Today’s News 10th June 2022

• World Health Organization Finally Admits COVID Lab-Leak Theory Is A Possibility
  World Health Organization Finally Admits COVID Lab-Leak Theory Is A Possibility

  For two years, governmental and global medical institutions like the CDC and WHO along with conmen like Anthony Fauci have been referring to the argument that Covid-19 leaked from the virology lab in Wuhan, China (the only Level 4 lab in Asia) as a “conspiracy theory.” 

  For two years, the mainstream media and Big Tech social media platforms have called for outright censorship of anyone trying to discuss the evidence. 

  The WHO has been an avid protector of the Chinese government and dismissed any assertions they they were involved in development of covid related viruses through gain of function research. 

  Now, suddenly, the WHO is willing to give the theory a serious look and admits there are several important pieces still missing from the origin puzzle.

  

  It’s hard to say why this sharp change of attitude has occurred, but it is now very difficult to deny the facts.

  Evidence has been mounting for some time that the virus was at the very least coaxed into existence through mutation processes if not outright engineered.  Covid-19 is a 96% match to a virus sample collected and held at the Wuhan lab for several years.  This same virus strain does not naturally exist anywhere near Wuhan, only in the lab, and the 4% discrepancy could be explained by gain of function research. 

  Such research is now a confirmed FACT, and was funded by Anthony Fauci, the NIH, NIAID and related institutions for years.    

  The only “evidence” to support the wet market theory of covid’s origin comes from the Chinese government, which has a vested interest in lying about the situation and still has yet to release any accurate data on covid deaths within the country.  The claim was essentially debunked by Chinese researchers when multiple cases of early infections were discovered among people who had no contact with the market in Wuhan.   Extensive evidence now supports the lab leak theory, an argument made by the alternative media during the entire course of the pandemic and one which we were constantly attacked for. 

  Will the WHO ever actually admit that the most likely scenario for the covid outbreak is a lab leak from the massive Level 4 virology lab in Wuhan which specializes in covid gain of function research? 

  No, they won’t. 

  But, they will now try to act as if they are entertaining the idea because if they do not they will lose all credibility in the process.  Many researchers argue that it’s already too late for that. 

  The mainstream media continues to perpetuate numerous falsehoods surrounding covid and has built a complex narrative of assumptions and misdirections to deny reality.  As time passes, more and more of the original narrative falls apart. 

  The “fact checking” machine is being exposed as a propaganda machine, and people who defend REAL science, real logic and real data can take heart that as the truth is exposed any institution that perpetuated the lies will also be exposed in the long run.   

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 06/10/2022 – 02:45

• British Health Secretary Says "Sex Matters" After NHS Removes "Women" From Cancer Guidance
  British Health Secretary Says “Sex Matters” After NHS Removes “Women” From Cancer Guidance

  Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times,

  Health Secretary Savid Javid has said that the word “women” should not be removed from ovarian cancer guidance, after it was found that the NHS had “desexed” some of its main sites on female medical conditions, by using “inclusive” gender-neutral language that excludes the words “female” and “women.”

  

  The health secretary told Sky News, “You won’t be surprised to know that as a health secretary, I think that your sex matters, your biological sex is incredibly important to make sure you get the right treatment, the very best treatment.”

  The Times of London reported on Tuesday that the main NHS web pages on ovarian, womb, and cervical cancers no longer referred to women on some of the main pages.

  For example, the womb cancer page used to say that “cancer of the womb (uterine or endometrial cancer) is a common cancer that affects the female reproductive system. It’s more common in women who have been through the menopause.”

  Now it says that “most womb cancer usually starts in the lining of the womb (endometrium), this is also known as endometrial cancer.”

  For the ovarian cancer page, the site used to say that “ovarian cancer mainly affects women who have been through the menopause (usually over the age of 50), but it can sometimes affect younger women.”

  Now the guidance says that “ovarian cancer affects the 2 small organs (ovaries) that store the eggs needed to make babies. Anyone with ovaries can get ovarian cancer, but it mostly affects those over 50.”

  Javid said that he hadn’t seen the Times of London report. “Well, look, I haven’t seen that particular report, but I have heard of instances like that and I don’t think it’s right,” he said.

  He added that he was “looking into this” and used prostate cancer as an example of a disease that can only affect “those that are biologically male” and that it was “important to talk about women when talking about cervical cancer … so people know what you are talking about.”

  “It’s important that when messaging is given to people for cancers that words like women and men are used,” Javid said.

  “There are many different trusts and I want to listen to why someone might have taken a different approach, I don’t just want to assume, but I think I’ve made my views clear on this,” he said.

  He added, “I know there’s some sensitivity around this language, but we have to use common sense and use the right language so that we can give people the best possible patient care.”

  A spokeswoman for NHS Digital told The Times of London on Tuesday: “It is not correct to say that there is no mention of women on the ovarian, womb, and cervical cancer pages. We have updated the pages as part of our routine review of web pages to keep them in line with the best clinical evidence, and make them as helpful as possible to everyone who needs them.”

  Tyler Durden
  Fri, 06/10/2022 – 02:00

• Everything Is A Weapon: The US Government Is Waging Psychological Warfare On The Nation
  Everything Is A Weapon: The US Government Is Waging Psychological Warfare On The Nation

  Authored by  John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

  “Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings? … Anything we touch is a weapon. We can deceive, persuade, change, influence, inspire. We come in many forms. We are everywhere.”

  – U.S. Army Psychological Operations recruitment video

  The U.S. government is waging psychological warfare on the American people.

  

  No, this is not a conspiracy theory.

  Psychological warfare, according to the Rand Corporation, “involves the planned use of propaganda and other psychological operations to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of opposition groups.”

  For years now, the government has been bombarding the citizenry with propaganda campaigns and psychological operations aimed at keeping us compliant, easily controlled and supportive of the police state’s various efforts abroad and domestically.

  The government is so confident in its Orwellian powers of manipulation that it’s taken to bragging about them. Just recently, for example, the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group, the branch of the military responsible for psychological warfare, released a recruiting video that touts its efforts to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

  This is the danger that lurks in plain sight.

  Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare may be the most devastating in terms of the long-term consequences.

  As the military journal Task and Purpose explains, “Psychological warfare is all about influencing governments, people of power, and everyday citizens… PSYOP soldiers’ key missions are to influence ‘emotions, notices, reasoning, and behavior of foreign governments and citizens,’ ‘deliberately deceive’ enemy forces, advise governments, and provide communications for disaster relief and rescue efforts.”

  Yet don’t be fooled into thinking these psyops (psychological operations) campaigns are only aimed at foreign enemies. The government has made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded.

  Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government has been subjecting the American people to “apple-pie propaganda” for the better part of the last century.

  Consider some of the ways in which the government continues to wage psychological warfare on a largely unsuspecting citizenry.

  • Weaponizing violence. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

  • Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.

  • Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.

  • Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

  • Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

  • Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

  • Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

  • Weaponizing fear and paranoia. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

  • Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

  • Weaponizing the future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

  The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

  The facts speak for themselves.

  Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly not looking out for our best interests, nor is it in any way a friend to freedom.

  When the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution, then you no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”

  What we have is a government of wolves.

  Our backs are against the proverbial wall.

  “We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State.

  Brace yourselves.

  As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have become enemies of the Deep State.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 23:40

• Visualizing The Best-Selling Video Game Consoles Of All Time
  Visualizing The Best-Selling Video Game Consoles Of All Time

  In 1972, the first-ever commercially available home video game console hit the market – the Magnavox Odyssey. Players of the Odyssey had a choice between two built-in games that were stored directly in the device, and would use a joystick and dials as a controller.

  

  But, as Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang details below, video game consoles have come a long way since then, and the console market has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry that’s expected to reach $72.67 billion in value by the end of 2022.

  This graphic by Enrique Mendoza uses data from VGChartz to show the market leaders in the industry, by highlighting the top-selling video consoles of all time, as of May 8, 2022.

  

  Nine Generations of Video Game Consoles

  Before diving into the top-selling consoles, it’s worth taking a step back to touch on the evolution of home consoles to show how they’ve changed over the years.

  We dug into the literature on the history of video game consoles, and found that most articles and blog posts on the topic cite nine different generations of devices.

  Here’s a breakdown of each generation, and some of their most noteworthy systems:

  1972: Gen One, Where it Began

  Consoles in the first generation had pre-built games that were stored directly on the device. They include the Magnavox Odyssey and Atari’s Pong.

  1976: Gen Two Emerges

  In this generation, games were sold separately, rather than programmed into the device. Consoles of this gen include the Fairchild Channel F and the Atari 2600.

  1983: Gen Three, the “8-bit Generation”

  This era’s consoles typically had 8-bit processes which allowed for more advanced graphics for the time. A few notable consoles during this gen were ​​the Sega SG-1000 and the Nintendo Famicom, released outside Japan as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

  1987: Gen Four Elevates Handheld Gaming

  Home consoles were released with 16-bit systems, meaning that audio and graphics improved even more in this era. But an arguably bigger moment for this gen was the emergence of the Nintendo Game Boy.

  1993: The 3D Start of Gen Five

  This generation saw the move away from pixels and towards 3D polygons. Some consoles like the Sony PlayStation started using CD-ROMs instead of cartridges, which stored more data at a cheaper cost and changed the industry.

