Apr 14

Today’s News 14th April 2021

  • Shipping Container Rates Expected To Remain Elevated Through Year
    Shipping Container Rates Expected To Remain Elevated Through Year

    Bad news for US importers searching for cheap shipping container rates, that is, rates are as up much as 50% than one year ago. Increasing shipping costs are crimping margins of importers that will ultimately have to be passed onto consumers. 

    Take, for example, the Asia to North American trade line last week was approximately $2,500 to $3,000 for a 40-foot container, about a 25% to 50% increase than the previous year, George Griffiths, an editor on the global container freight-pricing team at S&P Global Platts, told Bloomberg. Shipping costs create massive headaches for US importers, he said, adding that, the logistical issues they are facing today are extreme. 

    Hapag-Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen said container prices are likely to remain elevated through the second half of the year. “I don’t see any signs around the corner that demand is falling off a cliff,” he said.

    Meanwhile, Oakland and Long Beach, California ports, both reported record imports for March – on a seasonal basis, usually quiet months for containerized inflows. But no thanks to Jay Powell and Janet Yellen’s historical experiment: unleashing trillions of dollars in helicopter money into consumer pockets has created the largest ever pull forward in history where Americans are using their stimulus checks to purchase goods from Asia. 

    … and it doesn’t come as any surprise the annual trade deficit for goods came in at an all-time high in January, increasing $3.4 billion to a record $221.1 billion. In another sign of the massive trade imbalance, there is a shortage of shipping containers to bring things into the US.

    The congestion is so bad at the US West Coast port that the port’s head told importers to expedite container pickup to alleviate congestion last month. Los Angeles and Long Beach ports are locked in traffic jams of vessels waiting to offload cargo as trillions of dollars in stimulus result in one-sided trade with Asia.

    “The container dwell time is much higher than it was pre-pandemic,” Port of Los Angeles Executive Director Gene Seroka told CNBC, referring to the duration a container spends at the port. 

    Data compiled by Marine Exchange of Southern California shows a massive congestion crisis of moored container ships waiting to unload their cargo. 

    All these supply chain challenges are feeding concerns of inflation could be around the corner. The US producer prices jumped more than forecasted last month, and the March CPI is expected to be released Tuesday.  

    The four core trade lines worldwide (data provided by Freightos) show prices per 40-foot container began to increase rapidly during the summer of 2000. 

     It’s unlikely shipping container rates will decline anytime soon as the Biden administration continues to hand out free money to US consumers who turn around and purchase products that are not manufactured in the US. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/14/2021 – 02:45

  • Western Media Eager To See Ukraine Use US-Supplied Weapons Against Russia
    Western Media Eager To See Ukraine Use US-Supplied Weapons Against Russia

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    With tensions simmering in eastern Ukraine, US media outlets are happy to push the narrative that Russia is the aggressor and is preparing to invade its neighbor. These reports ignore the fact that the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the eastern Donbas region declared independence from Ukraine back in 2014 in response to a US-backed coup.

    Since 2014, the US has provided Ukraine with about $2 billion in military equipment and supported its fight against the Donetsk and Lugansk separatists. Supporting a war on Russia’s border is an incredible provocation, but these facts are lost on the Western press, and some outlets seem eager to see the situation escalate. On Monday, Politico published a report that asked if it was time for Ukraine to deploy weapons provided by the US to face Moscow.

    Javelin anti-tank missile

    The Politico report reads: “As Russia amasses the highest number of troops on Ukraine’s border since 2014, the question for Kyiv now becomes: Is it time to start putting US-made weapons in the field?“

    The report explains how President Trump took a step his predecessor was unwilling to take and sold hundreds of Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. President Obama chose not to give Kyiv offensive weapons for fear of provoking Moscow. This fact contradicts the conspiracy theory that Trump was beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was pushed hard by Politico. One of the co-authors of the Ukraine report, Natasha Bertrand, built her career on pushing the Steele Dossier, a now-discredited document that made unverified claims about the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016.

    The Javelin missiles were sold under the condition that they would be stored in western Ukraine, far from the front lines of the Donbas war. But the weapons can be deployed anywhere in the country and can be used as long as Kyiv can frame their use as “defensive” in nature.

    Two unnamed former US military officials told Politico that the current situation with Russia is “exactly the kind of scenario the Javelin sale was designed to counter.”

    Mainstream media being very blatant about some wishful thinking…

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    The Biden administration has already approved a $125 million military aid package for Ukraine that includes armed patrol boats, and another $150 million is expected to be provided sometime this year. Over the past few weeks, the US has delivered multiple military shipments to Ukraine as it hypes the movement of Russian troops inside Russia.

    On top of the military support from the US, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is pushing for a NATO membership. Even though Ukraine being a NATO member could lead to the US and Russia going to war, which should be an unthinkable scenario, Zelensky’s request is receiving favorable coverage in the Western media.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 04/14/2021 – 02:00

  • Setting The Scene For Global Destruction. Now It's The Arctic
    Setting The Scene For Global Destruction. Now It’s The Arctic

    Authored by Brain Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    On April 8 the front pages of the main U.S. newspapers noted that President Biden was “open to compromise” and a quick glance prompted optimism that Uncle Joe might be seeing some sense about international developments. He said that “Debate is welcome. Compromise is inevitable. Changes are certain,” which is a deep and important statement that would be immensely heartening if it referred to U.S. relations with China and Russia.

    Alas, his words referred to purely domestic affairs, in that the White House was preparing to compromise with the blinkered Republican Party which is intent on defending business interests — and especially those concerned with weapons’ production — at the expense of the average citizen. Joe declared that he is “sick and tired of ordinary people being fleeced,” which is an understandable point of view. But the way he’s heading in foreign policy means that these ordinary people, and everyone else in the U.S. and all round the world, may well be conned, and possibly terminally. They are facing ever-increasing danger of being destroyed, because Joe is backing the sabre-brandishers in their encouragement of confrontation and provocation that could well lead to major war.

    Make no mistake : there is going to be no such thing as “limited” war if the U.S.-Nato military alliance continues to goad and antagonise Russia and China. If there is a clash of military forces there will be escalation, and the ensuing conflict will inevitably heighten the risk of nuclear exchanges which would destroy the planet.

    The scene-setting by Washington’s military-industrial complex and in the Pentagon’s sub-office in Brussels includes warnings about a Russian “buildup” in the Arctic, as reported by CNN which quoted a Pentagon representative as saying “Russia is refurbishing Soviet-era airfields and radar installations, constructing new ports and search-and-rescue centres, and building up its fleet of nuclear and conventionally-powered icebreakers.” This activity is indeed taking place, and is happening in Russian sovereign territory, which has nothing to do with the Pentagon or anyone else. It’s not in any way similar to the U.S. military’s overseas “forward military presence” of some 200,000 troops in over 800 bases around the world.

    USA Today states that Trump “opened additional bases in Afghanistan, Estonia, Cyprus, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Niger, Norway, Palau, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Somalia, Syria and Tunisia”, which seems pretty impressive, but in reality-land is entirely counter-productive. And it seems that Uncle Joe isn’t going to close down any of them.

    It is unfortunate that so many of these bases have proved totally useless in practical terms, but this doesn’t stop or even slow down the Pentagon’s global expansion. In spite of all the bases in Afghanistan, for example, a chaotic civil war still rages. As USA Today observes, “The 19-year-old conflict has cost more than $2 trillion and more than 2,300 American lives. More than 38,000 Afghan civilians have been killed. And yet the Taliban controls vast swaths of the country, which continues to be wracked by violence…” So what have all these U.S. bases accomplished? What do they achieve anywhere, other than apprehension and reaction on the part of those whom they are designed to threaten?

    In a world already aflame with conflict, one of the most recent threats to peace is growing in the Arctic, where the U.S. is intent on increasing its military capabilities. Forward deployments and operations have so far included flights over the Barents Sea by USAF B-1 Lancer strategic bombers based at Ørland in Norway, where the large air base “is important not only for Norway, but also for NATO. The air station is the base of F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, F-16 fighter aircraft, B-1B strategic bombers, Westland Sea King search and rescue helicopters and a location for E-3A Sentry AWACS…”

    The ominous focus of Washington on the Arctic is allegedly justified by Russia’s legitimate improvement of its defence facilities in its own sovereign territory. The Pentagon’s official position is that “Obviously we’re watching this, and as I said before, we have national security interests there that we know we need to protect and defend.” The spokesman then declared (presumably being unaware of the U.S. strategic bomber deployment and other military operations), that “nobody’s interested in seeing the Arctic become militarized.”

