Today’s News 12th October 2022

• Russia Building Floating Nuclear Reactor Fleet To Power Remote Projects
  Russia Building Floating Nuclear Reactor Fleet To Power Remote Projects

  Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times,

  China’s Wilson Heavy Industry shipyard held a keel-laying ceremony in August for the first of four barges that’ll eventually employ not one but two nuclear reactors.

  Once completed, the barge will become Russia’s second floating nuclear power plant.

  The first, the Akademic Lomonosov, was commissioned in 2020 and was the world’s first floating nuclear power plant since the 1960s. It’s also currently the only floating atomic reactor and a key component in Russia’s plan to open a significant shipping lane through the Arctic.

  But a shipping lane is only the beginning of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plan for floating nuclear power plants. Last year, Rosatom, a Russian state nuclear energy corporation, presented Putin with a reported $2.3 billion proposal to build up to five floating nuclear reactors.

  Along with opening a Northern Sea Route, Russia’s easternmost province is home to a copper and gold mine that’s said to be the world’s largest unexploited deposit. The area has no roads and little power, necessitating a creative power source.

  

  A view shows Russia’s floating nuclear power plant Akademik Lomonosov and tugboat Dixon before the departure from the service base of Rosatomflot company for a journey along the Northern Sea Route to Chukotka in Murmansk, Russia, on Aug. 23, 2019. (Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

  Nuclear Fuels Expansion

  In the 1960s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers converted a former World War II Liberty Ship into the first floating nuclear power plant. Containing a single-loop pressurized water reactor, the MH-1A STURGIS generated electricity in the Panama Canal at a time when building a new energy plant wasn’t cost-effective or feasible.

  While the STURGIS proved practical and reliable for supplying power to an onshore grid for military and civilian use, the Army Corps shut it down in 1976 after the Panama Canal Company installed permanent power supplies in the area. From 1976 to Russia’s latest endeavors, no floating nuclear power plants were built or proposed, according to the American Nuclear Society.

  In 2020, Russia finished building and launched its first floating nuclear power plant in Pevek, a remote and sparsely populated Russian port off the northern coast of Siberia. Pevek is a strategic location for Putin’s expansion plans because he views it as a future central shipping hub and because Pevek is close to Chukotka, an area rich in copper, lithium, gold, and silver.

  

  A merchant ship sails along the Panama Canal on March 23, 2015. (Rodrigo Arangua/AFP via Getty Images)

  In 2019, Putin stated at the International Arctic Forum in St. Petersburg, “[Artic expansion] is a realistic, well-calculated, and concrete task. We need to make the Northern sea route safe and commercially feasible,” RadioFreeEurope reported.

  Currently, Pevek’s harbor is only accessible for four months a year. Still, Putin believes a changing climate will eventually enable a Northern Sea route and an economically viable North-East passage between Russia and the West, the Arctic Institute reports.

  More importantly, Putin isn’t alone in his belief. The United States, Norway, Denmark, and Canada also believe in a Northern Sea route future and have realized the need to compete for jurisdiction in the area.

  In 2017, then-U.S. defense secretary Jim Mattis said of Russia’s Arctic expansion, “The Arctic is key strategic terrain. Russia is taking aggressive steps to increase its presence there. I will prioritize the development of an integrated strategy for the Arctic.”

  Floating Nuclear Power

  Chukotka is the farthest northeastern portion of Siberia and is said to be where the world’s day begins. It also borders Alaska by the sea and is heavily populated with reindeer. Reindeer herding is the main focus of agriculture in the region, which is something Putin hopes to change with his Arctic mining venture.

  Located within Chukotka is Baimskaya, a mining project, which the company in charge of the project, Kaz Minerals, reports has “the world’s most significant undeveloped copper assets with the potential to become a large scale, low cost, open pit copper mine.” The deposit was discovered in 1972 but remained undeveloped due to a lack of infrastructure and roads. Russia is using its floating nuclear power plants to address part of the problem.

  The Academic Lomonosov won’t reach full ramp-up until 2023, and even then, it won’t be enough to supply all the necessary power for Putin’s Arctic expansion plan in Chukotka. Consequently, Russia commissioned four more floating nuclear power plants.

  

  The Academy Lomonosov passes by the island of Langeland, off the coast of Spodsbjerg in Denmark, on May 4, 2018. (Tim Kildeborg Jensen/AFP/Getty Images)

  “The required infrastructure is being processed with the Russian government in accordance with the Complex Development Plan for the Chukotka region. … Carbon-free power will be supplied to the site from a nuclear facility to be constructed and operated by Rosatom, enabling the Group to produce very low-carbon copper,” Kaz Minerals reports.

  It adds, “The project is located in a region identified by the Russian Government as strategically important for economic development and is expected to benefit from the provision of tax incentives.”

  According to the World Nuclear Organization, the Baimskaya development requires approximately 300 megawatts of electricity. Rosatom plans to provide the power via its scheduled three floating nuclear power plants. Each ship will have a pair of pressurized water nuclear reactors designed to produce 55 megawatts of electricity. The fourth ship will be held in reserve and used for emergencies and repairs.

  Realizing the potential for Arctic expansion made possible through floating nuclear power plants, Danish start-up Seaborg Technologies is developing a Seaborg Power Barge. The development was made possible by a grant from the European Union.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 10/12/2022 – 02:00

• Biden Says Recession Possible But "Very Slight", Believes He Can Beat Trump Again
  Biden Says Recession Possible But “Very Slight”, Believes He Can Beat Trump Again

  With the NYT engaging in pre-emptive damage control, calling Biden’s demented torrent of fabrications and lies “folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details that are exaggerated or wrong, the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences”, and then going so far as comparing Trump with Biden and concluding that “with Biden, people have decided these are not the kind of lies that matter,” Mr. Alterman added. “These are the kinds of lies that people’s grandfathers tell”, you knew that something epic was about to come out of Biden’s mouth.

  And that’s precisely what happened late on Tuesday, when Joe Biden spoke to CNN and said that a recession in the US is possible but that any downturn would be “very slight” (why note even “transitory”) and that the US economy is resilient enough to ride out the turbulence.

  “I don’t think there will be a recession. If it is, it’ll be a very slight recession. That is, we’ll move down slightly,” Biden said sparking chaos at the Fed for blowing up their carefully planted narrative that the Fed will somehow not push the economy into a recession.

  Responding to a question about his age, Biden ticked through legislative accomplishments intended to cut costs for US households, such as drug price provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, and said they would cushion the blow of any stagnation or downturn and signaled a distrust in experts’ warnings. Of course, the reality is once again the polar opposite with real wages under the Biden administration falling for a record 17 consecutive months, inflation at a 40 year high, consumer confidence at record lows, the stock market crashing, and with 7% mortgage any home is now unaffordable to all but those who can pay cash up front for the purchase. In short, both the US economy and stock market are a total disaster. Oh, and as for Biden’s foreign policies, well there’s always World War 3 to look forward to.

  “Every six months they say this,” he said of recession warnings. “There’s so much that’s been accomplished that the idea that there’s something — there’s an automaticity to a recession, and it’s just not — it’s just not there.”

  Asked flatly if the American people should prepare for a recession, Biden replied: “No.” What he meant is that there is no need to prepare for a recession before the midterms; because on November 9, the BLS will suddenly discover that there were 10 million previously uncounted unemployed workers and… well, the rest is history.

  Hilarious, for Biden – who has repeatedly said he doesn’t expect a recession, often disagreeing with Republicans or analysts who have warned that a downturn of some measure is a possibility, if not a near-certainty – having a recession is equivalent to failure. And yet, it is his own Fed that is now doing everything in its power to push the economy into recession and spark millions in layoffs, which apparently are urgently needed to contain soaring inflation… even though the Fed has precisely zero control over supply side inflation which is the primary source of exploding costs.

  The president told the Associated Press in June that a recession was “not inevitable”; but since then, the Fed has maintained aggressive rate increases and inflation has remained stubbornly high, narrowing the path for a so-called soft landing that cools price growth without a downturn. A month later, Biden said he thought the low jobless rate would carry the economy through without a contraction.

  “We’re not going to be in a recession,” he said in July. “We’ll see some coming down. But I don’t think we’re going to — God willing, I don’t think we’re going to see a recession.”

  And therein lies the rub: because as long as Biden orders the Bureau of Labor Statistics to signal a manipulated job market that is artificially rosy, markets will keep crashing and the final collapse will be far worse than if Biden had agreed to controlled demolition.

  Needless to say, the dire state of the economy is a huge liability for Democrats heading into the November midterm elections, in which Biden and his party are hoping to hold on to slim majorities in both chambers of Congress. Unfortunately for Biden, warnings abound that the US economy is poised for a slowdown or contraction: none other than JPM’s far more expected and non-dementia ridden CEO Jamie Dimon said this week that headwinds are “likely to put the US in some kind of recession six-to-nine months from now.”

  And while the Fed isn’t officially forecasting a recession, it is poised to deliver its fourth-straight 75-basis-point hike when it meets early next month, just days before the midterms, in the process pushing the average credit card rate to new record highs and crushing what little purchasing power the middle class may have.

  A Monmouth poll conducted in late September showed 82% of Americans called inflation an extremely or very important issue and 30% approve of Biden’s handling of the issue; it wasn’t immediately clear if those 30% can walk and breathe at the same time. On jobs and unemployment, 68% said the issue was extremely or very important, with 43% approving of the president. Of course, it’s easy to be dismissive of unemployment when it is just allegedly 3.5%. Wait until it hits 7% and everyone in your family is unemployed: something tells us that inflation will suddenly be a far small threat than finding a new job.

  It wasn’t just the coming depression that was discussed, however.

  Asled if he would meet with Vladimir Putin during the upcoming G20 summit in Bali next month to discuss the release of detained basketball star Brittney Griner, Biden said yes, but he would not talk with the Russian leader about resolving the war in Ukraine without Kyiv’s involvement.  

  “Look, I have no intention of meeting with him,” Biden said, most likely forgetting who “he” is. “But for example, if he came to me at the G-20 and said I want to talk about the release of Griner, I’d meet with him. I mean, it would depend.”

  During the same interview, Joe Biden downplayed a report that federal investigators believe they have enough evidence to charge his son Hunter with tax and gun crimes, saying he “has confidence” in him.

  “I’m confident,” Biden said that “what he says and does are consistent with what happens.” The Washington Post reported that Hunter Biden purchased a handgun and allegedly filled out a federal form in October 2018 stating that he was not a user of or addicted to drugs. By his own account in a memoir, the younger Biden was using drugs heavily that year. The tax investigation has focused on whether he did not declare income related to his business ventures, including overseas endeavors that dogged his father’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to the Post.

  President Biden told CNN he “didn’t know anything” about the situation involving Hunter’s gun purchase but acknowledged his son “wrote about saying no” on the gun form.

  “I love him and he’s on the straight and narrow, and he has been for a couple of years now. I’m just so proud of him,” President Biden said.

  Of course, charging Biden for an illegal gun purchase is a slap on the wrist compared to his real crimes of selling access to Joe Biden, first in Ukraine (where “energy guru” Hunter was paid tens of thousands to sit on the board of the local energy company, Burisma) and later in China.

  Next, the president rambled on, touching on his latest nemesis that humiliated him on the global arena, namely OPEC head Saudi Arabia, and warning that there “will be consequences” after Saudi’s decision last week to side with Vladimir Putin and cut oil production.

  “There’s going to be some consequences for what they’ve done, with Russia,” the US president said in an interview on CNN. “I’m not going to get into what I’d consider and what I have in mind. But there will be – there will be consequences.” He wouldn’t get into it because there is nothing planned for the best customer of the US military industrial complex (except for Ukraine of course).

  Earlier in the day, John Kirby, the national security council spokesperson, said Biden believed that the US ought to “review the bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia and take a look to see if that relationship is where it needs to be and that it is serving our national security interests”, adding that the re-evaluation was “in light of the recent decision by Opec, and Saudi Arabia’s leadership”.

  Naturally, Biden’s archnemesis, Vladimir Putin was also discussed; here the president said he doesn’t think Russian President Vladimir Putin will use nuclear weapons despite repeated threats to do so — even as the Russian leader continues to press on in the war in Ukraine. “Well, I don’t think he will,” Biden said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper that was aired Tuesday. “But I think that it’s irresponsible for him to talk about it.” Well, let’s hope Joe is right.