  1998: Gen Six and the Internet

  At the start of this generation, the three major players in the console space were Sony, Sega, and Nintendo. By the end, Sega would be replaced with Microsoft as it launched the Xbox and helped popularize online console gaming.

  2005: HD Graphics and Motion Controls of Gen Seven

  On one side of the market, Microsoft and Sony were competing with high-definition graphics, faster processers, and different forms (Blu-rays or DVDs). But Nintendo’s motion-sensing Nintendo Wii arguably defined this generation, and the handheld Nintendo DS swept the market as well.

  2012: Gen Eight’s Modern Consoles

  Consoles of this era started having increased connectivity and processing power, with full HD an expectation. It was also an extremely long generation, starting with Nintendo’s unsuccessful Wii U and ending with the ultra-successful Nintendo Switch, widely considered the first hybrid console with three different ways to play: TV mode, handheld mode, or tabletop mode.

  2020: Gen Nine and Beyond

  So far, this generation has brought upgraded graphics (up to 8K resolution), larger games, and game-streaming capabilities. Devices in this gen include the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5, which both use solid state drives to increase speed and performance, while Nintendo has yet to introduce a 9th generation device.

  The Best-Selling Game Consoles

  The best-selling video game console of all time is Sony’s PlayStation 2 (PS2). More than 157 million systems have been sold around the world since its launch in March 2000.

  

   

  Despite the fact the PS2’s been discontinued since 2013, no other gaming console has managed to top it—in fact, the next closest actively-sold consoles, the PS4 and Nintendo Switch, are each more than 40 million units behind.

   

  One major factor for the PS2’s success was its built-in DVD player. At the time, DVD players were very expensive, and in many places a PS2 was a cheaper and effective alternative. It was also one of the first devices to be “backward compatible,” meaning users could play most of their PS1 games on the PS2. This meant players didn’t have to buy a whole new library of games when they made the switch to a PS2, and Sony could tap into its existing customer base.

  But while Sony’s PS2 is the top-selling console on the list, Nintendo has more top-selling consoles on the list—almost half of the consoles on the list are manufactured by Nintendo (11), while only seven are made by Sony.

  What Will it Take to Out-Sell the PS2?

  As the PS4 has started taking a backseat to the PS5 in sales and promotion, the current most-likely contender for the best-selling console crown is the Nintendo Switch. Early in 2022, it was the fastest console to sell 100 million units.

  With lots of hype around the possibilities of AR and VR, it’ll be interesting to see what new features come with the next generation of gaming consoles.

  Will future devices ever beat the PS2’s record-breaking sales? Time will tell. But for now, the 22-year-old console continues to hold its well-earned spot at the top.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 23:20

• 'Pawns' For Beijing: CCP Pressures US Officials To Tilt Policies In China’s Favor
  ‘Pawns’ For Beijing: CCP Pressures US Officials To Tilt Policies In China’s Favor

  Authored by Eva Fu via The Epoch Times,

  It was late February 2020, as the pandemic was heating up in the United States, when a request from China caught Wisconsin state Sen. Roger Roth’s attention.

  

  It was an email from Wu Ting, wife of the Chinese consul general in Chicago.

  Wu wanted Roth to help pass a resolution “in support of China’s fight against the novel coronavirus.”

  The “Chinese government has taken unprecedentedly rigorous measures to bring [the coronavirus] under control, including locking down Wuhan,” she wrote in a Feb. 26 email that has been viewed by The Epoch Times.

  “We have drawn up a draft resolution just for your reference,” she wrote, adding that the Chinese consulate in Chicago was committed to promoting China–Wisconsin relations, “particularly mutually beneficial cooperation in trade, agriculture, and other fields and people-to-people links.”

  The Chinese consul general looked forward to visiting Roth’s “beautiful state” and meeting with the senator to “discuss how to take our relations forward,” the email said.

  Regarding the draft resolution, “In essence, it praised China for their openness and transparency in their handling of the coronavirus,” Roth told The Epoch Times.

  

  “I thought this had to be a joke,” Roth said. “It came from a Hotmail account, of all places. It wasn’t even an official thing.” He discarded the email and thought of it no further, but Wu persisted. A few weeks later, she followed up using the same email, attaching the same resolution.

  He had his staff verify the email address with state government sources and learned that Chinese consulate officials routinely use private email accounts. Wu, it turns out, is the wife of the Chinese consulate general Zhao Jian.

  Once Roth realized the email was legitimate, he became “downright angry.”

  “I dictated a one-word response to them, and I said: Dear Consul General, Nuts. Signed respectfully, Roger Roth,” he said. “Not only do we respond to them with the word ‘nuts,’ we even drafted our own resolution on the Communist Party of China, exposing who they really are.”

  That one-word reply, a nod to Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s famous response to a German surrender ultimatum during World War II, was the last communication Roth had with the Chinese consulate in Chicago. Wu later wrote an email expressing shock at his response, which he never replied to. But that interaction pushed him onto the offensive in Wisconsin.

  It “awakened me to the real threats that our country is facing from the Communist Party of China,”​​ said Roth, who is running for lieutenant governor in his state.

  “Most people in the world probably don’t even know where we are, if we even exist, but they are trying to reach their tentacles even into Wisconsin,” he said.

  ‘Pawns’ for Beijing

  Wisconsin isn’t the only state where Beijing has tried to exert influence.

  Around the same period as the emails to Roth, the state of Utah was approving a resolution expressing solidarity with the Chinese people. In language similar to what Wu had put forward, the resolution noted “a friendly relationship and strong economic, cultural, and people-to-people ties” that Utah and China share, and “the unique, 14-year legislative relationship between Utah and Liaoning,” referring to a legislative exchange program between the Western state and a Chinese province.

  That Feb. 25, 2020, resolution also urged against virus restrictions that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade and raise fear and stigma.” At the time, the Trump administration had imposed a flight ban to and from China in response to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, a move that initially sparked condemnation from the Chinese regime and the World Health Organization, but was ultimately adopted by the majority of countries around the world as the pandemic evolved.

  States like Utah that passed such resolutions didn’t know “what was really happening and how they were being used as pawns,” Roth said.

  The Epoch Times has reached out to the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Jacob Anderegg, for comment. An email to the bill’s sponsor in the state House, Eric Hutchings, who was a representative until last January, was undeliverable.

  The states of Georgia and New York also have passed a “China Day” resolution.

  The Georgia version, passed on Feb. 3, 2020, intended to “commend the special friendship between Georgia and the People’s Republic of China” and to “recognize the Consul General Cai Wei of the Consulate General of China in Houston.”

  Cai, prior to the resolution’s passage, gave a speech on the state Senate floor touting China’s leadership in the virus fight. The State Department five months later would order the closure of the consulate, with then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling it a “hub of spying and intellectual property theft.”

  

  The New York Senate resolution that was approved in June 2019, meanwhile, appears to be the nation’s first such gesture to commemorate Oct. 1, marking the Chinese Communist Party’s official takeover of China.

  The resolution’s lead sponsor, state Sen. James Sanders, didn’t respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times about whether the consulate had any role in the resolution’s eventual adoption.

  Coercion and Threats

  For those who chose to take a stance critical of the Chinese Communist Party, the regime took direct action in a bid to thwart their efforts.

  The first time former California state Sen. Joel Anderson experienced Chinese pressure firsthand was 15 years ago, when he was first elected to the California state assembly.

  His purported offense was to introduce a resolution recognizing the anniversary of the introduction of Falun Gong, a spiritual belief that the regime has marked for elimination since 1999. The resolution, he said, simply aimed to welcome Falun Gong adherents “to a country that recognizes religious liberty.”

  “It didn’t say anything more. It didn’t say that they were the best faith, or they were better than many other faiths,” he said. “All it said was, you know, we welcome you.”

  That resolution put Anderson in the crosshairs of the Chinese Communist Party. Shortly after, he received a six-page letter from Chinese authorities branding him a “terrorist.”

  “It told me that if I traveled to China, I’ll be arrested and prosecuted as a terrorist,” Anderson told The Epoch Times.

  

  Anderson, who at the time knew little about the Chinese regime’s persecution of Falun Gong, said he was taken aback.

  “China doesn’t get to dictate to the United States. We’re a free country. And we allow religious liberty,” he said. “We allow all faiths to be practiced here in the United States.”

  The Chinese regime’s displeasure toward Anderson didn’t ease up after he joined the California state Senate years later. As a senator, he was invited on an official trip to China to promote bilateral trade relations. Recalling the threats from the letter, he mentioned the issue to the state office handling the logistics. The answer that came back was blunt: He “would not be welcomed,” Anderson recalled.

  “So I can’t go to China without fear of being arrested and convicted.”

  What happened to Anderson was not at all a one-off incident.

  Over the decade and a half that followed, he and other U.S. officials at local and federal levels would receive pressure through visits, emails, and phone calls from Chinese authorities with an eye toward bending their policies in China’s favor.

  President Joe Biden in May accused the CCP of lobbying against a bill aimed at bolstering U.S. competitiveness against Beijing.

  Anderson drew the regime’s attention a second time when in 2017, he introduced a resolution denouncing Beijing’s persecution of Falun Gong.

  After the measure was approved by the state Senate Judiciary Committee with a vote of 5–0, the Chinese consulate in San Francisco sent a round of letters to all of Anderson’s colleagues, warning that the passage of the resolution could “deeply damage the cooperative relations between the State of California and China and seriously hurt the feeling of Chinese people.”