    The Arctic has always been an important region but has assumed greater significance since global warming resulted in extensive ice-melt and opening of seaways including what is now called the Northern Sea Route or NSR. The Arctic Bulk commercial group, based in Switzerland, describes the NSR as “a shipping lane between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean along the Russian coast of Siberia and the Far East, crossing five Arctic Seas.” Further — and never mentioned by the Pentagon or the U.S. media — the NSR is located entirely within Russia’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

    On April 5 the Pentagon announced that “the region is key terrain that’s vital to our own homeland defence and as a potential strategic corridor between the Indo-Pacific, Europe and the homeland — which would make it vulnerable to expanded competition.”

    It was not explained how a commercial shipping route could affect Washington’s “homeland defence”, or what “expanded competition” there could be, but Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made that feature clear in Deutsche Welle on March 22 when he said “The melting of the ice in the Arctic could lead to the heating up of geopolitical tensions between different powers in the world. We have seen the increased military presence of Russia. They’re opening up Soviet military facilities in the Arctic.”

    China is also a threat, according to Stoltenberg, but the main one in the north is identified as Russia, so in addition to U.S. strategic bomber flights there have been other war preparations involving Nato countries, including a deployment in which “U.S. Marines and Sailors with Marine Rotational Force-Europe 21.1 enhanced their warfighting ability above the Arctic Circle during exercise Arctic Littoral Strike in Northern Norway from March 11-31.”

    Further confrontation will include Exercise Northern Edge from 3-12 May, in which, according to the U.S. Air Force Times, “Ten thousand troops will descend on the High North to practice how the U.S. military might react if simmering tensions in the Arctic reach a boiling point.”

    The U.S. is preparing for war in the Arctic, and the “boiling point” referred to by the Air Force Times might not be far away. It’s entirely up to Washington to decide on how long the military manoeuvres will continue and what level they will reach. If the provocations are so relentless as to result in local exchanges of fire, there is every possibility that escalation will be rapid — and it could be final. The solution is for Washington to calm down, and President Joe Biden would be well advised to extend his domestic policy to international affairs, in which “Debate is welcome. Compromise is inevitable. Changes are certain.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 23:50

  • FLIR Wins DARPA Contract To Develop Next-Gen Combat Suits For Biowarfare
    FLIR Wins DARPA Contract To Develop Next-Gen Combat Suits For Biowarfare

    FLIR Systems, Inc. has won a major Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract to produce next-generation combat suits that will protect soldiers from biological weapons to the Ebola virus. 

    FLIR announced Monday the new contract with the Pentagon’s research arm to rapidly develop “novel fabrics with embedded catalysts and chemistries that can fight and reduce chemical and biological threats upon contact.” 

    The high-tech material will be interwoven into the combat suit for soldiers on the modern battlefield. FLIR has already received $11.2 million in funding for the five-year contract that would be worth up to $20.5 million. 

    The advanced combat suit shields soldiers from all sorts of biological agents, from VX to chlorine gas to Ebola virus, will be developed and manufactured under the Personalized Protective Biosystems (PPB) program. FLIR calls the fabrics “revolutionary” because of the ability to fight chemical and biological agents. 

    Everything from combat boots to gloves to entire suits, the revolutionary fabrics will be interwoven and worn on the modern battlefield. 
    DARPA’s PPB program reduces the weight and physiological burden and integrates Protective Equipment (PPE) into one combat advanced suit. 

    “With lives at stake, future operators wearing PPB suits will gain a major edge in staying protected from toxic chemicals and emerging biological threats such as dangerous viruses,” said Mark Stock, VP and general manager of the Sensor Systems business at FLIR.

    “We’re honored DARPA has chosen us to lead this extraordinary and highly innovative effort to develop first-of-its-kind protective fabrics for our nation’s warfighters, health and public safety officials.”

    What this all suggests is the Pentagon wants to accelerate the development of innovative textiles and intelligent materials to protect soldiers on the modern field from chemical and biological threats. Especially since the US State Department’s former lead investigator who managed the COVID-19 task force suspects SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and may have been the product of bioweapons research.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 23:30

  • We Are Now Entering Full-Blown Tyranny In The Western World
    We Are Now Entering Full-Blown Tyranny In The Western World

    Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

    If we accept what they are doing to us now, they are just going to keep pushing the envelope.  Over the past 12 months, authorities throughout the western world have used the pandemic as an excuse to impose Orwellian measures that we never would have accepted during normal times.  They are promising us that these measures are just “temporary”, but the pandemic has already been with us for a year and there are no signs that it is going away any time soon.  If those governing us are willing to go to such ridiculous extremes during a relatively minor pandemic, what are they going to be willing to do once things start getting really crazy?

    Watching the events that have unfolded at a church in Edmonton in recent days has been a breaking point for me emotionally.

    Last Wednesday, the RCMP received global attention when it put up a three layer fence around GraceLife Church in an attempt to keep people out.

    I don’t know why they decided that one fence would not be sufficient.  Apparently having Christians gather together is so dangerous that three fences were needed.

    Needless to say, this draconian move made a lot of headlines, and on Sunday approximately 400 Christians gathered to protest at the church.  Most of them were just singing hymns or reading the Bible, but when a few of them started tearing down one of the fences, 200 heavily-armed riot police moved in.

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    I would expect to see this sort of a scene in communist China, North Korea or Iran.

    This sort of thing was never supposed to happen in Canada.

    Out of 4.4 million people living in Alberta, there have only been 2,013 deaths, and about half of those were among people 80 years of age or older.

    If it isn’t safe to go to church, why are hordes of Canadians allowed to circulate through retail establishments every single day of the week?

    If churches should be shut down, you would think that Wal-Mart, Costco and Canadian Tire should be shut down too.

    But they aren’t shut down.

    All over the western world, we are being promised that life will finally go back to “normal” once the pandemic is over, and they are telling us that the vaccines will end the pandemic.

    But that isn’t happening.  Cases are on the rise again, and thousands are still getting sick even though they have been “fully vaccinated”.

    And now Pfizer and Moderna are publicly admitting that their vaccines only provide about six months of immunity…

    According to new research from Pfizer and Moderna, it looks like COVID-19 immunity will last at least six months in fully vaccinated people, though studies are ongoing. In a statement released by Pfizer-BioNTech on Thursday, immunity against the coronavirus is confirmed to last at least half a year for people who have been fully vaccinated with the Pfizer shot.

    Most people that are getting shots think that they now have some sort of permanent immunity, but that isn’t even close to accurate.

    Meanwhile, variants continue to emerge around the globe that the current vaccines won’t be effective against at all.

    I know that a lot of you don’t want to hear this, but the pandemic is with us to stay.

    And that means that the Orwellian measures that are being put in place are with us to stay too.

    Over in the UK, one recent survey found that a majority of the British population is actually in favor of a permanent vaccine passport system…

    Another disturbing survey has revealed that a majority of British people are willing to accept vaccine passports in order to engage in basic day to day activities, and that they are willing to go along with the digital ID card system PERMANENTLY.

    The London Independent poll, conducted by pollster Savanta ComRes, highlighted the findings, with 56 per cent saying that it would be acceptable to have to prove vaccination or negative COVID status in order to enter a shop.

    Fewer than a third, 32 per cent, said that this would be unacceptable, according to the survey.

    What in the world has happened to the British?

    Here in the U.S., researchers are developing an implantable sensor that can tell if you are sick or not.  If you do not know about this yet, I would highly recommend watching this 60 Minutes report.

    In Australia, the Orwellian measures that they have instituted during this pandemic have regularly made headlines all over the globe, and now they are considering doing something that is completely insane.

    I had a hard time believing this when I first read it.  According to an Australian news source, the government is actually considering requiring people to provide “100 points of identification” before they are allowed to access social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram…

    The Morrison Government will consider a radical measure to prevent online bullying and trolling, but experts say the proposal would involve serious risks for social media users.

    The government is considering forcing users of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — as well as online dating platforms like Tinder — to upload 100 points of identification in order to use them.

    The recommendation, which has been raised before, is one of 88 recommendations from a parliamentary committee report looking at family, domestic and sexual violence.

    This is the direction that our world is headed.

    For a long time we enjoyed an Internet that was relatively free and open, but now that era has ended.

