% increase from earlier projections). They see no end in sight, and I believe that the debate will put the deficit in the headlights (and not in a good way) as the reality of most policies seems to be destined to increase the deficit (just doing it in different ways).

    The short end of the curve should benefit from data, while the longer end of the yield curve is likely to be impacted by re-focusing on the deficit, and the debate seems like an ideal catalyst for that.

    Credit

    Corporate issuers had to take advantage of the drop in yields and the window to issue ahead of the potentially slow July/August period, and that pushed spreads slightly higher.

    I’m still all-in on adding to credit risk, across the board, from structured, to high yield, to IG, to munis. There are some interesting charts showing that for investment grade companies, net interest expense is actually a positive. So many companies are locking in low yields and many companies are sitting on huge cash piles earning more than their cost of debt, that interest is coming into corporate America, rather than being paid out. Not sure how long that lasts, and it mostly impacts a handful of companies, but interesting, nonetheless. That is the only new thing that I would add to Credit Spreads Can Go Much Tighter.

    Bottom Line

    Greedy, but less greedy. It seems like not only is the “catch up” trade not gaining traction, but even the best performing areas are seeing some profit taking.

    Is this a possible inflection point in the direction of flows? Have we set ourselves up to the point that momentum might waver, triggering selling in the momentum arena, which has been a great factor to chase this year? If so, does the weighting of a handful of stocks in the indices (and ETFs) force too much liquidity into too few stocks? We’ve been arguing that the depth of liquidity has been low – both on the way up and the way down, and too much is being channeled into too few names. This is no fault of any of the individual names (other than they have had incredible success growing into great businesses), but the “passive” investing makes it difficult sometimes to see the forest for the trees, and I suspect this might be one of those times.

    It is unclear and we need to see where we head in the coming days and weeks, but the stock market once again feels ripe for a sharp, fast pullback. If I’m right on yields, this could certainly help push us in that direction.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 15:10

  • Unhinged Jamaal Bowman Goes On Profanity-Laden Rant At Bronx Rally With AOC
    Unhinged Jamaal Bowman Goes On Profanity-Laden Rant At Bronx Rally With AOC

    Fire alarm specialist Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York delivered a an unhinged rant at a rally on Saturday, criticizing U.S. involvement in Israel and AIPAC and flailing his arms wildly while starting to chant his own name at one point.

    “We are gonna show f—ing AIPAC the power of the motherf—ing South Bronx,” he screamed at the crowd. 

    Bowman is up for re-election this Tuesday and is currently getting absolutely smoked in the polls, down 48% to 31% to George Latimer, according to Fox News. 

    He targeted the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for its recent $14 million campaign against his reelection due to his stance on Israel.

    Bowman has been a longtime critic of the Israeli government and its war against Hamas in Gaza and described the conflict as a genocide against Palestinians. At the rally, he reiterated that U.S. dollars are funding the killing of innocent civilians.

    “Cease fire now!” he had the crowd chanting while taking a wooden stool and slamming it onto the stage repeatedly. 

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    “People ask me why I got a foul mouth. What am I supposed to do? You coming after me. You coming after my family. You coming after my children. I’m not supposed to fight back? I’m not supposed to fight back? We’re gonna show them who the f— we are,” Bowman shrieked on stage. 

    “We are not gonna stay silent while the U.S. tax dollar kills babies and women and children. My opponent supports genocide. My opponent and AIPAC are the ones destroying our democracy,” he added, stating: “And it is on us, it is on all of us to save our democracy and save our collective humanity. Because this race is about our collective humanity.”

    And of course AOC was there to help “turn up a vote”. Bowman added: “Cease fire now, let’s get it poppin'”

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    AOC went on her own unhinged rant later in the rally, even forcing out a ‘y’all’ to try and blend in and act as though she doesn’t spend a majority of her waking hours far outside of the Bronx:

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    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 14:35

  • "This Cannot Go On Forever": Explaining The U.S. Debt Crisis In Simple Terms
    “This Cannot Go On Forever”: Explaining The U.S. Debt Crisis In Simple Terms

    Submitted by QTR’s Fringe Finance

    James Lavish, CFA, is a seasoned professional in institutional investing and risk management with over two decades of experience. He is currently the Managing Partner of the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, which focuses on public and private investments in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Lavish is recognized for his work in educating others about financial fundamentals through his newsletter, The Informationist, which simplifies complex financial concepts for a broad audience.

    On my talk with him last week, I asked him to lay out, in simple terms, exactly just how screwed the U.S. economy is.

    James opened by talking about the fact that the numbers and what consumers are feeling are like having two different economies: “You’re seeing two economies out there. And that’s causing a lot of confusion out there. You hear the Fed talking about inflation. You hear the White House saying they’ve got inflation tackled. You hear businesses saying that they’re struggling. You hear consumers saying that they’re struggling. They can’t stand the inflation, the prices. They can’t keep up. But yet you see these numbers that are coming out that seem to be okay. They’re conflicting.”

    🔉 Listen to the audio of this full hourlong interview here.

    He added: “You’re getting unemployment numbers that are conflicting with the actual job numbers. You’re getting pricing that is conflicting. If you go to the grocery store, you’re looking at the prices, you’re saying there’s no way this is up 3.2 percent from last year. This is up 10, 12, 15 percent. So there’s confusion out there.”

    He then went on to try and explain why this is: “The confusion, Chris, is that you’ve got pockets of recession, which are natural when you have the Fed raise rates so quickly and hold them there for so long. And look, 5.5% is not an incredibly high rate on interest rates on the Fed funds rate historically. But when you raise rates from just over 0%, where they were holding for a decade, to 5%, it’s massive because we’ve become incredibly indebted in this nation, which we’re going to touch on quite a bit here. But the most important thing to understand is why people are asking, ‘If the Fed has raised rates so steeply, why is the inflation rate not come down? Why is it not back to the two percent or under two percent target?'”

    “And the answer is that it’s because the government is spending wildly, like so incredibly irresponsibly, that it’s causing what we’re calling fiscal dominance, meaning fiscal spending is dominating the Fed’s attempt to tackle inflation by raising rates. And so you’re seeing pockets of recession and people are feeling it. People are feeling it in their pocketbooks and their wallets,” he continued.

    James went on to describe the era of fiscal dominance we are entering: “So what’s happening is it’s the federal spending. It’s the government spending so much money that you’re seeing areas of deep recession. There’s just no question about it. Commercial real estate has a problem, and that means regional banks have a problem. The Fed is all over this. The regional Federal Reserve banks are all over this. They are working with these community banks to make sure that they don’t go under. And we’ve already seen them go under. We saw Silicon Valley go under. That’s a little bit of a different situation that didn’t have to do with commercial real estate, but that had to do with exactly what you talked about. So you have rates that rise catastrophically on a meteoric pace.”

    He also talked about how the rise in rates has effected treasuries on corporate balance sheets: “Treasuries were considered riskless because in the last 15 years, they were riskless. If you owned a treasury, there was pretty much a certainty that the price of that treasury would just gravitate to par, and you would mature and get your maturity payment and all the coupons along the way. However, when you raise interest rates from 0.025% to 5.5% on a bond with a 30-year duration, you’re basically saying that if you went to try to sell that treasury that you own, let’s say a 1.5% treasury with a 30-year yield, and it’s yielding 1.5%, and you try to sell that in the market, that’s a difference of four percent annually for that bond. So if this thing still has 7, 8, 10, or 15 years of duration on it, that means you’re marking this bond down significantly. It’s not just a few percent.”

    James pointed out that protecting the market is crucial at this stage: “The economy is driven by this, and it’s been shown for the last decade that the stock market really is a large part of the economy. It’s not just because of tax receipts off of capital gains, but because people look at their net worth and see their net worth go up in their stocks. They’re willing to spend more of their discretionary income rather than saving it because they think, ‘Oh, well, look, my net worth is up 20%, 30%, 40% in the last couple of years. I’m fine. I’m going to go ahead and spend my paycheck. I’m not going to put any more money into the market. I’m good.’ And so it just drives the economy.”

    🔥 80% OFF: Since it’s officially summer, I’m going to offer up my largest discount of the year for Fringe Finance: Get 80% off forever

    Lavish explains that any crisis now will be kicked up to the sovereign level for the first time in recent history: “We have the tech bubble, and that’s kind of kicked up to the banks. Then we continue on, and we’ve got this risk, this debt indebtedness, that’s now kicked up to the banks. And now we’re coming on the great financial crisis with the housing market. The housing bubble and all of these banks holding this mortgage paper, which is just garbage, end up going under. Where does it get kicked? It gets kicked up to the federal level. And now it’s sitting on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. Flash forward to 2020, and you’ve got the lockdowns that caused the entire economy to grind to a halt. The government, in a panic, went and monetized $6 trillion of debt. So now you’ve got a Fed balance sheet that’s holding more treasuries than anybody else in the world.”

    “What’s going on today is that the problem is we have a fiscal policy that is absolutely unimaginably irresponsible,” he says. “We’re running $2 trillion deficits at a time that we’re not even in a recession. All this matters because the indebtedness and the risk have been kicked all the way up to the sovereign level. The punchline is that if you have a collapse of the economy, it’s the sovereign level that must stomach it completely now.”

    And then he lays out the case bare: “We can walk through the numbers, but the bottom line is that the US government and the Treasury have entered a debt spiral. We now have $34.7 trillion of debt, which is over 120% of GDP. If you’re a country with debt over 120% of GDP, your fiat currency fails. This is where we’re at, and we’re just spending and spending and spending.”

    “What happens if you get into a recession? Your tax revenues drop precipitously, and your spending rises at a similar rate because of all your social programs like unemployment and wage security. You could wind up having a deficit that’s not $2 trillion but could be $3, $4, $5, or even $6 trillion if it gets bad enough. Just imagine that. Suddenly, we are adding over 10% to our debt in a year, maybe 20% in a year. That is the debt spiral.”

    He continues: “We can’t do that because the rest of the world will turn around and look at our bonds and say, ‘Why would I buy those bonds if they have to keep issuing new bonds to pay me for my bond?’ We are in a situation where we have to continually issue more and more debt. This is rising exponentially, and there really is no way out. That’s the problem.”

    “Modern monetary theory proponents think it’s just driving the economy; there’s no big deal. However, when the music stops and people stop having confidence in the U.S. Treasury, that feeds into the US dollar. That’s when you get into a problem. Why does that happen? It happens because of inflation. It all goes back to this central problem: this constant and relentless manipulation of the monetary system through central banks that create inflation.”

    “That is a soft default on that debt every single day because the dollars you’re getting paid back in the future are worth less than when you lent them out to the government initially. So, who wants to lend the U.S. Treasury dollars for 30 years when they know that inflation only has to go up to continue the charade?”

    “They get into what’s called a debt spiral. They can’t get out of it. And this is where we are. So what is the option for the U.S. government if they continue to borrow? What does that mean? Well, that means that they must have inflation. There absolutely is no way around it. That inflation allows GDP to grow nominally. Remember that $28.5 trillion number? That has to go up. Nominally meaning just in terms of dollars, not inflation-adjusted.”

    “When you have more dollars in the system, it creates more GDP because there’s more dollars. And so that GDP number goes up. The productivity number goes up. But it’s fake. It’s not more stuff. It’s just stuff that’s more expensive. So there are more dollars in the system. And when you go to pay down that debt in the future, you’re paying it down with dollars that are cheaper, that are worth less. This is called the debasement of the U.S. dollar. The U.S. dollar gets worth less and less and less every single year.”