  

  “That had a chilling effect on my colleagues voting forward in the future,” Anderson said. “All my colleagues had been voting in favor of it until they received the letter; the letter just completely flipped them from support to oppose.

  “They didn’t let it get to a vote; what they did is they tabled it. And then they voted to table it so that it could not be heard.”

  Anderson tried at least 18 times in the final week of the Senate session to bring the resolution to a floor vote.

  “What’s so disappointing is their congressmen, who shared the same constituents, not only voted in favor of it in Congress, but they co-authored it,” he said, noting that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had co-authored a bill in 1999 denouncing the persecution of Falun Gong.

  “So on the federal level, it was supported, on the state level, it was not,” he said. His colleagues “didn’t want to talk about it. But “the only difference between supporting it or not supporting it” was the letter.

  A similar story had played out in Minnesota two years earlier, when the state’s Senate took up the issue of forced organ harvesting, a Beijing-sanctioned practice targeting primarily Falun Gong practitioners. After introducing the resolution, state Sen. Alice Johnson received a letter from the Chinese consulate in Chicago. The consular officials also visited her and state Sen. Dan Hall in a bid to get them to drop the bill. The resolution was passed unanimously in May 2016.

  Visa Blackmail

  On the hot button issue of Taiwan, a self-ruled island that the regime has long desired to control, the regime has been no less aggressive.

  In August 2019, then-Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant received a letter from the Chinese consulate in Houston, warning that his state would lose Chinese investment if he chose to travel to Taiwan, Pompeo said in a speech in September 2020 at the Wisconsin State Capitol.

  

  Mirroring Bryant’s experience, a U.S. congressional delegation a few months later would learn that Beijing rejected their visa applications to China after they had planned a trip to Taiwan, in what Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) described as “visa blackmail.”

  “Chinese officials told members of my staff on multiple occasions that if I canceled the trip to Taiwan, I would be granted a visa,” he wrote in an op-ed in October 2019.

  “This was visa blackmail, designed to stanch the longstanding tradition of robust U.S. congressional engagement with Taiwan,” he wrote.

  As Utah adopted the pro-Beijing resolution in the early stages of the pandemic, another bill condemning the Chinese regime’s forced organ harvesting appeared to hit roadblocks in the state’s legislature.

  The measure was introduced in late February 2020 by state Rep. Steve Christiansen. Days later, however, Utah doctor Weldon Gilcrease, who had been working with Christiansen on the bill, got a call informing him that the lawmaker was backing out.

  In effect, Christiansen said, “I’m backing out because I was told I need to talk to the Chinese community,” according to Gilcrease, an oncology professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

  “To me, that meant he was pressured,” he told The Epoch Times. “He wasn’t backing out because he didn’t believe it was true, he was backing out because he was afraid of not listening to the ‘Chinese community.’

  “To me, that’s the voice of the Chinese Communist Party. Those are the people that have clearly put pressure on our officials. The Chinese Communist Party has used its channels to pressure our legislators to do nothing.”

  While the proposal passed the third reading in the Senate, the latest update, on March 12, 2020, showed that the bill had lapsed.

  Christiansen, who left office in October, couldn’t be reached for comment after repeated requests via email, phone calls, and social media.

  Keep the Pressure On

  California hasn’t seen any major legislative action relating to Falun Gong since Anderson left the state Senate in 2018.

  The former state legislator, who has been advocating for the victims of Beijing’s persecution for years, said he still finds it hard to understand why the communist regime perceives the spiritual group as a threat.

  “The faith is a very peaceful faith, brings great joy to many people. And yet, if you practice the faith, you were put in jail, you were tortured, and in some cases, you had body parts harvested for medical tourism,” said Anderson, now on San Diego County’s Board of Supervisors. “The pressure needs to stay on China.”

  Roth, the Wisconsin senator, has since proposed a series of measures aimed at curtailing Chinese influence in his state, including barring Chinese military members from working in the University of Wisconsin system and curbing Chinese recruitment or propaganda programs within the university system.

  “As lawmakers all over the country, everything we do plays into a larger narrative,” he said. And we have an opportunity, though it be limited … we have an opportunity to make a stand for freedom, and to make a stand for the freedom-loving peoples of China right now, or who are held hostage by this brutal regime.”

  To achieve that goal, Roth said, U.S. lawmakers need to make sure they’re not enabling the CCP.

  “If I had passed this resolution, that would have been enabling the CCP, and they would have used this for propaganda on their own people,” he said, recalling the resolution drafted by the Chinese consulate. “So right now is an opportunity for Americans to wake up and recognize this fight for freedom, which sometimes we take for granted here in the United States.

  “Freedom is a fragile thing.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 23:00

• NY Governor Signs Off On New Gun Laws Requiring Permits And Banning Body Armor
  NY Governor Signs Off On New Gun Laws Requiring Permits And Banning Body Armor

  New York Governor Kathy Hochul has an extensive track record of authoritarianism. 

  The same governor that enforced a pointless and ineffective lockdown of her state for two years and argued that anyone refusing to submit to the experimental mRNA covid vaccines and vax passports is going against “the will of God” is now affirming new laws that make rifles illegal to own without permits and that ban life protecting body armor.

  

  New laws also raise the legal age for owning a firearm to 21 and expand on existing Red Flag rules.  This allows all healthcare professionals to file “risk orders” and requires police to follow up on any and all threat accusations, potentially confiscating a person’s weapons based on hearsay and without due process.  

  The unconstitutional nature of such laws is not a new issue within the state of New York.  The Safe Act and numerous other laws enforced over the past century in NY are up for review by the Supreme Court this year with rampant violations of the Bill of Rights and the 2nd Amendment coming into question.  Under Hochul’s political leadership the state has become one of the most restrictive in the country.

  The state’s draconian policies have clearly contributed to the fact that it now leads the US in population loss.  From 2020 onward NY has faced a mass exodus of citizens citing medical tyranny, bureaucracy and taxation as their primary reasons for leaving.  In 2021 alone, Manhattan lost around 7% of its population, the highest of any county in America.

  New York has also suffered from the slowest economic return in the US following its covid lockdown lunacy.  It is still missing over 450,000 jobs from pre-pandemic levels while the rest of the nation has fully recovered (red states most of all). 

  Governor Hochul seems to be completely ignoring the connection between rising economic instability and crime as well, while preferring to blame the existence of guns as the core problem.  In March, NYC saw crime rates increase 36% overall from last year, and this is added to the growing crime rates since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020.  

  As crime and financial distress rise in NY, the state is moving to make self defense a far more difficult prospect.  Gun permits turn a constitutional right into a government granted privilege which they can take away any time they please.  Furthermore, body armor, a product with purely defensive capabilities, is now mostly illegal for anyone outside of an “eligible profession” (law enforcement).  Though, interestingly, some ballistic plates including those used by the Buffalo grocery store shooter are still legal.  This is likely due to an oversight caused by a lack of understanding of the gear being banned; a very common issue among Democrats.

  Typically, anit-2nd Amendment legislation is tested out in states like New York and California before spreading into other blue states.  It is then attempted at the federal level; though luckily this often ends in failure.   

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 22:40

• University Study Finds Higher Risk Of Psychiatric Diagnoses Among COVID-19 Patients
  University Study Finds Higher Risk Of Psychiatric Diagnoses Among COVID-19 Patients

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

  A recent study published by Oregon State University discovered that COVID-19 infected individuals have a higher chance of developing psychiatric disorders within about four months of contracting the virus.

  

  For the study, published in World Psychiatry on May 7, researchers used data from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). They matched 46,610 patients infected with COVID-19, which can trigger a respiratory tract infection (RTI), with control patients diagnosed with a different RTI.

  This allowed researchers to specifically look into how COVID-19 affected the mental health of infected individuals. No patients with any history of mental illness prior to 21 days after a COVID-19 diagnosis were included in the study. Those with a medical record extending a year prior to their COVID-19 diagnosis were also excluded.

  Researchers looked at the rate of psychiatric diagnoses in the 46,610 COVID-19 patients for two time periods—the early post-acute phase between 21 and 120 days from the infection and the late post-acute phase between 121 and 365 days from the infection.

  The study discovered that COVID-19 patients had a 3.8 percent rate of developing a psychiatric disorder in the early post-acute phase when compared to just 3 percent for other respiratory tract infections. This amounted to a nearly 25 percent higher risk for COVID-19 patients.

  However, the researchers did not find such a “significant difference in risk” when they compared COVID-19 late post‐acute phase patients with individuals with other respiratory tract infections.

  When researchers looked at anxiety disorders, they found the incidence proportion of a new‐onset anxiety disorder diagnosis was “significantly higher” for COVID-19 patients when compared to RTI patients. For mood disorders, such significant differences were not observed.

  “For people that have had COVID, if you’re feeling anxiety, if you’re seeing some changes in how you’re going through life from a psychiatric standpoint, it’s totally appropriate for you to seek some help,” Lauren Chan, co-author of the study, said according to a June 6 news release by Eurekalert.

  “And if you’re a care provider, you need to be on the proactive side and start to screen for those psychiatric conditions and then follow up with those patients.”

  Chan stressed that not every COVID-19 infected individual is going to have such psychiatric problems. In the context of the health care infrastructure of the United States, an increase in the number of COVID-19 patients seeking psychiatric care could add more strain on the system, she warned.

  Multiple other studies have also suggested that a segment of COVID-19 patients might end up facing psychological issues.