  Putin has indirectly threatened to use nuclear weapons. In a televised speech in September, he announced a partial military mobilization and said he would “certainly use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people.” He added that he was not bluffing.

  * * *

  The punchline of Biden’s long-winded, rambling interview, however, was his preview of the main event in 2024. Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he’ll focus on whether he’ll seek another term after the midterm elections in November.

  “Is one of the calculations that you think you’re the only one who can beat Donald Trump?” Tapper asked.

  “I believe I can beat Donald Trump again,” Biden responded.

  Biden has in the past indicated he would welcome a rematch with Trump, whom he defeated in the 2020 election. The president told reporters at a NATO summit in March that he would be “very fortunate” to run against Trump again.

  While we very much doubt such a rematch will take place – Biden will be 81 on Election Day in 2024, while Trump would be 78 – since a recent CAPS/Harris poll found 67% of voters said Biden should not seek another term, while 57% said Trump should not run for another term, we are confident that with enough mail-in ballots Biden could be a two-term president. Maybe even three.

  Biden’s full interview for the insomniacs is here.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 23:48

• NASA's Suicide Spacecraft Changed Asteroid's Path As Planetary Defenses Strengthened
  NASA’s Suicide Spacecraft Changed Asteroid’s Path As Planetary Defenses Strengthened

  Last month, NASA’s first mission to deliberately crash a spacecraft into an asteroid was an overwhelming success. The technology could one day go into practice to defend Earth against threatening objects.

  “This is a watershed moment for planetary defense and a watershed moment for humanity,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated in a press release, adding that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission “shows NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us.”

  Dart’s accomplishment shows NASA’s strategy to catapult a suicide spacecraft at an asteroid to alter the primary path of the object through sheer kinetic force could be a future strategy to defend the planet. 

  “The impact was perfectly executed,” Megan Bruck Syal, the planetary defense project lead at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and a co-investigator of the $325 million mission, told WSJ. 

  

  NASA released data that shows DART’s impact on the asteroid named Dimorphos, about double the height of the Empire State Building and 525 feet wide, orbiting an asteroid about five times larger called Didymos, was reduced by 23 minutes to 11 hours and 23 minutes. This was confirmed by Webb and Hubble space telescopes, as well as ground-based telescopes. 

  “DART has given us some fascinating data about both asteroid properties and the effectiveness of a kinetic impactor as a planetary defense technology. 

  “The DART team is continuing to work on this rich dataset to fully understand this first planetary defense test of asteroid deflection,” Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement released by the space agency. 

  This was the last image captured by DART seconds before impact. 

  

  BBC News quoted Chabot, who said protecting Earth from threatening asteroids would mean launching suicide spacecrafts into space years before estimated impacts to alter paths. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 23:20

• The End Of Debate
  The End Of Debate

  Authored by Daniel Greenfield via The Gatestone Institute,

  In New York City, world leaders dodged traffic, deranged panhandlers and the city’s unique fall funk, to lecture the planet about their views at the United Nations General Assembly.

  Their theme was the threat that “misinformation” or “disinformation” poses to their power.

  

  “Hate speech, misinformation and abuse – targeted especially at women and vulnerable groups – are proliferating,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres claimed.

  Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov blamed his country’s PR problems on, “disinformation, crude staging, and provocations”.

  “Today I have listened to further instalments of Russia’s catalogues of distortions, dishonesty, and disinformation,” UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly retorted.

  Catherine Colonna, minister for Europe, countered that, “Where Russia employs disinformation and propaganda, justice must be grounded in facts.”

  The one thing the Russians and Europeans can agree on is that the whole matter of the war can be reduced to “disinformation”: bad speech that we would all be better off without. The only issue, as Vladimir Lenin put it, is “Who, whom”. Who gets to censor whose speech?

  No regime, no matter how debased, hesitated to rant about “disinformation” at the UN.

  Nigeria’s Islamist tyrant, President Muhammadu Buhari, argued that, “Nigeria has had many unsavoury experiences with hate speech and divisive disinformation” and urged “efforts to protect communities from the scourge of disinformation and misinformation.”

  New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whose destructive Christchurch Call to Action had already been used to eliminate political dissent and suppress speech in a variety of countries, including the United States, had her own disinformation take.

  “As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even those most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly,” she argued, before tossing away the highly valued values of free speech.

  “After all, how do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble? How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists?”

  How indeed? If only it were possible for us to use free speech to debate these ideas. But whether it’s Europe or Russia, Nigeria or New Zealand, world leaders seem united in turning their backs on the very notion of debate. The only difference is that the ex-liberal leaders like Ardern pay some sort of lip service to free speech before taking it out back and shooting it.

  “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work,” Barack Obama complained a few years ago.

  “I can have an argument with you about what to do about climate change,” he explained his limitations. “I don’t know what to say if you simply say, ‘This is a hoax that the liberals have cooked up, and the scientists are cooking the books.'”

  Debate is hard. Especially to leftists like Obama or Ardern who have lost the ability to recognize that anyone can fundamentally, rather than procedurally, disagree with them in good faith.

  Disinformation rapidly became a catch-all term for delegitimizing disagreement on moral grounds using conspiracist fig leaves to depict dissent as an existential threat. To the political establishment, there are no legitimate grounds for disagreeing with it on any issue.

  The establishment designates experts to establish a manufactured consensus, and denounces those who disagree as pawns of some larger conspiracy whose ideas endanger us all. When everything is either a public health crisis (COVID-19, racism, transgender mutilation) or a threat to the survival of the human race (war, global warming) the threat is too serious for democratic norms. The only thing to be done is to expose the conspiracy and silence its perpetrators.

  An AP story quotes a Stanford University academic who claims to track ‘fossil fuel disinformation’. “We are living within an extended multi-decade campaign executed by the fossil fuel industry,” he insists. “The debate was manufactured by the fossil fuel industry in the 1990s.”

  The rhetoric, “they faked the moon landing”, “they killed JFK”, and “they invented doubt about our pet cause” is familiar from a thousand conspiracy theorists, but the difference is that it’s a conspiracy endorsed by the establishment to end the debate. If the opposition is really part of a conspiracy, then there’s no point in debating them, is there? Or even allowing them to be heard.

  Disinformation charges rapidly move from delegitimization to criminalization. World leaders like Ardern insist that we could solve problems if people didn’t insist on disagreeing with us. Obama contends that a society can’t function if we can’t all agree on what’s true. Someone has to decide that. And who better than the leaders who gather at world conferences? As Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock put it at the G7:

  “It is disinformation that prevents an open debate. It discredits. It suffocates those who hold a different view. Disinformation is an attack on the very values of our liberal democracies: our openness, our transparency, our ability to debate and to argue fairly and freely.”

  The only way to protect free speech is through censorship. Censorship becomes freedom. And free speech is the ultimate censorship. Only by destroying free speech can we save it.

  Disinformation is the ultimate ad hominem argument. It’s become the first resort of echo chamber establishments that have lost the ability to debate because they don’t understand how anyone can or should be allowed to think differently than they do. The obsession with fighting disinformation just takes the safe space university model nationally and internationally.

  And in the perfect example of horseshoe theory, it brings together totalitarians from across the world who don’t agree on anything except that different opinions are a threat to their regimes.

  The rejection of debate is the ultimate in illiberalism. And yet the war on disinformation is being championed by western leftist governments that warn about illiberalism from their opponents.

  Governments and individuals can and do lie, they can argue in bad faith, spread propaganda, and demonize the other side. That is what debate looks like. Speech isn’t just good speech, it’s all speech. That includes the exchange between two British 18th century notables, “You must either die of the pox, or on the gallows” to be met with, “That depends upon whether I embrace your Lordship’s mistress, or your principles.”

  If the only legitimate kind of free speech is truthful, good or fair, that’s just censorship with lipstick. Someone will have to decide what kind of speech needs to be censored and the invented class of experts put forward by leftists to fight disinformation will ensure that their speech will be protected and those of their political opponents will be suppressed.

  Speech, like elections, is either free or it’s not. The closing of political systems encompasses general principles and specific applications like the Bill of Rights. An international censorship coalition is growing. Its purpose is to ensure that the only debate to be allowed anymore will consist of world leaders reading from prepared speeches at the UN General Assembly before returning home to oversee countries where free speech and all freedoms have been eliminated.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 23:00

• CCP Runs Police Outpost In New York City, Part Of Global Network Of Transnational Repression: Report
  CCP Runs Police Outpost In New York City, Part Of Global Network Of Transnational Repression: Report

  Authored by Dorothy Li via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Chinese authorities have opened at least one “overseas police service station” in the United States as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) global transnational repression, according to the human rights group Safeguard Defenders.

  “These operations eschew official bilateral police and judicial cooperation and violate the international rule of law, and may violate the territorial integrity in third countries involved in setting up a parallel policing mechanism using illegal methods,” the Spain-based group said in a recent report.

  

  The report, titled “110 Overseas: Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild,” examined the initiative, which was begun by 10 “pilot provinces” in 2018. These stations also are called 110 Overseas, named after the country’s police emergency services phone number.

  An outpost in New York City was among the “first batch” of 30 overseas police service stations in 21 countries set up by the Public Security Bureau in Fuzhou, the capital city of the southern coastal province of Fujian. Other Chinese cities also set up their own outposts abroad.

  The Chinese police authorities’ division in New York opened on Feb. 15, according to Dongnan News, a media outlet backed by the Fujian provincial government. The center, called Fuzhou Police Overseas Service Station, is located at 107 East Broadway, inside the headquarters of the American ChangLe Association (ACA), a nonprofit with close ties to the Chinese regime.

  Safeguard Defenders identified 54 overseas police service stations across five continents, including in cities from Toronto to Dublin.

  The total number of such stations is unclear.

  “There is no complete list of such “110 Overseas” police service stations available,” the report states. “[T]he number is undoubtedly larger and such stations more widespread.”

  

  ACA

  Established in 1998, the ACA is one of the most influential communities for immigrants from Fujian Province in the United States, according to its website.

  The ACA cooperated with Fuzhou’s Public Security Bureau to set up the Fuzhou police service station this year, the association’s chairman said in April during an event at the group’s office while hosting the deputy Chinese consulate general in New York, Wu Xiaoming, Dongnan News reported at the time. Wu, according to the report, recognized the association’s contribution to “promoting Sino-U.S. friendship and supporting China’s peaceful reunification.”

  The New York community group, as with many purportedly grassroots Chinese organizations, is linked to the Chinese Communist Party’s sprawling “united front” system. That refers to a network of thousands of overseas groups loosely overseen by the United Front Work Department, a powerful Party agency that works to advance the regime’s interests abroad, including by carrying out foreign influence operations, suppressing dissident movements, gathering intelligence, and facilitating the transfer of technology to China.

  The ACA maintains close ties to the regime and has been praised for its efforts in supporting CCP and its leaders. Photos displayed on its website include a certificate of appreciation from the Chinese consulate in New York in 2015. The consulate praised the ACA for playing an active role in organizing overseas Chinese nationals to welcome Chinese leader Xi Jinping when he traveled to New York to attend United Nations meetings at that time.

  The group’s former president, Zhang Zikuo, in 2019 attended an official ceremony in Beijing to mark the 70th year of CCP rule over China as a representative of overseas Chinese nationals in the United States, according to a 2020 report by the Fuzhou City Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese.

  In May 2020, Zhang, then-president of the ACA, attended an online seminar organized by the United Front Department of Fuzhou’s Changle District, during which they had an “in-depth study of the spirit of the two sessions,” the report reads. “Two sessions” refers to annual meetings held by the regime’s rubber-stamp legislature and political advisory body.

  ‘Sinister Goal’

  Ostensibly, the overseas police service stations serve administrative purposes, with many tasks the report said that would be “traditionally considered of a consular nature.”

  For example, the New York station’s most popular service was assisting overseas Chinese in renewing driver’s licenses without having to return to the country, according to an August report by Dongnan News. The report said that from March 1 to April 27, 36 applications completed an online physical examination at the station and had their driver’s licenses renewed.

  The stations make overseas Chinese feel the “care and love” of the motherland, ACA Chairman Lu Jianshun told Dongnan News. The report mentions that Lu also is a staff member at the New York station.