    He concludes: “And so this is the challenge. The U.S. government absolutely must have negative real rates. What do I mean by that? That means they must have coupons on their treasuries that are lower than the inflation rate, and they have to have this in perpetuity. That’s the only way they can keep this charade going. It won’t go on forever. Make no mistake, this cannot go on forever.”

    You can listen to the full hour long interview, including insights on when the market cracks, ugly looking treasury auctions and more, at this link.

    QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author. This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. These positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour. Also, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it twice because it’s that important.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 14:00

  • SpaceX Leads Reusable Rocket Race, While China Continues Crashing Boosters To Earth
    SpaceX Leads Reusable Rocket Race, While China Continues Crashing Boosters To Earth

    As of early last week, Elon Musk’s SpaceX had completed 356 launches, 319 landings, and 290 relights, according to flight data from Fox News. This is a monumental achievement for the world’s first private space company to pioneer and deploy reusable rockets. 

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    The reusable Falcon 9 rocket has dominated the launch industry and propelled America into the number one spot in the global space race. 

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    Data from BryceTech shows SpaceX launched 525 spacecraft into orbit in the first quarter. This is more than any other space program worldwide, surpassing China and Russia by a considerable margin. 

    SpaceX launched about 429,125 kg of spacecraft upmass in the quarter, significantly outpacing China’s rocket program (China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation), which launched a measly 29,426 kg. 

    SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket, which successfully completed a test flight earlier this month, could indicate that America’s rocket program will lead through 2030.

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    Pivoting to China, where reusable rockets have yet to be deployed, a Long March 2C rocket launched days ago shows the rocket booster falling back to Earth, landing in a populated area with people running for cover. 

    The booster fell to Earth near Guiding County, Qiandongnan Prefecture in Guizhou province, according to another post. An airspace closure notice for the mission established a temporary danger area containing Guiding County, Guizhou. –SpaceNews

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    What’s evident is that China has yet to master reusable rockets, while SpaceX successfully landed its first reusable Falcon 9 rocket in 2015.

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    Earlier this year, there were reports that Beijing-based Orienspace was working on reusable rockets, but the first test flight might not occur until late 2025 or even 2026.

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 13:25

  • Hezbollah Shows Off Israeli Target Bank Of Sensitive Sites In New Video Warning
    Hezbollah Shows Off Israeli Target Bank Of Sensitive Sites In New Video Warning

    Via The Cradle

    Hezbollah released a video titled “To whom it may concern” on Saturday, featuring coordinates of sensitive and vital Israeli targets that would be struck in the event of a war against Lebanon, marking the second such warning within less than a week. 

    The video begins with a clip from the latest speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, where he warns that the Lebanese resistance will fight “without limits, rules, or restraints” if Israel wages a war against Lebanon. It then proceeds to show numerous targets across Israel. 

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    The targets include several sensitive targets in Haifa, the port of Ashdod, the Hadera power station, the Ramat David Military Airport in Afula, Pengrion Airport, Nevatim air base, oil refineries on the coast, and the Research Center at the Dimona Nuclear Reactor. 

    The clip also showed the HaKirya Complex, which includes the headquarters of the Israeli Ministry of Security and the General Staff. Fears are growing in Israel as Tel Aviv has threatened that it is preparing an expanded attack on Lebanon.

    Also on Saturday, retired Israeli general Yitzhak Brik said that declaring war on Lebanon would mean “mass suicide for Israel.”

    The new clip came just a few days after Hezbollah released a nine-minute video of footage filmed by its drones, “…what the hoopoe came back with,” which show several sensitive sites in Israel’s north, namely the port of Haifa and the warships and military sites in its vicinity. 

    The video also showed buildings belonging to the Israeli Rafael defense technology firm north of Haifa, where air defense missiles for the Iron Dome and David’s Sling systems are manufactured, assembled, and stored.

    Below: Hezbollah releases close-up surveillance footage captured recently by its reconnaissance drones, showing sensitive Israeli targets in the north – including Haifa Port, a number of Iron Dome Platforms, and military complexes.

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    “The Hezbollah video conveys an unequivocal message to Israel, that the party is present inside Israel by the air, land, and sea, and is planning what comes next, and that is capable of carrying out severe strikes,” Israel’s Channel 14 news outlet said last week, adding that the filming of this footage is “an Israeli security failure of the first degree … The situation in the north is much worse than we imagine.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sun, 06/23/2024 – 12:50

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Jun 23

Today’s News 23rd June 2024

  • How Likely Is It That The US Replaces Zelensky In The First Half Of Next Year?
    How Likely Is It That The US Replaces Zelensky In The First Half Of Next Year?

    Authored by Andrew Korybvko via Substack,

    President Putin shared his view during a press conference in Hanoi that the US will replace Zelensky during the first half of next year after they use him to make unpopular decisions such as further lowering the draft age.

    His prediction coincided with Russia’s foreign intelligence service publishing its latest such report about this scenario, which claimed that Zaluzhny is being seriously considered by the US as his replacement and is also deemed to be more suitable for negotiating peace with Moscow than others.

    It was explained last month how “Russia Hopes To Influence Ukraine’s Possibly Impending US-Backed Regime Change Process” after that same service released a related report about this at the time. This strategy continues unfolding as evidenced by President Putin declaring two weeks ago that the Rada Speaker is now the legitimate leader of Ukraine if the Constitution is still being followed. Accordingly, he said that Russia could negotiate with him or someone else if Kiev is interested in peace, but not Zelensky.

    As regards the conflict’s military-strategic dynamics, they continue trending in Russia’s favor and won’t be changed by minor adjustments to US policy such as letting Ukraine use its arms to hit any targets across the border that are allegedly planning to cross the frontier.

    The only variable that can make a meaningful difference at this point in time is if NATO stages a conventional intervention, but that would spike the risk of World War III by miscalculation.

    Returning back to President Putin’s prediction about Zelensky being replaced in the first half of next year, he’s either assuming that no such conventional intervention will occur or that the subsequent escalation would remain manageable instead of spiraling into the apocalypse.

    Regarding the first possibility, there’s a chance that this won’t happen since it’s dependent on Russia achieving a military breakthrough across the front lines, which NATO could then exploit to justify directly involving itself in this conflict.

    That might either not happen and thus rule out this scenario, or it’ll unfold and then set that sequence of events into motion, therefore leading to the second possibility of them managing this escalation.

    In that case, Russia might either eschew striking NATO units so long as they don’t cross the Dnieper and pose a credible threat to its new regions, or they’ll engage in controllable tit-for-tat strikes before freezing the conflict. No matter what happens, however, Zelensky’s political future is set in stone.  

    The first possibility is actually much worse for him since he’ll be pressured like never before to lower the draft age as soon as possible in order to replace all the meat that’ll have to be ground to prevent a Russian breakthrough across the front lines.

    It’s impossible to predict the timing with which he’d then be replaced since it depends on when that policy is implemented and whether (and how long) the secret police can control the public’s furious reaction to sending their young adult males to the slaughter.

    If NATO conventionally intervenes in Ukraine but the escalation doesn’t spiral into World War III by miscalculation, which of course can’t be taken for granted, then the bloc might keep Zelensky in place only until they reach a deal with Russia for comprehensively managing Europe’s “new normal”. Once that’s achieved, whenever it may be, he’ll then be pushed aside in order to herald the coming of the so-called “new Ukraine” under these new circumstances and turn the page on this dark period.

    Just like in the first possibility, he’d only remain in power long enough to make unpopular decisions, albeit under totally different circumstances in that case. Nevertheless, the writing is on the wall, and it’s that his political career is drawing to a close either way. Zelensky’s only use right now is to legitimize radical policies in either scenario. He’ll then be cast aside once he’s done what’s needed of him, though it’s unclear when that’ll be since everything depends on whether NATO conventionally intervenes.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 23:20

  • Nuclear Weapon Spending On The Rise
    Nuclear Weapon Spending On The Rise

    Global spending on nuclear weapons rose by 13.4 percent in 2023.

    As Statista’s Martin Armstrong reports, a newly released report from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) shows, the United States instigated the largest proportional annual increase with a rise of almost 18 percent, closely followed by the United Kingdom with 17.1 percent.

    Infographic: Nuclear Weapon Spending on the Rise | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    In terms of spending, the U.S. had the largest outlay last year by some margin: $51.5 billion, compared to the second highest total of $11.9 billion in China.

    The total global spend equated to an estimated $91.4 billion, the equivalent of $173,884 every minute. 2023 wasn’t a freak year, either, but rather the continuation of a trend.

    From 2019 to 2023, global spending rose by 34 percent.

    As reported by ICAN, a cumulative $387 billion was spent to build and maintain nuclear weapons over this five year period.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 22:45

  • Common Sense And Memes Are Viruses To The New World Order
    Common Sense And Memes Are Viruses To The New World Order

    Authored by Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com,

    The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.

    – Albert Camus

    Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

    – C.S. Lewis

    Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

    – Albert Einstein

    If there is one thing that became perfectly clear during my time in the dump truck, it is this:  The world runs on diesel. So every time I see a semi hauling a wind turbine, the following considerations come to mind:  How many blades have been transported for how many windmills in how many areas?  How much petroleum, or coal, or nuclear power, was utilized in the construction of said blades?  How many gallons of diesel fuel were used to excavate the ground to run power lines from the rural areas where the wind turbines are located?

    For what genuine purpose are wind turbines planted? Who benefits? And how much maintenance will the turbines, subjected to the elements, require over time? What is the net payoff?

    Certainly, wind power, or solar, or electric vehicles, for that matter, are not currently self-sustaining. Instead, these are now subsidized by false narratives, and tax-payer funds, all in the service of Anthropological Climate Change®, which is an epic lie.

    Last fall, in a previous article under the paragraph heading “The electric school bus acid test…”, I described the electric school bus “sales pitch” being made to schools.  Consequently, earlier this month, I spoke to the transportation supervisor of our local school system and asked if he planned to order any electric vehicles this summer.  Fortunately, he said “no”.  He added that the superintendent was like-minded because of some information the supervisor had previously shared.  The supervisor said he had contacted the local utilities and was informed their power plant did not have the capacity to power a fleet of electric buses during peak usage.  Of course, peak usage occurs during the school year in a cold climate.

    To be sure, narratives are so powerful because people believe them. Folks then act on their beliefs and sh*t happens.   This is why the global propaganda models remain ever-fluid and universal:  Problems are magnified via deception.  As a result, the reasoning of “authorities” seems quite noble to virtue-signaling ignoramuses eager to embrace the lies.  Tyranny ensues.

    The War on Terror.  The War on Invisible Viruses.  The Wars against Foreign Aggressors. The War against Racism. The War against Sexism. The War against the Patriarchy. The War on the Weather.

    Evidently, therefore, a correction is now required on my part:  The world runs on diesel and bullsh*t.   Except diesel is being phased out by climitards who Stand With Ukraine®.

    Relativism, undeniably, trends in modernity.  And Orwell was right:

    The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

    — Orwell, George, ”1984”: part 2, chapter 9

    So whether by Marxism or any other form of secular utopianism:  The goals are always out with the “old” and in with the “new”.  Order out of chaos.  Dissolve and coagulate.

    Also like Orwell’s “1984”:  The world’s global societal power structure is stratified into concentric rings of power.  The Inner Party functions to continuously preserve and enrich itself; as the Outer Party (i.e. those following orders) and the Proles are utilized and cannibalized when necessary. The circles of power have become increasingly interconnected in modernity; and technology allows the Inner Party to launch policies that are enforced by the Outer Party and unto the Proles.