    Now tyrants all over the globe are seeing that the Internet can be used as a tool of control, and that should deeply alarm all of us.

    Over the past 12 months, the pandemic has been used as justification to advance tyranny by leaps and bounds.

    If this is what has happened during a relatively minor pandemic, what is going to take place once a true global emergency comes along?

    We should all consider that very carefully, because we are moving into very dark times, and government tyranny is only going to get worse.

    *  *  *

    Michael’s new book entitled “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 23:10

  • Police Fire Tear-Gas, Flashbangs As Minnesota Riots Enter 3rd Night
    Police Fire Tear-Gas, Flashbangs As Minnesota Riots Enter 3rd Night

    Despite widespread curfews, freezing temperatures, and snow, thousands of Black Lives Matter activists took to the streets of Brooklyn Center, a Minnesota suburb, for the third night to protest the shooting of Daunte Wright.

    The protesters, carrying shields (marked with ACAB – All Cops Are Bastards) and chanting Wright’s name and “Black Lives Matter” surrounded the police station, prompting law enforcement to break up the “unlawful assembly,” which some might dare to call a ‘riot’.

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    Police demanded “leave the area now” as they fired smoke and gas grenades into the crowd…

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    When the crowd refused to disperse, the police moved in…

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    The protesters peacefully threw objects at the police…

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    But eventually began to disperse.

     

     

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 22:48

  • The "Fundamental" Economic Design Driving Crypto Valuation Above $2 Trillion
    The “Fundamental” Economic Design Driving Crypto Valuation Above $2 Trillion

    Via The FinTech Blueprint,

    This week, we look at:

    • The crypto asset class breaking $2 trillion in market capitalization

    • The practice of token economics and token engineering, and how incentive design can create vary different operating outcomes (e.g., Fei protocol vs. The Graph)

    • How incentive design is already encoded into social norms at companies like Amazon, which can scale to a million employees and retain an identity

    Crypto isn’t magic. It’s math. Two trillion dollars worth of math.

    We are still, often, asked incorrect questions about the crypto currency markets. Questions like — “but what is the fundamental value?”

    You have to unpack the word “fundamental”. That word signals a Warren Buffet view of the world: there are companies out there, they have equity shares well specified by corporate law in a particular jurisdiction, some are expensive while some are cheap, and that bargain shopping can be determined by a spreadsheet analysis of their cashflows relative to others. It’s so fundamental!

    The story of such fundamental truth is anchored in our cultural and social history. We can point to the intellectual tradition of rationalism and classical economics, and talk about the theory of the firm, and its production function. We can point to how these things grew out of governance by religion, and natural rights as granted by a deity, and all sorts of other non-empirical hand waving.

    We can talk about supply and demand, and equilibria, and describe some agents in a perfect market with perfectly formed property rights. And some of these agents, surely, will be “good” (i.e., cheap relative to performance) and some will be “bad” (i.e., expensive tulips).

    Anyway. Then we look at the real world and learn that markets are imperfect and deceptive, that humans behave irrationally because of their evolutionary biology programming, that top-down rationalist models don’t square with reality, that some of Warren Buffet’s best investments are in fact political and derive from monopoly market structure, and that the whole machine is careening off a cliff into imagination land.

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    That doesn’t mean that equities traded on a stock market, as circumscribed by their full supporting human history, can’t be valued relative to each other. On the contrary, they demonstrate that having people agree on a mathematical framework for structuring economic exchange can create that specific economic exchange. As another example, once the Black–Scholes options pricing model was used for options pricing, it is how options were priced.

    But we are living in a system that exhibits complexity, and which appears random not due to some underlying randomness, but due to the exponential interaction of underlying mechanisms. Any math that we put around it is an approximation. This is famously stated as “The map is not the territory”, and cleverly articulated by Elizier Yudkowsky on LessWrong, as well as by Rene Magritte in pointing out that a painting of a pipe is not a pipe.

    And so the financial models we trade on the markets are not companies; they are representational beliefs derived from financial models correlated to the promise of legal enforcement on some physical plane.

    Let’s assume that we’ve budged your conviction about what is financially real. Turning to crypto networks, we can see that many of the elements of “assets traded on a stock market” do not apply to them. They are not always companies duly organized in Delaware, but often a global smattering of individuals across the Twitterverse. While some deliver cashflows, it is not always the financial attributes that networks seek to grow but economic or operating ones.

    So instead of using questions like “How can we maximize profit to accrue to owners?”, they use questions like “How can we get this industry to create a virtuous cycle for storing data for itself on this network?” This is the type of question that a community manager or online game designer may ask. It is also the type of question that a well-cultured traditional company may ask if it has a Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos customer orientation, supplanted with an open source ethos.

    This is what is worth two trillion dollars.

    Re-Discovering Token Engineering

    Sometimes things fail, even though they were the right idea at the time: Morgan Stanley roboadvisors from 2001, machine learning algorithms from the 1970s, video streaming in the mid-2000s. The surrounding infrastructure was not the right soil for that particular idea to grow at the time. All you get is a bunch of salty entrepreneurs.

    When the first token offering wave hit in 2017 and 2018, various smart people began to establish a formal practice of token engineering, sometimes called crypto economics or tokenomics. It is rooted in rigorous game theory, mechanism design, and mathematical simulation. There was a notable difference in the quality of thinking across the industry. Some teams used terms from this field as if they were magic summoning words, and that in saying those words, correct outcomes would simply appear. Other teams built concepts for the long term with system design in mind.

    There was a lot less data around in 2017 about what would end up working. Overly mathematical papers looked like nonsense in an environment where Telegram and EOS were raising over $1 billion each based on business logic and hype. Much of that vapor would dissipate, and the unpopular inventors went onto new frontiers.

    Yet over the long run, there are stark differences between successful and unsuccessful token design. This practice is the closest “truth” we get to the concept of fundamentals in the crypto ecosystem. You can create a network or protocol with incentives that drive usage and value into the ground — a Nash equilibrium with bad payoffs.

    Sometimes those paths to a bad equilibrium come from edge conditions, such as too much demand and popularity. The Fei protocol, which attempts to create an algorithmic stablecoin with punishing mechanics for selling the pegged coin, ran a fundraise which attracted over $1 billion of capital, but quickly lost its mark-to-market value. While we are not endorsing any particular view on this asset, the following threads are instructive in showing how incentive design created the opposite of the desired outcome, and is now resulting in emergency action.

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    In a counter example, we can look at Ocean Protocol and The Graph. Both projects had spent years sweating their tokenomics and openly discussing design ideas (not that Fei hasn’t). The result looked over-engineered during the summer of DeFi growth and downright unnecessary in the crypto winter of 2018-2019. But it was built for the long run. And when these projects launched, their machines ground into gear, generating purpose-built economic activities.

    Certainly, crypto asset prices will wiggle around and should not be taken for granted. Our examples might be wrong, and flip in relative performance. But if you are looking to build confidence into understanding what drives the value of a particular token, you have to build the mathematical understanding of what drives the value of a particular economic system.

    Bitcoin rewards miners in order to generate digital scarcity of its native store of value. The correlation between increased computation to get those rewards and the value of a secure digital asset is a well-designed game theoretical equilibrium. It posits players trying to achieve certain self-interested outcomes for themselves, and in their competitive interactions with others they generate an ecosystem. It is the first and best example of the token engineering principles.

    Key Takeaway

    There is one last mental model we want to share about token engineering.

    It is imperative to have clarity and insights into what exactly one is trying to grow and optimize. In the parlance of linear programming or machine learning, you have to know your objective function — the exact equation, and thereby outcome, that you want to maximize. And as a corollary, you have to know how that function actually works: its inputs, its outputs, and how the gears turn to generate the outputs. This is the opposite of meme-based investment frameworks, and should be comfort to asset allocators looking for “fundamentals”.

    However, the objective function also needs the magic touch of marketers and community organizers to align the financial machine to help real customers, rather than imagined hypothetical ones.

    But you also need to think about where the incentives are plugging in. Per the diagram above, some will be nested into the actual legal and economic system, or equivalently the underlying blockchain network. We can think of this as monetary policy, or cooperation through capitalist competition, or the trade-offs between blockchain miners and software developers. Others will live at the equivalent level of the firm, and be structured as protocols or platforms. Such projects will have incentives focused on particular digital assets, their adoption, and customer behaviors. Yet other digital assets will be self-contained products, like the art NFTs now coming to market, and power only the asset itself.

    While each layer can have financial flows, they require radically different design considerations.