  Safeguard Defenders, however, said such 110 overseas have a “more sinister goal, as they contribute to ‘resolutely cracking down on all kinds of illegal and criminal activities involving overseas Chinese.’” Some of the stations have already been “implicated in collaborating with Chinese police in carrying out policing operations on foreign soil,” the group said.

  One example provided in the report was the successful return of a Chinese fugitive surnamed Xia, who was accused of fraud and fled to Serbia.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 22:20

• Georgia Inmate Scams Billionaire For Over $11 Million In Wild Tale: Prosecutors
  Georgia Inmate Scams Billionaire For Over $11 Million In Wild Tale: Prosecutors

  An inmate at a Georgia maximum security prison is accused of impersonating and stealing $11 million from a billionaire movie mogul, and may have scammed millions more out of other billionaires, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

  

  The story involves gold coins, a private plane, duffel bags stuffed with cash and a Buckhead mansion.

  And it adds up to potentially one of the biggest heists ever pulled off from inside an American prison – made even more startling by the fact that the inmate was in the Georgia Department of Corrections’ Special Management Unit, a maximum security facility designed to house the state’s most hardened criminals. -AJC

  The man, 31-year-old Arthur Lee Cofield Jr., assumed the identity of LA mogul Sidney Kimmel and stole $11 million from his Schwab account, according to federal agents and attorneys, who have spent more than two years sifting through evidence. 

  Kimmel is the CEO of Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, which was behind such films as “Crazy Rich Asians” and “Moneyball.”

  Cofield allegedly used contraband cell phones, with which he convinced customer service representatives at Schwab that he was Kimmel – who then transferred $11 million into an Idaho company for the purchase of 6,106 American Eagle one-ounce gold coins.

  Then, Cofield allegedly arranged for a private plane to transport the coins to Atlanta, where someone used them to buy a $4.4 million house in Buckhead.

  “Cofield was a shrewd, intelligent individual who could con you out of millions,” said Jose Morales, who was the warden at the Special Management Unit when Cofield was there.

  Cofield has pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and money laundering. Two others, 65-year-old Eldridge Bennett and his 27-year-old daughter, Eliayah Bennett, have also pleaded not guilty to charges that they worked on the outside to further the scheme.

  Little has been reported about the case since federal authorities first uncovered it in 2020. But recent court filings and other documents reviewed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reveal significant new details, including the fact that Kimmel was the victim and that he may not be the only one. -AJC

  “Mr. Cofield has figured out a way to access accounts belonging to high net worth individuals, frankly billionaires, located across the country,” said federal prosecutor, Scott McAfee during a December 2020 bond hearing, during which he added that the government had evidence that Cofield accessed an account belonging to the wife of Florida billionaire Herbert Wertheim – an optometrist worth $4 billion, stealing $2.25 million – which he also turned into gold coins. Criminal charges were not filed in that case.

  According to the report, Georgia prison officials knew that Cofield – who was serving a 14-year sentence for armed robbery – had the ability to procure cell phones and use them for illegal activity. After allegedly ordering a shooting in Atlanta, Covield was moved from Georgia State Prison to the Special Management Unit after a warrant was issued for his arrest. In Oct. 2021 he was released from GDC custody, and was placed into federal custody where he remains.

  

  Kimmel, 94, is worth $1.5 billion according to Forbes. Before becoming involved in Hollywood, he sold an apparel company he founded – Jones New York – for $2.2 billion.

  Matthew Kamens, an attorney advising the billionaire told AJC that if there was fraud, the victim was Charles Schwab – not Kimmel.

  “Mr. Kimmel was unaffected by whatever occurred, and we have no knowledge of what occurred, either in terms of background or context,” Kamens wrote.

  Schwab, meanwhile, said it has fully reimbursed Kimmel and alerted the authorities.

  “As soon as Schwab was aware of suspected fraudulent activity, we launched an investigation, initiated measures to protect the client’s account and notified the authorities,” the bank said in a statement.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 22:00

• ESG Cancel Culture Comes For State Financial Officers
  ESG Cancel Culture Comes For State Financial Officers

  Authored by Derek Kreifels via RealClear Wire,

  As the leader of a nonprofit group whose mission is to promote economic freedom, sound public policy, and responsible financial management at the state level, I’m honored to help our nation’s financial officers practice good stewardship of taxpayer dollars. Their work often includes managing pension funds that are vital to millions of Americans’ retirement security. Over the past few years, a growing threat called ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) has been negatively impacting state pension systems, ultimately putting retirees at risk. Sadly, our nation’s state financial officers and the retirees they have a fiduciary responsibility to protect are increasingly under siege by ESG ideologues who are motivated by politics rather than economics. 

  

  For instance, U.S. Rep. Sean Casten, a Democrat from a competitive district in Illinois who has come under fire for allegedly lining his own pockets with taxpayer-funded energy dollars, devoted more than half of his time in a recent congressional hearing to defaming our organization. Casten accused the State Financial Officers’ Foundation (SFOF) of “spreading disinformation” – a claim he made without evidence – while ignoring his own conflicts of interest and the catastrophic failures of his own energy strategy.

  Casten is trying to strongarm bank CEOs into blacklisting us. He asserts that we are trying to “[block] the capital sector from freely allocating capital.” But our goal is precisely the opposite. We trust free people and free markets to allocate scarce resources more effectively than politicians in Washington.

  History and economics are on our side. What Casten and other far-left politicians refuse to acknowledge is that economic freedom is by far the best policy for the planet and its people. As Nick Loris, vice president of Public Policy at C3 Solutions argues, free economies are twice as clean as less free economies. What Casten and others are attempting to do is to centralize the economy by using ESG principles as their manifesto. By embracing ESG cancel culture, Casten is blocking the development of affordable energy.

  The one thing Casten gets mostly right is when he says SFOF is advancing “policies that are encouraging [financial institutions] to invest in areas that are struggling to attract capital.” Those areas have names – West Virginia, Texas, Utah, etc. – and the reason they are struggling to attract capital isn’t because the businesses aren’t financially sound. Indeed, 2022 has been a banner year for conventional energy sources that abound in these states. The reason they are challenged is because investment firms and financial institutions in recent years have implemented de facto boycotts of American energy producers. Firms like BlackRock have used their market power to “force behaviors,” sometimes by penetrating corporate boards, sometimes by starving unfavored businesses of capital, all in obeisance to an agenda based on subjective and ephemeral criteria, divorced from historical markers of a company’s financial strength. 

  It’s not surprising that many state financial officers are fighting back against ESG ideologues who are attempting to end investment in industries they find objectionable, American energy producers in particular, regardless of the impact it has on communities and states across the country. And SFOF has never argued that institutions should not invest in clean energy companies. Unlike Casten, we trust free markets and free people and deplore command-and-control policymaking.

  Casten apparently believes that castigating state financial officers will be politically beneficial. We support his First Amendment right to be wrong. Polls show that Casten is on the wrong side of not just the American people but also Democrats when it comes to demonizing American sources of energy. A strong majority of Democrats (71%) support an “all of the above” energy strategy that rejects the “everything but American-produced fossil fuel” ESG mantra.

  In the meantime, SFOF and its members will continue to stand up to what we see as a destructive ESG movement, which advances a progressive agenda outside the democratic process. We’ve made a consistent argument to financial institutions that are driving ESG while being cheered on by radical, left-wing politicians. It is simply this: return to fulfilling your fiduciary duty and focus on returns, instead of making investment decisions based on subjective criteria unrelated to business profitability. 

  By embracing economic freedom, returning to sound financial principles, and embracing the innovation of the free market, we can create prosperity for our communities, protect the planet, and build a future of which we can all be proud.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 21:40

• Intel To Fire Thousands Just Weeks After Biden Signs CHIPS Stimulus Bill
  Intel To Fire Thousands Just Weeks After Biden Signs CHIPS Stimulus Bill

  With the personal computer market crashing at an unprecedented pace, and with Intel stock losing two-thirds of its value in the past year and plunging to 10-year lows…

  

  …  Intel – which is just days from becoming the target of some activist hedge fund campaign – is planning a “major reduction” in headcount, numbering in the thousands according to Bloomberg, to cut costs and cope with the suddenly disintegrating PC market.

  The layoffs will likely be announced around the time the company reports its Q3 earnings on Oct. 27, said Bloomberg sources. And there will be quite a few to pick from: the chipmaker had 113,700 employees as of July, or a roughly 1 worker for every market cap in value (INTC’s market cap closed at a 8-year-low of $102.8 billion today). Some divisions, such as Intel’s sales and marketing group, could see cuts affecting about 20% of staff, the report noted.

  Besides the dismal macro environment which has crippled demand for PC processors, its main business, Intel has also struggled to win back market share lost to rivals like AMD and Nvidia. In July, the company warned that 2022 sales would be about $11 billion lower than it previously expected. Expect another ugly last-minute preannouncement, or even uglier Q4 and full year guidance. Analysts are predicting a third-quarter revenue drop of nearly 20%; meanwhile Intel’s once-enviable margins have also shriveled: amid the ongoing inventory liquidations and surging commodity prices, they’re about 15 percentage points narrower than historical numbers of around 60%.

  During its second-quarter earnings call, Intel acknowledged that it could make changes in its business to improve profits. “We are also lowering core expenses in calendar year 2022 and will look to take additional actions in the second half of the year,” Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger said at the time.

  Intel’s last big wave of layoffs occurred in 2016, when it trimmed about 12,000 jobs, or 11% of its total. The company has made smaller cuts since then and shuttered several divisions, including its cellular modem and drone units. Like many companies in the technology industry, Intel also froze hiring earlier this year, when market conditions soured and fears of a recession grew. And now it is moving to the inevitable final stage of rightsizing: mass layoffs.

  As Bloomberg notes, “it’s a particularly awkward moment for Intel to be making cutbacks. The company lobbied heavily for a $52 billion chip-stimulus bill this year, vowing to expand its manufacturing in the US. Gelsinger is planning a building boom that includes bringing the world’s biggest chipmaking hub to Ohio.”

  Well, so much for Biden’s stimulus. Oh well, at least it can be redirected to support the pristine, uncorrupted administration in Ukraine.

  US tensions with China also have clouded the chip industry’s future. The Biden administration announced new export curbs on Friday, restricting what US technologies companies can sell to the Asian nation.

  David Zinsner, Intel’s chief financial officer, said after the company’s latest quarterly report that “there are large opportunities for Intel to improve and deliver maximum output per dollar.” The chipmaker expected to see restructuring charges in the third quarter, he said, signaling that cuts were looming. 

  What about others? Well, notable chipmaker competitors such as Nvidia and Micron have said they’re steering clear of layoffs for now, but expect that to change very soon. But other tech companies, such as Oracle Corp. and Arm Ltd., have already been cutting jobs.

  Of course, none of this will impact the absolute datamockery which the BLS engages in every month and we fully expect the October jobs report, due just days before the midterm election, to show hundreds of thousands of farcically bullshit job gains. And just as predictably, once the midterms are in the rearview mirror and the government can again report the truth, we expect revisions will confirm that the US economy is currently losing several hundred thousand workers every month, a number which will only rise as the Fed triggers the worst global recession since the financial crisis.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 21:20

• Who's Afraid Of Tulsi Gabbard? Everyone…
  Who’s Afraid Of Tulsi Gabbard? Everyone…

  Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

  This isn’t the biggest news of the week but it may turn out to be so if I’m right about what this means and where it leads. Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard formally left the Democratic Party in a public announcement this morning on Twitter.

  

  Here’s Gabbard’s full statement:

  I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms, are…

  …hostile to people of faith & spirituality, demonize the police & protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, dragging us ever closer to nuclear war.

  I believe in a government that is of, by, and for the people. Unfortunately, today’s Democratic Party does not. Instead, it stands for a government of, by, and for the powerful elite. I’m calling on my fellow common sense independent-minded Democrats to join me….

  …in leaving the Democratic Party. If you can no longer stomach the direction that so-called woke Democratic Party ideologues are taking our country, I invite you to join me.

  Click the link to watch my full statement on why I’m leaving the Democratic Party:

  Originally tweeted by Tulsi Gabbard  (@TulsiGabbard) on October 11, 2022.

  Gabbard’s statement is a big deal given the timing, less than a month out from the mid-term elections.

