- Durham: Clinton Allies Spied On The Executive Office Of The President
Durham: Clinton Allies Spied On The Executive Office Of The President
Submitted by Techno Fog via The Reactionary,
The Michael Sussmann case is heating up.
On February 11, 2022, Durham filed the Government’s Motion to Inquire into Potential Conflicts of Interest in the Michael Sussmann case. Read it here. As you might recall, Sussmann was charged with giving false statements to then-FBI General Counsel James Baker regarding the interests he was representing in pushing to the FBI the Alfa Bank/Trump Organization hoax. More background information on the Sussmann indictment can be found here.
The basis for the motion is that Sussmann’s current counsel, Latham & Watkins LLP (Latham) might have a conflict of interest because Latham previously represented Perkins Coie and Mark Elias “in this investigation.” It is alleged that Latham “likely possesses confidential knowledge about Perkins Coie’s role in, and views concerning, Sussmann’s past activities.” (Cleaned up.)
There might also be a conflict because Latham was representing both the Clinton Campaign and Hillary for America in the Special Counsel’s investigation. Durham observes that Latham’s duties to these former clients “might cause its interests to diverge from those of [Sussmann].”
Why might there be a conflict?
Because Durham might offer evidence at trial he obtained from the Clinton Campaign and Hillary for America.
We previously discussed how Rodney Joffe (identified as Tech Executive-1 in the Sussmann indictment and in the latest filing discussing the conflict) exploited proprietary – and perhaps classified – data provided by DARPA to further their own political attacks, and how that might result in charges. It was later confirmed that two former DARPA employees have given grand jury testimony, so it appears Durham is following this track.
I provide that background because of what we just learned. Durham also divulged, to an extent, that contractors and tech experts – those same people involved in the Alfa Bank hoax – essentially spied on President Trump.
According to Durham, Joffe and his associates exploited internet data from “the Executive Office of the President of the United States” to further their own political agenda. They had come to possess this data as part of a “sensitive arrangement” with the U.S. government. As Durham explains:
Joffe and his associates manipulated this information to further a conspiracy theory that Trump and those in Trump’s orbit were continuing their secret backchannels with the Russians. This was repackaged with the Alfa Bank hoax and given to Sussmann, who then laundered it to the CIA on February 9, 2017. Sussmann alleged to the CIA that the data showed “that Trump and/or his associates were using supposedly rare, Russian-made wireless phones in the vicinity of the White House and other locations.” Durham “identified no support for these allegations.”
One can’t help ask why Joffe (via Sussmann) risked legal exposure to continue to push false Trump-Russia allegations before and after the 2016 election. First to the FBI in 2016 then to the CIA in 2017. It seems that Joffe was desperate, and his desperation only increased after Trump’s election.
The source of Joffe’s desperation? It’s speculation at this point, but perhaps it goes to the origins of the purported Russia/DNC hack. To revise a previous question we have asked:
What if Crowdstrike was a patsy, there to unknowingly reach false conclusions of a “Russian hack” based on fraudulent information provided to them by Rodney Joffe and Perkins Coie and the DNC/Hillary Campaign?
We don’t have an answer to that question – yet. Maybe we never will. But if anything, it seems likely that we will see an indictment of Rodney Joffe.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 02/13/2022 – 00:27 - Separation Or Purge? Sharing A Society With The Political Left Is Impossible
Separation Or Purge? Sharing A Society With The Political Left Is Impossible
By Brandon Smith of Alt-Market
Of all the social drivers in history the concept of freedom is the most powerful and fascinating. There are many observable objective truths in the world and it’s always important to recognize them, but the idea of freedom is more rare because it is a universal SUBJECTIVE truth. Meaning, it exists inherently in the majority of individuals; we don’t learn it, we just know it instinctively. Most of us share the experience but there is no microscope or telescope in existence that can observe that experience. We just have to trust it, or perhaps, have faith.
Freedom is not taught to us, we are born with the idea already hardwired. If anything, it has to be conditioned out of us.
We can see the aftereffects of the human experience of freedom in the great upheavals that occur when our societies become too rigid, too controlled and too authoritarian. Some will argue that tyrants have no concept of freedom and this debunks the notion that it’s an inherent psychological quality, but this is a misconception. Many tyrants love freedom, but only for themselves. Like an obsessive compulsive, when the average authoritarian sees free movement within the rest of society all he sees is chaos that needs to be micro-managed. He is so mentally unhinged by the existence of independent activity that he is compelled to crush it and impose his brand of “order.”
If you want to understand the thinking process of the political left today, this is where you need to start. They believe only certain special people deserve to have freedom (or deserve to live), and they are of course part of that group. The rest of us can’t be trusted with freedom because we “think the wrong way,” and so we need to be corralled and fenced in.
This is not to say that some structure within society is wrong, it can be a good thing, but not when it is imposed by an elitist minority of psychopathic people. There will never be any justice within such a system, no fairness and no true progress. Authoritarianism is the opposite of progress; it is the antithesis, and yet these people call themselves “progressives.”
Freedom requires boldness and courage because it demands personal responsibility. When you are free to make your own decisions you are also free to fail, and only you can be blamed for your own failures. This is a terrifying notion for most leftists and collectivists because they believe that they are owed a positive outcome regardless of their actions or merit. They believe it is their “right” to be taken care of by others if they are incapable of taking care of themselves, but this is not equality, this is “equity.” This is stealing wealth and opportunity from more worthy people in order to artificially inflate others that put in little or no effort.
Meritocracy is the most equal system in existence because it is freedom based; equality of opportunity is the epitome of fairness; equity of outcome is the epitome of injustice.
Leftists hyperfocus on race, skin color and sexual identity for this very reason. They are desperately searching for a way to circumvent the obstacles of freedom, merit and individualism. If everything in society can be reduced down to race, then personal accomplishment and responsibility are no longer relevant. In the mind of the leftist, if certain people are inherently oppressed and others are inherently oppressive, then equality of opportunity is not enough and equity of outcome must be enforced.
Making everything about victim group status thereby erases freedom and meritocracy cannot function. All a person needs to do is say “I am oppressed, therefore I am entitled,” and if they meet the broad leftist criteria then they are handed a livelihood or success simply because they exist.
I saw a commercial on YouTube a week ago for yet another social justice documentary titled ‘Everything’s Going To Be All White,’ once again attempting to pontificate on our supposed reign of dominance across every facet of the globe and I could not help but think this entire narrative is nothing more than a cowardly attempt to deflect responsibility. Yes, it’s also an attempt to divide and conquer western nations but how many people are actually watching these race hyped documentaries and TV shows un-ironically? According to the stats and reviews there aren’t very many.
Nearly every claim made in these productions is based on previously debunked social justice misrepresentations of history from books like ‘White Fragility’ and movements like the 1619 Project. If you really want to get an accurate representation of US history in particular and the limited role slavery played in terms of modern social outcomes, then I suggest reading the works of Thomas Sowell, a brilliant black American economist and historian with no bias in his analysis.
Slavery is a mere footnote in our past, not an all encompassing determinant of our present and future as leftists like to argue. There is no legal slavery in America, and there is no one alive today in America who has experience race based slavery or that has been affected by it. Slavery and racism were far more pervasive in nations of brown and black people in history. In fact, some of these countries still engage in various forms of slavery today. If you want to experience actual racism as a black or brown person then travel to a country like China and see how long it takes before you are kicked out of an establishment for your skin color.
White people are not the problem, people who disrespect the benefits of freedom are the problem regardless of their skin.
What we need to understand is that race and oppression propaganda is not really rooted in race and oppression. It appeals to a certain subset of our population because it offers them a way to rationalize their lack of merit and their fears of freedom and consequence. If you can blame white people for all your problems and have this be believed, then the temptation to fail is increased because there are no consequences. Why work hard to make something of yourself if you can do nothing and be rewarded anyway?
By extension, the racism blame game is alluring to many in society because it can be used as a weapon to harm political enemies. When leftists complain about the evils of “white people” what they are really talking about are the “evils” of conservatives and others that do not conform to the leftist ideology. They rarely come right out and say it, but one day the documentaries will switch from “Dear White People” to “Dear Conservatives.” The fight has never been about race, it’s always been about ideals and principles and eliminating the ideals that contradict the leftist mission. This is why they are consistently hostile to anyone conservative, even more so if that person is black.
The leftist agenda is all about diminishing freedom and societal respect for freedom by whatever means necessary. Everything is about management, everything is about centralization, everything is about control. Conservatives and many moderates stand in direct opposition to this.