    This approach to growing organizations sounds novel, but can be actually found internally at high-performing companies. We recently read Working Backwards, the book about Amazon’s culture and approach to tackling market opportunities by solving from the customer’s point of view. It’s an operating guide on how to build scalable teams, improve organization and process, and implement rules to make good decisions across a million employees.

    These operating rules are about a particular way of being, like algorithms for decision making. Some of them relate to compensation and financial incentives. Others create intangible social capital, or set cultural norms. There is either well-catalogued incentive design or clear and transparent prioritization of values to grow the Amazon organization.

    It is like a fractal expanding with a particular generative pattern. Amazon can enforce its rules through economic force, but it does it instead with social norms.

    The same thing can be said about crypto networks, just at the level of the software. Software has much higher precision around the specification of what agents can do with the software itself. Therefore, network-orchestrated organizations are currently more quantitative rather than the qualitative human social norm. It is this mathematics that is creating the $2 trillion of value now attributed to digital asset ecosystems. And it is this practice that will be a core part of valuing our future economies.

    *  *  *

    For more analysis parsing 12 frontier technology developments every week, a podcast conversation on operating fintechs, and novel food-for-thought essays, become a Blueprint member.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 22:30

  • Indian Crematoriums Overwhelmed As Country Struggles With Second-Worst COVID Outbreak
    Indian Crematoriums Overwhelmed As Country Struggles With Second-Worst COVID Outbreak

    India’s crematoriums and burial grounds are working overtime. Even during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic last year, mortuaries in the world’s second-most populous country managed to cope – if only barely.

    Now, after facing a sharp jump up in daily new infections over the last 10 days, India has retaken its status as the second-worst hit country in terms of COVID. On Tuesday the country reported 161,736 new cases and 879 deaths, more than four times the daily average in January. Some have seen bodies piled up.

    “Earlier 15 to 20 bodies were coming in a day and now around 80 to 100 dead bodies are coming daily,” said Kamlesh Sailor, the president of a trust that operates a crematorium in Surat, a city in the industry-heavy western state of Gujarat.

    “Even after the crematorium doubled capacity when India’s first virus wave struck last year and started operating 24 hours a day, families still needed to wait at least two to three hours to cremate the bodies of their relatives,” he added.

    Business is booming so much, it has become a problem, per BBG.

    “We can’t afford to have long queues of people at the crematorium, as that again increases the risk of spreading infection,” Sailor said.

    “The situation is likely to worsen going ahead as hospitals across the city are filled to capacity.”

    The deluge of infections and deaths highlights just how unprepared Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has been to deal with the latest wave of the epidemic. Many of India’s neighbors are now struggling with outbreaks of their own after watching India struggle.

    Local media has been filled with grim reports of melting furnaces at crematoriums running non-stop, bodies piling up and smoke from continuously burning flesh creating another health risk for locals. Workers at six crematoriums across the country confirmed the scenes in phone interviews, saying they’ve seen Covid-19 deaths climbing.

    Source: worldometer

    One public health professional warned that long lines at crematoriums could also contribute to higher infection rates. In the capital New Delhi, the largest burial ground and cremation centers reported an average of 8-9 Covid deaths a day, up from one or two a month ago. They are preparing for more after the city on Monday reported a record high of over 11,000 new infections.

    The deluge of infections and deaths highlight just how unprepared Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has been to deal with the latest wave of the epidemic, even as India has emerged as a global leader in production of the vaccine, while also winning early praise for its hated national lockdowns.

    In the past weeks large crowds have gathered for elections rallies in five states, festivals, and religious pilgrimages — indicating things could get even worse for the country and its crematoriums.

    As Bloomberg pointed out, Media footage of queues at hospitals, critical medicine shortages, and an exodus of migrant workers heading to rural villages in fear of another lockdown has been reminiscent of the strict shutdown roughly a year ago that gave rise to one of the worst humanitarian crises the region has seen in decades.

    The High Court in Gujarat on Monday urged the state government to take quick measures to deal with the growing health crisis and demanded an official report in two days. The state’s lawyer, Kamal Trivedi, told the court that last week the government compelled some hospitals to set aside facilities for Covid treatment.

    “there>

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 22:10

  • Big Corporations Now Deploying Woke Ideology The Way Intelligence Agencies Do: As A Disguise
    Big Corporations Now Deploying Woke Ideology The Way Intelligence Agencies Do: As A Disguise

    Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

    By draping itself in the finery of political activism, the corporatist class consolidates political power, corrupts democracy and distracts from its real functions…

    Customers wait in line in an attempt to purchase limited-edition Air Jordan 1 ‘Light Smoke Grey’ outside a Nike store on July 25, 2019, in Yichang, Hubei Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

    The British spy agency GCHQ is so aggressive, extreme and unconstrained by law or ethics that the NSA — not exactly world renowned for its restraint — often farms out spying activities too scandalous or illegal for the NSA to their eager British counterparts. There is, as the Snowden reporting demonstrated, virtually nothing too deceitful or invasive for the GCHQ. They spy on entire populations, deliberately disseminate fake news, exploit psychological research to control behavior and manipulate public perception, and destroy the reputations, including through the use of sex traps, of anyone deemed adversarial to the British government.

    But they want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”

    Official publication of the British surveillance agency GCHQ, May 17, 2015

    Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.

    Similar agencies of deceit, militarism and imperialism now robustly use this same branding tactic. The CIA — in between military coups, domestic disinformation campaigns, planting false stories with their journalist-partners, and drone-assassinating U.S. citizens without due process — joyously celebrates Women’s Day, promotes what it calls The Agency Network of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Officers (ANGLE) and hosts activities for Pride Month, and organizes events to commemorate Black History Month. The FBI does the same.

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

    It’s so sweet that one is tempted to forget about, or at least be more understanding of, all the bombing campaigns and all the dictatorships they install and prop up that repress and kill the very people that they purport to honor and cherish. Like the GCHQ, how menacing can an intelligence agency be when it is so deeply and sincerely supportive of the rights of the people they routinely spy on, repress and kill?

    Again, this does not make the CIA perfect — sure, they make some mistakes and engage in some actions that are worthy of criticism — but to combat real evil, you do not go protest at Langley. They are engaged in important work combating homophobia, racism and misogyny. Thus, real warriors against evil look not to them but instead go searching online for the Boogaloo Boys and boomers on Facebook who post Q-Anon and other problematic memes. That is where your focus should remain if you want to root out the real threats.

    Large corporations have obviously witnessed the success of this tactic — to prettify the face of militarism and imperialism with the costumes of social justice — and are now weaponizing it for themselves. As a result, they are becoming increasingly aggressive in their involvement in partisan and highly politicized debates, always on the side of the same causes of social justice which entities of imperialism and militarism have so effectively co-opted.

    Corporations have always sought to control the legislative process and executive branch, usually with much success. They purchase politicians and their power aides by hiring them as lobbyists and consultants when they leave government, and those bought-and-paid-for influence-peddlers then proceed to exploit their connections in Washington or state capitals to ensure that laws are written and regulations enforced (or not enforced) to benefit the corporations’ profit interests. These large corporations achieve the same goal by filling the campaign coffers of politicians from both parties. This is standard, age-old K Street sleaze that allows large corporations to control American democracy at the expense of those who cannot afford to buy this influence.

    But they are now going far beyond clandestine corporatist control of the government for their own interests. They are now becoming increasingly powerful participants in highly polarizing and democratic debates. In the wake of the George Floyd killing last summer, it became virtually obligatory for every large corporation to proclaim support for the #BlackLivesMatter agenda even though many, if not most, had never previously evinced the slightest interest in questions of racial justice or policing.

    One of the very few companies that refused to do so was the Silicon Valley-based cryptocurrency exchange platform called Coinbase — which announced that it would remain apolitical and not involve itself in partisan debates or causes of social justice unrelated to its core business mission. When announcing that policy of political neutrality, the company’s co-founder Brian Armstrong explained that “the reason is that while I think these efforts are well intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division.” That once-anodyne announcement — to stay out of politics as a corporate entity — produced instant backlash. And exactly two months after, the notoriously censorious and politicized “tech reporters” of The New York Times punished the company for its heresy of neutrality with a lengthy article depicting Coinbase as a bastion of racism and toxic bigotry (the company was also savaged by journalists because of its audacity to reveal and respond to the NYT’s allegations in advance of the paper’s decision to publish).