  I know a lot of people are really torn on Gabbard. She elicits from the “patriot or “MAGA” crowd the same kind of unthinking division that Donald Trump elicits from the world.

  There are few nuanced takes on either of these people. This is because they represent threats to the people who are desperately trying to maintain control over the political and economic system. It doesn’t matter if they are competent or not.

  Since that system is failing, rapidly, the socio-political immune system must be vaccinated against all foreign ideas.

  So, the modus operandi is always the same. As they rise in popularity seed and amplify their faults to gaslight some would be supporters. In the case of Gabbard it was her invitation to the 2015 WEF Young Leaders conference and her positions on key domestic policy issues.

  People don’t like Gabbard for these reasons. Some of them are valid criticisms. Her voting record is Progressive on domestic economic issues. But, like a lot of young people, they come in with certain ideas and they leave with others after peaking behind the curtain.

  This focus on past specifics keeps many projecting personal anxieties onto them rather than assessing their personal journey.

  This precludes thinking strategically about how they can be an asset and only knee-jerk rejecting them for failing to pass some purity test.

  Might I remind you what that type of behavior is reminiscent of?

  

  It’s Left-Brain dominance bordering on possession. This is threat assessment, a function of the left-brain, taken to its extreme. It’s what drives wokeness as well as the opposite. We live in times designed for maximal anxiety.

  There are threats to our being and livelihoods multiplying seemingly by the day. President “Biden” is casually talking about nuclear war, FFS. We’re all stressed out. I get it.

  But too much of anything is a bad thing. The mechanisms of paranoia are the same for all parts of the political spectrum. And the anxiety pimps (H/T Dexter White for that) with their hands on the levers of the psy-ops understand this very, very well.

  Giving into those anxieties leads to only looking at how something can only be a threat rather than an asset. And if you are triggered by me saying this now, QED.

  This is no different than those who can only see the Fed as a threat and, for example, any/all past relationships Jerome Powell had with ‘the bad guys’ becomes prima facie evidence that fuckery is afoot.

  It looks like reasoning and analysis, when it’s just pattern recognition from previously being programmed.

  This is my primary point when it comes to Gabbard and her announcement this morning. The real psy-op isn’t that she’s some Klaus von Commie Schnitzel Triple Agent leading us like a pied piper to our own doom.

  The real psy-op is that many can’t consider her as anything else BUT THAT.

  If you doubt me, look on my Twitter feed this morning after I pointed this exact thing out. Tulsi Gabbard triggers people because they can’t believe she walked up to the WEF mountain, was offered “the Precious!” and turned them down.

  But that is exactly what it looks like she did.

  This woman was the perfect Davos Trojan Horse. She was young, attractive, well-spoken.

  She’s also a “woman of color” who joined the army after 9/11 to serve for patriotic reasons and, on top of all of this, a freaking Democrat!

  Yahtzee!

  When you look at the landscape for 2024 who do the Democrats have who aren’t completely loony tunes?

  Their rejection of her in 2020 was the big tell and it had nothing to do with the Clintons.

  This was a woman who in 2016 after being ‘groomed’ for greatness resigned from the DNC over Hitlary’s corruption of the primaries at a moment in time everyone, and I mean EV-ER-Y-ONE, thought Hitlary would be the next president.

  Even I didn’t believe my own arguments that Trump would win in May 2016.

  Gabbard defied the most vindictive woman in US political circles.

  

  A woman with a presumed body count that measures in the dozens who was supposed to seal Davos’ deal to sell the US out to the globalists and their planned Great Reset.

  That takes immense stones and speaks to a lot of personal integrity.

  Now, you can construct some MI-6/John LeCarre narrative that she was just playing the long game for Klaus, but seriously folks, Occam’s Razor is almost always valid.

  When she ran for President in 2020, was she promoted to be the one who would stand with Joe Biden? No. If she was Klaus’ girl she would have been.

  She would have gotten more than 1 delegate. She wouldn’t have been given the Ron Paul treatment at the convention.

  No, what she actually did was destroy the presidential ambitions of the woman-of-color who had been chosen, Kamala Harris.

  And she did it without any DNC support whatsoever. She did it with almost no speaking time. It was the most effective political takedown in history save Ron Paul’s destruction of Rudy Guiliani in 2008.

  To believe this narrative that Gabbard is a WEF Trojan Horse means you have to believe in a stage play so stupid and complicated it beggars belief. So, I ask everyone in the audience, if you are triggered by Tulsi Gabbard, reflect on why that is and where those feelings come from.

  Because they ain’t coming from her.

  She endorsed Biden, very reluctantly. It made sense. She didn’t like Trump personally and she was still nominally a party member. She’s not perfect. I don’t need perfect in this environment.

  But, per my previous arguments in January, Gabbard can position herself as a moderate populist, a kind of John Anderson figure from the 1980 election that ensures that no Democrat has a prayer of winning the 2024 election.

  If the GOP was smart, as big an ‘if’ if there ever was one, they would begin the process of saying this recession is regrettable but necessary. Embrace it and build on the anger at Brandon for screwing everyone in the wake of COVID.

  They can see Gabbard coming in to pull centrist votes from Hillary (or whomever) back towards the GOP or worse, advocating for real fiscal and foreign policy reform in D.C. as she runs as a kind of John Anderson figure against Jimmy Carter.

  In fact, the more I think about this the more likely John Anderson is the best analogue for her role in 2024. She’s the sane Democrat who’s interested in practical solutions, pulling in a very important 5-7% of swing voters tired of the outright lying, the destruction of communities and leadership turning a blind eye to violence and the coming rape of those same suburbs by Larry Fink and Blackrock.

  That was then. Today my thinking is even more insane.

  As the GOP VP candidate she can be a voice of sanity on foreign policy and human rights (vaccines, social credit score, etc.), leaving her running mate to focus on domestic issues and rebuilding America.

  So, what does this announcement actually mean for the future?

  It means that my off the cuff hope for a Florida Governor Ron DeSantis/Tulsi Gabbard 2024 unity ticket I discussed with Garland Nixon on my podcast back in May is taking shape… and right on schedule.

  I know that Robert Barnes believes and/or has real information that the 2024 ticket is Trump/DeSantis. And that may still be the default plan. I’m not privy to anything, just reading the tea leaves.

  But Trump has to navigate serious opposition as the Democrats try to take him out of the equation. Generals always fight the last war. Davos is fighting Trump when they should be fighting the generational shift just over the horizon, from Boomers to Gen-X.

  The Democrats really think they can win in 2024 by taking Trump out of the picture through lawfare and blaming the country’s ills on us not accepting their lunatic spending packages. Gavin Gruesome is clearly positioning himself for this role.

  The fallback plan if Trump is invalidated would be DeSantis at the top of the ticket with someone else to soften the edges and bring the country together.

  There is no one else in American politics poised to do just that than Tulsi Gabbard.

  If you can’t see the script of Gabbard giving a unifying, edifying speech about healing the divisions and getting back to work at the GOP convention then I’ve taught you not one thing in five years about how screenwriting actually works.

  DeSantis is killing it as Florida governor. Davos and the Democrats truly hate him because Ron’s so damn competent and willing to play Alinsky games to win. They’ve never had one of those guys before.

  Joe Biden had to publicly praise a Republican Florida governor for his handling of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Ian on the eve of an election.

  That’s a big deal, folks. More evidence Joe shouldn’t be allowed to speak off script.

  For this to work, however, there has to be a quid pro quo. The GOP will demand it. Gabbard switching sides can’t happen all at once. First she has to walk away from the Democrats and help the GOP win a few seats in the House for the mid-terms. Check.

  Then she continues to build her credibility as a moderate who speaks against the things that Presidential candidates can’t speak on or lose the support of the current crop of Davos-controlled Congresscritters — anti-war, the MIC, etc.

  She’ll be on Tucker Carlson very soon now and a lot more going forward.

  By the time the 2024 party conventions occur, the Fed’s tight monetary policy, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe and war with Russia over Ukraine will have the people focused almost wholly on domestic issues.

  We’ll be in the worst recession/depression since the 1970’s.

  Ukraine will quickly morph into Vietnam as a political albatross.

  If you think Americans don’t want a war with Russia today, go out another 20 months or so when they can’t feed their families or afford to drive to work.

  This is why the neocons and Davos are desperate to upgrade the conflict in Ukraine NOW. They have to flip the switch with the American electorate that Putin is our problem.

  He needs to be the scapegoat for the collapse.

  And that only happens with a casus belli that is incontrovertible.

  Putin continues to refuse to give that to them.

  

  If they can’t get their Just War and blame it on the GOP then they have only the economy to run on. But “Biden” takes that heat while the GOP simply keeps pointing to being fiscally responsible in the face of Democrat insanity.

  By this logic, the best thing that could happen for this country is for the DNC to indict Trump and block his nomination for president. It paves the path to flipping the psychology of the whole center of the country to rejecting everything they are.

  Gabbard can make that case as an independent, a former DNC insider who walked the walk, as either VP or as the second coming of John Anderson — the man who ensured that Reagan couldn’t be stopped.

  DeSantis does not trigger moderates the way Trump does. If anything he’s the governor most people want, even if they tell their friends they don’t.

  Gabbard’s strategic value to this situation should be obvious.

  *  *  *

  Join my Patreon if this post triggered you

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 21:00

• Putin's New Ukraine Commander Dubbed "General Armageddon" For Ruthless Track Record
  Putin’s New Ukraine Commander Dubbed “General Armageddon” For Ruthless Track Record

  “Russia and Russia’s commanders are worried about the state of their military machine,” the head of British intelligence agency GCHQ Jeremy Fleming, told BBC Radio on Tuesday. “We can see that desperation at many levels inside Russian society and inside the Russian military machine,” he described in an assessment which comes days after a big Russian military command shake-up.

  Following the past weeks of a rapid roll-back of Russian positions in Ukraine’s east, President Vladimir Putin sacked two of his senior military commanders and appointed General Sergey Surovikin to lead the next the next phase of the war effort in Ukraine, which began with Monday’s major escalation in airstrikes on over a dozen cities, which was a response to the Kerch Bridge bombing. 

  

  Pundits and journalist in the West are widely casting Gen. Surovikin’s appointment as part of a new “gloves off”, more brutal offensive to come on the heels of last month’s partial mobilization order which has involved calling up some 300,000 reservists to support the “special operation”. He was previously head of the air force.

  Mainstream press reports have already labeled him “General Armageddon” for his reputation as being “absolutely ruthless” – particularly in the prior command role which saw him gain most battlefield experience: Syria. 

  Within Russian establishment media circles which lean hawkish, Surovikin has been hailed as a “legendary” commander and as the country’s “most competent” general. According to a brief review of his rise through top echelon ranks in Al Jazeera:

  The general, born in 1966 in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, was announced as the head of Russia’s southern military grouping in its war on Ukraine in June.

  Surovikin received the title of Hero of Russia and was awarded a medal for his service in Syria in 2017, where he led the Russian military expedition as commander of the Aerospace Forces.

  He is known for being totally “ruthless” in the Russian military, according to a report (PDF) by the Jamestown Foundation, a US defence policy think-tank.

  “Surovikin made a stellar career in the top echelons of the General Staff and defence ministry after 2008, during the radical military reform that required ruthlessness,” read the report, adding that his “readiness to vigorously execute any orders trounced any potential questions about his checkered curriculum vitae”.

  Now in succeeding Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov in the role of top commander over the Ukraine operation, Surovkin faces the immense pressure of seeking to deliver Putin’s key objectives, even as NATO backers of Kiev ramp up their own intelligence-sharing and arms resupply efforts.

  This week UK intelligence put out an assessment saying Surovikin “will likely have to contend with an increasingly factional Russian defense ministry which is poorly resourced to achieve the Kremlin’s objectives in Ukraine.”

  

  According to more on his checkered past reaching back to the political discord of 1990’s post-Soviet struggles, he spent “two stints in jail for allegedly selling weapons and for leading a military column against protesters during the 1991 coup,” The Guardian reviews. “He has also previously served in Tajikistan and Chechnya.” And more: 

  “For over 30 years, Surovikin’s career has been dogged with allegations of corruption and brutality,” wrote British intelligence officials in a recent report on Surovikin’s likely promotion to lead the southern military group.