    This process is also called “history”.

    The Outer Party depends upon the Inner Party for survival and it always remains a difficult challenge to convince the Proles of something they can’t, or won’t, see.

    As a result, history unwinds in inevitable, cyclical waves.  Yet, the Inner Party has survived for generations – even before the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and its unleashing of the modern Fractional Reserve Banking monster.

    Slavery is rooted in economics; and so the Inner Party uses debt to implement and expand its various wars. The rich get richer as the poor suffer, starve, and die.

    While driving the other day, I listened to an “expert” on AM radio discussing the vast increase of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere and the conclusion was this:  “Climate Change is real!”

    The radio voice seemed very confident in its conclusions and, by implication, it was ready to do everything necessary to stop what it perceived as a genuine threat.  Always the same dialectics, again and again.

    What’s wrong with carbon, again?

    Is America having seizures? Or postmortem convulsions?

    At this point in time, I am convinced it’s the latter.

    While in communication with a retired retarded professor, she expressed exasperation at those who still plan to vote for Trump.  After all, he was convicted by a jury of his peers and is now a convicted felon.

    In response, and from memory, I typed out a meme I saw on the internet:  “He lived over 70 years without a criminal record. But when he ran for president he was charged with over 90 crimes! How can you explain that?”

    Silence.  But… oops!  Did you notice what I did there? Did you see how the Inner Party’s phony dialectics had me defending the proud promoter of Operation Warp Speed®?

    Behind the proliferating Kayfabe FUBAR, however, the Inner Party works tirelessly toward the establishment of their New World Order by 2030:  A high-tech prison camp ruled by “stakeholders”.

    When it was revealed that U.S. Senate ratification was required for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Pandemic “Treaty”, it was, instead, transitioned into an “agreement”.  Except that strategy went down in flames, too, at the WHO’s 77th World Health Assembly.  In response, Team Biden, China, and other unelected WHO totalitarians stealthily passed new International Health Regulations (IHR) behind closed doors. This was done on June 1, 2024 in Geneva, Switzerland.  The Ethiopian Communist, and WHO Director, Tedros Ghebreyesus, violated the IHR’s Article 55.2 eligibility requirements and with less than the required quorum of member states voting. This power grab was completely illegal and unlawfully elevated the WHO “from a global advisory-only body to an international enforcer of its mandates.”

    So we all better get the word out, before it’s too late.  Especially now that it’s another election year so flu season is almost here.

    Politics is the religion of Marxists as well as all those who seek to establish any sort of earthly “utopia”.  But, to the Luciferians, Freemasons, and the friends of Jeffrey Epstein, politics is merely the means to their ends; and, in their view, communism has proven to be an efficient means to eventually control and depopulate political enemies and uncooperative Proles.

    World War III is a War on the Petrodollar and it serves as just another means to facilitate the collapse of the West.  Accordingly, the high-speed daily saturation of arbitrary polemics has made it near impossible to discern, distill, and dispute what is occurring around the globe – which is, also, surely, part of the plan

    The Inner Party was always long on communism; this is why U.S. manufacturing was gutted on behalf of China, and why the American economy has been Cloward & Pivened as corporate, political, and religious institutions have undergone Wokeification. The Inner Party’s desired NWO is an economic, political, and faith-based multi-polar dystopia; but, as I’ve stated before, any ideology, whatsoever, could be used as the “faith” to control the material and online realms: Fascism, Communism, Islam, Freemasonry, Luciferianism, Outer Space Aliens, or a witch’s brew of any, or all, of these to be administered as technocratic totalitarianism.

    If Trump wins the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election he will surely embrace a new global order blended into separate (multi-national) economic regions.

    Or maybe Trump will be imprisoned or killed before the election, thus, igniting the ever-simmering rage of American Patriots.

    Toward whatever outcome, however, the fists of anti-democratic revolutions are forming, Left and Right.

    The Inner Party has been successful, once again, in its efforts to distract and divide. This is so it can rule over fractious factions of enemies.  It’s a king’s strategy that has been applied continuously throughout history.

    Even so, the memes march forward. They gather like torches in the dark.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 22:10

  • These Are The Countries With The Highest Smoking Rates
    These Are The Countries With The Highest Smoking Rates

    It was not until 1950 when the link between smoking and lung cancer was proven, though physicians as far back as the late 19th century had identified it as a potential cause.

    Since then, many countries have discouraged tobacco products in an attempt to reduce smoking rates, and consequent health effects.

    In the following infographic, Visual Capitalist’s Pallavi Rao visualizes the countries with the highest rates of tobacco use among their population aged 15 and older.

    Data is sourced from the World Health Organization, and is current up to 2022.

    Which Countries Smoke the Most?

    In Nauru, nearly half of the population aged 15+ uses a tobacco product, the highest in the world. The island also has a high obesity rate, and nearly one-third of the population suffers from diabetes, due to poor nutritional variety in the food supply.

    Here’s a list of smoking rates by country, ranked from highest to lowest.

    Note: Figures rounded. “Tobacco use” includes smoke and smokeless products.

    Meanwhile, countries in the Balkan also see a high incidence of tobacco use, bucking the general European trend. Entrenched cultural norms, lax laws, and inexpensive cigarettes are some of the most commonly identified causes.

    On the other hand, tobacco use is a lot lower in the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa.

    In the U.S., fewer than one in four adults smoke. Canada is even lower at 12% of the population. But some African countries (Nigeria and Ghana) are all the way down in the single-digits, at 3%.

    Interestingly, men smoke more than women in nearly every country in the world.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 21:35

  • Gaps In Electoral College Tiebreaker Rules Could Bring Constitutional Crisis
    Gaps In Electoral College Tiebreaker Rules Could Bring Constitutional Crisis

    By Brian McGlinchey at Stark Realities

    While many Americans know that an Electoral College tie sends presidential and vice presidential elections into the House of Representatives and Senate, few realize there’s a constitutional crisis lurking in the incomplete rules for resolving such draws.

    In 2024, scrutiny of these hidden dangers is more than a mere academic exercise, as there are plausible scenarios by which Joe Biden and Donald Trump could end up with 269 electoral votes apiece. One, for example, centers on Trump winning Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and Biden winning Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.

    One of the scenarios that could yield a 2024 Electoral College tie (via 270toWin)

    In the event neither candidate reaches the requisite 270 electoral votes, Americans would witness the first “contingent election” in 100 years. In accordance with the 12th Amendment, the president would be chosen by the House of Representatives, and the vice-president by the Senate. In both chambers, votes would be cast by the newly-elected Congress that first convenes in January.

    That top-level description — which is about all you typically get from most media references to the possibility —is deceptively simplistic. In practice, a contingent election would be far messier than most Americans realize, with the potential for a deadlock that leaves the Oval Office unattended.

    “Unsettled legal and procedural questions permeate nearly every aspect of the process,” wrote Beau Tremitiere and Aisha Woodward at Lawfare, “and in today’s political environment, high-stakes legal disputes and constitutional hardball would be inevitable.”

    Before we look at the lurking risks to an orderly transfer of power, let’s quickly review some contingent-election basics. In the House, presidential votes are cast not by individual representatives, but by state delegations, with each state having a single vote. The House chooses from the top three Electoral College vote-getters; of course, in most years, only the two major-party candidates receive any. Winning requires the votes of 26 states.

    As of today, Republicans control 26 House delegations compared to the Democrats’ 22, while the North Carolina and Minnesota delegations are evenly split among the two parties. However, since the votes would be cast by the victors of the November election, the delegation-control math could be different when the 119th Congress is gaveled into existence at noon on Jan. 3.

    If the House vote for president results in a tie, the state delegations keep on voting until there’s a winner. If that hasn’t happened by Inauguration Day — January 20, 2025 — the new vice president becomes acting president until a candidate gets 26 votes in the House.

    Things work a little differently in the Senate. Unlike the House’s state-delegation approach, individual senators cast their own vote for vice president. Rather than the top three electoral-vote finishers, senators pick among the top two. Counting independents who caucus with the Democrats, the Democrats currently control the Senate by a slim 51-49 margin, but face an uphill climb to retain a majority in January.

    Here’s where we encounter a major gap in the contingent-election rules: While the 12th Amendment spells out what to do if the House is deadlocked on Inauguration Day, it fails to address the same possibility in the Senate.

    The vice president is also president of the Senate. During ordinary business, vice presidents are summoned to cast tie-breaking votes. Some suggest that, since Kamala Harris would be vice president during the contingent election, she would simply cast a tiebreaking vote — for herself.

    However, the 12th Amendment stipulates that “a majority of the whole number [of Senators] shall be necessary to make a choice [of vice president].” Some scholars argue that this rules out a tiebreaking vote being cast by the vice president, who is, strictly speaking, not a “senator.”

    The most concerning scenario would arise if both the House and Senate are deadlocked on Jan. 20. If that happens, some say the new president should be selected using the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. That’s the law that provides a line of succession that proceeds from vice president to speaker of the house, president pro tempore of the Senate, and then through the cabinet secretaries in order of their departments’ founding date, with State coming first.

    Not everyone agrees on that solution. “The Succession Act does not clearly apply to a failure by the House to elect a President or the Senate a Vice President by the time the new terms of those officers begin,” wrote William Josephson in the Journal of Constitutional Law.

    According to its language, the Succession Act applies to the absence of a president “by reason of death, resignation, removal from office, inability, or failure to qualify.” That last term seemingly refers to constitutional qualifications for office — such as being 35 years old and a natural citizen — and not the failure of any candidate to receive the requisite number of electoral votes or contingent-election votes.

    On top of that, it’s been argued that the Succession Act’s inclusion of the House speaker and Senate president pro tempore in the succession sequence violates the Constitution. “The best reading of the Constitution’s text, history, and structure excludes federal legislators from the line of presidential succession,” wrote Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar in the Stanford Law Review.

    Even if the Succession Act were to be applied, Americans may be surprised by who ends up serving as interim president. The House speaker would almost certainly refuse the opportunity to ascend. Given politicians’ huge appetites for power, that’s counterintuitive — but not when you consider that, under the Succession Act, the speaker becomes president only “upon his resignation as speaker and as representative in Congress.”

    Knowing the House could sort out the contingent-election impasse in short order, most speakers would recoil at the idea of tossing away not only the speakership but even their seat. If the Senate president pro tempore likewise refused, that could lead to a President Antony Blinken as an interim solution. Again, that’s only based on the highly dubious assumption that the Succession Act covers a tied-election scenario.

    Partisan Procedural Warfare

    As if gaps in the basic rules of a contingent election weren’t enough, the process would also be subject to delays and breakdowns arising from parliamentary gamesmanship.

    As many more Americans now know — thanks to what happened last time around — Jan. 6 is the legally-prescribed date on which Congress counts electoral votes submitted by the states. If there’s a tie, the 12th Amendment says the House must “choose immediately, by ballot, the President.”

    The electoral vote count on January 6, 2021 was particularly well-attended 

    Like so many other words in Washington, “immediately” can’t be taken at face value. Since Congress has never gotten around to passing a law spelling out how contingent elections are to be administered, the House would first need to adopt a set of rules for the process. The majority party as of January 2025 would be incentivized to force rules that favor its candidate.

    To give one example of how the rules could be tailored to one party’s benefit, note that the 12th Amendment doesn’t stipulate how the House’s individual state delegations conduct their votes, or whether the state’s decision must spring from a plurality, simple majority or supermajority of the delegation.