    Post from Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, Sept. 27, 2020; New York Times article on Coinbase, Nov. 27, 2020

    Ever since, large corporations are diving into numerous other political debates with great vigor and force — provided that their views are in alignment with affluent liberal culture and prevailing social justice pieties (though, like NBA officials and stars, they confine themselves to easy domestic causes and scripted liberal platitudes while they steadfastly avoid commenting on any injustices that may implicate their business interests, such as debates over repression in China or Amazon’s abuse of its workers). The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that “dozens of chief executives and other senior leaders gathered on Zoom this weekend to plot what several said big businesses should do next about new voting laws under way in Texas and other states.” The campaign against these laws includes not just corporate giants but also the nation’s largest and richest corporate law firms.

    Part of the motive may be self-serving strategy. With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress as well as the Executive Branch — all of the instruments that can legislate and regulate their businesses — they may be calculating that using their massive weight to serve the Democratic Party’s political agenda is wise. Doing so could curry favor with powerful lawmakers and regulators and result in rewards or, conversely, allow them to avoid punishment and recrimination for the crime of refusing to engage in activism. That motive at least partially explains why they have been so generous with their donations to Democratic candidates. “Wall Street is putting its money behind Democrat Barack Obama for president,” reported Reuters in 2008, while they did the same overwhelmingly in 2020 to support Biden over Trump (just as Democrats have increasingly become the party of affluent suburbanites, they are also increasingly supported by the wealthiest corporate and tech power centers).

    The farcical nature of all of this is obvious. Just as it is laughable that the CIA and GCHQ care about social justice, feminism, and racial diversity as they bomb and subvert the rest of the world in ways that contradict all of those professed values, the idea that corporate giants who use sweatshops, slave labor, mass layoffs and abuse of their workforce care about any of these causes would make any rational person suffocate on the stench of their insincerity.

    New York Times, Nov. 20, 2020

    But whatever the motives, the dangers of growing corporate involvement in U.S. political debates are manifest. In its healthiest form, the way democracy would function is that citizens vote for the representatives they believe will best serve their interests, and those representatives then enact laws they believe their constituents favor. But when giant corporations use their unparalleled economic power to override that process — by forcing state and local governments to rescind or reject laws they would otherwise support due to fear of corporate punishment — then the system, by definition, far more resembles an oligarchy than a democracy. Rod Dreher, writing on Monday in The American Conservative, advanced arguments and concerns that were once the province of the left:

    This is progressive oligarchy. Woke Capitalism is a threat to democracy. As I write about in Live Not By Lies, these same people are eventually going to eagerly collaborate with government to create the Social Credit System necessary to make this country controllable.

    When is it going to occur to people on the Left that Big Business is doing all this because it knows that if it makes the right moves on cultural issues that matter to the Woke, it will be able to do whatever it wants to workers? It has never had to worry about Republicans. That may be changing soon, if we elect a crop of populists who know how to do more than tweet and make belligerent but empty speeches. I’d like to see Republicans like this get elected, and get active to remind Big Business of its proper place. . . .

    Big Business is already quite powerful in our society. Do we really want a society in which Big Business reserves to itself the right to tell polities what their laws and policies are going to be, at the risk of punishing that polity economically if it resists? Does this sound like the kind of country you want to live in? If you are pro-choice, imagine that Big Business decided to threaten your state’s legislature with economic consequences if it doesn’t pass pro-life legislation. One expects the business lobby to engage itself on legislative questions pertaining to its own sphere, but beyond it? Big Business already has a lot of power over our lives — and now it wants more. The only force powerful enough to reign it in is the State. Whatever else you might say about the State, at least it is democratically accountable — unlike Big Business.

    Residing beyond the dangers of even greater corporatist control over our lives and politics is the deceitful branding and distractions that this exploitation of social causes, by design, engender. If large corporations are crusading for voting rights, why would anyone regard them as a menace? The contrary is true: we should be grateful for their noble activism.

    When it comes time to identify the root causes of social pathologies, we will look elsewhere. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the corporate class and the ways they abuse and eliminate labor, control government, and destroy the working and middle classes will be impossible to see, as we are all blinded by the glare of their virtuous Instagram posts about racial justice and their unified campaigns against voter suppression. In an instant of swooning over their benevolent devotion to social justice, we will forget what they actually exist to do. When we work to harness their power to support our own political causes, we forget about how out of control and menacing that power is, and what it is most often used for. And that is exactly the way they want it.

    *  *  *

    [Attention writers, Glenn’s hiring]:

    As I announced on social media earlier this morning, we are further expanding this Substack by creating a program to actively solicit and publish paid freelance contributions from interesting reporters and writers doing important work that would not fit within standard, conventional, dreary liberal media sectors. The initial success of this page has already enabled me to expand this platform by hiring copy editors, a research assistant and a new video team. I’ll have more shortly on the expansion of the journalism we want to do here and the ways it can be supported, but as always, we are an exclusively reader-supported enterprise which relies on readers subscribing either for themselves or as gifts for others. The more we can grow, the more of an impact we can make with truly independent journalism.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 21:50

  • Goldman Spots Something Odd In Today's Market Action
    Goldman Spots Something Odd In Today’s Market Action

    One week ago, we asked if – after such an auspicious start – the great “value rotation” had died again, pointing out that after impressive gains for value and small-cap stocks to start the year, the rotation from growth to value had fizzled about a month ago, with value stocks surging in the past two weeks…

    … As Russell 2000 relative to Nasdaq 100 hit the long-term downtrend and reversed sharply.

    Interestingly, as we first pointed out a few days ago, while Tech was leading the index higher last week, the broader index is also quietly marching higher. Unlike in Q1 when tech strength meant weakness in the rest of the market, the S&P 500 was up 2% for the week “a particularly strong gain even in this era of strong stock gains” as Goldman put it. Also notable, the S&P 500 was achieving these gains the ‘old fashioned’ way, led by mega-cap Tech, with each of the FAAMG stocks up 4%-5%+ on the week. In fact, despite all of the talk of a rotation into pro-cyclicals this year, the average FAAMG stock is now up 12% vs a 10% rise for the S&P 500.”

    Which brings us to today’s action where despite a solid bid for risk assets, underneath the surface the market was assuming a defensive posture led by mega-cap Tech and the bond proxies – Utilities and Real Estate (yields on 10-year Treasuries are back down to 1.61%). On the flip side, the procyclicals – Industrials and Financials – lagged

    However, in a notable divergence from recent action, Goldman’s Chris Hussey points out that the defensive tilt took place in an environment of relaxation, not anxiety. To wit, the VIX was down again today to 16.6 – after initially spiking to almost 18 on the J&J news – and nearing the 15 level that the VIX was camped out at during long stretches of the pre-pandemic/post-GFC era.

    So, as Goldman concludes, “the “defensive” shift we are seeing today appears to be less about playing defense and more about the duration rotation.” Looking ahead, the bank notes that as rates continue to fluctuate, the move into procyclicals may stall from time to time but the bank believes that overall, procyclicals still have more room to run unless of course the highest conviction trade on Wall Sreet now – the reflation super boom – fizzles, in which case all value/procyclical bets are off.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 21:30

  • 7 Reasons Why A Vaccine Passport Should Give Us Pause For Thought
    7 Reasons Why A Vaccine Passport Should Give Us Pause For Thought

    Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

    As the use of vaccine passports snowballs around the world, concerns about their potential reach and implications are growing.

    Vaccine passports (or passes or certificates) are being rushed through around the world, including in places where most people have not even been able to get a vaccine yet. They are being touted as a way of jump-starting the global economy by providing a means for people to prove their vaccinated status, allowing them to travel, shop, go to the gym, attend sporting and cultural events and conduct other indoor activities. Countries like Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore have already introduced vaccine passports in the last couple of months.

    Of course, the use of the word “passport” is deceptive. “Passport” implies a document endorsed by a state that establishes citizenship and guarantees diplomatic protection. A traditional passport does not require the bearer to participate in a vaccine program, although immunity certificates have existed for diseases such as Yellow Fever. Another difference is that a vaccine passport is likely to come in the form of a digital document. The potential scope of its application is also far broader than that of a normal passport. It could be required not only to establish identity and vaccine status at national borders but also to travel, access public buildings and basic services within one’s own country of residence.