  During the 1991 coup d’état attempt launched by Soviet hardliners, Surovikin, then a captain, led a rifle division that drove through barricades erected by pro-democracy protesters. Three men were killed in the clash, including one who was crushed.

  The report further speculates that “With the appointment, the Kremlin may also be seeking to combat criticism from nationalists who have accused the army of mismanaging the war in Ukraine and of failing to use harsh tactics to try to force the Kyiv government to submit.” Some of those ‘harsher tactics’ have been on display with Monday into Tuesday’s large-scale bombing waves of major Ukrainian cities, particularly focused on energy infrastructure.

  2 days after appointing butcher of Aleppo (Syria) Sergei Surovikin its head of forces in Ukraine, #Russia drops missiles on downtown Kyiv during morning rush hour…: pic.twitter.com/tNHjSFJwzG

  — Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) October 10, 2022

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

  FT in a new profile playing up his brutality in Syria, writes of the top general that the 56-year old “is notorious for his campaigns in Syria, where he served two stints as commander of Russian forces supporting Bashar al-Assad’s regime.” The report further underscored:

  Human Rights Watch named him among officials who “may bear command responsibility” for attacks on civilians, alleging in a 2020 report that he had ordered attacks on homes, schools and hospitals. In line with those tactics, Russian missiles on Monday and Tuesday hit civilian infrastructure, including a playground in Kyiv, despite continuing claims by Moscow that only military sites were targeted.

  As for those already calling Surovikin the “butcher of Aleppo” who they say destroyed Syria’s largest city and ultimately enabled Bashar al-Assad’s survival, some are pointing out that the Russian military entered the conflict in 2015, significantly after fierce fighting had long been raging. 

  Back again with the Aleppo lie… Aleppo was well beyond destroyed of three years of fighting between SAA and rebels before Russia began its operations in Syria… Find another lie for God sake… https://t.co/NVpC8Nfabt

  — Within Syria (@WithinSyriaBlog) October 10, 2022

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

  Ukraine’s ambassador to the UK Vadym Prystaiko also emphasized the purpose of intimidation in Putin’s appointing Surovikin: “Every escalation, they bring in more dangerous people. This guy was known as the Butcher of Syria. They brought in a bad guy to scare us. But we won’t be scared.” Prystaiko added: “They finally understood they can’t do anything on the ground… So they brought in an air forces guy to try. To me, this means Putin is really frustrated, really desperate.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 20:40

• Has The USA Reached Another Historical Inflection Point?
  Has The USA Reached Another Historical Inflection Point?

  Authored by Kevin Duffy via The Mises Institute,

  “At the rate things are going, we are all going to end up working for the Japanese.”

  – Lester Thurow, MIT economist, 1989

  “The United States is rapidly becoming a colony of Japan.”

  – Congresswoman Helen Bentley, 1990

  “The Japanese can buy our buildings, our Wall Street firms, and there’s virtually nothing to stop them. In fact, bidding on a building in New York is an act of futility, because the Japanese will pay more than it’s worth just to screw us. They want to own Manhattan.”

  – Donald Trump, March 1990

  During the late 1980s, Japan had the Midas touch. In the eyes of the mainstream media, Wall Street strategists, economists and politicians, the Japanese could do no wrong. America’s brand of capitalism—self-centered, greedy, chaotic, and unplanned—was no match for Japan’s unique brand of state capitalism, with the long-term-oriented government bureaucrat, aggressive businessman and diligent, loyal employees all working in perfect harmony for the common good. Newspaper headlines routinely lamented America’s decline as much as they feared Japan’s rise.

  While a whole slew of Keynesians and mercantilists confused a liquidity bubble for an economic miracle, a handful of contrarians, including Jim Grant, John Templeton and Marc Faber, parted ways with the crowd. At the end of 1988, I wrote, in a letter to the editor that was published in the Wall Street Journal,

  By the end of this century, the question may not be “Will the U.S. be No. 1?” but “Will Japan still be No. 2?”

  That was a pretty bold prediction at the time. (I was young, naïve and didn’t know better.) There was some luck, no doubt. My study of financial bubbles, including Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, implanted the idea that a frenzied crowd is almost guaranteed to be wrong. And my discovery of Austrian economics, especially Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression, provided the economic rationale for why government intervention would not only fail in Japan, but likely intensify with the downturn and usher in a decade or more of stagnation. My sense was that the world’s financial markets were at a major inflection point and that sticking my neck out and flaunting the consensus would lead to significant returns.

  

  A 239-Year History of Inflection Points in America

  Does the everything bubble suggest a similar inflection point today? To try to answer this question, I’ve constructed a table of major financial turning points in the US, with coinciding political and foreign policy events, to see if a pattern emerges (see below).

  Major US Inflection Points

  

   

  At first glance, our table reveals some obvious patterns:

   

  Timing—The best time to buy stocks is at the point of maximum pessimism about the economy. The onset of wars tends to build the wall of worry further and ensure key bottoms: Spanish-American War (1898), World War II (1941) and the first Iraq War (1990). The start of the second Iraq War (2003) pinpointed a four-year bull run. One notable exception was US involvement in the Vietnam War, which began covertly right after World War II and escalated from 1965 (first combat units introduced) to 1969 (five hundred thousand US military personnel stationed in Vietnam). Adjusted for inflation, the Dow Jones Industrials Average peaked in 1966 and didn’t bottom until 1982. Meanwhile, peace and prosperity generally coincide with stock market tops. E.g., the roaring ’20s (1929) and dot-com bubble (2000) witnessed an absence of external enemies.

  Duration—Inflection points alter the course of stocks, bonds and gold for long periods of time, often decades. E.g., the 1946–81 bear market in bonds (thirty-five years) was replaced by a thirty-nine-year bull market.

  Conflict vs. cooperation—The 1946 inflection point ended a long period of conflict between nations: centuries of imperial rivalry culminating in two world wars separated by a massive trade war. The end of World War II ushered in a seventy-year period of decolonization, globalization, expanding division of labor and relative peace. (While President Trump’s trade war with China arguably arrested this trend, at least in the short run, I believe the long-term trend will reassert itself.)

  Megatrend: Big Government

  The overarching trend in the US since 1789 has been an ever-expanding and centralized government. That year marked the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation for a more centralized federation of sovereign states with George Washington its first president. The new government was the outcome of a heated debate between competing visions for the United States, with the federalists (led by Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s first treasury secretary,) prevailing over the Anti-Federalists who were thrown a bone with the Bill of Rights to try to keep the central state in check.

  (The federalists were clustered in commercial centers; their message was amplified by the press. The more agrarian anti-federalists included such luminaries as Patrick Henry, Melancton Smith, William Grayson, George Clinton, and Richard Henry Lee; most have since faded into oblivion.) Importantly, the new government’s Constitution opened the door to direct taxation and enforcement at the national level, roles confined to the states under the Articles. This was a boon to speculators in government bonds which had become practically worthless after the war with Britain.

  Where the founders did agree (including Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson) was on national greatness and expansionism. According to Sheldon Richman in America’s Counter-revolution,

  Even the government’s schools teach … that America’s founders had—let us say—an expansive vision for the country they were establishing…. Clearly, these men had empire on their minds. Indeed, in the eyes of the founders, the American Revolution was largely a war between a mature, exhausted empire and a nascent one. Many—but assuredly not all—Americans of the time would have cheerfully agreed.

  In other words, the dramatic shift from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution was the ultimate inflection point. As historian Vernon L. Parrington (1871–1929) wrote:

  [It] marked the turning point in American development; the checking of the long movement of decentralization and the beginning of a counter movement … The history of the rise of the coercive state in America, with the ultimate arrest of all centrifugal tendencies, was implicit in that momentous counter movement.1

  A key step on the path to centralization occurred in 1861 as state sovereignty became a casualty of the misnamed “Civil War.” The bloodiest conflict in US history, which took the lives of roughly 2 percent of the population—seven times the death rate of World War II—was over the South’s right to secede (taken for granted seventy years earlier), not a struggle between factions over who would run the government. As Tom DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked, wrote shortly after the 9/11 attacks:

  Lincoln’s war established myriad precedents that have shaped the course of American government and society ever since: the centralization of governmental power, central banking, income taxation, protectionism, military conscription, the suspension of constitutional liberties, the “rewriting” of the Constitution by federal judges, “total war,” the quest for a worldwide empire, and the notion that government is one big “problem solver.”

  The next giant leap took place in 1898. According to Stephen Kinzer in Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq:

  Historic shifts in world politics often happen slowly and are hardly even noticeable until years later. That was not the case with the emergence of the United States as a world power. It happened quite suddenly in the spring and summer of 1898.

  The seeds, however, were planted five years earlier with the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy:

  In the months after the 1893 revolution in Hawaii, that country’s new leaders sought annexation to the United States, but [anti-imperialist] President Grover Cleveland … would not hear of it. He was quite right when he declared that most Americans rejected the seizure of faraway lands “as not only opposed to our national policy, but as a perversion of our national mission.” Five years later, this consensus evaporated. Almost overnight, it was replaced by a national clamor for overseas expansion. This was the quickest and most profound reversal of public opinion in the history of American foreign policy.

  The April 21, 1898, invasion of Cuba began with a false flag incident (the Maine explosion) providing fodder for prowar yellow journalists (notably William Randolph Hearst), was sold to Congress and the American people as a mission to liberate the Cuban people from Spanish rule (Teller Amendment) and ended with broken promises and betrayal of the original cause:

  In the United States, enthusiasm for Cuban independence faded quickly. Whitelaw Reid, the publisher of the New York Tribune and the journalist closest to President McKinley, proclaimed the “absolute necessity of controlling Cuba for our own defense,” and rejected the Teller Amendment as “a self-denying ordinance possible only in a moment of national hysteria.” Senator Beveridge said it was not binding because Congress had approved it “in a moment of impulsive but mistaken generosity.” The New York Times asserted that Americans had a “higher obligation” than strict fidelity to ill-advised promises, and must become “permanent possessors of Cuba if the Cubans prove to be altogether incapable of self-government.”

  The long-term consequences of America’s interventions in Cuba would prove to be as profound as they were tragic.

  The 1898 inflection point put the rest of the world on notice:

  Outsiders watched the emergence of this new America with a combination of awe and fear … The Manchester Guardian reported that nearly every American had come to embrace the expansionist idea, while the few critics “are simply laughed at for their pains.” Some of these journalists were unsettled by what they saw … The Frankfurter Zeitung warned Americans against “the disastrous consequences of their exuberance” but realized that they would not listen.

  Endgame

  Is the megatrend towards big government in the US nearing an end? For starters, history has not been kind to empires. The British empire had its day, peaking with the first world war. By the time of the 1947 partition of India it was in full retreat, ushering in a bipolar world with the United States pitted against the Soviet Union. The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 created a vacuum with the US assuming the mantle of global hegemon. The American empire appears to have peaked somewhere between 1988 with the absurdity of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis’s failed photo-op in a tank and 2003 with the hubris of President George W. Bush’s staged declaration of “mission accomplished” aboard an aircraft carrier just weeks into the second Iraq War. Public debt–to-GDP was 58 percent when Bush declared victory; today it stands at 123 percent.

  To keep the game going, the political class has increasingly relied on borrowing, inflation and diversions like victimology, covid and climate change. “War is the health of the state” needs updating. The modern state has evolved, learning the lesson that any conflict feeds the Leviathan. Conflict is not limited to “us versus them” and “good versus evil,” but left vs. right, black vs. white, male vs. female, straight vs. LGBTQ, rich vs. poor, entrepreneurs vs. employees, young vs. old and even man vs. the planet. Wars have morphed into abstractions—e.g., war on poverty, war on drugs, war on terrorism, and now a war on a virus. The justifications for protecting party A against the predations of party B are endless.

  This presents a problem for the state, however: the web of lies becomes infinitely more complex and impossible to keep stitched together. The truth is an ever-present nuisance, as Lew Rockwell, founder of the Mises Institute, so passionately argues:

  The truth, no matter how seemingly battered and bruised, still shines through. It can never be wiped out, no matter how rotten the regime. In the end, the truth will triumph over deceit.

  One sign that Americans are beginning to see through the lies: a record number are rejecting both major political parties.