  Research published in April 2021 found that 34 percent of the 236,379 COVID-19 survivors included in the study developed neurological and mental disorders in the six months after becoming infected, according to WebMD.

  Anxiety was the most commonly found disorder, with 17 percent of subjects reporting it. This was followed by mood disorders at 14 percent, substance abuse disorders at 7 percent, and insomnia at 5 percent.

  When it came to neurological problems, 0.6 percent reported brain hemorrhage, 2.1 percent reported ischemic strokes, and 0.7 percent reported dementia. Among patients diagnosed as seriously ill with COVID-19, these rates jumped. Of the patients admitted to the intensive care unit, 7 percent experienced a stroke while 2 percent were diagnosed with dementia.

  In another study published on Feb. 16 at BMJ, researchers analyzed records of nearly 153,848 COVID-19 patients in the Veterans Health Administration (VHS) system, comparing them with individuals who had not contracted the virus.

  Those who got infected were found to be 35 percent more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety following the infection than uninfected people, 38 percent were more likely to be diagnosed with adjustment and stress disorders, 39 percent were more likely to be diagnosed with depression, and 41 percent were more likely to be diagnosed with sleep disorders.

  “There appears to be a clear excess of mental health diagnoses in the months after Covid,” Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the study, told The New York Times.

  However, only 4.4 to 5.6 percent of individuals in the study were diagnosed with anxiety, depression, adjustment, and stress disorders.

  “It’s not an epidemic of anxiety and depression, fortunately,” Harrison added. “But it’s not trivial.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 22:20

• "I Will Never Forgive Them": Teacher Shot In Uvalde Slams Police As "Cowards"
  “I Will Never Forgive Them”: Teacher Shot In Uvalde Slams Police As “Cowards”

  Fourth-grade Robb Elementary school teacher Arnulfo Reyes says he was “destroyed” inside after a gunman spent 77 minutes killing 19 students – including 11 in Reyes’ classroom, and two teachers.

  

  Reyes, who sustained multiple gunshot wounds, called local police “cowards” for waiting outside and restraining parents while 18-year-old Salvador Ramos committed mass murder.

  Reyes said that before Ramos entered his classroom, he immediately “knew something was wrong” upon hearing two shots ring out. He told his students, “Get under the table and act like you’re asleep,” before the gunman burst in and started firing.

  Reyes told the 10 and 11-year-olds to keep quiet.

  “I prayed that I wouldn’t hear none of my students talk,” he said, adding “And I didn’t hear talk for a while. But then, later on, he did shoot again. So, if he didn’t get them the first time, he got them the second time.”

  The teacher then pretended to be unconscious himself. “And that was the second time he got me,” he said. “Just to make sure that I was dead.”

  “I had no concept of time,” Reyes continued. “When things go bad, it seems like eternity. The only thing that I can say is I felt like my blood was like an hourglass.”

  Reyes has had five surgeries and had his blood replaced twice since the shooting.

  Police fail

  According to Reyes, he heard officers in the hallway approach his classroom three times, but they failed to enter. In one instance, he said a student was calling for the police in the next classroom over to no avail.

  “One of the students from the next-door classroom was saying, ‘Officer, we’re in here. We’re in here’…But the [police] had already left,” he said. “And then [the gunman] got up from behind my desk and he walked over there, and he shot again.”

  Unbeknownst to Reyes, parents and onlookers eventually gathered outside of the school, encouraging officers to enter the building. It wasn’t until 12:50 p.m. when a tactical unit finally breached the classroom door and killed the gunman.

  “After that it was just bullets everywhere,” he said. “And then I just remember Border Patrol saying, ‘Get up, get out,’ and I couldn’t get up.” –ABC News

  “They’re cowards,” said Reyes of the police, who took over an hour to subdue the attacker. “They sit there and did nothing for our community. They took a long time to go in… I will never forgive them.”

  

  ABC notes that both law enforcement and state officials have changed their story multiple times – providing conflicting information, while at one point admitting that the on-scene commanding officer (who was recently sworn in on the city council), made the “wrong decision” to wait so long.

  Reyes noted that despite an active shooter drill at Robb Elementary just weeks before the shooting, “There was no announcement. I did not receive any messages on my phone — sometimes we do get a Raptor system,” adding “but I didn’t get anything, and I didn’t hear anything.”

  Reyes also described complaints he said he had made about his door, which is meant to remain shut and locked while class is in session. At prior security checks, Reyes said he noticed that his door would not latch — an issue he said he raised with the school’s principal.

  “When that would happen, I would tell my principal, ‘Hey, I’m going to get in trouble again, they’re going to come and tell you that I left my door unlocked, which I didn’t,'” he said. “But the latch was stuck. So, it was just an easy fix.”

  Even with the failures in plan implementation, Reyes said the outcome felt inevitable: “No training would ever prepare anybody for this.” -ABC

  “It all happened too fast. Training, no training, all kinds of training — nothing gets you ready for this,” Reyes continued. “We trained our kids to sit under the table and that’s what I thought of at the time. But we set them up to be like ducks.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 22:00

• Louisiana Transgender Sports Ban To Become Law
  Louisiana Transgender Sports Ban To Become Law

  Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Transgender females will be banned from playing on girls and women’s sports teams at schools and colleges in Louisiana after the governor took no action to veto or sign a bill passed by the GOP-controlled legislature.

  

  Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, who is opposed to the bill, said he took no action on Senate Bill 44 because it “was going to become law whether or not I signed it or vetoed it” because of the current make up of the Louisiana State Legislature.

  Under Louisiana law, any bill that passes the state’s House and Senate automatically becomes law by the end of the legislative session if the governor takes no action.

  “It became very clear to me after two years, seeing the votes on both sides, and in the conversations that I had with a number of legislators, that that bill was going to become law regardless of what I did,” Edwards told reporters on Monday.

  The bill, titled the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act (pdf), will require K–12 schools and universities to “designate intercollegiate and interscholastic athletic teams according to the biological sex of the team members” recorded at birth.

  It specifically provides that teams designated for females “are not open to participation by biological males,” which includes transgender females.

  Louisiana is not the first state to enact such laws. The issue of transgender athletes competing in female sports has been a significant issue.

  Proponents of similar bills have argued that the physical advantage transgender females have as biological males in the sporting arena is taking opportunities away from biologically female athletes.

  SB44 seeks to address that, stating that “the biological differences between females and males” provide biological males, at puberty, with “lifelong effects” that are “most important for success in sports.”

  “Categorically, they are strength, speed, and endurance generally found in greater degrees in biological males than biological females,” the bill states.

  The bill therefore seeks to protect biological women and girls from that physiological advantage that transgender females benefit from in sports owing to being born biological males.

  In further comments, Edwards noted that he knew of no example in Louisiana of an openly transgender athlete trying to complete in a female sport, and that this was a reason he vetoed a similar bill last year.

  He said he thinks some of those advocating SB44 and similar bills elsewhere are sending a negative message to transgender people.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 21:40

• Five Georgetown Ethics Profs Scold President For Failing To Uphold Free Speech Policy
  Five Georgetown Ethics Profs Scold President For Failing To Uphold Free Speech Policy

  Five Georgetown ethics professors have penned an open letter to university president John DeGioia decrying his administration’s failure to uphold a school policy that makes freedom of speech paramount over preventing hurt feelings. 

  McDonough School of Business ethics professors John Hasnas, Jason Brennan, William English, Peter Jaworski and Sahar Akhtar write: 

  “In our courses, we examine examples of both organizations that act with integrity and honor their commitments even when doing so carries some cost, and those that pay lip service to their commitments but abandon them when they become inconvenient. We write because, in an important respect, Georgetown presently falls into the latter category.”

  In 2017, spurred on by a presentation to a faculty steering committee by one of the signatories of this week’s letter, Georgetown adopted a speech and expression policy that explicitly gave priority to freedom of expression over protecting members of the campus community from being offended.   

  The ethics professors note that, in its two-year journey to adoption, the policy first garnered the approval of the faculty senate, the Office of Student Affairs, the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity & Affirmative Action, and university counsel.

  In part, Georgetown’s speech and expression policy proclaims:

  “It is not the proper role of a university to insulate individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. Deliberation or debate may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.“

  However, the ethic professors cite several examples illustrating Georgetown’s failure to uphold that policy:

  • In 2017, an undergraduate student group, Love Saxa, was investigated and threatened with being defunded. Campus critics alleged that the group’s assertion that marriage should be defined as “a monogamous and permanent union between a man and a woman” fostered “hatred or intolerance of others because of their…sexual preference.” (Lest the irony go undetected, it bears noting that we’re talking about a Catholic University.) 

  • In 2019, the acting U.S. secretary of Homeland Security was forced to abandon his delivery of a speech after protestors continuously shouted him down. The professors say insufficient intervention by administrators and campus security officers at the event violated a Georgetown speech policy provision that says protestors “may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe.”  

  • In 2021, an adjunct professor was recorded expressing dismay that black students comprised a disproportionate share of the low grades in her class. A fellow adjunct prof listened without disagreeing. The law school dean promptly fired the first professor and put the second on administrative leave, and condemned the “abhorrent” conversation containing “reprehensible statements concerning the evaluation of black students.” University president DeGioia publicly endorsed the dean’s actions.  