The most common mistake among newbies in the liberty movement is when they try to explain away leftist actions by bringing up the “false left/right paradigm.” These people don’t understand what this actually means. The left/right paradigm exists at the TOP of the social and political pyramid; top political and corporate leaders pretend to be in one party or the other while in reality they are all working together and implementing the same policies. At the bottom of the pyramid among regular people there is no false left/right paradigm – There is a very real left/right division.
This is undeniable now in the face of the covid and vaccine mandates. For the longest time I have heard people claim that when the push for authoritarianism in the US arrived many conservatives would simple go along with it. Yet, today numerous conservative red states are fighting the mandates tooth and nail while leftist blue states have been suffocated by them. In fact, red states have acted as beacons of rebellion for the world – Without them it is unlikely that the Supreme Court would have dropped Biden’s federal vax mandates. The threat of war is tangible if such mandates are ever instituted, and the Supreme Court knows this.
I have had people ask me in the past why there haven’t been any major actions on the part of conservatives in the US against the mandates and I have to break it to them that there ARE NO MANDATES in conservative places and there haven’t been for at least 18 months. None. Zero. Zip. We don’t need to protest because we stopped the mandates before they could take hold.
As I have said from the very beginning of the pandemic response, if even a handful of states or countries can remain free from covid controls they will inspire people around the world and act as proof that the mandates are pointless. Today, as America continues to beat back the covid agenda there are mass protests in Canada and the UK has cut most of their covid restrictions. Freedom spreads like wildfire once the flames are sparked.
Leftists hate this. Covid, like the fantasy of “institutional racism,” is a tempting vehicle to forward their ideology. If you can convince the public that they are a constant threat to themselves and each other, then it is a small matter to convince them that government needs to step in and protect society from itself and from notions of freedom that might put society at risk. Without covid as a foil the political left has nothing, and so they continue to perpetuate the lie that the virus is an imminent threat to the majority of people when the average Infection Fatality Rate is a tiny 0.27%.
The real question here is, when a group of people hate freedom this much how is it possible to coexist with them? The answer is we can’t.
Anyone who defends merit and liberty will always be a target of those that despise merit and liberty. They will never stop. They will forever be looking for ways to undermine both. If covid mandates and race based propaganda don’t work then they will search for another tool to do the job. If one can say anything “good” about leftists, it’s that they do not give up even when they are clearly outmatched and beaten. The problem is that this dedication to their cause is not based in love or truth, but in zealotry and cultism. They are jihadists, and nothing, not logic, not facts, not reason nor moral principle will convince them of the error of their ways.
So what is the solution? One could suggest that we make it easy for them to leave. After all, if they hate America as much as they say they do then why are they still living here? Probably because most other places in the world are abysmal in comparison. But if we keep them around they will drag the country down to the same terrible level. It’s a conundrum. Beyond that, what country would want them? Social justice is seen as a cancer in many countries and an injection of leftist migrants would be a disaster for them economically and socially, even in nations that claim to support leftist models.
Most leftists would also refuse to leave anyway because they believe they should decide the path of America’s future. As much as they hate this country they see themselves as its saviors.
Then there is the option of internal separation, which I see as preferable. This is already happening in many forms as conservatives and moderates from blue states relocate by the millions to red states. In my home state of Montana there has been an influx of migrants from blue states and every single new person I have talked to is a conservative/prepper whose family lived in a blue state for generations and they finally got fed up. The vast majority of people moving are conservative minded and they are now congregating.
Why not carry this process forward to its natural conclusion? Red states break from blue states and red counties break from blue state control and we live our lives the way we see fit. Let the leftists continue with their draconian economic and political models and see how well that goes for them. I guarantee they will be in financial ruins within a decade (the list of most indebted places in the country is dominated by blue states) and they will be begging to return to a union with red states (except for the zealots, which would lose influence as they continue to fail).
But this will not happen peacefully because, again, leftists cannot tolerate free activity. Their OCD will not allow them to be content with living in a collectivist state of their own; ALL states must be collectivist before they are satisfied. People are property to them; property of the collective, and people who are property cannot be allowed to make decisions without oversight.
There are people who will naively argue that the establishment wants America divided and separation plays into their hands. Guess what? There is no reconciliation with tyrants and trying to maintain a union with them is the pinnacle of idiocy. There is no union, it is a figment of your imagination. I think the establishment prefers that we stay within the box; that we continue wasting all our time and attention on on trying to hold a system together that is corrupt beyond repair. We will never be allowed to peacefully repair what has been broken.
Unfortunately, the only path this leaves is one of violence. Leftists will have to be forced out of positions of power and influence and removed from our culture like a cancerous tumor is cut from the body to save the body. I don’t think this should be the obvious choice. I don’t want it to be. What I am saying is, leftists and their partners in government and the corporate world will force the issue because they cannot help it; like the story of the scorpion and the frog, it’s in their nature to destroy.
They will continue to push and steal and threaten and abuse until they get the inevitable response of a punch in the teeth. Then, they will play the victim like they always do. This crying and gaslighting will have to be ignored. In the end, these people cannot be tolerated in a free culture and their power to harm and enslave others must be removed, one way or another.
* * *
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Tyler Durden
Sun, 02/13/2022 – 00:00 - These Are The World Largest Cannabis Markets
These Are The World Largest Cannabis Markets
North America and Europe are home to some of the world’s most famous cannabis cultures, such as California and Amsterdam.
However, as Visual Capitalist details below, even in these undoubtedly successful markets, cannabis legality varies by country – and as this graphic by Tenacious Labs explores, so does its subsequent market value.
The European Cannabis Market
Although the European Union is one single economic market with agreed upon laws and regulations, individual countries still have their say on national laws. Looking at Europe as a region reshapes things again as countries like the UK are outside the EU—further muddying cannabis laws and regulation.
Regardless, there is immense potential in the European cannabis market—it is expected to be worth $37 billion by 2027. The biggest markets driving this are Germany, the UK, and France.
As of December 2021, Malta became the first European country to fully legalize recreational cannabis. Three other countries have also started the process towards legalization, and a number of others are expected to fully legalize in the next few years, namely:
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Germany
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Luxembourg
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The Netherlands
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Spain
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Switzerland
On average, 1 in 10 Europeans use cannabis every year. With little legality for recreational cannabis, this high demand has to be met by the illegal market. As a result, yearly illicit cannabis market sales are estimated at around €11 billion (US$13 billion)—representing significant untapped potential.
The North American Cannabis Market
The U.S., Canada, and Mexico make up the world’s largest continental cannabis market, worth $18.1 billion in 2020. In Canada, cannabis is federally legal, and Mexico will soon be in the same boat. The U.S., however, is a different story.
America’s stance on cannabis legality varies on a state-by-state basis. Federally, cannabis is illegal—listed as a Schedule I drug, alongside heroin. But individual states have their own laws, from states with fully legal recreational cannabis to medical usage only permitted, and full illegality.
The U.S. has the biggest cannabis market potential in North America by far.
In states where cannabis has been fully legal for years—like Colorado—countless jobs and revenue have been added to the state’s economy and in such markets, regulation is pushing the industry towards maturity. In contrast, in states like Wyoming it is still illegal to be ‘under the influence’ of cannabis.
This stark contrast within one country hinders the market potential of the entire continent. However, the MORE (Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement) Act was recently reintroduced in the U.S.’ House of Representatives. If passed, it would remove cannabis from its classification as a Schedule I drug.
Cannabis Markets with Huge Potential
North America and Europe are the most advanced cannabis markets, but without transparent and clear regulation, we have yet to experience their full potential.
Treaties like USMCA in North America, and the economic union for most European countries, offer the chance for the world to benefit from the highly lucrative cannabis market.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 23:30 -
- Retired 3-Star General: Critical Race Theory Leading To Military 'Failure'
Retired 3-Star General: Critical Race Theory Leading To Military ‘Failure’
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A retired Marine general spoke out about critical race theory training in the armed forces, arguing that the Marxist ideology will ultimately weaken the U.S.’s military capability.
U.S. Army soldiers are seen in a 2011 file photo taken near Nasiriyah, Iraq. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) Writing for military magazine Task and Purpose, retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold argued that critical race theory and related ideologies run counter to the “stone-cold pragmatism” needed to win conflicts.
“Wars must be waged only with stone-cold pragmatism, not idealism, and fought only when critical national interests are at stake,” he wrote. “Hopes for changing cultures to fit our model are both elitist and naive. The failures of our campaigns in Iraq and especially in Afghanistan confirm this.”
Meanwhile, the tenets of critical race theory—an offshoot of the Marxist critical theory school—can ruin unit cohesion, he added.
“A military force’s greatest strengths are cohesion and discipline,” said Newbold, who retired in 2002. “Individuality or group identity is corrosive and a centrifugal force. Indeed, the military wears uniforms because uniformity is essential.”