  Interventionists Jump the Shark

  Perhaps the most convincing argument that a major change is at hand is the nature of bubbles and their ability to reverse long-running trends. If the everything bubble is unraveling, the game has changed. In classic form, a timeline of the past two and a half years reveals a burst of euphoria accompanied by peak absurdities, followed by increasingly visible warning cracks and general denial by the interventionists:

  • March 2020—As covid-19 arrives and panicked investors dump stocks for safe haven assets, US thirty-year T-bond yield hits all-time low of 0.84 percent (now 3.52 percent); President Trump signs $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill (CARES Act);

  • April 2020—Fed Chairman Jerome Powell urges Congress to unleash “great fiscal power” to defeat covid, claims “we won’t run out of money”;

  • May 2020—President Trump unleashes Operation Warp Speed to fast track a vaccine for covid; the death of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police, ignites months of “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”;

  • June 2020—Quaker Oats cancels “Aunt Jemima” image from syrup brand to fight “racial stereotypes”;

  • November 2020—Joe Biden narrowly defeats Donald Trump in disputed election;

  • December 2020—President Trump signs $2.3 trillion stimulus bill (Consolidated Appropriations Act);

  • January 2021—First wave of meme stock craze ends with GameStop topping out at split-adjusted 81.25 (now 28.64, down 65 percent);

  • February 2021—Growth-at-any-price manager Cathie Wood’s ARK ETFs rake in $8.3 billion in new money, third behind fund giants Vanguard and BlackRock; ARK Innovation ETF peaks at 158.82 (now 42.58, down 73 percent); assets hit $23.3 billion as inflows total $8.8 billion over previous three months;

  • March 2021—President Biden signs $1.9 trillion stimulus bill (American Rescue Plan Act); nonfungible token by a digital artist known as Beeple sells for $69 million;

  • April 2021—Sri Lanka government bans all chemical fertilizers to make farming 100 percent organic, reverses course seven months later after mass protests by farmers and a surge in food price inflation;

  • May 2021—Price inflation hits thirty-year high, with the year-over-year Consumer Price Index (CPI) +5.0 percent;

  • June 2021—Italian artist sells “invisible” sculpture for more than £12,000; tiny activist investor Engine No. 1 wages successful battle to install three directors on Exxon Mobil’s board with goal of reducing company’s carbon footprint;

  • August 2021—US ends twenty-year war in Afghanistan; Federal Reserve assets total $8.3 trillion, double prepandemic levels;

  • September 2021—El Salvador adopts bitcoin as legal tender;

  • November 2021—Bitcoin hits all-time high of $68,790 (now $20,040, down 71 percent);

  • December 2021—University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas (identifying as “Lia”) qualifies to compete as a woman after taking a year of hormone treatments, records fastest national times in the 200- and 500-yard freestyle, and wins 1,650-yard freestyle by forty seconds;

  • January 2022—S&P 500 hits all-time high of 4,819 (now 3,873, down 20 percent); New York City mayor Eric Adams takes his first paycheck in cryptocurrency;

  • February 2022—Canadian truckers protest Trudeau government’s vaccine mandate; price inflation hits forty-year high, with year-over-year CPI +7.9 percent; Engine No. 1 launches climate change ETF; Russia invades Ukraine;

  • March 2022—Federal public debt tops $30 trillion, up $7.2 trillion from prepandemic levels, and Lia Thomas becomes first transgender athlete to win NCAA Division I championship in any sport;

  • April 2022—President Biden’s approval rating sinks to new low, Nasdaq Composite enters bear market territory; Federal Reserve assets peak at $8.9 trillion (now 1.5 percent lower);

  • May 2022—Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admits she didn’t see inflation coming, Sri Lanka defaults on its national debt; Solomon Islands signs new security agreement with China;

  • June 2022—Two-thirds of economists anticipate a recession while Jerome Powell sees “no sign of a broader slowdown;” the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci tests positive for covid-19 despite being fully vaccinated and twice boosted; Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, returns power to the states; Sri Lanka government collapses; and

  • August 2022—Anthony Fauci announces his resignation, effective in December; California plans to ban sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, two-time NBA MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo helps launch ESG fund.

  Investment Implications

  “It has been 241 years since Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Being short America has been a loser’s game. I predict to you it will continue to be a loser’s game.”

  – Warren Buffett, CNBC interview, September 21, 2017

  “In the beginning of the QE period, I became convinced that the system was going to destroy the nature of money itself. I became convinced that the rules of the game had changed completely. When the rules change, the basic framework with which you make decisions need to change.”

  – Tony Deden, Q&A with Grant Williams, July 5, 2018

  With all due respect to Warren Buffett, if we are at a major inflection point reversing a 239-year megatrend in government growth, the last thing you want to do as an investor, entrepreneur, or young person launching a career is to play by the old rules and blindly emulate past winners. Government bonds should be avoided; likewise, the stocks of companies sucking up to government, looking for favors, and peddling official narratives. Under the new rules, investors will likely pay a premium for independence—i.e., companies that can stand on their own.

  While Warren Buffett and John Bogle have had great runs (fifty-seven and forty-eight years, respectively), their playbooks are widely copied. Imitation is the sincerest path to subpar returns. Admittedly, much of their wisdom is likely to stand the test of time—e.g., the circle of competence, patience over activity, and keeping fees and turnover low. However, I suspect paying attention to macroeconomic issues will pay dividends because this is largely dismissed by the Buffett faithful as an exercise in futility. Likewise, active investing will be rewarded because Bogle’s brainchild, the index fund, is far too popular.

  At the end of 1988 I suggested looking forward, not backward:

  The world is still in the early stages of a third economic wave—the transition from an industrial to an information-based economy. Innovators tend to lead, whereas imitators tend to lag such waves. As the world’s best imitators, the Japanese capitalized on the ending of the industrial age. As the world’s best innovators, Americans should be the main beneficiaries of the beginning of the information age.

  That advice still holds today. The information age is thirty-four years older, but shows no signs of slowing down (although it has become far more global and not nearly as concentrated in Silicon Valley). Likewise, the “hockey stick of human prosperity” is still early, having begun just 250 or so years ago, up against five thousand years of recorded history. “You can’t afford not to be invested in the relentless ascent of man,” advises Dan Ferris in so many wise words.

  All bubbles are destructive in nature and based on a false belief that must be exposed and repudiated. In this case, the bad seed is government as universal problem solver. Bear markets have their place, to impart lessons, change behavior, restore health, and introduce the deluded to reality.

  Major tops are a process, not an event. The trend in centralized power was a long time in the making. Its reversal could play out over a century or more (with plenty of heart-wrenching rallies along the way). The transition will be messy and painful for those who are unprepared or live in the past, but wildly bullish long-term as the government parasite withers and dies.

  If I am right, the everything bubble helped seal the fate of big government. The state will increasingly be seen as an impediment to human progress and vestige of the past.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 20:20

• Trans-Pacific Shipping Rates Plunge 75% As US Retail Demand Falters
  Trans-Pacific Shipping Rates Plunge 75% As US Retail Demand Falters

  The problem with price inflation is that it often makes it impossible to track the true health of consumer demand.  For example, in August of this year Walmart reported a jump is overall sales, but also a decline in profits.  How is this possible?  Spiking inflation in most goods means people have to pay more for the same amount of stuff they usually buy.  But, Walmart also has to deal with higher wholesale prices and declining customer purchases as people start to make cuts to their retail budgets.

  In other words, inflation makes it seem like sales are increasing when in reality profits are plummeting.

  Another way to track actual retail performance without price inflation obscuring reality is to examine shipping volume and shipping rates.  In the summer, import volumes to the US began dropping off a cliff, indicating that consumer demand was indeed being affected by inflation/stagflation.  Now, trans-pacific shipping rates have also plunged at least 75%.  Shipping companies are reporting that empty cargo containers are becoming frequent in freight to the US, with companies scrambling to adjust after two years of boats overflowing with goods.

    

  One thing that is important to note is that this process has been ongoing and has very little to do with the Federal Reserve’s rate hike program.  It is a separate issue tied directly to price inflation and Fed rate hikes have been ineffective in dealing with this problem.

  Another issue that needs to be addressed is that prices are still high.  Faltering consumer demand is not dragging inflation back down to Earth as many economists expect, and this is a direct consequence of a stagflationary environment rather than a purely deflationary one.  Prices on many goods (necessities in particular) stay high or continue to climb while demand falls.  This is caused by high costs in raw materials, manufacturing and wages translating over to high prices in wholesale.  Retailers cannot lower prices much despite falling demand because profit margins are so thin.

  The huge decline in volumes and shipping rates signal an important shift in the US economy and are a warning of changes to come.  Most importantly, the drop indicates that the $8 trillion in covid stimulus money that was helicopter dropped on the public in 2020 and 2021 is now gone, or at least, the effects are finally ending.  But what does this mean?

  First, it means job demand is going to explode.  The millions of workers that were happy to live off of unemployment, covid welfare and their parents rather than participate in the economy are now going to be searching for work.  And, for now, there are plenty of empty job positions for them to fill.  This means a continuing jump in employment as job availability sees declines.  

  However, with profits slumping and demand falling the US will then see actual job losses and mass layoffs.  Stagflation will continue to hold until unemployment hits a level that affects manufacturing and costs in raw materials.  This will likely take some time.

  The point is, the economy is not going to behave within the traditionally accepted mechanics.  We are not dealing with a standard inflationary crisis or a standard deflationary crisis.  There are elements of both at play, and the instability is much worse than was witnessed during the stagflationary event of the 1970s.  

  The US is now entering a stage of implosion in demand, inevitably followed by rising unemployment.          

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 20:00

• Microplastics Detected In Human Breast Milk, Raising Concerns Over Health Impact On Babies
  Microplastics Detected In Human Breast Milk, Raising Concerns Over Health Impact On Babies

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

  A new study has detected microplastics in human breast milk for the first time, sparking concerns over the potential toxic effects and health impact they may have on infants.

  

  Researchers in the study found microplastics composed of polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and polypropylene with sizes ranging from 2 to 12 micrometers in the breast milk of women.

  Microplastics (MPs) are extremely small plastic particles composed of mixtures of polymers and functional additives.

  The majority of MPs are unintentionally released into the environment during the disposal and breakdown of larger plastic products or industrial waste, although they are also deliberately manufactured and added to products like exfoliating facial scrubs.

  Researchers in the study took breast milk samples from 34 healthy new mothers who were lactating a week after giving birth in Rome, Italy. Their milk was then analyzed by Raman microspectroscopy, which found MPs in 26 of the 34 women.

  The researchers recorded the women’s consumption of food and drink in plastic packaging and of seafood, as well as their use of personal care products containing plastic compounds.

  However, they did not find any significant relationship between the two, which they said suggested “that the ubiquitous MP presence makes human exposure inevitable.”

  The researchers pointed to a previous study they had conducted in 2020 that found microplastics in human placentas and said that this discovery, coupled with the latest findings of MPs in human breast milk, “represents a great concern since it impacts the extremely vulnerable population of infants.”

  “In fact, the chemicals possibly contained in foods, beverages, and personal care products consumed by breastfeeding mothers may be transferred to the offspring, potentially exerting a toxic effect,” the study authors wrote.

  “Hence, it is mandatory to increase efforts in scientific research to deepen the knowledge of the potential health impairment caused by MP internalization and accumulation, especially in infants, and to assess innovative, useful ways to reduce exposure to these contaminants during pregnancy and lactation,” researchers added.

  Breastfeeding Benefits Outweigh Disadvantages

  Valentina Notarstefano at the Universita Politecnica delle Marche, in Ancona, Italy, told The Guardian that it is crucial to find ways for pregnant women to reduce exposure to these contaminants, both during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

  However, she pointed to the advantages of breastfeeding, which she said outweighed the disadvantages caused by the presence of polluting microplastics.

  “Studies like ours must not reduce breastfeeding of children, but instead raise public awareness to pressure politicians to promote laws that reduce pollution,” Notarstefano said.

  “We would like to advise pregnant women to pay greater attention to avoiding food and drink packaged in plastic, cosmetics, and toothpaste containing microplastics, and clothes made of synthetic fabrics,” Notarstefano added.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 19:40

• Saudi Arabia Defied Biden's Threats Ahead Of OPEC+ Production Cut
  Saudi Arabia Defied Biden’s Threats Ahead Of OPEC+ Production Cut

  We already know that the Biden administration was humiliated on the international scene last week when OPEC+ cut oil output by 2 million barrels (really more like 1 million when netting out reduced Russian capacity) in stark contrast to the position held by the White House and thus driving a stake through the admin’s plan to keep draining the SPR until the midterms thus delivering the lowest possible gas price on November 8 (with zero regard for what happens the next day now that the US emergency oil reserve is one-third smaller), but we didn’t know just how much delight the Saudi crown prince derived from snubbing George Soros’ closest circle.