    In countries that already have an established national health service, such as the UK and Israel, the vaccine passport has been mandated at state level. In the US tech and health-care companies are firmly in the driving seat. At least 17 alternative programs are currently under development. As for the EU, it has proposed issuing “digital green certificates” that would allow EU residents to travel freely across the 27-nation bloc by the summer as long as they have been vaccinated, tested negative for COVID-19 or recovered from the disease. It’s worth noting that the EU has been studying the feasibility of creating a common EU vaccination card since early 2019.

    International Initiatives

    There are also initiatives taking place internationally such as the Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group, whose partners include WHO, UNICEF, ITU and the European Commission. The group “is focused on establishing key specifications, standards and a trust framework for a digital vaccination certificate to facilitate implementation of effective and interoperable digital solutions that support COVID-19 vaccine delivery and monitoring, with intended applicability to other vaccines.”

    Another initiative is the CommonPass digital health app being developed by the Commons Project Foundation (CPJ), which was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation and is supported by the World Economic Forum. The CommonPass is both a framework and an app that “will allow individuals to access their lab results and vaccination records, and consent to have that information used to validate their COVID status without revealing any other underlying personal health information.”

    Then there’s ID2020, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for digital IDs for the billion undocumented people worldwide and under-served groups like refugees. In 2019, ID2020 launched a new digital identity program in collaboration with the government of Bangladesh and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). It is now involved in the Good Health Pass Collaborative, “an open, inclusive, cross-sector initiative, bringing together leading companies and organizations from the technology, health, and travel sectors”.

    Pause for Thought

    Some of these initiatives are already being piloted by companies, including airlines, and local or regional authorities. All Nippons Airways has started a test of the CommonPass on its flights from Tokyo Haneda to New York. Last week New York unveiled its Excelsior pass, which is based on technology from IBM. Other states are likely to follow suit. France has also just completed a month-long trial of a health passport app for Air France passengers travelling to Martninique and Guadeloupe.

    The speed at which these initiatives are being rushed out should give pause for thought. Just as with contact tracing apps, the rollout is haphazard and rife with conflicts of interest. The technology is unproven and the privacy issues are glaring. Below are seven reasons why I believe vaccine passports should worry us. Perhaps you can think of more.

    1. We still don’t know how effective or safe the vaccines are.

    The ostensible goal behind the vaccine passport is to provide proof that a person has taken an officially approved vaccine and therefore poses less of a contagion risk. Yet we still don’t know just how effective or safe each vaccine is. Naturally, the efficacy levels of each vaccine vary. As WHO itself concedes, there is still uncertainty over whether inoculation actually prevents transmission of the virus.

    We also have no idea how long the immunity — partial or otherwise — provided by each vaccine lasts. What’s more, some of the vaccines appear to have reduced efficacy against some variants, including the B.1.351 strain (originally identified in South Africa).

    It’s not just the potential lack of efficacy that should have us worried. There are also big safety concerns. Numerous adverse reactions have already been reported around the world. In the case of the vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, concerns about blood clotting side effects have led some countries to restrict or even suspend their use.

    In the US, the latest VAERs data released on April 12 showed over 46,000 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines. Women have been disproportionately affected, accounting for 77% of cases. Many are experiencing abnormal menstruation, raising fears that the vaccines could even affect fertility.   

    2. Vaccine geopolitics.

    To all intents and purposes the West is already locked in a new cold war with China and Russia. Tensions are escalating on an almost daily basis. Against such a backdrop, it’s hardly beyond the realms of possibility that at some point down the line countries or companies in the West will refuse to recognise vaccines certificates that are based on Russian or Chinese vaccines, and vice versa. The justifications for doing so will grow as bad news continues to emerge about the efficacy and safety of vaccines.

    Over the past weekend Western news sources reported that George Fu Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Prevention and Control, had publicly acknowledged that Chinese-made vaccines currently offer low efficacy against the virus. “We will solve the issue that current vaccines do not have very high protection rates,” he said, adding that adjusting the dosage or sequential immunisation and mixing vaccines might boost efficacy.

    Since then China has backtracked on the comments. But the episode nonetheless raises serious questions for those nations relying heavily on the Chinese jab, including many in Latin America. If Chinese vaccines are not as effective as originally thought, it’s perfectly feasible that some countries in the West will refuse to acknowledge vaccine passes sporting the name of a Chinese vaccine. As such, rather than freeing up global travel, vaccine passports could up erecting new barriers.

    3. The potential for mission creep. 

    To begin with, SMART Health Cards are likely to include a person’s complete name, gender, birth date, mobile phone number, and email address in addition to vaccination information. But although advertised as digital vaccination records, they are clearly intended to be used for much more. Public information on the protocol notes that SMART Health Cards are “building blocks that can be used across health care,” including managing a complete immunization record that goes far beyond COVID-19 vaccines, sharing data with public-health agencies, and communication with health-care providers.

    The framework is unlikely to be limited to health-care information. The use of the term “digital wallet”, both by the Vaccine Collective Initiative and IBM, to refer to their different digital health passes suggests that economic activity could become an integral part of the frameworks’ functions. The developer of the Vaccine Collective Initiative’s SMART Health Cards framework at Microsoft Health, Josh C. Mandel, hinted in a recent YouTube presentation that SMART Health Cards could soon be used as IDs for commercial activity, such as renting a car.

    That this is all happening as central banks around the world are busily laying the foundations for central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs as they’ve come to be known, raises the specter of digital vaccine passports being used as a vehicle for the creation of a purely digital currency system to replace physical coins and notes. That’s not to say this will happen but it is a possibility. If the vaccine passport does become a digital currency wallet and cash is eliminated, opting out will be much harder. And opting in will leave us subject to levels of surveillance and control that were heretofore unthinkable. 

    4. Creating a two-tier society/world.

    Since its very inception Covid-19 has been a pandemic of inequality. This is particularly true in Israel, which was already a two-tier society long before Covid came along. It recently became the first country to launch a nationwide vaccine passport scheme, the so-called Green Pass. But its intended target is Israelis, not Palestinians. According to The Guardian, just over 4% of the 5 million Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have so far received vaccines. Active Covid cases are back near historic highs while in the rest of Israel they are at their lowest level since last June.

    Vaccine passports could end up exacerbating social divisions wherever they are used. Those who have access to vaccines can return to some semblance of normal life while those who don’t find themselves left even further out in the cold. This will happen not just within countries but between countries. As the Israeli economy reopens, Palestinians face arguably even more restrictions on their movement and activities than before Covid. But it’s not just Palestinians who are finding themselves being treated as second class citizens; so too are Israelis who refuse to take the vaccine, on religious, ethical or health grounds. Without Green Passes, they are unable to enter certain places or participate in certain activities.

    Over time, as life gets more difficult for these people, the pressure to get the jab will grow. At least that’s what vaccine passport proponents like Joan Costa-Font of the London School of Economics are hoping.

    “Vaccine passports can be used as an incentive to change behavior. They not only provide some direct benefits, but they signal what society expects from individuals. They exemplify a social norm that individuals are expected to comply with.”

    But coercing people to take the vaccine could have the opposite effect, warns an opinion piece in the BMJ:

    All in all, there are reasons to conclude that vaccine passports for basic activities may actually undermine vaccine rollout by disincentivising the very populations who most need incentivising. Closer inspection of the Israeli “green pass” scheme serves to reinforce this message. The evidence for passes increasing vaccination uptake is weak, while suspicions of compulsion and reports of people barred from workplaces for not being vaccinated have “resulted in antagonism and increased distrust among individuals who were already concerned about infringement on citizens’ rights.”

    5. Loss of bodily autonomy and integrity.

    Forcing an experimental vaccine upon someone who doesn’t want it clearly contravenes their right to bodily autonomy and integrity.  According to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, “everyone has the right to respect for his or her physical and mental integrity. In the fields of medicine and biology, the following must be respected in particular: the free and informed consent of the person concerned, according to the procedures laid down by law.”

    If bodily autonomy and integrity are indeed fundamental human rights, then the issuance of COVID vaccine passports should hinge on the informed consent of the individual and not mandatory adoption, as has been proposed in France, or coercion (and yes, denying people access to basic services is a form of coercion). This is particularly true in the case of vaccines that are approved merely on an emergency use basis.

    6. Most governments and tech giants have already shown they cannot be trusted with our most valuable data.

    Vaccine passports raise huge privacy concerns. Data-hungry companies like Microsoft, a member of the Vaccine Credential Initiative, will be given new opportunities to track our daily movements and activities and share that data with third parties. There are also major concerns about data security. If recent history has taught us anything, it is that no data — no matter how private or precious — is completely secure.