  • In January, Ilya Shapiro, the incoming director of Georgetown Law’s Center for the Constitution, criticized President Biden’s advance commitment to nominating a black female Supreme Court justice. Shapiro tweeted, “Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog & v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman.” The law school dean condemned the tweet, put Shapiro on administrative leave pending an investigation and barred him from campus for five months. (Shapiro resigned on Monday just days after been reinstated.)

  • In May, Georgetown distributed a “Campus Climate Newsletter” inviting people to help the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Inclusion track down the source of anonymous, “racially insensitive” messages on Flok, a social media app. The ethics professors denounce the invitation for campus community members to inform on others for expressions the university deems “offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived”—expressions that are explicitly protected by university policy.   

  Throughout the 2,800-word letter, the professors stress that, while the university deliberately adopted a policy that puts free speech first, it continues to emphasize the primacy of eliminating “bias” and promoting a “welcoming” environment—not just by its actions in the above incidents but in its public statements too. 

  Indeed, in recently reinstating Shapiro, Georgetown Law dean William Treanor referred both to the university’s dedication to free speech and what he called an “equally important principle” of building “a culture of equity and inclusion.” 

  Professors Hasnas, Brennan, English, Jaworski and Akhtar say it’s incumbent on the university to either: 

  1. Enforce the speech and expression policy that was adopted in 2017, or

  2. Change the policy to subordinate free speech and unfettered debate to the promotion of an “inclusive and welcoming educational environment.” 

  Advocating neither option, they conclude:

  “One of the most fundamental principles of organizational ethics holds that organizations must honor their freely undertaken commitments. We are duty bound by the nature of our employment to call upon Georgetown University to abide by this principle.”

  You can read their full letter here.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 21:20

• US SPR Release Is Creating A Problem For Canada’s Heavy Crude Oil
  US SPR Release Is Creating A Problem For Canada’s Heavy Crude Oil

  By Julianne Geiger of OilPrice.com

  The Strategic Petroleum Reserve release in the United States – a large one designed to release a million barrels per day from storage into the commercial markets – is creating a bit of a problem for the Canadian oil industry.

  

  All crude oil grades aren’t equal, and a large share of what the SPR is releasing into the Gulf Coast area is heavy sour crude – a similar grade to the oil shipped down from Canada.

  The heavy Mars and Poseidon grades—both hailing from the GoM area and both heavy grades—are getting lost in the sea of heavy crude flooding the market from the SPR. So is Western Canadian Select (WCS)—the Canadian crude oil that traverses pipelines from Hardisty, Alberta, to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

  The WCS discount to the U.S. crude benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is now the steepest in years at $20 per barrel.

  

  “It’s not great timing,” Rory Johnston, founder of the Commodity Context newsletter based in Toronto, told Reuters. “The vast majority of what’s coming out of the SPR is medium sour crude. It’s hitting directly at that marginal pricing point for WCS.”

  Canada is no stranger to battling steep discounts—also referred to as wide spreads—compared to U.S. crude oil. For several years, their lack of pipeline capacity into the United States created a situation where all their pipelines were full, and the bottlenecking in this midstream segment created a pricing situation most unfavorable to Canada.

  By 2020, Canada had increased its storage capacity and slacked crude oil production, which dragged up the price of WCS—and shrunk the gap between WCS and WTI. Compared to today’s steep $20 discount, June 2020 contract pricing for WCS was just $3.80 per barrel.

  For those thinking that the steep discount to WTI means the SPR is working to bring down crude oil prices, that is not the case. As of Thursday morning, WCS was trading at $108.01—nearly double what it was trading this time last year.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 21:00

• PLA Military Jet Crashes In Middle Of Chinese City, Leaving At Least 1 Dead
  PLA Military Jet Crashes In Middle Of Chinese City, Leaving At Least 1 Dead

  Chinese media showed images of the dramatic aftermath of a military jet crash in a busy residential area of the city of Laohekou, in central Hubei province Thursday morning.

  China’s state-run national broadcaster CCTV confirmed that at least one person was killed, and two others injured. Military sources said it was a PLA Air Force J-7 fighter that went down near the city’s airport while on a training mission.

  

  The pilot had successfully ejected from the plane prior to the crash, resulting in a huge fireball amid residential buildgings, and only sustained minor injuries.

  Tragically, the fatality was reported to be a resident on the ground at the time of impact, with the pilot along with the injured in the area rushed to local hospitals.

  According to a description of the dramatic fiery crash in CNN, “Videos circulating on social media show some homes on fire, believed to have been caused by the crash, which occurred near Laohekou airport in Xiangyang, Hubei province.”

  “The cause of the crash and related casualties is under investigation, with emergency response underway, state media said.”

  Several apartments were seen on fire in the crash aftermath, according to eyewitness reports.

  Laohekou Airport is reportedly mainly used as a military training site for new fighter pilots belonging to Central Theatre Command Air Force. It has long stopped serving civilians aviation routes. It’s as yet unclear what caused the crash.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 20:40

• Report Reveals Depth Of US Complicity In Saudi Massacres Of Yemeni Civilians
  Report Reveals Depth Of US Complicity In Saudi Massacres Of Yemeni Civilians

  Authored by Brett Wilkins via Common Dreams,

  A leading peace group on Monday said a new report detailing the depth of US support for Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen—hundreds of which have been called war crimes by international legal experts—shows the need for Congress to pass a recently introduced measure to end American complicity in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

  According to The Washington Post—which along with the Security Force Monitor (SFM) at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute analyzed thousands of news reports and images to identify warplanes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that have attacked Yemen—“a substantial portion of the air raids were carried out by jets developed, maintained, and sold by U.S. companies, and by pilots who were trained by the US military.”

  

  This, despite a February 2021 pledge by President Joe Biden to end U.S. support for “offensive operations” in the Saudi-led war—a promise that has been repeatedly sidestepped via arms sales and a $500 million maintenance contract.

  “This is an absolutely devastating analysis of U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen,” tweeted the Quaker peace group Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL). “Our ongoing complicity is a stain on our nation’s soul. Just further reason for Congress to pass the newly introduced Yemen War Powers Resolution.”

  Last week, a bipartisan group of 48 House lawmakers introduced a War Powers Resolution directing “the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized by Congress.”

  “It’s critical that the Biden administration take the steps necessary to fulfill their promise to end U.S. support for the disastrous Saudi-led war in Yemen,” explained Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), one of the resolution’s lead sponsors.

  “We should not be involved in yet another conflict in the Middle East,” he added, “especially a brutal war that has created the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, and contributed to the deaths of at least 377,000 civilians.”

  As so many of us have documented for nearly 8 years, US-backed Saudi air strikes have been nonstop war crimes. The siege has been eased, but it’s still a war crime. https://t.co/2Pl4H5gzgg

  — Sarah Leah Whitson (@sarahleah1) June 4, 2022

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

  Writing for Just Security, Priyanka Motaparthy, director of the Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict, and Human Rights Project at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, and SFM’s Tony Wilson noted Saturday that “during seven years of war, coalition airstrikes have killed nearly 9,000 civilians in Yemen.”

  “Human rights groups and the United Nations-mandated Group of Eminent Experts have documented more than 300 airstrikes that are likely war crimes or violations of the laws of war,” they continued. “These strikes have hit hospitals and other medical facilities, markets, a school bus filled with children, and a funeral hall filled with mourners.”

  “Independent human rights groups, journalists, and U.N. monitoring bodies have found U.S. weapons used in many of these attacks,” the pair added.

  The Post-SFM investigation comes amid widespread U.S. and Western condemnation of alleged and documented Russian war crimes in Ukraine.

  “Thousands of similar strikes have taken place against Yemeni civilians,” the report notes. “The indiscriminate bombings have become a hallmark of the Yemen war, drawing international scrutiny of the countries participating in the air campaign, and those arming them, including the United States.”

  The report also comes as Biden prepares to visit Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks in a bid to boost relations with the oil-rich kingdom amid record fuel prices driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—despite a campaign promise to make the nation’s leaders “pay the price” for their role in the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

  America has done more to enable Saudi Arabia’s aggression in Yemen than we have done to end it.pic.twitter.com/7F5eNnKurk https://t.co/zPZomwfQz3

  — Quincy Institute (@QuincyInst) June 5, 2022

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

  The president’s decision to visit the fundamentalist kingdom, one of the world’s worst human rights violators, stands in stark contrast to the U.S.’ exclusion of Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan leaders from the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles—purportedly due to the lack of democracy and respect for human rights in those countries.

  Annelle Sheline, a Middle East research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, last week called the introduction of the War Powers Resolution “a key factor in why the warring parties in Yemen decided to extend their ceasefire,” which is now in its third month.

  Speaking of the resolution on Al Jazeera last week, Sheline said that “if this were to pass, two-thirds of Saudi Arabia’s air force would be grounded, because they cannot operate without U.S. military contractors, spare parts, and assistance.”

  “It very clearly shows,” she added, “that the Saudis… don’t want to be in the position of losing the ability to fly their own planes if the U.S. does withdraw support.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 20:20

• Watch Live: Jan. 6 Panel Prime-Time 'Show-Trial'
  Watch Live: Jan. 6 Panel Prime-Time ‘Show-Trial’

  Watch the fully-produced circus live here (due to start at 2000ET)

  As WaPo reports, while the committee is bipartisan, both Republicans on it are fierce Trump critics. McCarthy (Calif.) pulled his handpicked members from the panel last year after Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) vetoed two of his picks.