    Different procedural machinations could unfold as the Senate carries out its vice presidential election. Under Senate rules, ending debate and moving to a vote requires the consent of 60 senators — but it’s unlikely either party will have that many seats in January, which means the VP vote could be delayed by a filibuster. To break it, the majority party could be compelled to “go nuclear” — changing Senate rules so only a simple majority is needed to cut off debate.

    Given the enormous stakes, the majority party could be tempted to use far more extreme tactics. In the House, that could mean expelling or refusing to seat members of state delegations that would otherwise be evenly split among Democrats and Republicans, or those delegations where the chamber’s minority party has a mere one-vote advantage.

    As all these controversies and procedural duels play out, the clock will be ticking — and there are just 14 days between Jan. 6 and the Jan. 20 inauguration. Over that short period, any number of high-stakes legal challenges could play out in various courts.

    While the prospect of rushed litigation is disconcerting, it may also be wishful thinking. Due to separation-of-powers concerns, the federal judiciary has historically avoided involving itself in what it considers internal congressional disputes. If controversy erupts over how the contingent election is being administered in the House or Senate, there may be no external referee for an aggrieved party to turn to.

    In short, if both contests are still unsettled on Inauguration Day, America could conceivably be without a president or vice president and without any final authority on how to name a temporary one.

    Potential “Faithless Elector” Mayhem

    What seems like a 269-269 tie on Nov. 6 could be resolved in an altogether different and even more controversial way: One or more presidential electors could go rogue when the Electoral College votes on Dec. 17, voting for someone other than the winner of their state’s popular vote.

    In 2016, there were a whopping ten such “faithless electors.” Texan Bill Greene, for example, voted for libertarian Ron Paul, who’d made a spirited bid for the GOP nomination. While a 2020 Supreme Court ruling upheld the power of states to impose penalties on faithless electors, many states have no laws barring deviant votes, some states have laws with no penalties, and many states have no provision for canceling deviant votes.

    In a less likely but more explosive scenario, rather than breaking a seeming 269-269 tie, faithless electors could instead cause a tie and a contingent election. Keeping in mind that the House chooses from the top three electoral-vote recipients, faithless electors could throw someone other than Biden and Trump into the mix — such as independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, or someone else who could end up becoming president as a House compromise candidate.

    Americans can debate the likelihood of a 2024 electoral college tie and ensuing contingent-election deadlock. However, until gaps in the Electoral College tiebreaker rules are filled by new federal law and perhaps a constitutional amendment, we’ll keep playing a quadrennial game of chance that could someday result in an unprecedented crisis from which there is no clear exit.

    Stark Realities undermines official narratives, demolishes conventional wisdom and exposes fundamental myths across the political spectrum. Read more and subscribe at starkrealities.substack.com  

    Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 21:00

  • Social Media: Where It's Hardest To Tell Truth From Fake News
    Social Media: Where It’s Hardest To Tell Truth From Fake News

    According to a survey conducted in 47 markets for the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024, concern over what is real or not on the internet in general is on the rise.

    Such concerns were notably prevalent in some of the countries holding elections this year, including South Africa (81 percent), the United States (72 percent) and the United Kingdom (70 percent).

    Expanding on the concerns themselves, the writers write:

    “Previous research shows that these audience concerns about misinformation are often driven less by news that is completely ‘made up’ and more about seeing opinions and agendas that they may disagree with – as well as journalism they regard as superficial and unsubstantiated.”

    Specifically, Statista’s Anna Fleck notes that TikTok and X are the hardest social media platforms for identifying whether news content is trustworthy…

    Infographic: Social Media: Where It's Hardest to Tell Truth From Fake News | Statista

    You will find more infographics at Statista

    As the chart above shows, roughly one in four respondents surveyed in early 2024 said that it was at least somewhat difficult to make the distinction between truth and fake news on the two platforms.

    Facebook and Instagram weren’t far behind though, with 21 percent and 20 percent saying the same, respectively.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 20:25

  • "We Need Icebreakers"… And More Strategic Partnerships
    “We Need Icebreakers”… And More Strategic Partnerships

    Authored by Pepe Escobar,

    The St. Petersburg forum offered a wealth of crucial sessions discussing connectivity corridors. One of the key ones was on the Northern Sea Route (NSR) – or, in Chinese terminology, the Arctic Silk Road: the number one future alternative to the Suez canal.

    With an array of main corporate actors in the room – for instance, from Rosneft, Novatek, Norilsk Nickel – as well as governors and ministers, the stage was set for a comprehensive debate.

    Top Putin adviser Igor Levitin set the tone: to facilitate seamless container transport, the federal government needs to invest in seaports and icebreakers; a comparison was made – in terms of technological challenge – to the building of the Trans-Siberian railway; and Levitin also stressed the endless expansion possibilities for city hubs such as Murmansk, Archangelsk and Vladivostok.

    Add to it that the NSR will connect with another fast-growing trans-Eurasia connectivity corridor: the INSTC (International North South Transportation Corridor), whose main actors are BRICS members Russia, Iran and India.

    Alexey Chekunkov, minister for development of the Far East and the Arctic, plugged a trial run of the NSR, which costs the same as railway shipping without the bottlenecks. He praised the NSR as a “service” and coined the ultimate motto: “We need icebreakers!” Russia of course will be the leading player in the whole project, benefitting 2.5 million people who live in the North.

    Sultan Sulayem, CEO of Dubai-based cargo logistics and maritime services powerhouse DP World, confirmed that “the current supply chains are not reliable anymore”, as well as being inefficient; the NSR is “faster, more reliable and cheaper”. From Tokyo to London, the route runs for 24k km; via the NSR, it’s only 13k km.

    Sulayem is adamant: the NSR is a game-changer and “needs to be implemented now”.

    Vladimir Panov, the special representative for the Arctic from Rosatom, confirmed that the Arctic is “a treasure chest”, and the NSR “will unlock it”. Rosatom will have all the necessary infrastructure in place “in five years or so”. He credited the fast pace of developments to the high-level Putin-Xi strategic dialogue – complete with the creation of a Russia-China working group.

    Andrey Chibis, the governor of Murmansk, noted that this deep, key port for the NSR – the main container hub in the Arctic – “does not freeze”. He acknowledged the enormity of the logistical challenges – but at the same time that will attract a lot of skilled workers, considering the high quality of life in Murmansk.

    A maze of interconnected corridors

    The building of the NSR indeed can be interpreted as a 21st century, accelerated version of the building of the Trans-Siberian railway in the late 19th/early 20th century. Under the overarching framework of Eurasia integration, the interconnections with other corridors will be endless – from the INSTC to BRI projects part of the Chinese New Silk Roads, the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and ASEAN.

    In a session focused on the Greater Eurasia Partnership (GEP) Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Alexander Pankin praised this concept of Eurasia “without dividing lines, uniting ancient civilizations, transportation corridors and a unified common space of 5 billion people”.

    Inevitable connections were drawn – from GEP to the EAEU and the SCO, with the proliferation of multimodal transport and alternative payment systems. Khan Sohail, the deputy secretary-general of the SCO, remarked how virtually “everyday there are new announcements by China” – a long way “since the SCO was established 21 years ago”, then based exclusively on security. Big developments are expected at the SCO summit next month in Astana.

    Sergey Glazyev, the minister of macroeconomics at the Eurasia Economic Commission, part of the EAEU, praised the EAEU-SCO progressive integration and fast-developing transactions in baskets of national currencies, something “that was unchallengeable 10 years ago”.

    He admitted that even if GEP has not been formalized yet, facts on the ground are proving that Eurasia can be self-sufficient. GEP may be on the initial stage, but it’s fast advancing the process to “harmonize free trade”.

    Another key session in St. Petersburg was exactly on the EAEU-ASEAN connection. The ASEAN 10 already configure the 4th largest trading bloc in the world, moving $3.8 trillion and 7.8% of global trade annually. The EAEU already has a free trade agreement (FTA) with Vietnam and is clinching another with Indonesia.

    And then there’s Northeast Asia. Which brings us to the ground-breaking visit by President Putin to the DPRK.

    A new concept of Eurasia security

    This was quite the epic business trip. Russia and the DPRK signed no less than a new Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement.

    On trade, that will allow a renewed flux to Russia of DPRK weapons – artillery shells to ballistics -, magnetic ore, heavy industry and machine tool industry, as well as the back-and-forth of an army of mega-skilled IT specialists.

    Kim Jong-un described the agreement as “peaceful” and “defensive”. And much more: it will become “the driving force accelerating the creation of a new multipolar world.”

    When it comes to Northeast Asia, the agreement is nothing less than a total paradigm shift.

    To start with, these are two independent, sovereign foreign policy actors. They will not blackmailed. They totally oppose sanctions as a hegemonic tool. In consequence, they have just determined there will be no more UN Security Council sanctions on the DPRK enacted by the U.S..

    The key clause establishing mutual assistance in case of foreign aggression against either Russia or the DPRK means, in practice, the establishment of a military-political alliance – even as Moscow, cautiously, prefers to phrase that it “does not exclude the possibility of military-technical cooperation”.

    The agreement completely shocked Exceptionalistan because it is a swift counterpunch not only against NATO’s global designs but against the Hegemon itself, which for decades has enforced a comprehensive military-political alliance with both Japan and South Korea.

    Translation: from now on there is no more military-political Hegemony in Northeast Asia – and in Asia-Pacific as a whole. Beijing will be delighted. Talk about a strategic game-changer. Accomplished without a single bullet being fired.

    The repercussions will be immense, because a broader concept of “security” will now apply equally to Europe and Asia.

    So welcome, in practice, to Putin the statesman advancing a new integrated, comprehensive concept of Eurasian security (italics mine). No wonder the mentally-impaired collective West is stunned.

    Gilbert Doctorow correctly observed how “Putin considers what NATO is about to do at its Western borders as the very act of aggression that will trigger Russia’s Strategic Partnership with North Korea and present the United States with a live threat to its military bases” in Korea, in Japan and in the wider Asia-Pacific.

    And it doesn’t matter at all if the Russian response will be symmetric or asymmetric. The crucial fact is that the U.S. “containment” of the Russia-China strategic partnership is already unravelling in real time.

    In auspicious terms, Eurasia-style, what matters now is to focus on connectivity corridors. This is a story that started in previous editions of the St. Petersburg forum: how to connect the DPRK to the Russian Far East, and beyond to Siberia and wider Eurasia. The DPRK’s founding concept of Juche (“self-reliance”, “autonomy”) is about to enter a whole new era – in parallel to the NSR consolidation in the Arctic.

    Everyone indeed needs icebreakers – in more ways than one.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 19:50

  • "Here In Ten Days": Dust Plume From Africa Headed To US Gulf Coast 
    “Here In Ten Days”: Dust Plume From Africa Headed To US Gulf Coast 

    Around this time each year, strong trade winds over northwest Africa stir up Saharan dust, carrying it thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Caribbean Sea, and eventually over the US Gulf Coast. This year’s first wave of Saharan dust is expected by the end of the month. 

    “Dust from Africa here the next 10 days. Will help keep things quiet it looks like this next week, especially in the Caribbean,” Mike’s Weather Page wrote in a post on X, along with a forecast model showing the dust will reach Florida and the rest of the Gulf Coast by next weekend. 

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    The National Hurricane Center explained in a post on X that the dust would keep tropical activity low through next week.

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    Current NHC data shows light tropical activity, with one active system in the southern Gulf of Mexico. 

    Before the Saharan dust arrives in South Florida, a heat dome has scorched parts of the eastern US for the past week, and this intense heat is expected to continue into next week.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 19:15

  • LEGO Produces 'Pride' Video With Drag Queens And Furries
    LEGO Produces ‘Pride’ Video With Drag Queens And Furries

    Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

    Children’s toy company LEGO has released a ‘Pride’ video featuring drag queens and even furries in toy form.