“The tenets of Critical Race Theory—a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement that seeks to examine the intersection of race and law in the United States, but which has the unfortunate effect of dividing people along racial lines—undermine our military’s unity and diminish our warfighting capabilities.”
If military leaders focus on differences and group identity, he added, it undermines “cohesion and morale.” After that, “failure results,” the retired general said.
“Values that are admirable in civilian society—sensitivity, individuality, compassion, and tolerance for the less capable—are often antithetical to the traits that deter a potential enemy and win the wars that must be fought: Conformity, discipline, unity,” Newbold said.
Last year, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested that critical race theory is being taught to cadets.
“I want to understand white rage, and I’m white,” Milley said during a contentious House Armed Services Committee exchange in June. “I personally find it offensive that we are accusing the United States military general officers, commissioned [and] noncommissioned officers, of being ‘woke’ or something else because we’re studying some theories that are out there. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.”
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) also claimed last year that they’ve received hundreds of tips from military whistleblowers who reported that critical race theory and related diversity training programs are being implemented in the armed forces.
“We’ve received hundreds of whistleblower complaints about critical race theory being pushed on our soldiers,” Cotton said in a statement last year. “The problem is real—and worse than we thought.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 23:00 - China's Rare Earth Monopoly Is Diminishing
China’s Rare Earth Monopoly Is Diminishing
Some while ago, precious rare earths important in the production of microchips, electronics and electric motors were almost exclusively sourced in China. However, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, in recent years, several nations have picked up production again while new players entered the market, diversifying it at least to some degree.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Yet, China was still responsible for 60 percent of global production in 2021, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
But since many countries are wary of depending on China, especially when it comes to technology products, nations with rare earth deposits are likely to exploit them further. The U.S., however, is still shipping its rare earths to China for processing, but is looking to add domestic processing facilities using funds of the bipartisan infrastructure deal.
China also has the largest know deposits of rare earths, but Brazil, Vietnam and Russia also have a lot of (largely) untapped potential in the sector.
The United States and Australia ramped up production of rare earths after 2010 and most recently, Myanmar and Thailand started to mine considerable amounts. As seen in our chart, the U.S. had in the past mined and produced rare earths for military uses and re-entered the market as rare earths were getting more important as a part of the implementation of crucial technologies.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 22:30 - Why Ideology Is The Ancient Enemy Of Civilization
Why Ideology Is The Ancient Enemy Of Civilization
Submitted by Victor Davis Hanson, via the Epoch Times
What ultimately destroyed the evil empires of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were bankrupt dogmas. Crackpot ideology destroyed free expression. It ruined meritocracy and ensured unequal application of the laws—and so paved the way for far worse.
After a “mostly peaceful” march to the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta on May 29, 2020, protestors returned to the area around the CNN Center and confronted police amid outrage over the death of George Floyd The Nazi idea of a superior Aryan race adjudicated everything from physics to tank design. Soviet commissars did the same, subordinating rational thought to communist agendas.
Zealots in both systems infiltrated the universities and schools to institutionalize indoctrination.
Wokeism, while not yet as lethal, is similar. Racial wokeism posits that the race and gender of the vice president and the next Supreme Court justice subordinate all other considerations.
But will the current vice president and next Supreme Court justice commensurately select their own future surgeons, or their upcoming airline pilots, on the same predetermined race and sex criteria?
What—other than ideology—explains why rejecting nominations of African-American judge Janice Rogers Brown in 2003 and 2005 was not racist and sexist, but blocking Joe Biden’s upcoming nomination of a preselected African-American female would be?
Why were most Antifa and Black Lives Matter criminals who looted, destroyed, and assaulted during the 120 days of summer 2020 not charged, much less tried? Why, in contrast, were the January 6 rioters or the current Canadian truckers treated disproportionately harshly by the media?
Had the same rioters on January 6 been waving pride flags and BLM banners, would some of them have been sitting for a year in solitary confinement and still uncharged?
Had the criminal protestors and looters of summer 2020 been wearing red MAGA hats, would they also have mostly gotten off without charges?
What would have happened had conservative demonstrators cut out a police-free “MAGA Zone” in Seattle rather than the exempted Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone? Would police have similarly left it alone, and the media similarly romanticized such illegality?
One of the reasons the COVID-19 lockdown and mask policies lost public confidence was their utter corruption by ideology.
When thousands in June 2020 brazenly defied quarantines—and yet were excused by over 1,000 healthcare professionals claiming that woke agendas justified violating quarantine laws—then millions of Americans concluded government policy was as much about identity politics as saving lives.
Which politicians in 2020 trashed the vaccine programs and declared they would likely not get inoculations—if they were endorsed by then-President Donald Trump?
If Trump is demonized as a destroyer of election legitimacy, what then are we to say of the beatified Stacey Abrams? She lost the Georgia gubernatorial race by more than 50,000 votes. Yet for years, she has maintained the voting was rigged and the elected governor is illegitimate.
In 2000, who challenged for weeks the vote count, despite numerous public and private audits confirming George W. Bush’s popular vote victory in Florida?
Who in 2004–2005—for only the second time in history—challenged in Congress the Electoral College vote? In whose party were the 31 House members and one senator who forced a congressional vote in a failed effort to overturn the election?
Who in 2016 ran ads for weeks after the election, beseeching the chosen electors to violate their constitutional duties, ignore their state vote tallies, and instead vote for Hillary Clinton?
And who in 2016 claimed her victorious opponent was elected president illegitimately? Who bragged she was joining the “resistance” to undermine his presidency? Who advised Joe Biden in 2020 not to accept the election result if he lost?
If conservative zealots were ransacking American stores, carjacking innocents in the major cities, and spiking murder rates to historical highs, would the Biden administration be mobilizing law enforcement to ensure arrests, prosecutions, and incarceration? Would current city and county prosecutors continue to turn a blind eye?
If anti-communist Cubans by the millions were illegally crashing the southern border, would they be welcomed in as are those from Mexico and Central Americans?
If, by 2024, a Republican president enjoys a Republican Congress, what would be the reaction to conservatives who advocated ending the filibuster? Ensuring a national voting law requiring IDs at all the polls? Voting to increase the Supreme Court to 15 justices to guarantee at least six new nominations for the Republican-controlled presidency and Congress?
When ideology in places like Castroite Cuba, the old Soviet Union, and Venezuela warped the application of the law, destroyed the role of merit in assessing qualifications, silenced speech, and unequally applied the law, then society unwound.
In such ideological dystopias, eventually even the shelves empty, the currency becomes worthless, and the nation regresses into poverty and chaos. Is that the future we await?
Scarier still, ideology ensures that such chaos is heralded as success. Critics are demonized and hounded. And the obsequious state media assures the public that things are going just great.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 22:00 - World Economic Forum 'Insane Pro-CRT Propaganda' Video Draws Sharp Rebuke
World Economic Forum ‘Insane Pro-CRT Propaganda’ Video Draws Sharp Rebuke
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has come under fire for a video which initially appears as a neutral explainer on Critical Race Theory (CRT), only to quickly shift into a full-throated endorsement of the ideology.
CRT charges an entire demographic with a collective crime, uses the charge as grounds for framing individuals within that demographic of perpetrators of that crime, and then seeks to strip condemned individuals of rights, dignity, and equal protection based on that charge (h/t).
The WEF video defines CRT as a theory “first developed by US legal scholars in the 1980s” which “argues that the laws, rules and, regulations that govern society today have been shaped by the historical subordination of people of colour and that this is a driving force behind racial inequality today,” according to Breitbart.
As an example of the supposed racism embedded in every fiber of America’s institutions, the WEF points to the high number of incarcerated black males throughout the country.
“Take the US criminal justice system, for example,” it says. “While everyone is seen as equal under the law, Black Americans are imprisoned at 5 times the rate of white people.“
“CRT says this disparity is a legacy of America’s racist past,” but that opponents say it “paints all white people as bigots.”
The video then positions CRT awareness as an honorable pursuit. Watch what opponent Chris Rufo described as an “Insane pro-CRT propaganda video.”
This is what you need to know about critical race theory.
Learn more about racial equality: https://t.co/aNh1BmXuyi pic.twitter.com/R0eAn4P7lJ
— World Economic Forum (@wef) February 8, 2022
Others condemned the WEF as well (via Breitbart):
“Ah yes, the world economic forum promoting a radical departure from the current relations of power,” wrote video essayist and author Peter Coffin.
“This PROVES CRT is the revolution. I’ve been wrong this whole time!” he mocked.