  Many of the details of the proceedings have been kept secret, but Politico reported Tuesday morning that the proceedings will include testimony from US Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards and a documentarian named Nick Quested who was embedded with the Proud Boys during the attack, but it’s unclear what the focus of his testimony will be.

  In fact, while expectations have been set for a ‘smoking gun’, ‘gotcha’ moment for Trump – just like Schiff and his pals did with Russia collusion – WaPo reports that committee aides sought to temper expectations of any shocking revelations during Thursday’s hearing and instead framed the session as an opening argument.

  “[Thursday] night is connecting the dots,” said a second aide.

  “A lot of this has been reported and bits and pieces of it have been shared. But our aim is to tie all that together in a comprehensive narrative and to show how it’s a pattern that started before the election and went all the way through January 6.”

  We look forward to seeing the ratings for this must-watch TV… sigh.

  *  *  *

  As we detailed earlier, the Jan. 6 panel will use never-before-seen documentation and closed-door depositions on Thursday to present their grand unifying theory to connect former President Trump to the Capitol riot, as part of a broader effort to keep him in power.

  

  Tonight’s televised 90-minute hearing, which begins at 8pm ET and is being produced by a former network television executive, will show that the Jan. 6 2021 attack on the Capitol was the result of a coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and stop the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden,” a House Select Committee aide told reporters during a Thursday call.

  “And indeed, that President Donald Trump was at the center of that effort,” the aide added.

  

  House Democrats will also feature live testimony from Nick Quested – a British documentarian who was creating a project about the Proud Boys and was present at a meeting between that group and the Oath Keepers, who participated in the Capitol breach.

  “You’re talking about two witnesses who were there at the very initial breach,” said the aide. “We’re going to hear about their experiences from that day — particularly sort of what they heard, what they saw from the rioters.”

  Democrats are expected to connect how the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers interacted with Trump’s tweets on Reddit and other message boards, according to Axios, which pointed out two other ‘areas of interest.’

  1. Efforts by Trump and aides to destroy documents.

  • Trump often tore up White House documents that should have been preserved as presidential records.

  • Some of the presidential records sent to the Jan. 6 committee by the National Archives had been ripped up, then taped back together, the Washington Post reported.

  • A committee witness testified that then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows burned papers in his West Wing fireplace after meeting with a House Republican about challenging the 2020 election, the N.Y. Times and Politico reported.

  2. Trump’s consideration of invoking the Insurrection Act, a federal law that allows the president to deploy the military domestically.

  • Committee members have studied how close Trump came to invoking the act immediately after the election and leading up to Jan. 6. -Axios

  Other witnesses include Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who was the first law enforcement officer injured on the day of the ‘insurrection’ attempt. Both Edwards and Quested, the documentarian, plan top recount their experiences – “particularly what they saw and heard from the rioters,” said a committee aide.

  January 6 was the violent culmination of an extensive effort to overturn a presidential election.

  The American people know a lot about those events, but soon they will learn more, and see how close we came to losing our democracy.

  On Thursday, we will begin to tell that story. pic.twitter.com/hX6RAS9GFR

  — Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) June 5, 2022

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  House Republicans, meanwhile, say that the Democrats’ use of former ABC News president James Goldston on the presentation may have violated House rules.

  As the Epoch Times notes, in a letter (pdf) to the Jan. 6 Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Committee on House Administration Chairperson Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), GOP lawmakers asked for confirmation that Goldston has been hired as an employee of the committee, and not as a consultant or in an “unofficial capacity.”

  The letter was signed by Committee on House Administration Ranking Member Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), and others.

  It comes after Axios first reported Monday that the former network news executive had joined the committee as an “unannounced adviser” and is “busily producing Thursday’s 8 p.m. ET hearing as if it were a blockbuster investigative special.”

  Goldston has previously served as a producer for some of the network’s biggest news programs like “20/20,” “Nightline,” and “Good Morning America.” He left ABC in March.

  Citing congressional laws pertaining to committee staff, the lawmakers noted that a letter is required requesting approval of the Committee on House Administration regarding Goldston’s hiring, along with a signed contract agreement and resume.

  Under that same law, Goldston would be unable to commence work for the committee until the contract has been approved by the Committee on House Administration.

  “To our knowledge, the Committee has not received or considered such a request,” wrote the representatives.

  The GOP lawmakers also cited reports from CNN that Goldston is working with the select committee “to help produce their upcoming hearings” and “helping the committee with the planning of the hearings and their presentation.”

  They noted that the committees are allowed to “obtain temporary or intermittent services of individual consultants or organizations, to advise the Committee with respect to matters within its jurisdiction,” but that Goldston would not be able to act as an employee of the committee.

  “The Committee on House Administration will not approve a contract if the services to be provided by the consultant are the regular duties of Committee staff,” lawmakers wrote. “Planning, preparation, and production of hearings are unquestionably the ‘regular duties of Committee staff’.”

  Republican lawmakers also noted in their letter that Goldston would be barred from working for the Jan. 6 Committee free of charge, noting that such an arrangement would “violate House Rules and the House Ethics Manual regulations which clearly states that no logical distinction can be drawn between the private contribution of in-kind services and the private contribution of money.”

  Finally, the big question is: Could Trump face criminal charges?

  Inciting an insurrection or riot is a federal crime, but the Justice Department would have to charge him separately. That’s unlikely, according to Frederick Lawrence, a lecturer at the Georgetown University Law Center. Not only would prosecutors have to prove Trump intentionally whipped up his supporters, Lawrence said, but also that he intended for them to break into the Capitol, loot and cause bodily harm.

  A further complication is a 1969 Supreme Court precedent that shields inflammatory speech under the First Amendment unless it’s aimed at “imminent” lawless behavior.

  Apart from what Trump said in his speech, prosecutors could take an alternative path if they uncover evidence that the former president or his advisers were involved in planning the riot.

  Whether such conspiracy charges are viable would depend on the nature of the plotting and how close Trump and his inner circle was to it.

  “It would all turn on who was in the room and what they are prepared to testify to,” Lawrence said.

  More than 850 people have been criminally charged in connection with the riot at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 by a mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters. Most are accused of conventional offenses such as trespassing and assault, while 16 members of two right-wing groups are facing a more exotic charge: seditious conspiracy.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 19:52

• State Farm Remains A 'Creepy Neighbor' After Transgender Book Backlash
  State Farm Remains A ‘Creepy Neighbor’ After Transgender Book Backlash

  Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  In light of a public backlash, State Farm has swiftly distanced itself from a collaborative book donation program that promotes transgender ideology among young children. The watchdog group that exposed the insurance giant’s involvement, however, said this is far from over.

  “They continue to not be a good neighbor, but a creepy neighbor,” said Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research, a nonprofit organization working to expose large companies that put “woke politics” ahead of their customers.

  

  In late May, Consumers’ Research brought national attention to State Farm’s partnership with transgender youth advocacy group The GenderCool Project, which sought to “increase representation of LGBTQ+ books” intended for readers as young as 5 years old.

  According to an internal email leaked to and publicized by Consumers’ Research, hundreds of State Farm insurance agents have been encouraged to participate in the program by donating a bundle of three GenderCool books to “their local teacher, community center or library of their choice.”

  Hild described these GenderCool titles—”A Kids Book About Being Transgender,” “A Kids Book About Being Non-Binary,” and “A Kids Book About Being Inclusive”—as “transgender-in-training books.”

  “They explain it in terms that would lead to confusion among your average 5-year-old,” Hild told NTD News. “For example, it’s implied that if you are a boy who likes playing with dolls, or playing dress-up, or a girl who likes playing sports—stereotypically something from the other gender, then you might be transgender.”

  “It even explicitly says that the doctor may have assigned you the wrong gender at birth, and that you need to question the doctor’s assessment of your sex,” he continued. “State Farm was asking their agents to give out these books without parents’ knowledge.”

  The exposure of the State Farm-GenderCool partnership has thrown the insurance company into “full panic,” Hild said.

  According to Hild, just four hours after being called out by Consumers’ Research on Twitter, State Farm sent out an internal email alleging a “misunderstanding” about the book donations. This was followed by another email, which announced that the partnership had ended, that the company’s top executives were unaware of the partnership, which they found inappropriate, and that they had only donated $40,000 to GenderCool.

  Even if this is true, it still means that GenderCool books worth a total of $40,000 might have made it into libraries, community centers, and schools across the country. “These books could be being read by students to deck in schools and libraries,” Hild said. “State Farm refuses to lift a finger to undo any of that.”

  In fact, a private school in Washington state received a donation of GenderCool books in April and posted a thank you message to State Farm on Facebook, according to the Washington Examiner, which first reported on the matter.

  Hild also rejected the claim that the higher-ups at State Farm didn’t know about the book donations, noting that he also obtained numerous email complaints that were sent to top executives by concerned employees.

  “There were emails of multiple agents, walking up the chain, complaining to higher-level executives that this is wrong,” he said, noting that he’s unable to publicize them without compromising the whistleblower’s anonymity.

  Hild said his organization will not end its “creepy neighbor” ad campaign against State Farm until the company takes action to undo the damage it has caused.

  Specifically, he demanded that State Farm hire a third-party auditor to examine “every program they have that targets children,” retrieve every one of these books that have been donated to a school, library, and community center, and have conversations with parents whose children have been exposed to such material.