    Yes, they are furries, not just random bears taking part in a Pride parade. 

    Who exactly is this aimed at?

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    Actual real gay people are fed up of this crap.

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    The kids unfortunately don’t get a choice.

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    They don’t even hide it anymore.

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    Don’t think you’ll be seeing this in Saudi.

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    Well done LEGO on alienating your last remaining customers.

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    Meanwhile in London, the mayor is ‘celebrating’ Pride by erecting giant billboards glorifying the removal of healthy breasts. 

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    Happy ‘Pride’.

    *  *  *

    Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 18:40

  • US-Built Gaza Pier To Be Dismantled Early Amid Ongoing Failures
    US-Built Gaza Pier To Be Dismantled Early Amid Ongoing Failures

    Following the latest weather and choppy seas setback, the US-built aid pier off Gaza has resumed operations as of the end of this week (Thursday), the Pentagon said, after it broke apart last month. It’s been an on-again off-again situation and the controversial and costly pier project has by and large proven ineffective.

    But despite aid reportedly now rolling off the pier once again, Israeli media on Saturday has documented more embarrassing issues, including apparently broken off parts from the pier still washing up to shore far away from its location…

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    Following significant repairs it underwent at an Israeli port, the pier was transferred back in place amid a series of problems largely due to turbulent seas in the eastern Mediterranean..

    The Associated Press has written in a fresh report that “Aid groups have sharply criticized the plan to bring aid by sea into Gaza, saying it’s a distraction to take pressure off Israel to open more land border crossings that are far more productive.”

    This week The New York Times essentially declared that the expensive Biden project is an utter failure and that it will be dismantled earlier than expected.

    “The $230 million temporary pier that the U.S. military built on short notice to rush humanitarian aid to Gaza has largely failed in its mission, aid organizations say, and will probably end operations weeks earlier than originally expected,” the Times wrote.

    “In the month since it was attached to the shoreline, the pier has been in service only about 10 days. The rest of the time, it was being repaired after rough seas broke it apart, detached to avoid further damage or paused because of security concerns,” the report continued.

    Anadolu via Getty Images

    Top US military officials have also acknowledged the failure of the project: “The pier was never meant to be more than a stopgap measure while the Biden administration pushed Israel to allow more food and other supplies into Gaza through land routes, a far more efficient way to deliver relief. But even the modest goals for the pier are likely to fall short, some American military officials say,” according to NYT.

    This project was never fundamentally about hungry Palestinians, but more about White House PR and damage control amid an avalanche of international and domestic criticism over Biden’s contradictory Gaza policy.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 18:05

  • Paxton Warns Texas Schools Not To Comply With Title IX Transgender Rules Or Face Legal Action
    Paxton Warns Texas Schools Not To Comply With Title IX Transgender Rules Or Face Legal Action

    Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has issued an advisory to Texas schools, warning of potential legal action against any school district that adopts policies and procedures that align with the federal Department of Education (DOE) revised Title IX rules that include provisions allowing female-identifying male students access to female-only spaces like lockers and bathrooms.

    Mr. Paxton issued the warning in a June 18 advisory, which said that he is prepared to take legal action against any Texas school district that crafts policies such as allowing men into women’s bathrooms or requiring teachers or students to address others using their preferred pronouns rather than pronouns that match their biological sex.

    In April, the Biden administration announced a final rule expanding the decades-old Title IX law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools to now include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” The move sparked a flurry of lawsuits from 15 Republican-led states, including Texas.

    The Title IX changes – which Mr. Paxton described in his advisory to Texas schools as “radical” and “unlawful” – gave men who identify as women the right to use female restrooms and locker rooms, and to join female-only organizations, like sports teams.

    The revised rules also define “harassment” as including someone addressing another using pronouns that conform to their biological sex rather than their chosen gender identity.

    Texas Court Ruling

    In Mr. Paxton’s lawsuit over the Title IX revisions, on June 11, Texas District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the DOE exceeded its authority, that it “cannot regulate state educational institutions in this way without violating federal law.”

    “To allow Defendants’ unlawful action to stand would be to functionally rewrite Title IX in a way that shockingly transforms American education and usurps a major question from Congress. That is not how our democratic system functions,” Mr. O’Connor wrote.

    The judge granted Mr. Paxton’s motion for a permanent injunction against the defendants’ enforcement of their Title IX interpretation in Texas, meaning that Texas public schools don’t have to comply with the gender-based revisions.

    Based on that ruling, Mr. Paxton’s office issued a statement on June 18: “Texas schools do not and should not adopt or enforce any of the policy changes contained in the rule. Texas students are now safe from losing their Title IX protections and the school districts are protected from the threat of the loss of federal funding.”

    Further, Mr. Paxton said in the statement, “If any Texas school district adopts a policy or procedure that conflicts with or contravenes state law, then I will pursue every remedy available to protect students and teachers from these illegal and radical policies.”

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton speaks during the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting in National Harbor, Md., on Feb. 23, 2024. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

    The Epoch Times has reached out to the Texas Education Agency, which is responsible for public education in Texas, with a request for comment.

    A spokesperson for the DOE told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that the department stands by the Title IX revisions, which he said guarantee that “no person experience sex discrimination in a federally funded educational environment.”

    “The Department crafted the final Title IX regulations following a rigorous process to realize the Title IX statutory guarantee,” the spokesperson added. “The Department stands by the final Title IX regulations released in April 2024, and we will continue to fight for every student.”

    The Title IX revisions, which have been blocked in a number of states, are slated to go into effect on Aug. 1.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 17:30

  • Dozens Of Cybertrucks Vandalized In Florida Parking Lot
    Dozens Of Cybertrucks Vandalized In Florida Parking Lot

    Dozens of Tesla Cybertruck owners might experience a slight delivery delay after a Florida parking lot filled with these electric trucks was vandalized. The culprit seems to have a strong dislike toward Elon Musk. 

    “Tesla cars vandalized at a parking lot near Sunrise Blvd and US1 in Ft Lauderdale,” Instagram user @onlyindade wrote, accompanying a short video showing dozens of Cybertrucks with graffiti reading “F*ck Elon.” 

    Nic Cruz Patane reposted the video on X, which was viewed 1.2 million times in less than 24 hours. 

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    Nic Cruz Patane said the parking lot full of Cybertrucks is located in Fort Lauderdale. He posted an image showing the lot from a distance. 

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    The good news is that the Cybertruck features a high-quality stainless steel exoskeleton, which makes removing spray paint fairly simple. 

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    Repainting won’t be necessary for the fix. It should just buff right out. 

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    Stainless steel is incredibly resilient. 

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    Let’s not forget that Musk’s Berlin factory was attacked in early May by woke Marxist extremists. 

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    As Musk recently noted, “Tesla Cybertruck, the finest in apocalypse defense technology!”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 16:55

  • Hackers Demand CDK Pay Millions In Ransom To End Auto-Dealer Cyberattack
    Hackers Demand CDK Pay Millions In Ransom To End Auto-Dealer Cyberattack

    Update (Saturday): New details about the CDK Global hack have surfaced through a Bloomberg source, indicating that a hacking group in Eastern Europe is likely responsible for the cyber incident. The group demands tens of millions of dollars in ransom, as the hack has paralyzed thousands of auto dealerships across the US.

    Here are more details from the report:

    CDK is planning to make the payment, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The hacking group behind the attack is believed to be based in eastern Europe, the person said. In the early days of any ransomware attack, discussions are fluid, and the situation could change. -Bloomberg 

    On Friday, Diana Lee, the chief executive officer of Constellation, a marketing agency with strong ties in the auto industry, told the host of Bloomberg TV that the cyber incident is “just mass chaos at this point … and worse than Covid.” 

    “The dealer’s required to actually run a DMS for sales, service, parts, for every single functionality — even stocking a vehicle, you can’t do it without the DMS system. So it is a disaster,”  Lee said. 

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    The cyber incident has paralyzed about 15,000 car dealerships in an industry that hit $1.2 trillion in sales last year. 

    Last week, some dealers closed, while others resorted to processing paperwork by hand. 

    What a mess for the auto industry. We assume auto analysts will be writing notes early next week about what’s next for the industry. 

    Still, CDK has provided no timelines for when core systems will be restored.

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    Over 15,000 auto dealerships nationwide face major disruptions due to an ongoing cyberattack for the third day, shutting down their backend management systems. This has halted sales for some dealers and forced others to complete transactions the old-fashioned way: by hand. 

    CDK Global, the leading provider of dealership management systems and digital retailing solutions, said cybersecurity breaches began on Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, CDK’s core systems were restored, only to be shuttered on Thursday after a second hack attack. This has made it nearly impossible for thousands of dealers to buy and sell vehicles this week.

    “We cannot process paperwork. Everything is frozen, everything is tied up — we cannot move money back and forth to pay off cars, to finance our customers’ transactions,” Tom Maioli, who owns Celebrity Motor Car Company with dealerships across  York and New Jersey, told CBS MoneyWatch. He said his business is “completely shut down.”

    Maioli continued, “We cannot process paperwork. Everything is frozen, everything is tied up — we cannot move money back and forth to pay off cars, to finance our customers’ transactions.”

    Consumers are being greeted with signs like this at auto dealers nationwide…

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    On Thursday, X user Car Dealership Guy was featured on CNBC. He said the auto industry’s biggest question after all of this chaos is: “Will the industry continue centralizing and consolidating technology? This has been the biggest trend in auto retail.” 

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    Such disruptions have forced back-office support staff to write orders and complete paperwork without computers (clearly first-world problems).

    “My selling team can hand-write a buyer’s order,” Brian Benstock, general manager of Long Island City-based Paragon Honda and Paragon Acura dealership, told CNN.

    There have been no reports (yet) of foreign adversaries involved in the cyber breach. Also, CDK has provided no timeline for when core systems will be restored.

    A lingering concern is the economic fallout from this cyber incident, given the size of the auto industry’s size.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 16:40

  • David Stockman On The Ukrainian Border War Folly
    David Stockman On The Ukrainian Border War Folly

    Authored by David Stockman via InternationalMan.com,

    Someone should tell the European ruling elites to take a long jump off a short pier.

    Their endless whining about the Ruuskies and Putin is just plain pathetic because…

    • It’s not justified—Russia bears no hallmarks of an expansionist imperial power.

    • The Russia-Ukraine conflict is none of western Europe’s business—since its essentially a territorial and civil war within the borders of historic Russia.

    • If EU officialdom is really concerned about the purported Russian threat why do they spend just a pittance of their GDP on defense?

    Yet, here we have Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, former German defense minister and full-throated war-hawk, talking absolute nonsense:

    “Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to see empires and autocracies back in Europe, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Economic Congress in Katowice.

    Speaking alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, von der Leyen insisted that she stands for a European Union that is ready to do whatever it takes to protect Europe, and especially Ukraine.

    “Putin’s war is about redrawing the map of Europe, but it is also a war on our Union and on the entire global rules-based system,” she said.”

    Well, that’s rubbish if there ever was such. The only time the borders of Ukraine have been redrawn at the barrel of a gun is when Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev did it between 1922 and 1954. That’s right, this bureaucratic half-wit wants to embroil the world in WWIII in order to enforce borders drawn by a trio if history’s most blood-thirsty tyrants.