“Run from the WEF working class people,” warned clinical psychologist and psychology professor Dr. Jordan Peterson.
Run from the WEF working class people. https://t.co/VmXzZfZHC5
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) February 9, 2022
“Why would the World Economic Forum come out in support of Critical Race Theory?” asked author and mathematician Dr. James Lindsay, who warned last month that CRT activists aim to dismantle the U.S. and establish “a total dictatorship” of the so-called “anti-racists.”
“Because they’re the ones who want to divide our society with this Marxist Theory or any other tool they can use to break the world and seize power,” he said.
Why would the World Economic Forum come out in support of Critical Race Theory? Because they’re the ones who want to divide our society with this Marxist Theory or any other tool they can use to break the world and seize power. https://t.co/wpsl3JAsh9
— James Lindsay, so emotional and sensitive (@ConceptualJames) February 9, 2022
Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) national security adviser tweeted “I can’t believe you’re advocating for ‘equality’ at the expense of equity” in 2022. “You’re either on board or you’re not. Be better.”
Read the rest of the comments here.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 21:30 - The Overton Window & Bitcoin
The Overton Window & Bitcoin
Authored by ‘DON’ via BitcoinMagazine.com,
As Bitcoin enters the mainstream conversation, it is becoming increasingly common for politicians to embrace or disparage the technology…
As Bitcoin moves into its adolescence, many people from all walks of life, from all across the world may be pondering the question: Is Bitcoin mainstream? Is it in the process of becoming mainstream? Or is it something that may never become mainstream?
The answer to this question will likely have profound effects on how governments around the world behave toward Bitcoin in its teenage years.
The reason that public perception plays a large role in how governments behave toward a certain topic is related to a concept called the Overton window.
In this article, we examine the Overton window: What it is, how it relates to Bitcoin, and whether the Overton window for Bitcoin has shifted far enough toward mainstream to warrant support from governments.
WHAT IS THE OVERTON WINDOW?
Wikipedia states,
“The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse.
“The term is named after American policy analyst Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians’ individual preferences. According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.”
At the core of the Overton window is public perception. Contrary to what many people think, politicians, at least politicians that want to stay in office, cannot enact any policy they please. Instead, they must choose from a range of policies that are politically acceptable at that time. The Overton window defines that range of ideas.
Examples of movements that have shifted from fringe — outside the Overton window — to mainstream include women’s suffrage, racial equality and recreational marijuana use. Once these movements became mainstream, government policies began to align in support of the movements.
HOW DOES THE OVERTON WINDOW RELATE TO BITCOIN?
Now that we have a fundamental understanding of the Overton window, let’s examine how it relates to Bitcoin. Bitcoin turned 13 on January 3, 2022. During its first 13 years, it has gone from a network primarily used by cryptography enthusiasts, extreme privacy advocates, hardcore libertarians and Austrian economic enthusiasts to something used by everyday individuals all around the world, companies small and large and even nation-states such as El Salvador.
With the understanding that the Overton window dictates “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time,” we can then ask ourselves, “Has the Overton window for Bitcoin shifted far enough toward the mainstream to warrant support from governments?” To answer that question, let’s examine the U.S. government’s actions related to Bitcoin to date and then extrapolate what those actions may mean moving forward.
UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AND BITCOIN
Contrary to what many bitcoin skeptics may say, in examining the U.S. government actions surrounding bitcoin to date, one would be hard-pressed to find anything overly burdensome. In 2014, the IRS classified bitcoin as property. The United States has some of the strongest property rights of any country in the world. Bitcoin being classified as property affords it the same legal protections as other types of personal property, such as real estate, and is an important reason that some of the largest bitcoin holders choose to own their bitcoin in the United States.
In 2017, the CME Group, working in conjunction with the CFTC, launched a bitcoin futures market, an important step for any commodity.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has repeatedly reiterated that bitcoin is not a security and thus not within their field of regulation. Other cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, may be in for a rude awakening when it comes to SEC enforcement.
In 2020, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave federally chartered banks the green light to custody bitcoin.
In 2021, the first bitcoin exchange traded fund (ETF) in the United States was approved. Yes, the ETF is based on bitcoin futures and does not hold physical bitcoin, but the fact that a bitcoin ETF product was approved at all is just another feather in the cap of bitcoin when it comes to favorable regulation in America.
So, when we review the totality of government action related to bitcoin in the United States, we can see that the U.S. government has been supportive of bitcoin overall to date. Now let’s turn our attention to what this may mean moving forward for Bitcoin as it relates to the Overton window.
IS THE TIME RIGHT FOR POLITICIANS AND GOVERNMENTS TO LEAN INTO THE BITCOIN MOVEMENT?
With millions of people owning bitcoin, corporations of all sizes owning bitcoin, and even nation-states owning bitcoin, it is clear that Bitcoin has, or is in the process of, passing through the Overton window in many parts of the world. That being the case, the time is ripe for politicians and governments to lean into the Bitcoin movement and use it to their advantage.
We’re starting to see the first inklings of this play out. In the United States, politicians such as Cynthia Lummis, Ted Cruz, Aarika Rhodes, Tom Emmer and others are leaning into pro-Bitcoin politics. In doing so, they’re tapping into a large base of voters who care about the issue of Bitcoin more than they do any other issue. This large single-issue voting block is powerful for any politician to tap into, as they tend to be very vocal and, in a world of 24/7 social media influence, being vocal is important. Dennis Porter wrote a great article, “Why Bitcoin Represents The Ultimate Single-Issue Voting Bloc.” I highly suggest you read it here.
Another great example of politicians and governments leaning into Bitcoin is President Nayib Bukele and El Salvador. Bukele and El Salvador burst onto the international scene in 2020 when they announced a law that would make bitcoin legal tender. Instead of continuing to be beholden to agencies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for funding, El Salvador instead chose to plug into the Bitcoin network. Bukele became internationally recognized almost overnight, and the country of El Salvador went from being a small country, mostly forgotten by the West, to being on the international stage. You can bet that other countries are considering similar actions.
Now that we’ve reviewed several examples of politicians and governments taking advantage of the shifting Overton window for Bitcoin, let’s review an example of a government trying to keep Bitcoin out of the Overton window: China.
China has “banned Bitcoin” more times than I count. Which makes sense when you think about it. A Communist country run by a dictator doesn’t want its people having access to a global, distributed, censorship-resistant sovereign monetary system? Shocking! However, in 2021, China took its disdain for Bitcoin to a whole new level. They were serious this time. They cracked down on miners, resulting in 50% of the Bitcoin hash rate being relocated to friendlier jurisdictions. They cracked down on exchanges, forcing accounts serving Chinese citizens to be closed. They generally put enough fear into enough people to dissuade many of them from interacting with Bitcoin. China put on a classic display of attempting to keep a movement from shifting into the Overton window. In my opinion, history will not be kind to China for its grave mistake.
CONCLUSION
The Overton window is an important concept to understand. Simply put, the Overton window dictates a range of policies that are acceptable to the mainstream population for a given topic at a given time. As Bitcoin embarks on its teenage years, and adoption continues to grow, it is clear that the Overton window for Bitcoin has shifted, or is at least in the process of shifting. Politicians and governments around the world will be well served to lean into the Bitcoin movement, use it to their advantage to attract single-issue voters, and to strengthen their position on the global stage. In the United States and El Salvador, we are seeing this process begin to play out. In other countries, such as China, we see attempts to thwart Bitcoin before it can pass through the Overton window. In my opinion, these countries will look back and realize that trying to stop the inevitable was a grave mistake.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 21:00 - Americans Love The NFL, But Change Is Looming
Americans Love The NFL, But Change Is Looming
While Baseball is often referred to as “America’s favorite pastime”, the NFL has long surpassed the MLB as the nation’s favorite professional sports league.
For several reasons however, including first and foremost its better suitability for television, Statista’s Felix Richter notes that football flew by baseball as Americans’ favorite sport to watch in the 1960s and hasn’t looked back since.
In recent years, baseball has even been surpassed by basketball, as younger audiences prefer the action-packed, star-studded NBA over what many young viewers consider the dragging affair of a three-hour baseball game.
According to recent findings from Statista’s Global Consumer Survey, the NFL remains the number 1 among major professional sports leagues in the U.S., at least for now.
You will find more infographics at Statista
While 52 percent of self-declared sports fans follow the National Football League, compared to 42 percent for the NBA and 31 percent who follow the MLB, looking at the youngest group of respondents reveals a worrying trend for NFL executives.