  We now do: according to the WSJ, days before last week’s major oil-production cut by OPEC and its Russia-led allies, Biden admin officials called their counterparts in Saudi Arabia and other big Gulf producers with an urgent appeal — delay the decision for another month, according to people familiar with the talks. The answer, as we already know, “a resounding no.”

  But this wasn’t your kindly, ole grandpa Biden politely asking Riyadh for a favor: instead, in US officials unleashed full-blown threat mode and warned Saudi leaders that “a cut would be viewed as a clear choice by Riyadh to side with Russia in the Ukraine war and that the move would weaken already-waning support in Washington for the kingdom.”

  Of course, as everyone knows by now, Saudi officials dismissed the requests “which they viewed as a political gambit by the Biden administration to avoid bad news ahead of the U.S. midterm elections” on which control of Congress hangs. High gas prices and inflation have been central issues in the campaign; in fact it is safe to say that with the midterms in the rearview mirror, both Biden’s and Powell’s urgency in “containing” inflation will disappear, and we may well experience the first official pivot just days after November 8.

  However, instead of complying with Biden’s threats of lumping Saudi Arabia in the same group of “baddy” nations as Russia and China, the kingdom leaned on its OPEC allies to approve the cut, which is precisely what happened as OPEC+ became the latest global front to opposite the Biden admin.

  The White House denounced the move and vowed to fight OPEC’s control of the energy market. Lawmakers from across the political spectrum called on the U.S. to cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia. And U.S. officials started looking for ways to punish Riyadh. Earlier today, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said that Biden is re-evaluating the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia: “I think the president’s been very clear that this is a relationship that we need to continue to re-evaluate, that we need to be willing to revisit. And certainly in light of the OPEC decision, I think that’s where he is”, he told CNN.

  According to the WSJ, in one of its first responses to follow,  the Biden administration is weighing whether to withdraw from participation in Saudi Arabia’s flagship Future Investment Initiative investment forum later this month (surely that will teach them the lesson of a lifetime).

  Biden’s henchmen said the OPEC+ decision was unhelpful as inflation driven by high energy prices threatens global growth and represents an economic weapon against the West for Russian President Vladimir Putin. It threatens to drive up American gasoline prices ahead of the Nov. 8 midterms. And apparently in Biden’s mind (really Soros’ mind), it’s inconceivable that Saudi Arabia will put its own interest ahead of those of the democratic party.

  The one-month delay requested by Washington – which once and for all shows that to Biden the only thing that matters is the price of gas on Nov 7 – would have meant a production cut made in the days before the election, too late to have much effect on consumers’ wallets ahead of the vote.

  In response, Adel al Jubeir, Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs, said the kingdom is committed to ensuring oil-market stability and noted that OPEC+ had increased output through much of the year. He said global economic headwinds justified the decision to cut production.

  He blamed the Washington reaction on “the emotions that have to do with the upcoming elections,” in an interview that aired on Fox News on Sunday. “The idea that Saudi Arabia would do this to harm the U.S. or to be in any way politically involved is not correct at all.”

  Well… maybe a little, especially when considering the aftermath of the fistbumb optics:

  

  Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia in July was meant to repair relations after the president entered office with a vow to treat the kingdom as a “pariah” over human rights, particularly the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi agents. Images of the president’s fist bump with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman became a polarizing symbol of the trip, especially when contrasted with historical photos of MBS with Putin.

  

  According to people inside the Saudi government, Biden’s July visit did little to change Prince Mohammed’s determination to chart a foreign policy independent of U.S. influence, in a break from almost 80 years of American-Saudi partnership.

  If anything, the WSJ sources said, the visit enraged Prince Mohammed, who was upset that Biden went public with his private comments to the Saudi royal over Khashoggi’s death, which prompted Saudi officials to publicly contradict Biden’s characterization of their interaction. Naturally, US officials – as always clueless to diplomatic nuance – said they saw no indications in their talks with Saudi leaders in recent months that Biden’s comments about Mr. Khashoggi had been damaging to ties.

  Prince Mohammed, who runs the kingdom day to day for his father, King Salman, has tried to maximize Saudi Arabia’s economic strength. With high energy prices, the kingdom’s economic growth this year is estimated by the IMF at more than 10%—making it one of the best performers globally. According to the WSJ, Prince Mohammed has told advisers that he isn’t willing to sacrifice much for the Biden administration, or anything it appears, citing its critical view of the Saudi war in Yemen, bid to close a nuclear deal with Iran that Riyadh opposes and Biden’s own comments on the prince.

  It gets even more humiliating:

  In August, the Saudis had planned to push OPEC+ to raise oil production by 500,000 barrels a day in an effort to please Mr. Biden, but Prince Mohammed ordered the increase lowered to a token 100,000 barrels a day after the Biden visit, the people inside the Saudi government said.

  And it only went downhill from there:

  The U.S. State Department’s energy-security envoy, Amos Hochstein, sent the Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, an email that suggested he had broken his word promising a larger increase, people familiar with the matter said.

  The email angered Prince Abdulaziz and strengthened his resolve to forge an oil policy independent of the U.S., the people said.

  Which brings us to today when the US is thinking what, if anything, it will do in response:

  The White House has said the OPEC+ decision shows that the group is clearly aligned with Russia now. U.S. officials warned that the Saudi move could imperil more than $100 million in active foreign military sales that Riyadh is seeking from the U.S.

  U.S. lawmakers announced plans to reintroduce a bill to immediately suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Any hopes the Saudis had of securing more precision guided missiles from the U.S. have been all but quashed, U.S. officials said.

  Some U.S. lawmakers want to pull American troops out of Saudi Arabia. And Senate leaders from both parties are backing a bill that would allow the Justice Department to sue Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations for illegal price fixing.

  In other words, what goes around comes around, as the US is gradually realizing as it also realizes that it has successfully alienated majority of the world’s population.

  *OPEC+ IS ALIGNING WITH RUSSIA WITH ANNOUNCEMENT: JEAN-PIERRE

  So OPEC+… Russia… China… India… Brazil… Africa… anyone else?

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 5, 2022

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

  More in the full WSJ report (link here).

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 19:20

• "Medical Censorship": Dr. Peter McCullough Responds To Twitter Ban
  “Medical Censorship”: Dr. Peter McCullough Responds To Twitter Ban

  Authored by Zachary Stieber and Steve Lance via The Epoch Times,

  Dr. Peter McCullough says Twitter banned him despite there being no change in how he’s been posting on the Big Tech platform.

  “Twitter claimed that I violated the community rules after thousands of consistent posts on scientific abstracts, and manuscripts. This was very carefully done. I was bringing the world the truth on pandemic response through the media and this was purely of the highest scientific integrity and analysis, and my tweeting pattern didn’t change,” McCullough told NTD’s “Capitol Report.”

  According to images shared with the Epoch Media Group, which includes NTD, Twitter removed all of McCullough’s followers.

  

  After McCullough’s legal team interacted with Twitter workers, “Twitter is backing off,” according to McCullough, though he has still not been restored to the social media website.

  “They initially didn’t allow me to download the data. They wiped out all the users in my account, and now they’re backpedaling. We’ll see what happens this week. But this is just another example of medical censorship by Big Tech on doctors who have the freedom, according to the First Amendment, to express their scientific views through freedom of speech,” McCullough said.

  McCullough, a former vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center and now the chief medical adviser for the Truth for Health Foundation, said that he’s been providing updates on COVID-19 vaccines and related pandemic issues due to a feeling of responsibility.

  “I felt I had the medical authority and professional responsibility to lead the nation. I’ve testified twice now in the U.S. Senate, multiple state senates. I’ve messaged the best I can through the peer reviewed literature as well as with podcasts and now Substack formats. People look to me for my analysis because I’ve been accurate and I’ve been conservative and reasonable in my statements,” he said. “And we haven’t seen any of that type of professional activity, any of that level of excellence, from our public health officials. They’ve let us down greatly.”

  McCullough has already turned to Twitter competitors like Truth Social but is optimistic about Twitter as Tesla founder Elon Musk pursues a purchase of the platform.

  “The Twitter story is not over. Elon Musk back on purchasing Twitter offers some hope that this really dark time of of censorship and Twitter manipulating people’s accounts to advance the government false narrative, hopefully, this era is coming to the close with the acquisition and new management of Twitter,” McCullough said.

  McCullough, a cardiologist, has warned against the COVID-19 vaccines for months, pointing to studies that have found an elevated risk of post-vaccination heart inflammation and other serious conditions.

  “Now we have hundreds of manuscripts published on myocarditis, heart inflammation,” McCullough added, indicating a recent paper that found a higher risk for young people after COVID-19 vaccination than after COVID-19 itself, and autopsies conducted on fatal cases of heart inflammation, some of which have suggested a causal link between the issues and the vaccines.

  “So when we see young people now dying, unexpectedly dying, either during sports or during sleep, in my view it should be considered COVID-19 subclinical myocarditis and sudden cardiac death until proven otherwise,” McCullough said.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 19:00

• China Gives Clearest Sign Yet It Will Stick With Zero-COVID Strategy
  China Gives Clearest Sign Yet It Will Stick With Zero-COVID Strategy

  One of the most prevalent pipe dreams in markets in recent months, even more widespread than the inevitable – if not imminent – Fed pivot is that China will capitulate on its long-standing Zero-COVID policy (despite it being a perfectly convenient scapegoat for Xi to deflect anger at the slowing economy) during this month’s 20th party Congress, despite skeptical insiders such as China Beige Book warning that this isn’t going to happen.

  Having done the rounds w/3-4 dozen funds over past month, 1 thing blew us away: the % convinced Xi will announce an endgame for #CovidZero at the Congress.

  This conviction goes against so much evidence. But the trade is “so juicy” it seems to have taken on a life of its own.

  — China Beige Book (@ChinaBeigeBook) October 11, 2022

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

  Well, it appears that the market will be disappointed yet again.

  According to SCMP, for the second day in a row, China’s Communist Party mouthpiece, People’s Daily, urged the country to stick with its zero-Covid strategy, “dampening hopes that controls would ease after a pivotal political meeting this month.” The commentary was the clearest sign yet, according to the SCMP editor, that the party is determined to continue with the stringent zero-Covid approach after its twice-a-decade national congress, which starts this Sunday. On Monday, the newspaper called for confidence and patience with the zero-Covid strategy, which aims to cut all virus transmission chains.

  Xi Jinping has been portrayed by state media as leading a national pandemic control effort that has resulted in few deaths. He has staked considerable political capital on the purported superiority of China’s handling of the pandemic compared with the West.  Still, the public and countless investors had hoped for a shift from the present measures after the 20th party congress, where Xi is expected to secure a precedent-breaking third term as the party’s top leader.

  According to Tuesday’s commentary, China’s dynamic zero-Covid approach has balanced pandemic control with economic and social development, allowing China to achieve “extremely low” mortality and “smooth” social and economic functioning.

  “Dynamic zero is the anti-epidemic strategy with the lowest overall social cost and is the best option for the timely control of epidemics in China at this stage,” it said.

  State news agency Xinhua also joined the chorus on Tuesday and called for the country to “build resilience and stamina” and not to “lie flat” – a term Chinese officials and media use for coexisting with the virus. To be sure, pressure for China to abandon its Covid zero strategy has been mounting as the world’s second-largest economy faces a historic slowdown. The most recent World Bank projections put China’s GDP growth for the year at 2.8%, down from its initial forecast of 5% and well below the rest of Asia.

  The recent National Day holiday, traditionally a week-long spending and travel spree, saw trips drop 18 per cent from a year earlier and 39% compared to 2019 levels. Tourism revenues fell 26 per cent from the same period last year and totalled less than half of those earned in 2019. The country’s people, who have cooperated with frequent testing, sudden lockdowns and travel restrictions, have grown increasingly frustrated by the disruptions to daily life.

  Meanwhile, China has seen a rebound in Covid-19 cases in recent weeks fuelled by stealthier and more transmissible variants.