  “Parents need to know if their kids were exposed to these materials by State Farm agents, and they can have a conversation to walk them out of the bizarre propaganda they were exposed to,” Hild said.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 19:40

• Former House Rep Pleads Guilty To Ballot-Stuffing For Dems In Five Elections
  Former House Rep Pleads Guilty To Ballot-Stuffing For Dems In Five Elections

  A former congressman has pleaded guilty to participating in a conspiracy to fraudulently create votes for Democratic candidates in five different election years. 

  Michael “Ozzie” Myers, 79, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges of conspiracy to deprive voters of civil rights, bribery, obstruction of justice, falsification of voting records, and conspiring to illegally vote in a federal election. 

  Myers paid Philadelphia election officials upwards of $5,000 per election to add fraudulent votes on voting machines—a practice called “ringing up” votes—and to falsely certify the voting machine tallies were accurate.  

  Carried out in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 elections in Philadelphia, the scheme benefitted candidates for federal, state and local offices, including judicial candidates. According to the FBI, Myers solicited payments from candidates in the form of cash or checks, with some labelled as “consulting fees.”

  Nope, sorry, this isn’t possible. I have been reliably informed by the very credible establishment media that Democrats never stuff ballot boxes to steal elections—especially in Pennsylvania! https://t.co/Xx05s8S7Nl

  — Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) June 8, 2022

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  The crime also entailed falsifying polling books and lists of voters by entering names of voters who had not appeared at a given polling station. One of the bribed election officials, Marie Beren, also instructed real voters whom to vote for. 

  Myers carefully managed the tally on Election Day, according to the Department of Justice:

  During Election Day itself, Myers conferred with Beren via cell phone while she was at the polling station about the number of votes cast for his preferred candidates. Beren would report to Myers how many “legit votes,” meaning actual voters, had appeared at the polls and cast ballots. If actual voter turnout was high, Beren would add fewer fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates.

  “Free and fair elections are critical to the health of our democracy,” said Jacqueline Maguire, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division, “which is why protecting the legitimacy of the electoral process at every level is such a priority for the FBI” (…the bureau’s participation in the election-questioning Russiagate hoax notwithstanding). 

  This isn’t Myers’ first brush with the law. In 1980, he was snared in the FBI’s ABSCAM sting. Then a sitting U.S. congressman, Myers was caught on video accepting a $50,000 bribe from undercover agents seeking special immigration accommodations to enable casino investments by fictional Arab sheiks. 

  ABSCAM inspired the movie “American Hustle,” but we find the original plenty entertaining:  

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 19:20

• "The Demand For Random Crap Suddenly Vanished, Taking Everyone By Surprise"
  “The Demand For Random Crap Suddenly Vanished, Taking Everyone By Surprise”

  By Rachel Premack of FreightWaves

  At the beginning of 2022, things were economically pretty peachy. Too peachy, one could argue: People were buying so much stuff that our ports and terminals could barely handle the massive import volume. Companies were desperate for someone, anyone, to come work for them. And movie theaters, offices, planes and other locales many eschewed during the pandemic were poised to bounce back; the omicron wave appeared mild compared to previous bouts of the coronavirus. 

  The vibes were good. Now, the vibes are completely terrible. 

  

  More and more spooky recession signs are cropping up seemingly every day, ranging from cooling housing starts to meek GDP growth, all amid the Fed tightening rates. Record-setting inflation – particularly for gas – is only adding to the premonitions, as Vox’s Emily Stewart wrote Wednesday in a piece aptly titled “The bad vibes economy.” But even as things feel bad, many still cast doubt that we’re headed for a recession this year, pointing out persistently low unemployment and the fact that certain indicators, while not as strong as the beginning of this year, are still unusually healthy. 

  No one is shocked that what goes up must go down. What’s shocking us all is how quickly the situation changed.

  Glum transportation indicators confirm the bad vibes

  A downturn, if not a full-on recession, is clear in the transportation world. While the rest of the economy debates whether things are that bad, it’s been clear for months to logistics providers that the situation has worsened — and the velocity of that change is still stunning. 

  The cost to move a container from Asia to a major port in North America or Europe has sunk by 23% since the beginning of this year, according to maritime research firm Drewry. Spot rates have plummeted even faster; marketplace Freightos said rates from China to the West Coast are down 38% month-over-month. FreightWaves forecast this week that ocean shipping volumes will “drop off a cliff” by this summer, based on slumping bookings out of China. 

  Spot van rates in trucking are down 31% since the beginning of this year, with some truck drivers reporting that rising diesel and plummeting rates have already harmed their business. 

  Even our mighty railroads are reporting a 3% year-to-date decline in volumes across the board, with only carloads of coal, chemicals and “stone, sand and gravel” (aka, frac sand) increasing. 

  

  The pullback in transports has been quicker and swifter than anyone imagined. In the ocean world, carriers have deployed more vessels than ever before, according to research firm Sea-Intelligence. In March, Sea-Intelligence forecast carriers to increase their capacity following Chinese New Year by 20% over 2019 levels. Asia-East Coast services were forecast to grow an eye-popping 40%.

  And in trucking, small carriers flooded the market. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of trucks available to haul a load is up 10%. 

  Transporters built up record capacity to move loads that are suddenly shrinking. Even if volumes merely settled to pre-pandemic marks, rather than collapsing to a 2008-like recessionary volume, carriers would still be in trouble. 

  And this isn’t a trend that’s exclusive to transportation.

  Retailers are a little embarrassed right now

  Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, Best Buy and most every other retailer are having their own mismatch of supply and demand. They stocked up too much this past year. Now they’re struggling with something called “inventory bloat.” It is even more painful than regular bloating, I imagine, if you are a shareholder in a large retail firm.

  While we were buying more and more crap, seemingly without any regard for our dwindling savings, our favorite retailers were doing anything to get more product in.

  At some point this year, though, the thirst for buying stuff finally quenched. Some of us got spooked by inflation, others got hit by a hefty tax bill and still others decided to spend their apparently boundless cash on trips abroad and fine dining. Or some weird combination of the three. 

  The retailers weren’t aware that we were all going to stop ravenously buying this quarter, apparently. They quietly kept amassing their own inventories, many of which were still depleted from 2020 and 2021. And concern over another black swan after years of oddities – trade wars, the pandemic and so on – probably drove many transportation managers to keep ordering stuff. Just in case.

  

  Retailers realized this spring that they built up too much. Amazon said in an April call to investors that it had to scale back after doubling its warehouse footprint. Bloomberg reported weeks later that the mega-retailer was quietly trying to end or sublease at least 10 million square feet of warehouse space. It was a stunning about-face for the company that many investors believed had not only endless growth but an unmatchable logistics machine. 

  It’s not just warehouse space that Amazon loaded up on – it’s the stuff in the warehouses. According to federal filings concerning the first three months of 2022, the value of Amazon’s total inventories increased 47% compared to the same period last year. But its North America net sales only popped 8%.

  Amazon was hardly alone in its uncomfortable first-quarter report. Walmart’s inventory jumped 32% from the previous year, compared to a 4% increase in sales. Best Buy’s inventories increased 9%, while sales declined by 8%. 

  

  Target really wants you to buy a bunch of televisions and lawn chairs

  America’s top retailers messed up – particularly the ones that focus on durable goods rather than groceries. Most of them released their earnings reports last month, saw shares take a beating and moved on.

  Target followed that at first. Its earnings report on May 18 fell short of investor expectations, with an anticipated profit margin of 5.3%. Over-the-top inventories of kitchen appliances and electronics were the top culprit. Its stock sank by 25%. 

  Then, the mega-retailer did something no one was expecting. On Tuesday, Target told investors it anticipated a profit margin more around 2%. It would slash prices on certain goods and cancel incoming orders. It’s highly unusual for a company to slash its profit expectations within weeks of its earnings report.

  Target said in its Tuesday press release that the profit slash comes from a need to “right-size” inventories. People aren’t buying items like televisions, outdoor furniture and kitchen appliances like they were last year. Those are some of the delicate, bulky items Target paid dearly to bring over from Asia in 2021, amid record-high shipping rates. 

  It’s all leading to what Forbes’ Madeline Halpert called “markdown mania,” and not just at Target. Gap is hawking $60 leggings for just $12. Target is selling televisions for 25% off and patio sets at a 52% markdown. In total, shares in consumer staples stocks have tumbled by about 9% from mid-April highs, while consumer discretionary shares are down by about 20% over the same period.

  Few of us in the logistics world were surprised. After all, if trucks and ships are moving less stuff, it’s a sign that consumers aren’t buying as much and that manufacturers have curtailed their output.  

  Sometimes it can be hard for us who toil in logistics to get the attention of lofty economists and traders. Even though I write about the companies that move everything we eat, wear, drink and most any other verb you could think of, I’m still told that I cover a niche industry. The ongoing downturn in trucking seems like it would only affect truckers – never mind the fact that a trucking recession has preceded nearly every recession since the 1970s, per research from freight brokerage Convoy.

  The demand for random crap suddenly vanished, taking everyone by surprise

  As my colleague Mark Solomon wrote last month on this “inventory bloat,” it’s challenging to forecast demand – even if you’re one of the biggest retailers in the world. We can return to that key metric of inventories-to-sales ratios, which, conveniently, the federal government tracks. 

  We generally don’t like an inventories-to-sales ratio that’s too high – it indicates that people don’t have the cash to buy stuff. But if it’s too low, like it was through much of 2020 and 2021, it means that there isn’t any stuff to buy. See: The “everything shortage” that dominated headlines last year. 