    As explained below, there never was a country even remotely resembling modern Ukraine until the Soviet communists decreed its existence. Before that, the pieces and parts of the country’s history go back to the 1650s when one of the more powerful and brutal rulers of the Cossack Hetmanate that occupied a small part of today’s central Ukraine abandoned his tribe’s historic fealty to the Polish kings and switched his loyalty to the Russians. After that, the “borderlands”( i.e.”Ukraine” in Russian) were all about vassalage in the Russian Empire and the Soviet one which followed.

    During that 375 year span the borders shifted all over the lot and back, as the Mongol, Turkish and Polish-Lithuanian empires receded and the Russian and communist ones expanded. So what’s so sacrosanct about the very last version of the map—one that hosted both the murderous regime of Stalin and Hitler’s Wehrmacht, too?

    Indeed, Europe is rife with borders redrawn again and again. While von der Leyen was in Poland preaching for border wars in Ukraine, in fact, it might well be asked, which sacrosanct Polish borders did she have in mind?

    For 700 years “Poland” has cavorted around the rivers, plains and forests of central Europe like a traveling minstrel show. This includes its disappearance entirely at the hands of the Prussians, Russians, Hapsburgs and other long-gone lesser powers during the later years of the 18th century and the entirety of the 19th century. Only in 1919 was it resurrected—in part upon German lands at Versailles because Woodrow Wilson realized that there were votes to be had among the fair part of the Polish nation which had migrated to Chicago and the industrial Midwest.

    Then Hitler and Stalin redrew Poland’s borders again under the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1938, cancelling Wilson handwork and returning the German Danzig Corridor to its previous owner. And then, seven years later, a different set of victors re-carved it again at Yalta, setting borders for “Poland” that satisfied Stalin’s aim to recover eastern lands the Soviets lost in the post-1918 civil war.

    That is to say, the picture below reminds not only how the latest borders of “Poland” were drawn, but how over the last several centuries of history most of Europe’s present borders came to be. They were not drawn by God’s deputies on earth or even the statesman of the day—but by the victors of the most recent wars.

    The Border Men of 1945

    Moreover, even a glance at today’s map reminds that the border-drawing work of victorious generals and politicians, and occasionally statesman, has always been subject to revision without necessarily making a war about it. In recent times that’s been true even for the handiwork of the better kind of draftsmen who drew maps at Versailles as opposed to the bloody chambers of the Soviet Empire.

    Thus, the statesman at Versailles decreed the existence of Czechoslovakia in 1919 as a potpourri of nations including a lot of Slovaks, Czechs, Hungarians, Romani people, Silesians, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and most especially millions of Germans. So it was subsequently dismembered by Hitler to bring the Sudetenland Germans home; then re-assembled by the Yalta winners; and finally divided between Slovakia and the Czech Republic on peaceable terms in 1993.

    Or take the case of the meandering borders of the six autonomous republics of the vanished state of Yugoslavia and particularly its anchor in Serbia. Wikipedia explains the border-making process there as well as can be done:

    “(Serbia) achieved de facto independence in 1867 and gained full recognition by the Great Powers in the Berlin Congress of 1878. As a victor in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, Serbia regained Vardar Macedonia, Kosovo and Metohija and Raška (Old Serbia). In late 1918, with the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Serbia was expanded to include regions of the former Serbian Vojvodina. Serbia was united with other Austro-Hungarian provinces into a pan-Slavic State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; the Kingdom of Serbia joined the union on 1 December 1918 and the country was named the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

    Serbia achieved its current borders at the end of World War II, when it became a federal unit within the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (proclaimed in November 1945). After the dissolution of Yugoslavia in a series of wars in the 1990s, Serbia once again became an independent state on 5 June 2006, following the breakup of a short-lived union with Montenegro.”

    Albeit mention should also be made of the former Serbian province of Kosovo. Washington and its NATO retainers decreed its independence after 75 days of persuasion with the Serbs. The messages were apparently written on the bombs dropped from a range of NATO aircraft that included about everything which could fly:

    “A large element of the operation was the air forces of NATO, relying heavily on the US Air Force and Navy using the F-16, F-15, F-117, F-14, F/A-18, EA-6B, B-52, KC-135, KC-10, AWACS, and JSTARS from bases throughout Europe and from aircraft carriers in the region.

    The French Navy and Air Force operated the Super Etendard and the Mirage 2000. The Italian Air Force operated with 34 Tornado, 12 F-104, 12 AMX, 2 B-707, the Italian Navy operated with Harrier II. The UK’s Royal Air Force operated the Harrier GR7 and Tornado ground attack jets as well as an array of support aircraft. Belgian, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese and Turkish Air Forces operated F-16s. The Spanish Air Force deployed EF-18s and KC-130s. The Canadian Air Force deployed a total of 18 CF-18s, enabling them to be responsible for 10% of all bombs dropped in the operation.

    The fighters were armed with both guided and unguided “dumb” munitions, including the Paveway series of laser-guided bombs.The bombing campaign marked the first time the German Air Force actively attacking targets since World War II.[142]

    The US B-2 Spirit stealth bomber saw its first successful combat role in Operation Allied Force, striking from its home base in the contiguous United States.”

    At length, the Serbian borders were redrawn!

    In the process, its president was captured as a war criminal. When he died prior to his trial in a NATO prison from “natural causes” he undoubtedly did not view this particular border drawing incident as an exercise in the rule of law.

    In any event, notwithstanding the historic fluidity of borders, there is no case whatsoever that Russia’s invasion was unprovoked and unrelated to NATO’s own provocations in the region. The details are arrayed below, but the larger issue needs be addressed first. Namely, is there any reason to believe that Russia is an expansionist power looking to gobble up neighbors which were not integral parts of its own historic evolution, as is the case with Ukraine?

    The answer is no, and its based on what should be called the double-digit rule. The true expansionary hegemons of modern history have spent huge parts of their GDP on defense because that’s what it takes to support the military infrastructure and logistics required for invasion and occupation of foreign lands.

    For instance, here are the figures for military spending by Nazi Germany from 1935–1944 expressed as a percent of GDP. This is what an aggressive hegemon looks like in the ramp-up to war and the actual conduct of military campaigns of invasion and occupation.

    Not surprisingly, the same kind of claim on resources occurred when the United States took it upon itself to counter the aggression of Germany and Japan on a global basis. By 1944 defense spending was equal to 40% of America’s GDP, and would have totaled more than $2 trillion in present day dollars of purchasing power.

    Military Spending As A Percent Of GDP In Nazi Germany

    • 1935: 8%.
    • 1936: 13%.
    • 1937: 13%.
    • 1938: 17%.
    • 1939: 23%.
    • 1940: 38%.
    • 1941: 47%.
    • 1942: 55%.
    • 1943: 61%.
    • 1944: 75%

    By contrast, during the final year before the Ukraine proxy war broke out in 2022, the Russian military budget was $65 billion, which amounted to just 3.5% of its GDP. Moreover, the prior years showed no build-up of the kind that has always accompanied historic aggressors. For the period 1992 to 2022, for instance, the average military spending by Russia was 3.8% of GDP– with a minimum of 2.7% in 1998 and a maximum of 5.4% in 2016.

    Historical Russian Military Spending As a Percent Of GDP

    Needless to say, you don’t invade the Baltics or Poland—to say nothing of Germany, France, the Benelux and crossing the English Channel—on 3.5% of GDP. Since full scale war broke out in 2022 Russian military spending has increased significantly to 6% of GDP, but even at current levels it has not been able to subdue even its own historic borderlands.

    So if Russia does not have the economic and military capacity to conquer its non-Ukrainian neighbors, let alone Europe proper, what is the war really about?

    In short, it is rooted in territorial disputes and civil strife in lands which have been vassals or integral parts of greater Russia for several centuries. Ukraine actually means “borderlands” in the Russian language. As we indicated, it now comprises a state that did not even exist until Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev confected it by force of arms after 1920.

    In fact, prior to the communist takeover of Russia, no country that even faintly resembled today’s Ukrainian borders had ever existed. So what NATO’s proxy war actually amounts to is a hideous attempt to enforce the dead hand of the Soviet presidium, as we amplify below.

    For avoidance of doubt here are sequential maps that tell the story, and which make mincemeat of the von der Leyen’s sanctity of borders malarkey. The first of these is a 220-year-old map from 1800, where the yellow area depicts the approximate territory of the four breakaway regions—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia plus Crimea—that are now allegedly under Russian “occupation”, but which in fact voted overwhelmingly during referendums in 2023 and 2014, respectively, to separate from Ukraine in favor of affiliation with Russia.

    Collectively, the five regions were historically known as Novorossiya or “New Russia” and had been acquired by Russian rulers, including Catherine the Great between 1734 and 1791.

    As is evident from the red markings on the map which designate the year of acquisition, the Russian Empire had gradually gained control over this vast area, signing peace treaties with the Cossack Hetmanate (1734) and with the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of the various Russo-Turkish Wars of the 18th century.

    Pursuant to this expansion drive – which included massive Russian investment and the in-migration of large Russian populations to the region – Russia established the Novorossiysk Governaorate in 1764. The latter was originally to be named after the Empress Catherine, but she decreed that it should be called “New Russia” instead.

    The Breakaway Provinces Of Ukraine Were Part Of Russia Before The US Constitution Was Even Written

    Completing the assemblage of New Russia, Catherine forcefully liquidated its aforementioned century-long Cossack ally known as the Zaporizhian Sich (present day Zaporizhzhia) in 1775 and annexed its territory to Novorossiya, thus eliminating the independent rule of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Later in 1783 she acquired Crimea from the Turks, which was also added to Novorossiya, as shown in yellow area of the map above.

    During this formative period, the infamous shadow ruler under Catherine, Prince Grigori Potemkin, directed the sweeping settlement and Russification of these lands. Effectively, Catherine had granted him the powers of an absolute ruler over the area from 1774 onward.

    The spirit and importance of “New Russia” at this time is aptly captured by the historian Willard Sunderland,

    The old steppe was Asian and stateless; the current one was state-determined and claimed for European-Russian civilization. The world of comparison was now even more obviously that of the Western empires. Consequently, it was all the more clear that the Russian empire merited its own New Russia to go along with everyone else’s New Spain, New France and New England. The adoption of the name of New Russia was in fact the most powerful statement imaginable of Russia’s national coming of age.

    In fact, the passage of time solidified the borders of Novorossiya even more solidly. One century later the light-yellow area of the 1897 map below gave an unmistakable message: To wit, in the late Russian Empire there was no doubt as to the paternity of the lands adjacent to the Azov Sea and the Black Sea: they were now part of the 125 years-old “New Russia”.

    Where’s Waldo Ukraine on This Map Circa 1900? 

    After the Russian Revolution, of course, the pieces and parts in this region of the old Czarist Empire were bundled-up into a convenient administrative entity by the new red rulers of Moscow, who christened it the “Ukrainian SSR” (Soviet Socialist Republic). In a like manner, they created similar administrative entities in Belorussia, Georgia, Moldavia, Turkmenistan etc.—ultimately confecting 15 such “republics”.

    Here is how and when these brutal tyrants attached each piece of today’s Ukrainian map to the territories acquired or seized by the Russian Czars over 1654-1917 (yellow area):

    • The old Novorossiya of the Donbas and Black Sea rim was added by Lenin in 1922 (purple area).

    • The western territory around Lviv (blue area) that been known as Little Poland or Galicia were captured by Stalin in 1939 and thereafter, when he and Hitler carved up Poland.

    • Upon the death of the bloody Stalin in 1954, Khrushchev made a deal with his Presidium allies to transfer Crimea (red area) from the Russian SSR to the Ukrainian SSR in return for their support in the battle for succession.