Among 16- to 25-year-olds, the NFL only plays second fiddle to the NBA, with just 33 percent of young sports fans following the league. The NBA reaches 40 percent of Gen X fans, who are overall less likely to follow any professional sports leagues than their older compatriots.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 20:30 - "We're At End Days Here" – US Faces Rampant Shortages Of 116 Different Pharmaceutical Drugs
“We’re At End Days Here” – US Faces Rampant Shortages Of 116 Different Pharmaceutical Drugs
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Global supplies of pharmaceutical drugs are getting tighter and tighter, and this has very serious implications for 2022 and beyond. If you depend upon a certain pharmaceutical drug in order to stay alive, I would recommend doing whatever you can to make sure that you have as much of that drug stockpiled as possible, because a day may come when you are unable to get any more for an extended period of time. Much of our drug production has been outsourced to China, and our relations with China are not going so well right now. In fact, the moment that China invades Taiwan we are going to have a major league national crisis on our hands.
Let me try to explain this one step at a time.
The FDA regularly keeps a list of pharmaceutical drug shortages. According to that list, there were 112 drug shortages in the U.S. in November, and there were 114 drug shortages in the U.S. as of January 11th…
Nationwide, more than 100 drugs are in short supply, including antibiotics, diuretics, opioids and heart failure medications, FDA data shows.
As of Jan. 11, 114 drugs were in shortage, according to the FDA’s database of current and resolved drug shortages, which is updated daily. The current tally is a continuation of shortage levels seen last year. In November 2021, the FDA reported 112 drug shortages.
I wanted information that was more up to date than that, so I went over and checked out the latest FDA drug shortage list for myself.
There are 165 entries on the list right now, but 49 of them have been resolved.
Subtracting 49 from 165 gives us a total of 116 pharmaceutical drug shortages in the United States at this moment.
That is shocking.
What are people supposed to do if they can’t get the drugs that they need?
Unfortunately, this is another area where we have outsourced a tremendous amount of production to China.
Today, a whopping 97 percent of all antibiotics purchased in the United States come from China.
Just think about that.
If our supplies of antibiotics were suddenly cut off, a whole lot of Americans would die.
And it isn’t just antibiotics that we are talking about. According to one expert, if China suddenly cut off the flow of pharmaceutical drugs many of our hospitals “would cease to function within months, if not days”…
As the U.S. defense establishment grows increasingly concerned about China’s potentially hostile ambitions, the pharmaceutical supply chain is receiving new scrutiny.
“If China shut the door on exports of medicines and their key ingredients and raw material, U.S. hospitals and military hospitals and clinics would cease to function within months, if not days,” said Rosemary Gibson, author of a book on the subject, “China Rx.”
Wow.
This is another example that shows why it was so foolish to become so dependent on manufacturing in China.
For years, I railed against all of the outsourcing that was going on.
But our politicians in Washington didn’t want to listen to voices such as mine.
And so now we are in a very precarious position. If China invades Taiwan, either we have to stand aside and let it happen or we give up most of our medicine.
At this point, things are so bad that we don’t even have a single penicillin plant in the United States anymore…
Other generic drugs whose key ingredients are manufactured in China include medicines for blood pressure medicine, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and depression, Gibson says.
“We can’t make penicillin anymore,” said Gibson. “The last penicillin plant in the United States closed in 2004.”
Isn’t that crazy?
The Chinese have the ability to bring us to our knees without firing a single shot.
For a very long time I have been warning my readers that the U.S. has been playing checkers while China has been playing chess.
They have outmaneuvered our clueless leaders every step of the way, and most Americans didn’t even realize what was happening.
Of course it isn’t just pharmaceutical drugs that are the problem. Western nations have outsourced the production of nearly everything, and now we are facing widespread global shortages that are unlike anything we have ever seen before. I included the following quote in an article that I posted yesterday, but I think that it is so important that I am going to share it again…
In a time when social networks have been swamped with photos of empty shelves from across the nation, Goldman’s head commodity strategist and one of the closest-followed analysts on Wall Street, said he’s never seen commodity markets pricing in the shortages they are right now.
“I’ve been doing this 30 years and I’ve never seen markets like this,” Currie told Bloomberg TV in an interview on Monday. “This is a molecule crisis. We’re out of everything, I don’t care if it’s oil, gas, coal, copper, aluminum, you name it we’re out of it.”
I don’t know if I have sufficient words to express the seriousness of what we are now facing.
A horrifying global meltdown has already begun, and it is only going to get worse.
Earlier today, I came across a video clip in which former BlackRock executive Edward Dowd warned that “we are at the end days here”.
“We are at end days here” Former Executive of BlackRock Edward Dowd
Sound ON
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) February 6, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Needless to say, he was specifically addressing the state of the financial markets, but his statement could definitely be applied on a much broader basis.
We have entered a period of great crisis, but many people still don’t understand this.
A lot of times, people don’t grasp what is taking place until it affects them personally. In recent weeks, I have gotten emails from numerous readers about the issues that they are encountering at their local pharmacies. In the old days, getting drugs that were prescribed was a snap, but now there are times when people have had to wait weeks or even months to get their drugs.
If you still believe that this is “temporary”, you haven’t been paying attention.
Our entire system is melting down, and what we have experienced so far is just the beginning.
* * *
It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 20:00 - The 20 Internet Giants That Rule The Web
The 20 Internet Giants That Rule The Web
With each passing year, an increasingly large segment of the population no longer remembers images loading a single pixel row at a time, the earsplitting sound of a 56k modem, or the early domination of web portals.
Many of the top websites in 1998 were news aggregators or search portals, which are easy concepts to understand. Today however, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley details below, brand touch-points are often spread out between devices (e.g. mobile apps vs. desktop) and a myriad of services and sub-brands (e.g. Facebook’s constellation of apps). As a result, the world’s biggest websites are complex, interconnected web properties.
The visualization below, which primarily uses data from ComScore’s U.S. Multi-Platform Properties ranking, looks at which of the internet giants have evolved to stay on top, and which have faded into internet lore.
America Moves Online
For millions of curious people the late ’90s, the iconic AOL compact disc was the key that opened the door to the World Wide Web. At its peak, an estimated 35 million people accessed the internet using AOL, and the company rode the Dotcom bubble to dizzying heights, reaching a valuation of $222 billion dollars in 1999.
AOL’s brand may not carry the caché it once did, but the brand never completely faded into obscurity. The company continually evolved, finally merging with Yahoo after Verizon acquired both of the legendary online brands. Verizon had high hopes for the company—called Oath—to evolve into a “third option” for advertisers and users who were fed up with Google and Facebook.
Sadly, those ambitions did not materialize as planned. In 2019, Oath was renamed Verizon Media, and was eventually sold once again in 2021.
A City of Gifs and Web Logs
As internet usage began to reach critical mass, web hosts such as AngelFire and GeoCities made it easy for people to create a new home on the Web.
GeoCities, in particular, made a huge impact on the early internet, hosting millions of websites and giving people a way to actually participate in creating online content. If it were a physical community of “home” pages, it would’ve been the third largest city in America, after Los Angeles.
This early online community was at risk of being erased permanently when GeoCities was finally shuttered by Yahoo in 2009, but luckily, the nonprofit Internet Archive took special efforts to create a thorough record of GeoCities-hosted pages.
From A to Z
In December of 1998, long before Amazon became the well-oiled retail machine we know today, the company was in the midst of a massive holiday season crunch.
In the real world, employees were pulling long hours and even sleeping in cars to keep the goods flowing, while online, Amazon.com had become one of the biggest sites on the internet as people began to get comfortable with the idea of purchasing goods online. Demand surged as the company began to expand their offering beyond books.
Amazon.com has grown to be the most successful merchant on the Internet.
– New York Times (1998)
Digital Magazine Rack
Meredith will be an unfamiliar brand to many people looking at today’s top 20 list. While Meredith may not be a household name, the company controlled many of the country’s most popular magazine brands (People, AllRecipes, Martha Stewart, Health, etc.) including their sizable digital footprints. The company also owned a slew of local television networks around the United States.
After its acquisition of Time Inc. in 2017, Meredith became the largest magazine publisher in the world. Since then, however, Meredith has divested many of its most valuable assets (Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune). In December 2021, Meredith merged with IAC’s Dotdash.
“Hey, Google”
When people have burning questions, they increasingly turn to the internet for answers, but the diversity of sources for those answers is shrinking.
Even as recently as 2013, we can see that About.com, Ask.com, and Answers.com were still among the biggest websites in America. Today though, Google appears to have cemented its status as a universal wellspring of answers.
As smart speakers and voice assistants continue penetrate the market and influence search behavior, Google is unlikely to face any near-term competition from any company not already in the top 20 list.