  Case counts have slowly climbed, with nearly new 2,100 local infections reported on Tuesday, though total cases remain much lower than in countries that have opted to coexist with the virus. In response, local governments have doubled down on efforts to contain the spread. Some cities in eastern Zhejiang province have asked travellers to complete testing within 1½ hours of arrival or face restrictions that would ban them from entering public places.

  Other cities have imposed lockdowns even when there are few infections. In the city of Yongji in Shanxi province, a three-day lockdown was imposed as a precaution, though no local infections were reported.

  In Beijing, some primary school pupils were sent home after infections were found at a game shop in the downtown Qianmen area. The capital city has had 54 local infections since September 29, and local party chief Cai Qi vowed to handle the outbreak as if “facing an abyss and walking on thin ice”.

  “We must make every effort to guard against new outbreaks and quickly and decisively handle it … to ensure the safety of the capital,” Cai said at a meeting on Saturday.

  Tuesday’s commentary recognized the challenge of containing outbreaks across the country, but said “the more this happens, the more we must appreciate that dynamic zero is sustainable and must be adhered to”.

  The epidemic is a big test. If the epidemic can be prevented, the economy can be stabilised, people’s lives can be safe and secure, and economic and social development can be smooth and healthy,” it said.

  “Compared to some countries that have relaxed travel and mask restrictions, China lags behind when it comes to vaccination and booster shot rates among the elderly. Some 90 per cent of China’s population received a primary dose of a vaccine, but only about 57 per cent received a booster shot. Among people 60 years or older – a group more vulnerable to severe Covid-19 – only 70 per cent received a booster jab.

  Citing the country’s large population and imbalanced healthcare resources, People’s Daily said relaxed controls would inevitably raise the risk of infections in susceptible populations, and the spread of cases would deal a serious blow to the economy and social development.

  “[We] will end up paying a higher price and suffer bigger losses,” it said, almost hinting that China will keep using covid zero as a scapegoat for all economic weakness for years to come…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 18:40

• Conservatives Should Be More Brave, Proactive, And Leverage Weaknesses Of The Left: Professor
  Conservatives Should Be More Brave, Proactive, And Leverage Weaknesses Of The Left: Professor

  Authored by Ella Kietlinska and Joshua Philipp via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  In the face of extreme policies peddled by the radical left, conservatives need to respond more boldly by using the power of institutions and leverage the weaknesses shown by the left to stop its destructive policies, according to a professor and researcher at a school of government.

  

  Extreme politics that brought about pushing transgender ideology on children, the southern border crisis, and crime surges in big cities requires “strong, real, self-confident men and women to say ’absolutely no’ to this,” said David Azerrad, an assistant professor and research fellow at Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government.

  Many young people at colleges and universities who advocate for woke principles do not truly believe in them, Azerrad told EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program in an interview on Sept. 12.

  “The kids who are at these elite universities are careerists. They’re ambitious … So they do the woke posturing because they feel pressure to their left,” Azerrad said, “but they never pay a price.”

  “If you started putting pressure [on them], a lot of them would fold in line and collapse like a deck of cards,” the professor said.

  For example, if a prestigious university institutes a policy that any student who disrupts a speaker is immediately expelled from the university with no diploma, the students’ behavior would change as they will not be willing to sacrifice a diploma for their woke principles, Azerrad explained.

  Not True Believers

  

  Some say that wokeness is a religion, Azerrad continued, but religions “produce people who sacrifice their lives for the cause.”

  “I don’t see a lot of that with our wokeness. I see a lot of signaling. I see a lot of performative wokeness,” Azerrad noted, “and this gives me hope because it means they could be crushed more readily because they’re not genuine fanatics.”

  There are, however, young people who are true believers, Azerrad said, making it clear that he could not provide the percentage of them.

  Supporting the woke stuff is for young people the way to get into good universities to climb the corporate ranks. Azerrad said, but ultimately” the ruling passion in their soul is not a passion for social justice–it’s comfortable living.”

  Azerrad said he believes that if they are forced through the power of the institutions to make a choice, many of them would fall in line. But this approach has not been tried on them all that much, he added. “This is another thing that gives me hope.”

  The pollings do not indicate that Millennials and Generation Z, also known as Zoomers, have turned conservative, but there is a mounting backlash of millennials and Zoomers who are much more right-wing than the Boomers or Generation X, Azerrad noted.

  “Right now, it’s not a large number,” but polling is static and can change, Azerrad said. “Don’t discount the power of statesmanship and effective governance and powerful rhetoric to move hearts and minds. … There’s more and more appetite and energy, and more dissent amongst them that I think could be harnessed, channeled, deepened, and broadened.”

  Putting Pressure on Ruling Class

  Azerrad thinks that the ruling class is much weaker than perceived because they hire and promote government servants based on diversity criteria instead of competence level.

  Therefore, they are not capable of running these major institutions as efficiently and ruthlessly as they could, Azerrad pointed out.

  “The right needs to just learn from the left,” said Azerrad, who teaches students his thoughts on the new left, including its theorists from Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School.

  Herbert Marcuse was a prominent Marxist scholar of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist theorists first associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and later with Columbia University in New York upon relocating to the United States in 1935.

  “[The new left] view themselves as a minority, which they were at the time, who want to take over institutions that are hostile to their beliefs,” Azerrad said.

  It would be helpful for the right to think in terms of defunding adversary institutions, having them bear the consequences of their woke actions, and rewarding and honoring friendly institutions, Azerrad said. “Know who your political enemies and friends are, and send money and honor only to your friends.”

  

  For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis revoked a tax break for a multi-billion corporation over its woke actions, Azerrad said.

  In April, DeSantis signed a legislature-passed bill to dissolve Walt Disney World’s self-governing status in central Florida. The revocation could have significant tax implications for Disney.

  The move came after Disney issued a critical statement about a DeSantis-backed bill, the Parental Rights in Education bill, that prohibits teachers from instructing about sexual orientation and gender identity topics to children under the third grade.

  There should be more governors taking similar actions. Azerrad said. “[This is] using the power of institutions we control to put the corporations back in their place.”

  However, the right should not copy the left in their actions aimed at attacking their political opponents, Azerrad said.

  “You should not attack a Democratic elected official who’s dining with their family at a restaurant. That’s unacceptable” Azerrad warned. “You shouldn’t issue death threats to sitting Justices of the Supreme Court, who are appointed by a Democratic president.”

  Republicans Need to Play Active Role

  The right usually focuses in its policies on tax cuts, school choice, and bolstering the military with money, Azerrad said. It also did some occupational licensing reform, but it “has not dealt some devastating blows to the left” that would be equivalent to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Azerrad pointed out.

  The Civil Rights Act ended segregation in public places and prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

  Read more here…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 18:20

• Nobody Has Traded 10Y Japanese Govt Bonds For 3 Days!
  Nobody Has Traded 10Y Japanese Govt Bonds For 3 Days!

  No trades (none!) were reported overnight in the benchmark 10Y Japanese Government Bond (JGB) for the third straight day.

  

  This is the longest such occurrence since 1999 when it became the benchmark.

  Trading volumes in JGBs have dried up over the years as the BOJ scooped up sizable chunks of the debt to keep a cap on yields, now holding just shy of 50% of all JGBs.

  

  Simply put, as one veteran JGB trader remarked privately to us, “there is no [cash] market anymore.”

  Traders also lack the incentive to trade benchmark 10-year notes because they expect yields to rise as the Fed aggressively tightens monetary policy, according to Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.

  “The BOJ’s fixed-rate operations have become the JGB trading floor,” said Katsutoshi Inadome, a strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ in Tokyo.

  “Players are guaranteed to find a solid buyer who also buys large lots.”

  Bid-ask spreads for JGBs have exploded since March as inflation fears ripped through global bond markets (but BoJ remains stuck in its easing policy framework)…

  

  Finally, we note that the issue of diminishing liquidity isn’t limited to Japanese bonds.

  

  Bank of America analysts warned in a note this month that shrinking trading volumes in the US Treasury market may be one of the greatest threats to global financial stability.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 18:00

• What If The Truth Never Comes Out?
  What If The Truth Never Comes Out?

  Authored by Julie Ponese via The Epoch Times,

  This is the question that seems to be on the minds of many these days.

  

  The attempt to reach “zero-COVID” was a colossal failure. Original claims of mRNA vaccine efficacy have reportedly been shown to be based on falsified data. Excess mortality is spiking across the globe. And the Canadian government finally admits they have a multi-million dollar contract (pdf) with the World Economic Forum for Traveler Digital ID. What was fiction and then conspiracy theory is now reality.

  Many believe we are approaching a tipping point, that we are on the verge of a revelatory storm, that the truth is finally coming out.

  And yet most people still believe in the narrative, still cling to the idea that lockdowns and masking were necessary and effective, that their questioning friends are unstable “anti-vaxxers,” that government is noble and mainstream media unimpeachable. And from the files of the truly unfathomable, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) is now urging doctors to prescribe drugs and even psychotherapy to their noncompliant patients. The tipping point is hardly a sure thing.

  What if we never reach it? What if the guilty are never held to account? What if we forget only to transgress again and again?

  Anecdotes of the harms of the last two years are palpable but ignored. Patients complain of symptoms their doctors won’t acknowledge. Citizens tell stories the media ignores. Family members try to open dialogue only to be shut down. The stories are told but, for the most part, they aren’t being heard.

  I recently interviewed Trish Wood who moderated the Citizens’ Hearing about the harms of our public health response to COVID-19. She wrote that, a week later, she still felt shaken by the magnitude of what she heard: the damage done to careers, families, and children by the blinkered approach of public health experts. She heard the stories of doctors who were silenced when trying to advocate for patients, people whose lives were forever changed by vaccine injury, and, most tragically, stories of those like Dan Hartman, whose teenage son died following mRNA vaccination.

  Trish wrote powerfully about the importance of taking account of embedding the acknowledgment of these harms in our collective moral conscience. Her words are, dare I say, reminiscent of Elie Wiesel’s.

  In the aftermath of the Holocaust, at a time when the world was so morally injured, so eager for a new start, Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel saw it as his responsibility to speak for those who had been silenced. At a time when most could not bear to remember, Wiesel could not bear to forget. He wrote:

  “I believe firmly and profoundly that whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness, so those who hear us, those who read us must continue to bear witness for us. Until now, they’re doing it with us. At a certain point in time, they will do it for all of us.”

  Weisel’s words are hauntingly poignant for our time.

  Those who tell the stories of the injured knowing they will be ignored, who advocate for patients only to be censured, who highlight the children who have died by suicide rather than from COVID-19 only to be silenced do it because they believe that a cry in the dark will eventually be heard. And even if it isn’t, they feel obligated to testify on behalf of those who can’t speak for themselves.

  I apologize if my reference to Nazi atrocities offends you. My aim in making the comparison is not to be irreverent but purposeful. True, the atrocities of our time are not identical to those of 1930s and ’40s Europe. But they don’t need to be to learn important moral lessons from them. Wiesel’s promise of “never again” was not just to past victims of atrocities but to all future victims as well.

  This is how the battle will be fought now, whether the truth about the last two years will be dragged into the open or revised into oblivion. We are already seeing backpedaling among our officials, whose mishandling of the pandemic is undeniable.

  But that is beyond my point. We have relied for too long on institutions to do the remembering for us, to generate moral responsibility on our behalf. In the era of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, personal accountability has been trained out of us. We were taught to believe that institutions would act as our surrogate moral conscience, taking account and making apology for us. I don’t deny the importance of collective responsibility. But sometimes moral injury is personal, done by individuals to one another, and the accountability needs to happen in kind.

  There are few who are not personally complicit in the harms of the last two years. And the temptation to put on the armor of the bystander is powerful, to say we weren’t involved, that we “had no choice.” But complicity is a form of moral action, sometimes the most powerful there is.

  Wouldn’t it be lovely if our moral slate could be wiped clean, if we could be absolved of all the hurt we have caused? But this doesn’t honor the truth, and it’s not the way we exercise our humanity.

  What if the truth never comes out?

  It may not.

  But if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be because we ignored those crying out to us, because we stood behind a shield of compliance and deference. The road back to freedom, unity, and reconciliation starts with testimony and accountability, and we need to take those painful first few steps now.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 10/11/2022 – 17:40

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