    In a word, Ukraine was born in communist blood and iron. Yet now the NATO and Euro-hawks like von der Leyen want to spend yet upwards of $200 billion to ensure that the handiwork of autocratic Czars and Commissars remains intact into the 21st century and presumably beyond.

    Modern Ukraine: Born In Communist Blood and Iron

    Of course, had the above-mentioned 20th century communist trio been benefactors of mankind, perhaps their subsequent map-making handiwork and reassignment of Novorossiya might have been justified. Under this benign counterfactual, they would have presumably combined peoples of like ethnic, linguistic, religious and politico-cultural history into a cohesive natural polity and state. That is, a nation worth perpetuating, defending and perhaps even dying for.

    Alas, the very opposite was true. From 1922 to 1991 modern Ukraine was held together by the monopoly on violence of its brutally totalitarian rulers. And that became more than evident when the Kremlin temporarily lost control of Ukraine during the military battles of World War II: During that especially bloody interlude, the communist administrative entity called Ukraine came apart at the seams.

    That is, local Ukrainian nationalists joined Hitler’s Wehrmacht in its depredations against Jews, Poles, Roma and Russians when it first swept through the country from the west on its way to Stalingrad; and then, in turn, the Russian populations from the Donbas and south campaigned with the Red Army during its vengeance-wreaking return from the east after winning the bloody battle that turned the course of WWII.

    Not surprisingly, therefore, virtually from the minute it came out from under the communist yoke when the Soviet Union was swept into the dustbin of history in 1991, Ukraine has been engulfed in political and actual civil war. The elections which did occur were essentially 50/50 at the national level but reflected dueling 80/20 vote breakouts within the regions. That is, the Ukrainian nationalist candidates tended to get vote margins of 80% + in the West/Central areas, while Russian-sympathizing candidates got like pluralities in the mainly Russian-speaking East/South.

    This pattern transpired because once the iron-hand of totalitarian rule ended in 1991, the deep and historically rooted conflict between Ukrainian nationalism, language and politics of the central and western regions of the country and the Russian language and historical religious and political affinities of the Donbas and south came rushing to the surface. So-called democracy barely survived these contests until February 2014 when one of Washington’s “color revolutions” finally “succeeded”. That is to say, the Washington fomented and financed nationalist-led coupe d état ended the fragile post-communist equilibrium.

    That’s the true meaning of the Maidan coup. It ended the tenuous cohesion that kept the artificial state of Ukraine intact for barely two decades after the Soviet demise. So save for Washington’s destructive intervention, the partition of a communist-confected state that had never been built to last would have eventually materialized.

    The evidence that the Maidan coup was the coup ‘d grace for the makeshift Ukrainian state is apparent in the maps below. These maps below tell you all you need to know about why this is a civil war, not an invasion of one neighbor by another.

    The first map is from the 2004 presidential election, which was won by the Ukrainian nationalist candidate, Yushchenko. The latter predominated in the orange areas of the map, over the pro-Russian Yanukovych, who swept the blue regions in the east and south.

    2004 Ukraine Election Results—National Divorce In The Making

    The second map is from the 2010 election, showing the same stark regional split, but this time the pro-Russian candidate, Yanukovych, won.

    In the map below, the dark blue parts to the far east (Donbas) indicate an 80% or better vote for Viktor Yanukovych in the 2010 election. By contrast, the dark red areas in the west voted 80% or more for the Ukrainian nationalist, Yulie Tymoshenko. That is to say, the skew in the Ukrainian electorate was so extreme as to make America’s current red state/blue state divide seem hardly noteworthy by comparison.

    As it happened, the sum of the pro-Yanukovych skews from the east and south (Donbas and Crimea) added up to 12.48 million votes and 48.95% of the total, while the sum of the extreme red skews in the center and west (the lands of old eastern Galicia and Poland) amounted to 11.59 million votes and 45.47% of the total.

    Stated differently, it is hard to imagine an electorate more sharply divided on a regional/ethnic/language basis. Yet it was one which still produced a sufficient victory margin (3.6 percentage points) for Yanukovych – so as to be reluctantly accepted by all parties. That became especially clear when Tymoshenko, who was the incumbent prime minister, withdrew her election challenge a few weeks after the run-off in February 2010.

    At that point, of course, Russia had no beef with the Kiev government at all because essentially Yanukovych’s “Regions Party” was based on the pro-Russian parts (blue areas) of the Ukrainian electorate. But when Washington essentially put the anti-Russian regions in charge of Ukraine’s government by orchestrating, funding and immediately recognizing the Maidan coup, everything changed on a dime. That was especially the case when the new, illegal government enshrined in its constitution a requirement to join NATO at the earliest possible opportunity.

    In effect, Washington’s 2014 Maidan coup was the equivalent of Khrushchev’s emplacement of missiles in Cuba during 1962. Even had Putin been as erudite and civilized as JFK, rather than the ruffian he actually is, he would have had little choice except to insist that NATO missiles 30 minutes from Moscow cannot stand.

    In a word, there has been no unprovoked “invasion” by Moscow of the transitory artifact known as the Ukrainian state. The latter effectively began and ended with the Soviet Union.

    Moreover, with respect to the actual underlying reason for intervention in Ukraine—NATO’s proxy war against Russia– a simple question recurs: Besides restocking the NATO arsenals depleted by the demolition derby in what remains of Ukraine, what’s the reason for NATO’s war?

    Alas, the question answers itself. The War Capital of the World on the Potomac insists upon it, and its vassals in Europe like Ursula von der Leyen nod, jawohl!

    *  *  *

    The amount of money the US government spends on foreign aid, wars, the so-called intelligence community, and other aspects of foreign policy is enormous and ever-growing. It’s an established trend in motion that is accelerating, and now approaching a breaking point. It could cause the most significant disaster since the 1930s. Most people won’t be prepared for what’s coming. That’s precisely why bestselling author Doug Casey and his team just released an urgent video with all the details. Click here to watch it now.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 16:20

  • Judge Judy Says Trump's NYC Hush Money Trial Was "Nonsense" And She "Resents" It As A Taxpayer
    Judge Judy Says Trump’s NYC Hush Money Trial Was “Nonsense” And She “Resents” It As A Taxpayer

    There’s going to be a lot of conflicted daytime TV viewers who count both The View and Judge Judy in their daily lineup after this one…

    One of Manhattan’s favorite judges, TV icon Judge Judy Sheindlin, weighed in on Donald Trump’s criminal “hush money” trial last week in an interview with Chris Wallace, calling the spectacle “nonsense”. 

    Sheindlin, known for her show “Judge Judy,” discussed former President Trump’s recent felony conviction with CNN’s Wallace. Sheindlin, a Brooklyn native, expressed her disapproval of Trump’s Manhattan prosecution.

    “Trump was indicted in 4 separate cases,” Wallace asked Judy. “Is that the justice system working?”

    She responded to Wallace: “I would be happier as someone who owns property in Manhattan, if the district attorney of New York County would take care of criminals who are making it impossible for citizens to walk in the streets and use the subway…”

    “…to use his efforts to keep those people off the street, than to spend 5 million or ten million of taxpayers money trying Donald Trump on this nonsense,” she continued. 

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    “I, as a taxpayer in this country, resent using the system for your own personal self-aggrandizement,” she said.

    The former family court judge, who is known for being ruthless on the stand, said that even she couldn’t figure out what the charges against Trump were: “You had to twist yourself into a pretzel to figure out what the crime was, he doesn’t like [Trump].”

    “I think he was a good businessman, a real estate guy, and he was certainly terrific on The Apprentice,” Judy is seen saying in the clip. 

    Despite this, Judy isn’t all sold on Trump, telling Wallace: “I don’t think that Donald ever should have been president, and I don’t think that even Donald thought he was going to be president.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 15:45

  • What Chinese AI Tells Us About The Semi Market
    What Chinese AI Tells Us About The Semi Market

    By Russell Clark of the Capital Flows and Asset Markets substack

    Back in January I wondered if semiconductors were the new oil. The price action this year probably says yes. Just as the Soviet Union tried to cripple the US in the 1970s through helping organise an oil embargo, the US is trying to cripple China through creating a semiconductor embargo. The US “war” with China was always about keeping China as a smaller economy than the US. From that perspective, it has been a resounding success. In dollar terms Chinese GDP has declined last few years.

    The problem with embargoes, is that they heavily motivate those suffering from them to initiate policies to counteract and insulate them from a future embargo. In the US, the oil embargo led to reforms that reduced domestic demand, as well as encouraged increased supply from sources other than the Middle East. The end result of all these reforms was that we eventually saw the collapse of the oil price from near USD40 a barrel to USD15. With collapsing oil revenues, Soviet Union went into decline and eventual collapse. The unintended consequences of policy is often called blowback, and for the Soviet Union and OPEC, it was the eventually collapse of oil prices.

    Banning high end semiconductor exports to China was meant to cripple development of high end industries in China. There is little evidence of this. China has become the world’s biggest exporter of electric cars. When I look at reviews of Chinese EVs on TikTok, they make Tesla look extremely second-rate.

    EVs are not the main use for high end semiconductors – low end semis which China has pre-existing expertise in are probably sufficient. For AI and LLM, the very high end GPUs that NVIDIA sell are necessary. Even without access to high end semiconductors, there is evidence that China was able to approximate high end semiconductor performance through very aggressive use of low end semiconductors. Hence AI has ended up boosting the demand for all semiconductors. This would explain the phenomenal performance of Philadelphia Semiconductor Index. The embargo is creating demand across the entire semi spectrum.

    A big driver in demand for semis has been AI and training large language models (LLM). It has been widely reported that a LLM price war has broken out in China. It is hard to understand how this is possible. It would be like seeing a price war among plastic producers in the US in 1974, just as their major inputs were soaring in price. After paying £14.50 for a Pimm’s at the cricket, I am shocked to see anything have a price cut – let alone the 90% prices cuts we have seen below. Some Chinese AI is now pricing at a 99.8% discount to OpenAI’s GTP-4. Whether this is a useful comparison is hard to tell, given the restrictions on access to Chinese internet (otherwise there is a huge arbitrage opportunity).

    In a fully open free trading market, I would suggest the price war in China would have negative implications for Nvidia. And it might well end up that way – showing that AI needs a huge consolidation before it can be profitable. But what it does show is that Chinese policy of breaking cartels and fostering competition is producing exactly the results you would expect – lower prices. In the US, Meta, Google, OpenAI and Microsoft look determined to create a lock on high end Nvidia chips to starve out competition.

    Increasingly the blowback for US policy to try and slowdown China, has been to spur an even more competitive Chinese tech industry, while creating a domestic tech cartel, with increasingly uncompetitive products : the iPhone continues to charge high prices for out of date tech for example, TikTok was destroying Meta and Google, while Microsoft remains Microsoft, Tesla looks pedestrian. Huawei has begun building an ecosystem completely independent of US tech. It would be no surprise if that system will produce substantially cheaper products.

    Combine this with US sanctions on Russian oil that has created a parallel financial system that cuts the US dollar out, it’s hard to escape the observation that US is making every single long term mistake possible. I am reminded of Japan in 1991, vaulting ambition just as it was losing competitiveness. The US now has vaulting ambition just as it was getting exposed on every single front. One very striking similarity is sky high golf club memberships. In Japan in 1991, golf club memberships were traded for millions of dollars. In the US, unlike Japan, there is no shortage of land, but USD 500,000 for a golf club membership does exist.