New Kids on the Block
Social media has long since outgrown its fad stage and is now a common digital thread connecting people across the world. While Facebook rapidly jumped into the top 20 by 2007, other social media infused brands took longer to grow into internet giants.
By 2018, Twitter, Snapchat, and Facebook’s umbrella of platforms were all in the top 20, and you can see a more detailed and up-to-date breakdown of the social media universe here.
A Tangled Web
Today’s internet giants have evolved far beyond their ancestors from two decades ago. Many of the companies in the top 20 run numerous platforms and content streams, and more often than not, they are not household names.
A few, such as Mediavine and CafeMedia, are services that manage ads. Others manage content distribution, such as music, or manage a constellation of smaller media properties, as is the case with Hearst.
Lastly, there are still the tech giants. Remarkably, three of the top five web properties were in the top 20 list in 1998. In the fast-paced digital ecosystem, that’s some remarkable staying power.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 19:30 - Oakland Truckers Overwhelmed By Looming CARB Rule, Supply Chain Obstacles
Oakland Truckers Overwhelmed By Looming CARB Rule, Supply Chain Obstacles
By Clarissa Hawes of Freight Waves
Besides the daily challenges drayage truckers face to keep their small businesses afloat at the Port of Oakland, some are questioning whether they still will be operating this time next year. That’s because of an emissions rule in California that is requiring them to upgrade their trucks to include 2010 model year or newer diesel engines by the end of the year.
Truckers in line at the Port of Oakland Bill Aboudi, president of AB Trucking in Oakland, planned to upgrade his aging fleet by replacing half of his trucks this spring and the remainder in the fall to comply with the California Air Resources Board (CARB) Truck and Bus rule deadline of Dec. 31.
Those plans are on hold for now, Aboudi said, as used truck prices continue to soar because of semiconductor shortages, which have caused larger fleets to hold on to their old equipment longer because of new truck order delays. He and other drayage companies typically buy their used trucks from over-the-road fleets, which are typically on a three-year depreciation schedule.
“I get asked about a possible CARB extension every single day by owner-operators,” Aboudi told FreightWaves. “CARB is creating uncertainty if they will be able to earn a living next year.”
The CARB rule covers all diesel vehicles with a manufacturer’s gross vehicle weight rating greater than 14,000 pounds.
Lynda Lambert, public information officer for CARB, said there is a provision in the Truck and Bus rule for new truck buyers who are experiencing manufacturer delays, but there’s no extension for California truckers who planned to buy used trucks but either can’t find one or can’t afford one because of supply constraints.
J.D. Power Valuation Services reported that used truck pricing in calendar year 2021 soared over 96% higher than in 2020 because of the chip import issues, which have drastically impacted the new truck market.
A new truck can have up to 35 chips that are used to collect data.
Prior to these challenges, Aboudi said, he would typically be able to find a used 2011 to 2016 model year truck for between $30,000 and $50,000 for his drayage operation. But not now.
He recently looked at a late-model truck with over 500,000 miles. The dealership was asking nearly $130,000, his initial budget to purchase three trucks.
Joe Rajkovacz, director of governmental affairs for the Western States Trucking Association, headquartered in Upland, California, estimates that over 40,000 trucks will be affected by the CARB rule based on the government agency’s data.
He said WSTA is talking with other trade groups about submitting “a unified request for a delay in the CARB rule.”
“If people think there’s a supply chain issue right now, imagine taking that many trucks out of service that can’t be replaced because of the computer chip shortage,” Rajkovacz told FreightWaves. “We believe a delay is warranted because of significant supply chain issues such as the inability to get a new truck or even buy a compliant used truck.”
One owner-operator in California made the decision to retire after he received an offer he couldn’t refuse for his late-model truck, which had around 400,000 miles.
“I planned to stay in trucking for another year or two and my truck wasn’t even for sale, but a guy offered me nearly triple what it would typically go for in a normal year,” the driver, who didn’t want to be named, told FreightWaves. “I’ve been at this a long time and my truck was paid off so I weighed hanging in there a little longer and possibly having a major mechanical problem, or getting out with a little money in my pocket. I took the money.”
Two owner-operators Aboudi knew in Oakland retired this year rather than continue hunting for trucks in an already tight used market. He said some drivers with trucks that meet CARB’s 2007 diesel engine requirement want an extension. This would give drayage haulers time to fix their current equipment and let the used truck market cool down.
“Port truckers are under a lot of stress already and we need an extension to the CARB rule by a year or two to let prices of trucks drop a little and we can rest a little easier,” Aboudi said. “If not, some aren’t going to be able to stay in business because they just can’t afford to buy used trucks at these prices.”
Frustration mounts among truckers, ag exporters
Drayage companies and agricultural exporters say recent attempts to address the supply chain challenges at the Port of Oakland are shortsighted because the steamship lines and terminal operators aren’t being held accountable for appointment time cancellations or delays and short receiving windows.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently announced that it is partnering with the Port of Oakland to fund a 25-acre container staging area for ag exports. However, port officials and the USDA failed to mention that more than a dozen trucking companies were evicted from the Howard Terminal to make this space available.
Some were rehomed to the same area they were evicted from six months ago. Others decided the cost of doing business in Oakland was too high and left.
One drayage company owner estimated the cost to relocate his company to the Howard Terminal six months ago was about $10,000, including moving his trucks and office trailers and hooking up to electricity and other utilities. Now he may be forced to move and pay those costs again.
Bryan Brandes, maritime director for the Port of Oakland, said the export yard will open on March 1 and “is designed to assist our exporters and relieve congestion at the marine terminals in order to better utilize our waterfront land.”
“The trucking companies dislocated by the empty yard were all offered space within the seaport and all understand these are short-term month-to-month agreements,” Brandes told FreightWaves.
He said the empty yard will better utilize the land as the dry empty containers will be grounded instead of on chassis, “more than quadrupling the capacity.”
The USDA will be offering a $125 incentive for each empty sourced from this yard that’s used for exporting agricultural products from Oakland, according to Brandes.
“The Port of Oakland will continue to offer limited truck and container parking as we modernize our seaport,” Brandes said. “Truck and container parking is not traditionally found within seaports and has only been available recently in the Oakland seaport with the closure of two marine terminals in 2014 and 2016.
Miguel Silva, CEO of Intermodal Logistics in Oakland, has concerns about how the empty yard for ag exports will be utilized.
“How is the empty yard going to make ships show up on time?” Silva asked. “How is the empty yard going to make the terminals be more efficient in the import and export rows?”
Cory Peters, president of Best Drayage, which operates about 75 trucks in Oakland, also has questions about how the yard will be used as well. The majority of his customers export agricultural products from California’s Central Valley.
“The biggest hurdles for ag shippers right now are being able to get space on the vessels and terminals receiving the loads in a timely manner,” Peters told FreightWaves. “Having an empty yard is nice but the steamship lines still need to provide empties. Right now that’s one of the biggest issues is the steamship lines either don’t have enough equipment or refuse to release that equipment for export bookings so they’ll ship them back overseas empty.”
Container lot at the Port of Oakland. Photo: Clarisa Hawes/FreightWaves Peters said some of the steamship lines’ receiving windows for export containers have dropped from four or five days to maybe four hours, if at all.
“If your load doesn’t make it in during those four hours, you have to take it over to your yard and store it until the next vessel opens, which may be a week or two later to find one that’s going to the same destination,” he said. “The steamship lines and terminals have made it clear they don’t care about export customers.”
He is concerned that some drayage truckers will quit hauling containers and switch to long-haul as freight rates continue to soar.
“You can’t blame somebody for wanting to drive across the country as opposed to sitting at the port and getting abused all day long and spending eight to 10 hours waiting to get a load,” Peters said.
Ryan Rotan, the controller of Minturn Nut Co. in Le Grand, California, said his company shipped 2,800 containers loaded with almonds and pistachios last year, with 90% of them being export loads.
On average, he said his company is touching its files 10 times more often than normal due to all of the ocean carrier and terminal changes.
Since the peak season started in October, Rotan said his company hasn’t had a consistent shipping month.
“We’ve had two good weeks out of every four in a month that has been on a normal shipping time frame,” he told FreightWaves.
He blames the lack of communication and information sharing between the steamship lines and terminal operators with the shippers and truckers as the root cause for the delays.
“We’ve completely stopped planning around here and it’s kind of frightening because it’s just the whim of what the terminals are going to tell us, what the ports are going to tell us and then we adjust from there,” Rotan said.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 19:00 - Mapping The World's Major Religions
Mapping The World’s Major Religions
The world has become increasingly more secular in the last few decades. However, as Visual Capitalist’s Anshool Deshmukh details below, religion remains an integral part of many people’s lives, and 84% of the world’s population identifies with a religious group.