    A vaccine certificate is likely to include our most precious data of all: our biometric data. And it is unlikely to be safe. As Peter Yapp, ex-deputy director of UK GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recently warned, building yet another centralised database to store even more of our personal data would create even more opportunity for hackers and cyber criminal organizations to plunder our data:

    “Centralised databases means you’re putting a lot of data in one place so it becomes an attractive target for hackers and the like so it’s like a honeypot – it attracts people in and they’re going to have a go because there is so much data… As a software engineer, I know all software has bugs. Bugs create security vulnerabilities, that’s why it’s a terrible idea to gather together so much data of such importance in one place. This is one more nail in the coffin in the idea of Covid certification.”

    7. Whatever the politicians might say, a vaccine certificate will be permanent.

    When the vaccine certificate debate reached fever pitch in the UK last week the Conservative Party tried to assuage voter fears by insisting that the certificate would be temporary.

    “It will be time limited and I think the duration of the scheme will be measured in months,” one unnamed insider said. “The party will not wear any longer.”

    This is from the same government that publicly insisted for months that it was not even considering vaccine certificates while in private it was examining how they could be used. After going to all the trouble and expenditure to create a digital ID system whose applications and uses can be expanded at ease, there’s no way in the world that the UK government is going to just hand it all back a few months later. As history has taught us time and again, whenever governments reward themselves new temporary powers, they usually find it painfully hard to relinquish them. Such will no doubt be the case with the vaccine passport, pass, certificate or whatever they want to call it.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 21:10

  • Texas Faces New Power Crisis: Prices Soar 10,000% As ERCOT Urges Power Conservation Amid Grid 'Emergency'
    Texas Faces New Power Crisis: Prices Soar 10,000% As ERCOT Urges Power Conservation Amid Grid ‘Emergency’

    Texas’ power grid operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which came under immense pressure months ago for mishandling the historic winter storm in mid-February, urged customers Tuesday afternoon to “reduce their electricity use” as a cold front swept through, causing power demand to spike. 

    ERCOT told customers to please “conserve energy at this time. Consumers and businesses are urged to reduce their electricity use this afternoon and into the evening.” 

    Texas’ power grid operator also said: 

    “Due to a combination of high gen outages typical in April & higher-than-forecasted demand caused by a stalled cold front over TX, ERCOT may enter emergency conditions. 

    With a cold front moving through the Lone Star state some generation units were already down for repair work. Bloomberg reports one spot price for Texas power jumped as much as 10,000% on Tuesday. 

    In particular, the average spot on-peak electricity at Ercot’s North Hub jumped more than 10,000% to $1,975.96 a megawatt-hour as of 4 p.m, according to grid data compiled by Genscape. Prices are capped at $2,000 a megawatt hour, after regulators suspended the previous $9,000 cap following the energy crisis.

    The grid has seen tight supply conditions as below-average temperatures pour into the state this week. 

    So far, “We do not expect customer outages. Declaring an emergency would allow us to access additional resources,” ERCOT said, although it requested energy conservation. 

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

    The internet was not enthused by ERCOT’s grid warning today: 

    On Twitter users said: “Let me get this straight — you nearly killed millions of Texans because of poor resource management and being woefully unprepared in February and suddenly you need us to conserve electricity because we are in to 50s??? How are any of you still in charge of our energy???”

    Another said, “I’ve already heard neighbors say they have lost power for a few minutes here and there. They were already testing their system, whatever that is.”

    “Those low 60s! Can’t expect @ERCOT_ISO to handle that kind of a cold snap,” a user said. 

    Still, there is good news: “This is not an extended winter storm that is going to last five days,” Ercot Vice President of Grid Planning and Operations Woody Rickerson told reporters during a briefing. “This is a shorter event.”

    Many power plants schedule annual maintenance for this time of year, when demand is expected to be lower due to lower temperatures. A few plants were also offline to make repairs related to the February storm, Rickerson said.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 20:50

  • Buchanan: Putin & Xi Have Red Lines, Too
    Buchanan: Putin & Xi Have Red Lines, Too

    Authored by Pat Buchanan,

    What are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping up to?

    In recent days, Russian tanks, artillery, armor, trucks and troops have been moving by road and rail ever closer to Ukraine, and Moscow is said to be repositioning its 56th Guards Air Assault Brigade in Crimea.

    Military sources in Kyiv estimate there are now 85,000 Russian troops between six and 25 miles from Ukraine’s northern and eastern borders.

    “I have real concerns about Russia’s actions on the borders of Ukraine. There are more Russian forces massed on those borders than at any time since 2014 when Russia first invaded,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” Blinken added this warning:

    “President Biden’s been very clear about this. If Russia acts recklessly, or aggressively, there will be costs, there will be consequences.”

    What “costs” and what “consequences” were left unstated.

    Earlier, Biden personally assured President Volodymyr Zelensky of America’s “unwavering support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s ongoing aggression in the Donbass and Crimea.”

    What does that mean?

    When Putin was a young KGB officer, the Black Sea was a virtual Soviet lake, dominated in the west by Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria and Romania, and on the north and east by the USSR. Turkey occupied the south bank.

    Today, three of the six countries that front on the Black Sea — Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey — are NATO members. Two of the others, Ukraine and Georgia, openly aspire to become members of NATO.

    If Russia feels a sense of loss and forced isolation, who can blame them?

    The transparency of the Russian military buildup suggests that it is more of a message to the U.S. and NATO than any preparation for an invasion.

    Putin seems to be saying: Ukraine’s admission to NATO or a stationing of U.S. or NATO forces in that country would cross a red line for Russia. And we will not rule out military action to prevent or counter it.

    The record suggests that Putin is not bluffing.

    We have been here twice before.

    In 2008, when Georgia invaded South Ossetia, a province that had broken free of Georgia in the 1990s, Putin sent troops into South Ossetia, drove the Georgians out, and then invaded Georgia and occupied part of that country as an object lesson.

    And though the U.S. had regarded Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili as a friend and Georgia as a potential NATO ally, George W. Bush did nothing.

    Again, in 2014, when a U.S.-backed coup overthrew the elected and pro-Russian regime in Kyiv, Putin occupied and annexed Crimea and assisted pro-Russian rebels in the Donbass in breaking free of Kyiv’s control.

    In short, when it comes to Ukraine, Russia has demonstrated that it has its own red lines, which it will back up with military action.

    The U.S. and NATO, however, have shown repeatedly that while they will give moral support and provide military aid to Ukraine, they are not going to fight Russia over Ukraine, or to wrest Crimea or the Donbass from Putin’s control.

    A similar test is taking place in the South and East China seas.

    Also on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” Blinken was asked if the United States would fight to defend Taiwan, which is being harassed and threatened by Xi Jinping’s China, which claims the island as its sovereign national territory.

    “Are we prepared to defend Taiwan militarily?” NBC’s Chuck Todd asked.

    Blinken’s response:

    “What we’ve seen, and what is of real concern to us, is increasingly aggressive actions by the government in Beijing directed at Taiwan, raising tensions in the Straits. And we have a commitment to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act … All I can tell you is it would be a serious mistake for anyone to try to change the existing status quo by force.”

    Since Biden’s presidency began, China has been sending military aircraft, fighters and bombers, into Taiwanese air space, circumnavigating the island with warships, and openly warning that any declaration of independence by Taipei would mean war with Beijing.

    Thus, Russia has made clear what it would fight to prevent — Ukraine’s accession to NATO and NATO troops on its soil. And China has made clear what its red line is, what it would fight to prevent — the declared independence of Taiwan.

    But U.S. policy in both cases seems to be one of “strategic ambiguity,” leaving the issue open as to what we would do.

    A question arises: Are Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, with their advantages of geographic proximity, threatening military action to jointly test the resolve of the Biden administration, and colluding to do so – one in Ukraine, the other in the South and East China Seas?

    And, should we fight for Ukraine, how many NATO allies would be there beside us? And should we fight to keep Taiwan free, how many Asian allies would fight China alongside us?

    Recent actions by Putin and Xi make the questions no longer academic.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 20:30

  • Hong Kong Activist Joshua Wong Handed 4-Month Jail Sentence For Anti-China Protest
    Hong Kong Activist Joshua Wong Handed 4-Month Jail Sentence For Anti-China Protest

    The man who is arguably the most visible and prominent Hong Kong pro-independence activist, and long featured in Western media reports – Joshua Wong – has been sentenced to four months in jail on Tuesday for “unauthorized assembly” as well as violating an anti-mask law which was designed to expose protesters to identification by authorities. He and other activists have been accused of “conspiracy to commit subversion”. 