    Unlike Japan, I expect the US dollar to take the brunt of decline in US industry. Our currency, your problem as the US government used to say – Switzerland is already showing the strain, having to cut rates even though they are already far below US rates. In a pro labour world, I thought growth would be strong, and higher rates would be the big problem for the market, but markets would flatline – and this has been true (outside of tech). But the more I look at the US, the more I think I maybe I wrong. Maybe we are headed to the greatest short selling market of all time – collapsing share prices AND amazing carry proceeds. Fun times – for short sellers anyway.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 15:10

  • Hundreds Of Thousands Of Americans Are Going "Off Grid" In Anticipation Of What Is Coming
    Hundreds Of Thousands Of Americans Are Going “Off Grid” In Anticipation Of What Is Coming

    Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

    As our society descends into chaos, vast numbers of people are choosing to pull the plug and walk away.  Of course it is nearly impossible to completely escape the ubiquitous madness that is seemingly all around us, but many are finding that an “off grid” lifestyle gives them the best opportunity to insulate themselves as much as possible.  When you become less dependent on the system, what happens to the system has less of an impact on you.  Unfortunately, it appears that our system is heading into a full-blown meltdown, and a significant portion of the population is feverishly making preparations in anticipation of what is coming.

    According to Reuters, it has been estimated that there are now approximately 20 million “preppers” in the United States…

    Brook Morgan surveyed booths at the “Survival & Prepper Show” in Colorado that were stocked with boxes of ammunition, mounds of trauma medical kits, and every type of knife imaginable.

    A self-described “30-year-old lesbian from Indiana,” Morgan is one of a new breed of Americans getting ready to survive political upheaval and natural catastrophes, a pursuit that until recently was largely associated with far-right movements such as white nationalists since the 1980s.

    Researchers say the number of preppers has doubled in size to about 20 million since 2017.

    There is a subset of that group that has decided that the best way to prepare is to go “off grid”.

    It is being reported that “more than 250,000 people in the U.S.” have chosen to adopt such a lifestyle…

    As energy costs and home prices continue to rise, more Americans are choosing to live off-grid. According to one estimate, more than 250,000 people in the U.S. have an off-grid lifestyle. While the potential cost savings are certainly attractive, technology and interest in tiny homes, shipping container homes and other energy-efficient housing alternatives are allowing families interested in sustainable lifestyles to move to off-grid living.

    If you are thinking of making a similar move, you need to do your research.

    Most of us are extremely dependent on the grid, and many find that making a switch to a radically different lifestyle is quite challenging…

    Living off the grid means committing to sourcing everything you need to survive and thrive independently: food, shelter, energy and most importantly: water. It’s empowering, until the moment things don’t work. Like when you’re halfway through a delightful hot shower at the end of a January day and the water pump suddenly stops working, sending you into the frozen darkness with a wet headful of shampoo and some tools to address the problem.

    For a lot of people, joining a community of others that have adopted an “off grid” lifestyle is very helpful.

    For example, about 55 miles south of Salt Lake City hundreds of survivalists are living in a very large community that is completely off the grid…

    A community of society-shunning Americans launched a survivalist haven in the Utah desert after finding themselves alienated from the modern world.

    Hundreds of people have set themselves up to live off the land under ‘Operation Self-Reliance,’ feeling that getting off-the-grid is the solution to a crumbling culture.

    This particular community was originally founded by a 74-year-old man named Philip Gleason, and he is warning that “a variety of apocalyptic scenarios could play out in the coming years”…

    Gleason said he fears a variety of apocalyptic scenarios could play out in the coming years, from a power grid failure taking down America’s electricity, to nuclear war and cyber attacks.

    ‘This is just history repeating itself,’ he cautioned. ‘At the start of any cultural revolution, the people that control their food are the ones that come out on top.’

    As Americans consistently share that they are losing faith in the nation’s institutions, those that have made a new life on Riverbed Ranch have essentially set up their own self-surviving nation state.

    Of course it probably wasn’t a great idea for them to share what they are doing with such a large audience, because when things do get really bad large numbers of desperate people may start heading that direction.

    Most of the time, families that choose to live an “off grid” lifestyle just do it on their own.

    Heather Graesser and her husband once owned a large home near Denver, but now they are much happier living an “off grid” lifestyle…

    Ten years ago I was living a typical suburban life on the outskirts of Denver. My husband, Casey, and I were both teachers. We lived in a four-bedroom house with a small yard where our two kids liked to play.

    Today our life looks radically different. We live entirely off the grid in a 300-square-foot home that we built from straw bales and cob, a natural building material made from soil, water, and other organic matter. We rely on solar power for electricity and rain collection for water, and we use a drop toilet to create “humanure” — compost made from human waste.

    We’ve left the conventional world behind. But along the way we’ve created a much more luxurious and free lifestyle than the one we were living in suburbia.

    Good for them.

    These days, it is becoming increasingly difficult to live a “normal” middle class lifestyle because the cost of housing has become so painful.

    In fact, an entirely new category known as “impossibly unaffordable” has been created because home prices have become so expensive in certain cities…

    Anyone with half an eye on the housing market over the last two decades will know that in many countries, not least the United States, it’s become much more difficult to buy a home.

    But a new report sums up the feeling of many potential home buyers by creating a category that labels some major cities as “impossibly unaffordable.”

    The report compared average incomes with average home prices. It found that pandemic-driven demand for homes with outside space, land use policies aimed at limiting urban sprawl, and investors piling into markets had sent prices soaring.

    Living “off grid” is often much cheaper than living a conventional lifestyle.

    And living “off grid” will also give you a much better chance of shielding yourself from the endless violence that we see all around us.

    Recently, I was deeply shocked to read about a 42-year-old man that fired 28 shots at women and children at a family splash pad in Rochester Hills, Michigan…

    An eight-year-old boy is fighting for his life after being shot in the head by a rampaging gunman at a family splash pad as seven others were also gunned down.

    The violent attack took place in Rochester Hills, Michigan, around 5pm Saturday after the shooter fired 28 rounds from a handgun in a seemingly random attack, peppering women and children at the Brooklands Plaza Splash Pad outside Detroit.

    The gunman fled the scene to a nearby home within half a mile of the splash pad, leading to a tense hours-long standoff that ended when the shooter – described as a 42-year-old white male who lived with his mother – died by suicide.

    You would have to be completely and utterly evil to do something like that.

    Sadly, our entire society is saturated with evil at this point.

    So I can definitely understand why so many people just want to get away from it all.

    Things are really bad now, but they are going to get a whole lot worse during the chaotic years that are in front of us.

    Ultimately, I think that large numbers of people are going to regret not adopting an “off grid” lifestyle while they still had the opportunity to do so.

    Our society is already in the process of collapsing all around us, and those that understand what is happening are getting prepared for what is coming.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 14:00

  • Maher Audience Silenced After Andrew Cuomo Admits NYC Trump Trial Should Have Never Happened
    Maher Audience Silenced After Andrew Cuomo Admits NYC Trump Trial Should Have Never Happened

    Former governor of New York from 2011 to 2021 Andrew Cuomo appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher on Friday where he discussed the implications of the New York City Trump trial with host Maher. 

    Maher’s mostly liberal audience is caught quiet when Maher and Cuomo start frankly discussing whether or not the trial was helpful for the Trump campaign. 

    “The trial in New York, the one he [Trump] got convicted for, was the greatest fundraising bonanza ever. He was lagging behind Biden, and now he’s pulled quite a bit ahead,” Maher said to Cuomo during the show. 

    “That trial was the greatest reason people had to send their checks for $5, $10, 2$5, whatever dollars to Donald Trump. So I was always with you [Andrew Cuomo] on the one in New York, the hush money trial. I don’t think they should have brought that one,” he continues. 

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    To which Cuomo, who was elected as New York State Attorney General in 2006, replied: “That case, the attorney general’s case in New York, frankly, should have never been brought.”

    Cuomo continued: “If his name was not Donald Trump and if he wasn’t running for president. I’m the former AG in New York. I’m telling you, that case would have never been brought. And that’s what is offensive to people. And it should be!”

    “Because if there’s anything left…it’s belief in the Justice system!”

    In the same episode, Maher also asks how Joe Biden could be ahead in the polls when he is losing votes with so many key demographics.

    “And yet I read in the polls he pulled ahead this week. Explain that to me,” Maher says.

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    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 13:25

  • DHS 'Intelligence Experts Group' Classified Military Service, Religion, & Trump-Support As Indicators Of Domestic Extremism & Terrorism
    DHS ‘Intelligence Experts Group’ Classified Military Service, Religion, & Trump-Support As Indicators Of Domestic Extremism & Terrorism

    Authored by Debra Heine via American Greatness,

    A now disbanded group in Joe Biden’s Department Homeland Security (DHS) classified Trump supporters, members of the military, and people with religious views as persons likely to commit “domestic violent extremist” attacks, newly released internal files show.

    DHS announced the formation of the “Homeland Intelligence Experts Group” in September 2023 to “provide advice and perspectives on intelligence and national security efforts” to the Department, but according to America First Legal, “it was a completely partisan group designed to provide top cover for the Department’s radical agenda

    AFL and former Ambassador Richard Grenell filed a lawsuit against the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group soon after the group was announced, and spurred Republican members of Congress to take action against it.

    AFL alleged that the group comprised of partisan actors violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act for various reasons – including its lack of balance, the Biden Administration’s inappropriate influence over it, and its lack of public notice and participation, among other things.

    To avoid further litigation and scrutiny, the Biden regime agreed in May to disband the illegal group and provide its records to AFL. However, the group may have been active for a year before it was pressured to shut down.

    “By the time the Homeland Intelligence Experts Group was announced in September 2023, the group had already been meeting for as long as four months,” AFL reported.

    Members of the deep state cabal included former Obama intelligence officials and Russia collusion hoaxers John Brennan and James Clapper—both signatories of the infamous “Letter of 51,” which mislead the American public on the veracity of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election.

    Also included in the unit were former Obama official Francis Taylor,  Asha George, Rajesh De, Caryn Wagner, and Elisa Massimino, all of whom contributed exclusively to Democrat candidates for political office.

    During a meeting in September on “Collection Posture and Associated Challenges,” the partisan group discussed ways to get around the Constitutional limits to their domestic intelligence gathering goals.

    One idea they came up with was expanding DHS’s reach into local communities in an “ambiguous” and “non-threatening” way to encourage teachers and parents to report on their conservative neighbors and children.

    The group sought to reclassifying political dissent as a “public health” issue so that “mothers and teachers” could feel comfortable coming forward.

    They also proposed that people be tagged with “in the military” and “religious” labels to profile them as having “indicators of extremists and terrorism” as a pretext to allow DHS to spy on them. The group said “we should be more worried about these” individuals [than left-wing extremist groups like antifa and the millions of unvetted illegal aliens DHS has allowed to cross the southern border].

    The group went on to discuss how “most of the Domestic Terrorism threat now comes from supporters of the former president [Donald Trump].

    This isn’t the first time the Biden regime has been caught engaging in abusive and partisan intelligence collection.

    In April 2022, DHS announced the formation of an “Disinformation Governance Board” (DGB) to respond to matters the government unilaterally determined to be mis-, dis- or mal-information (MDM)—specifically information that countered official regime narratives on “the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines,” “the efficacy of masks,” the validity of the 2020 election,” and “falsehoods surrounding U.S. Government immigration policy.”

    DHS disbanded the Disinformation Governance Board and its director, Nina Jankowicz, resigned in disgrace after an massive outcry from conservatives, who compared the board to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”

    Tyler Durden
    Sat, 06/22/2024 – 12:50

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