The religious profile of the world is rapidly changing, driven primarily by differences in fertility rates and the size of youth populations among the world’s major religions, as well as by people switching faiths.
With the help of data from Pew Research Center, we break down the religious composition of the major religions in countries worldwide.
Religious Makeup of the World by Major Religions
Determining the exact number of religions across the world is a daunting task. Many religions can be difficult to categorize or to tell apart for those not intimately familiar with their doctrine.
Pew Research Center organizes the world’s religions into seven major categories, which includes five major religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism), one category that broadly includes all Folk/Traditional religions, and an unaffiliated category.
Globally, Christianity has the largest following of these categories. Around 31% of the world’s population are Christians, closely followed by Muslims at 25%. Jews have the smallest population of major religions, with only 0.2% of the world identifying as Jewish.
Let’s take a look at the religious composition of the world when accounting for regions:
From Islam being the dominant religion in the Middle East to over 95% of Cambodians and Thais following Buddhism, here’s how prevalent every major religion in the world is.
Christianity
The world’s largest religion, Christianity, is practiced by about 2.4 billion people.
The country with the highest number of practicing Christians is the United States, with a Christian population of 253 million. Brazil and Mexico follow closely with 185 million and 118 million Christians, respectively.
Christianity has historically spread around the globe and today it remains a geographically widespread religion. Over the past century, it has become less concentrated in Europe while becoming more evenly distributed throughout the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Islam
Even though it’s the predominant religion of countries in the Middle East and Northern Africa, by sheer number, countries in Asia have the highest percentage of practicing Muslims in the world.
It may surprise you to know that 14.2% of Indians are Muslim. As a result, the country is home to one of the world’s largest Muslim populations, surpassed only by Indonesia.
Islam is also the world’s fastest-growing major religion. The number of Muslims is expected to increase by 70%, from 1.8 billion in 2015 to nearly 3 billion in 2060. The fact that they have the youngest median age, at 24, also helps this population growth.
Judaism
While Jews historically have been found all around the globe, Judaism is highly geographically concentrated today. More than four-fifths of all Jews live in just two countries: the United States and Israel. Israel is the only country with a Jewish majority, with 76% of the population being practicing Jews.
The largest remaining shares of the global Jewish population apart from the U.S. and Israel are in Canada (about 3% of the country’s population), France (2%), the United Kingdom (2%), Germany (2%), Russia (2%) and Argentina (between 1% and 2%).
Unaffiliated
The religiously unaffiliated population includes atheists, agnostics, and people who do not identify with any particular religion. 720 million of the Chinese population consider themselves religiously unaffiliated, while 78% of Czechs feel the same way.
However, it is worth noting that many of the religiously unaffiliated hold some religious or spiritual beliefs. For example, surveys have found that faith in God or a higher power is shared by 7% of unaffiliated Chinese adults, 30% of unaffiliated French adults, and 68% of unaffiliated U.S. adults.
Hinduism
Hinduism is the third-largest religion worldwide, with approximately 1.2 billion Hindus in many countries. Interestingly, however, Hinduism is the dominant religion in only three countries, India with 79%, Nepal with 80%, and Mauritius with 48%.
Although Hinduism is rarely a country’s primary religion, it still enjoys a global presence. Many regions around the world support significant populations of Hindus, including the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, North America, and South America.
Buddhism
According to estimates, half the world’s Buddhists live in China. Still, they make up only 18% of the country’s population. Most of the rest of the world’s Buddhists live in East and South Asia, including 13% in Thailand (where 93% of the population is Buddhist).
Buddhism in Asia is a matter of both identity and practice. Scholars and journalists have documented that many Asian countries may engage in Buddhist practices without considering themselves part of any organized religion.
Folk Religion
Folk religion is any ethnic or cultural religious practice that falls outside the doctrine of organized religion. Grounded on popular beliefs and sometimes called popular or vernacular religion, the term refers to how people experience and practice religion in their daily lives.
As of 2020, an estimated 429 million people, about 6% of the world’s total population, were adherents of folk or traditional religions. Some notable folk religions include African traditional religions, Chinese folk religions, Native American religions, and Australian aboriginal religions.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 18:30 - Biden Admin Urges Court Not To Allow Release Of 'Secret Report' On Dominion Voting Machines
Biden Admin Urges Court Not To Allow Release Of ‘Secret Report’ On Dominion Voting Machines
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,
Top officials at a U.S. federal cybersecurity agency are urging a judge not to authorize at this time the release of a report that analyzes Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Georgia, arguing doing so could assist hackers trying to “undermine election security.”
Jen Easterly, the director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, answers questions during her confirmation hearing in Washington on June 10, 2021. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was recently provided an unredacted copy of the report, which was prepared by J. Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society.
The report discusses “potential vulnerabilities in Dominion ImageCast X ballot marking devices,” or electronic voting devices, according to the government.
While CISA supports public disclosure of any vulnerabilities and associated mitigation measures with election equipment, allowing the release of the report at this point “increases the risk that malicious actors may be able to exploit any vulnerabilities and threaten election security,” government lawyers said in a Feb. 10 filing in the case.
The case was brought in 2017 by good-government groups and voters who say the lack of paper ballots undermines the voting process.
U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg, an Obama nominee overseeing the case, was urged by CISA to reject attempts to release a redacted version of Halderman’s report for now.
CISA officials want to review the information in the report and help Dominion resolve the vulnerabilities identified before the report is released. They said they weren’t able to provide a date by which they’ll be finished.
Totenberg must weigh the request against the wishes of Georgia Secretary State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican and one of the defendants, who called in late January for the release to happen immediately.
John Poulos, Dominion’s CEO and president, said in a statement released by Raffensperger’s office that Halderman’s review lacked “a holistic approach,” adding that Dominion “supports all efforts to bring real facts and evidence forward to defend the integrity of our machines and the credibility of Georgia’s elections.”
Plaintiffs, including the Coalition for Good Governance, also support the release of the report, David Cross, one of their lawyers, confirmed to The Epoch Times.
The plaintiffs said in a filing before a copy was sent to CISA that the agency should get a copy and begin its evaluation process, but that the evaluation “should not unreasonably delay the public disclosure of the report, which must be promptly disclosed to Georgia state and county election officials, and filed on the public docket, so that public officials can secure the upcoming May primary elections.”
They asked Totenberg to order them to file a redacted version of the report on the docket, which would make it accessible to the public, no later than March 4.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 18:00 - "Not Going To Happen To Me Again" – Prepping Goes Mainstream In Post-COVID Era
“Not Going To Happen To Me Again” – Prepping Goes Mainstream In Post-COVID Era
Consumer psychology radically changed during the early days of the virus pandemic as shortages at supermarkets emerged. Bulk-buying habits were never a thing with the modern consumer in a pre-COVID world, but now ‘prepping’ has gone mainstream two years since the beginning of the virus pandemic as supply chains remain snarled and food inflation is out-of-control. Many have discovered: be prepared or be hungry.
The pandemic was an eye-opener for tens of millions of consumers who learned the government and big corporations wouldn’t take care of them when things go south. Even our elected officials were nowhere to be found in the early days of the pandemic when people panic hoarded food at supermarkets and fought over toilet paper in a ‘free for all battle royale’.
WSJ interviewed consumers across the country who’ve expressed their purchasing habits have changed.
“Bulk-buying habit is expected to stick as people eat more at home, supply remains uncertain and inflation rears up. Retailers and producers are shifting operations as a result,” WSJ said.
Alexis Abell, a 41yo mother of five, buys in bulk out of fear of economic uncertainty.
“I don’t want to be in a position again where I can’t get something,” Abell said, who was laid off in 2020 and decided not to return to work. Her household spends about 25% more a week on food and staples versus a couple of years ago.
“The stimulus money is gone, but we’ve gotten used to having more on hand and I’m cooking more at home, so I expect this to continue,” she said.
Many people expanded their pantries during the pandemic, bought freezers, and made space for non-perishables. WSJ calls “bulk shopping” “hoarding,” though it’s not and instead should be considered a form of prepping.
Bob Nolan, senior vice president of Demand Science at food giant Conagra Brands Inc, has said consumers have “made permanent changes” after they experienced the “harsh realities of pandemic shortages.”
“They didn’t just stock up that week, but they said to themselves, even if subconsciously, ‘That’s not going to happen to me again,'” Nolan said.
Research firm IRI, which tracks consumption of household goods, confirms households are transforming into preppers as their average annual growth in sales by volume of food and beverages was 3% in 2020 and 2021, compared with just 0.5% average yearly growth for that last decade. IRI said consumers want larger package sizes.