  

  As you can see, the inventories-to-sales ratio is still very low, even if it is creeping up from the nadir of last year. That gives credence to some who argue that a recession isn’t in the cards for this year and could explain why the National Retail Federation declared on Wednesday that it expected port volume to roughly match the crazy numbers seen in 2021. (FreightWaves’ own research, which JPMorgan analysts lent credence to in a Wednesday note to investors, counters that.)

  The ratio is more marked when you look at the major consumer goods, as Solomon reported (emphasis mine):

  Furniture, home furnishings and appliances, building materials and garden equipment, and a category known as “other general merchandise,” which includes Walmart and Target, among others, reported higher inventory-to-sales ratios, according to government data analyzed by Michigan State.

  For the latter sectors, the change has happened fast, according to Jason Miller, logistics professor at MSU’s Eli Broad College of Business. As of November, inventory-to-sales ratios were at pre-COVID levels, Miller said. They have since exploded upward.

  To end, I’d like to emphasize that the vibes are abruptly off and no one really knows what’s happening. My colleagues who went to the Gartner supply chain conference in Florida this week found that executives were confused and not feeling very zesty. Transportation managers canceled orders in early 2020 predicting a recession, then found their hastiness left shelves empty and consumers furious. Now that they’ve built back up, customers aren’t buying anymore and their balance sheets are destroyed.

  The whiplash is baffling. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 19:00

• Inflation Storm Devastates US Households As Fuel, Power, And Food "Become Unaffordable" 
  Inflation Storm Devastates US Households As Fuel, Power, And Food “Become Unaffordable” 

  The latest inflation figures are due on Friday and will reveal if consumer prices are signaling a peak or will remain at four-decade highs that have financially devastated American households. 

  For months, households have been battered by soaring fuel, grocery-store food, and power bill costs — all rising at double-digit annual rates for the first time since 1981, according to Bloomberg. 

  

  Economists surveyed by Bloomberg forecast consumer prices in May will be around 8.2%, versus 8.3% in April, though some leading estimates suggest a move between 8.3% to 8.4%. The print isn’t expected to deviate too much from the 40-year high of 8.5% in March, and elevated inflation levels will continue to wreck lower-tier households.

  

  The souring economic backdrop with threats of stagflation is crushing households, and their views on the economy are bleak. The April consumer credit report from the Federal Reserve on Wednesday showed people are maxing out their credit cards as excess savings accumulated during the pandemic has been wiped out thanks to soaring prices of goods. 

  

  Consumers are struggling as they now pay $5 a gallon (national average) for gasoline at the pump, grocery prices rise by the week, and power bill costs erupt. Some Americans are getting a taste of what it’s like to live in a third-world country. 

  As prices for everyday expenses go up, more families are going without. Some 31% of households found it somewhat or very difficult to pay for usual household expenses, according to a Census Bureau survey conducted in late April and early May, compared with 25% at the same time last year. Nine percent of households sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat, the survey found, compared with 7% a year ago. 

  The challenges are especially acute for low-income Americans who spend more of their income on necessities. Gasoline and power bills now account for about 34% of the monthly budgets for the lowest-earning consumers, up from 31% last year, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association.

  “The cost of energy is becoming unaffordable,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of NEADA. US consumers currently owe about $22 billion in overdue utility bills, almost double the $12 billion seen in a typical year. This all comes at a time when housing prices are also surging, up the most since 1991 as of April. Shelter costs lag other CPI categories because of how the government tracks the data, so the category could increase further in the second half, adding to household strain. “We could have severe hardship in this country,” Wolfe said. “Families’ budgets are being cut. It’s like they’re being taxed, and there’s no end in sight.” –Bloomberg 

  Food, power, and fuel prices are becoming an even larger share of household expenses, straining discretionary spending on big-ticket items. Target has warned about consumer behavior shifts in the last several weeks. 

  Meanwhile, President Biden’s polling data is dropping to new lows as the administration fails to arrest rising gasoline prices at the pump, despite all the promises made by lawmakers to fix the energy crisis. This is terrible news for Democrats ahead of the midterm elections this fall. 

  

  An inflation storm crushes households as economic growth beats to the downside and stagflation threats emerge. Consumers have maxed out their credit cards and evaporated savings, just as the Federal Reserve is engineering a downturn via aggressive monetary tightening. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 18:40

• Democrats Ignore Their Own Role In Capitol Breach
  Democrats Ignore Their Own Role In Capitol Breach

  Authored by J. Peder Zane via RealClear Politics (emphasis ours),

  The Jan. 6 hearings set to begin tonight will be even more predictable than the prime-time fare they are preempting. Once again, we will be told the story of a narcissistic president who helped whip up the mob in the mad hopes of overturning the 2020 election.

  

  This drumbeat melodrama will spotlight Donald Trump’s infamous recklessness and showcase the damage he and his most fervent supporters did that day to their country, and themselves, when they breached the Capitol in the name of a lie.

  It is an important story but also a familiar one, pounded home for a year and a half in repetitive front-page articles and cable news chyrons. We get it. The hearings will not go beyond this storyline. They will not offer penetrating insight into the deeper forces that set the stage for that horrific day because they are not an honest pursuit of the truth but a partisan effort to eliminate a sworn enemy and give Democrats a more positive 2022 political narrative than rising crime rates and even faster rising inflation.

  While Democrats and their “Never Trump” brethren broadcast yet another episode of “Evil Orange Man,” the story we need to see is “Jan. 6: An American Tragedy.” The Capitol riot was not the singular result of Trump’s frustrated mind. It was a reflection of the aching anger and mistrust that is metastasizing across our body politic. Trump did not create this cancer; he fed off it. It will not be cured by excising him.

  Like Robert Mueller’s blindly partisan report – which discovered innumerable innocent contacts between Trump cronies and Russians but ignored the central role Hillary Clinton and her crew played in fabricating the Russiagate conspiracy theory – the Jan. 6 hearings will disregard the central role Democrats played in sowing the seeds of this tragedy.

  Democrats and their media allies gave Trump supporters plenty of reasons to believe their man would never get a fair shake by mercilessly maligning the president as a Russian agent and the second coming of Adolf Hitler. These same forces may have swung the election in its final days by falsely claiming that the laptop owned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which suggested the candidate’s involvement in Hunter’s shady business dealings, was “Russian disinformation.”

  Democrats helped sow doubts about the election by exploiting COVID fears to ram through a series of “electoral reforms” that favored their side, including the widespread use of mail-in ballots that were accepted with relaxed standards. Democrats also enjoyed an unfair advantage through the unprecedented use of private money to finance a public election, especially the $322 million Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan gave to a progressive group which appears to have funneled much of the money to Democratic strongholds in swing states. Perhaps all this one-sided activity was above board, but it raised reasonable concerns about electoral integrity.

  Democrats also laid the groundwork for Trump’s claims of a “rigged election.” Since George W. Bush’s victory in 2000, they have ascribed Republican wins to thievery, fraud, and voter suppression. The chairman of the Jan. 6 committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, voted to overturn the results of the 2004 election and his fellow committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin challenged the certification of the 2016 race. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton are just a few of the other party leaders who declared Trump an illegitimate president by falsely claiming he had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Democrats and their media allies have made a hero out of Stacey Abrams, despite her refusal to admit she lost the 2018 governor’s race in Georgia.

  Democrats also helped normalize the violence that occurred on Jan. 6 by tacitly endorsing the often-violent protests that erupted in their strongholds following George Floyd’s killing. Their muted response to the rioting and looting that filled our television screens and ravaged our downtowns – the scenes of diners and politicians being harassed by left-wing protestors – sent a dangerous message about acceptable behavior.

  Democrats on the Jan. 6 committee have only fueled this distrust of government in the 16 months since the attack. While pledging allegiance to “the facts” and “the truth” as they rail against Trump’s “Big Lie,” they have steadfastly failed to challenge the false narratives casting the riot as a deadly assault. Only one person died that day as a direct result of the violence, a Trump supporter named Ashli Babbitt who was shot by a Capitol Police officer. Committee members have not demanded that the Capitol Police explain why it claimed that Officer Brian Sicknick had died from injuries sustained “while physically engaging with protesters”when a medical examiner determined that he had succumbed to “natural causes.” Nor have they asked why the New York Times reported that a Trump supporter “appears to have been killed in a crush of fellow rioters” when, in fact, she died of a drug overdose (the “paper of record” has still not corrected this error).

  Democrats on the committee have also shown little interest in addressing the admitted failures of law enforcement. Nothing seems more central to its mission than determining what might have been done to control the crowd. But the committee has largely ignored the Inspector General report that found that the Capitol Police had failed to act on intelligence suggesting a potential threat, lacked a comprehensive plan in the event of violence, and did not adequately respond to officers who were frantically requesting backup during the melee. It has also shown little interest in videos that appear to show officers allowing Trump demonstrators into the Capitol.

  None of this absolves Trump or the rioters, who are facing the full force of the law for their actions. The Democrats are not responsible for the Jan. 6 assault, but they certainly share some of the blame for helping create the climate in which it occurred.

  By ignoring these factors, the Jan. 6 committee is just another symptom of our nation’s sick soul. Instead of bringing us together through an honest reckoning of our broken politics, it will only deepen our anger and mistrust.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 06/09/2022 – 18:20

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