“Even if somebody waves a magic wand and makes Covid go away completely, we still expect elevated consumption in the home because people are accustomed to working from home, and hybrid work is here to stay,” said Krishnakumar Davey, president of client engagement at IRI.
It’s human nature to be prepared. Take, for instance, the “Silent Generation” and “Boomers” who either lived through the 1930s Great Depression or were raised by parents from that period learned to keep a large pantry of food and save almost everything they had due to socio-economic uncertainties. Scarcity is terrifying and can easily sway an entire generation of folks, such as “Millennials” and “Generation Z,” who were accustomed to an on-demand society that abruptly came to a halt during the pandemic. Younger consumers were forever changed as their thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and perceptions of the economy changed during the pandemic. Thus what we’re observing today is that consumers are becoming preppers.
Megan Crozier, Sam’s chief merchant, said most new Sam’s Club memberships in the third quarter of 2021 had been millennial households.
Another variable pushing younger households into prepping is the hottest consumer prices in four decades. Consumers have noticed prices are going higher and higher for some foods every week. Global food prices are at a decade high and could easily reach a new high as early as this spring. People are stocking up on food because the product could either be unavailable next week or cost 20% more.
Prepping is become mainstream and not as much “fringe” as it was perceived just a few years ago. This is a symptom of people losing trust in government and corporations. The evolution of thought for consumers is to break away from the matrix, buy land in a rural community with a decent internet connection and grow food and hunt.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 17:30 - Canadian Oil Exports To U.S. At Record Level
Canadian Oil Exports To U.S. At Record Level
By Charles Kennedy of OilPrice.com
Canadian oil producers are exporting crude to the U.S. at record rates, Reuters reported, adding that demand for the heavy, sour crude that Canada is producing is surging.
What’s more, a growing amount of this crude is not staying at Gulf Coast refineries but is being exported to international markets. Kpler data cited by Reuters shows that the rate of Canadian heavy crude exports from the Gulf Coast topped 180,000 bpd last year, up from about 70,000 bpd in 2019 and 2020.
In December, export rates from the Gulf Coast reached 300,000 bpd. Most of this crude is going to India, China, and South Korea, replacing lost Venezuelan barrels.
Canada’s oil sands production is also at record levels of 3.5 million bpd, according to the Reuters report. According to a Capital Economics expert, however, Canada’s oil production is suffering from pipeline constraints.
“The oil sector is not the driver of GDP growth that it once was,” Stephen Brown said in a note quoted by Bloomberg this week. “Due to pipeline capacity constraints, there is little supply response to rising prices, with oil production still stuck near 2018 levels. With export capacity out of their hands, producers have been using their income to pay down debt rather than invest.”
“As there is little scope for an immediate supply response and it takes time for higher oil export earnings to feed through to the rest of the economy, for example, in the form of higher wages in the oil patch, there is a risk that higher oil prices initially have a modest negative impact on Canadian economic activity, by eating into consumers’ real spending power,” the economist also said.
The Canadian oil industry has been hard hit by canceled pipeline projects, but, as Reuters reports, Enbridge managed to expand the capacity of the Line 3 pipeline twofold last year. At the same time, the Capline Pipeline, which normally transports crude from Louisiana to Illinois, reversed flows last year to move more Canadian crude to the Gulf.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 17:00 - Post-COVID Super Bowl Ad Costs Reach Record High
Post-COVID Super Bowl Ad Costs Reach Record High
When Super Bowl LVI kicks off tomorrow, the NFL championship won’t be the only title that’s on the line. With roughly a hundred million viewers glued to the TV in the U.S. alone, Statista’s Felix Richter notes that some of the world’s biggest and most popular brands will be competing for the unofficial title of “Most Memorable Super Bowl Ad”.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Since 2010, the average rate for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl broadcast has risen from $2.77 million to $6.50 million, making it by far the most expensive time slot U.S. television has to offer – a 30-second spot during the Academy Award ceremony is less than half the price.
It’s a price that brands are willing to pay though.
Last year, in-game ad revenue amounted to $435 million.
According to Kantar Media that is roughly equivalent to the combined ad revenue of the four major U.S. broadcast networks in an average week.
In return for their investment, brands not only get a huge audience (91.6 million viewers in 2021) but an audience that sticks around: during the 2013 Super Bowl, only 0.7 percent of the audience tuned away during commercial breaks. The average tuneaway rate during regular TV programming is five times as high. Consumers tend to pay special attention to Super Bowl ads, as agencies typically try to honour the prestigious occasion with especially witty and often funny ads.
In recent years, the dawn of YouTube has added another bonus for Super Bowl advertisers seeing that the most popular ads often reach millions of additional viewers on the platform.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 16:30 - Russia Issues Rare Condemnation Of Israeli Airstrikes: "A Crude Violation Of Syria's Sovereignty"
Russia Issues Rare Condemnation Of Israeli Airstrikes: “A Crude Violation Of Syria’s Sovereignty”
Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,
On Thursday, Russia said it has “deep” concerns over Israel’s ongoing air campaign in Syria, warning the continued airstrikes could escalate tensions in the region and threaten civilian air traffic.
“Israel’s continuing strikes against targets inside Syria cause deep concern,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “They are a crude violation of Syria’s sovereignty and may trigger a sharp escalation of tensions.”
“Also, such actions pose serious risks to international passenger flights.” She said Russia opposes “attempts to turn Syria into a scene of armed confrontation between third countries.” The statement urged: “Once again we are insistently calling upon the Israeli side to refrain from such use of force.”
Israel claims its air campaign in Syria is meant to target Iran, but the airstrikes often kill Syrian soldiers. Syrian state media said one soldier was killed and five more were wounded in the latest Israeli attack, which happened Wednesday.
Russia has held talks with Israel on Syria, and in January, Russia said it would begin joint air patrols with Syria. The patrols will include areas near the Golan Heights, a frequent site of Israeli attacks, and Israel is said to be considering slowing the strikes.
Meanwhile, The Times of Israel details that this marks a change in policy for Russia: “Following the patrol, Ynet reported that Israeli military officials were holding talks with Russian army officers to calm tensions.”
The report said, “Israeli officials were struggling to understand why Russia, which announced that such joint patrols were expected to be a regular occurrence moving forward, had apparently changed its policy toward Israel.”
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 16:00 - TD Bank To Surrender Convoy Donations To Court As Organizers Turn To Crypto
TD Bank To Surrender Convoy Donations To Court As Organizers Turn To Crypto
Canada’s TD Bank says it plans to surrender approximately $1 million in un-refunded GoFundMe donations to the Freedom Convoy, as well as some $400,000 the group had accepted through direct donations.
On Friday, TD told CTV news that it would apply to surrender the funds to an Ontario court.
“TD has asked the court to accept the funds, which were raised through crowdfunding and deposited into personal accounts at TD, so they may be managed and distributed in accordance with the intentions of the donors, and/or to be returned to the donors who have requested refunds but whose entitlement to a refund cannot be determined by TD,” said spokeswoman Carla Hindman.
The Convoy, meanwhile, plans to fight for their donations – and is now looking to raise funding via cryptocurrency.
Convoy lawyer Keith Wilson said that the group planned to fight to retrieve any money they had raised — and could be seen in a video promoting the group’s next play: a cryptocurrency fundraiser that has raised almost US$1 million.
“We will be taking expedited legal steps to have the restrictions on the donated funds lifted as soon as possible,” Wilson said in an email to CTV News. -CTV
“The principle philosophy of what Bitcoin is is freedom,” says one organizer in a Facebook video. “For everyone who had their voice stolen by “GoFraudMe”, “GoFundMe,” you should feel solace that there are now alternatives.”
According to Ontario court filings, Ottawa Police cited the video in their affidavit, referencing the convoy’s crypto fundraising strategy.
According to the Globe And Mail, more than $500,000 has been raised by one Bitcoin wallet.
TD’s move is the latest hurdle faced by the Convoy – which has occupied Ottawa and other border crossings for approximately two weeks in protest of vaccine and mask mandates – sparking protests worldwide in solidarity, as well as a state of emergency declared by Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Friday.
As CTV notes, of the roughly $10 million raised via GoFundMe, just $1 million was deposited before the fundraising site decided to cancel the campaign and refund the remainder.
Two subsequent fundraisers launched on Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo have reached more than $9 million as of this writing.
Late Thursday, however, the Ontario Superior Court froze funds from these accounts, after the province’s Attorney General alleged that the funds would further the criminal act of ‘mischief on the streets’ of Ottawa.
GiveSendGo says the order doesn’t apply and is still collecting funds.
Tyler Durden
Sat, 02/12/2022 – 15:30
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