    The 24-year old who has over the years semi-regularly traveled to the US, UK and Europe at the invitation of Western government officials, even having testified before US Congress, has long been a target of pro-Beijing authorities who have alleged a ‘foreign hand’ behind his pro-democracy activism. He is now among at least 47 people charged under Hong Kong’s notorious draconian ‘national security law’ which was enacted on June 30, 2020.

    Via Reuters

    He was already facing jail time for a prior charge of “organizing an illegal assembly” but avoided the max possible sentence of three years. Wong reportedly pled guilty to both the new charges. 

    As Reuters details it came after a year of frequent unrest and protests which sometimes brought central sections of the city to a halt:

    In October 2019, Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam invoked colonial-era emergency powers for the first time in more than 50 years to enact a regulation banning face masks, which many pro-democracy protesters used to hide their identities from authorities.

    Under the law, it was illegal to wear a mask at both lawful and unlawful assemblies. Offenders faced a maximum one year in jail and a HK$25,000 fine.

    As feared and perhaps expected, the national security law has effectively chilled all major protests as Beijing also more recently implemented a far-reaching election process overhaul which basically ensured greater mainland control of Hong Kong’s government.

    Joshua Wong taken in handcuffs to a recent court appearance, via Reuters.

    A number of activists since the summer have literally fled to other countries in the wake of the national security law, which includes 66 articles that criminalize any act of the following: 

    • secession – breaking away from the country
    • subversion – undermining the power or authority of the central government
    • terrorism – using violence or intimidation against people
    • collusion with foreign or external forces

    Wong could face even more extreme charges and stiffer penalties as his protest actions in recent years are no doubt under Beijing’s microscope. For example, “collusion” with foreign entities could bring many more years or decades behind bars if authorities bring this charge. 

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 20:10

  • The 3 Nations Vying For Global LNG Dominance
    The 3 Nations Vying For Global LNG Dominance

    Authored by Alex Kimani via OilPrice.com,

    Last year was an unprecedented year for natural gas and liquefied-natural-gas (LNG) markets. Whereas natural gas demand declined by 3%, LNG demand proved to be more resilient and managed to grow 1%. Nevertheless, the LNG market was extremely volatile, with periods of extreme oversupply alternating with periods of extreme tightness during the year. According to global management consulting firm McKinsey, natural gas is set to become the strongest-growing fossil fuel, with demand expanding 0.9% per annum from 2020 to 2035. While that kind of growth is nothing to write home about, natural gas will be the only fossil fuel expected to grow beyond 2030, peaking in 2037 thanks to the strong clean energy momentum. From 2035 to 2050, demand is expected to decline modestly by 0.4% per annum due to hard-to-replace gas use in the chemical and industrial sectors as natural gas continues to replace coal in power generation.

    Meanwhile, LNG is set for much stronger growth, with McKinsey predicting that domestic supply in key gas markets will be unable to keep up with demand growth. Global LNG demand is expected to grow 3.4% per annum to 2035, calling for some 100 million metric tons of additional capacity to meet both demand growth and replace decline from existing projects. LNG demand growth will slow markedly from 2035 to 2050 to just 0.5% per annum but still call for more than 200 million metric tons of new capacity by 2050.

    That said, LNG markets are expected to be anything but calm, with leading LNG exports constantly jostling for market share. On one hand, Qatar will be looking to reassert its dominance against new LNG powerhouse, Australia, while the United States will be looking to close the gap with the market leaders.

    Major liquefied natural gas exporting countries in 2019 (in billion cubic meters)

    Source: Statista

    Here are the most dominant nations in the LNG market.

    #1. Australia 

    After years of playing second fiddle, Australia has finally managed to overtake Qatar as the biggest LNG exporter in the world.

    In 2019, Australia shipped 77.5 million tonnes with an export value of $49 billion, an 11.4% Y/Y increase. Figures released by Australian energy consultancy EnergyQuest by the end of November showed that Australia’s LNG exports were running 1.2 million tonnes ahead of 2019 figures and remained on course to hit a new high of 78 million tonnes. 

    That’s a million tonnes more than rival Qatar, which shipped 77 million tonnes in 2020.

    The surge by Australia follows a succession of massive LNG projects that have kicked off production over the past decade, including projects by global operators such as Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) and Chevron (NYSE: CVX) as well as megaprojects by ASX-listed Woodside Petroleum (ASX: WPL) and Santos (ASX: STO).

    Western Australia is the nation’s dominant LNG export region, accounting for 57% of shipments.

    #2. Qatar

    While Qatar might have momentarily relinquished the top spot to Australia, it’s probably only a matter of time before the Gulf Nation reclaims pole position.

    Last month, Qatar Petroleum, the world’s top LNG producer, announced that it’s cranking up the pressure on its rivals with bold expansion plans aimed at boosting supplies over the coming decade.

    Qatar has set a goal to boost LNG output by about 40% to 110 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) by 2026, which it hopes to achieve in phase one of its expansion of North Field LNG, the largest single LNG project ever sanctioned. The company intends to follow this up with second phase expansion plans which will lift LNG capacity by 2027 to 126 mtpa. That’s enough LNG to meet the import needs of both Japan and South Korea–the first and third biggest LNG importers in the world.

    But this is not just idle bluster: Qatar boasts some of the lowest LNG production costs, especially at its Ras Laffan plant, something that helps it play the role of swing supplier to great effect with the ability to steer exports towards the most attractive markets thanks to its strategic location halfway between Europe and Asia.

    #3. United States

    In the space of a few years, the United States has gone from being a net importer of LNG to a net exporter thanks to the shale boom.

    Source:EIA

     U.S. LNG exports have particularly exploded over the past five years, with EIA data showing that the U.S. exported 1,819,386 cubic feet of LNG in 2019, a far cry from just 16,255 cubic feet back in 2014.

    Source: EnergyInDepth

    This trend showed no signs of slowing down even at the height of the Covid-19 lockdowns.

    Despite the unprecedented impact of Covid-19 on global economies, total U.S. exports of LNG continued to grow in 2020, averaging 6.6 Bcf/d for the year, according to EIA. For the whole year 2020, LNG exports closed out with a new record of 2.4 trillion cubic feet, a brisk 32% Y/Y growth clip, with LNG exported to 37 countries, a record number.

    In sharp contrast, natural gas imports in 2020 dipped 7% to 2.6 trillion cubic feet, the lowest level since 1993.

    Another interesting development: For the first time, Asia dethroned Europe as the top destination for U.S. LNG cargoes, taking in almost half of all exports.

    U.S. exports to Asia increased 67% Y/Y to 3.1 Bcf/d, with China leading Asian countries in recording the largest increase, averaging 0.6 Bcf/d in 2020 as tariffs on LNG imports were lowered to 10% from 25%.

    U.S. LNG exports to Europe averaged 2.5 Bcf/d, up 0.6 Bcf/d from 2019 levels. LNG exports to Turkey increased by 0.3 Bcf/d while exports to the United Kingdom, Spain, Greece, and Lithuania grew by 0.1 Bcf/d each.

    The U.S. also scored a crucial win after Turkey ditched Russia in favor of the United States as its primary LNG supplier, with experts pointing fingers at the political tussle between Ankara and the Kremlin in Syria and Libya as being to blame for the growing bad blood between Turkey and Russia.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 19:50

  • China Threatens Retaliation Over Japan's Decision To Dump Radioactive Fukushima Waste Water
    China Threatens Retaliation Over Japan’s Decision To Dump Radioactive Fukushima Waste Water

    Out of all Japan’s major allies and neighbors, it appears the US is the only one to support Tokyo’s decision to dump

    As we noted yesterday, with nuclear waste and fuel rods still contaminating the area, more than one million tons of radioactive waste water has seeped from the facility, and more seeps out every day, forcing authorities into what Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga describes as the “unavoidable” position of having to dump the water. After more than 10 years and a containment effort that the government branded a “success”, Japan has decided to start dumping the radioactive water back into the ocean.

    China’s foreign ministry on Tuesday blasted the Japanese government for being “extremely irresponsible” in its decision to release 1 million tons of waste water into the Pacific Ocean over two years, a decision that has prompted fierce opposition from the local fishing industry as well as nearby countries, including South Korea. Beijing even threatened to retaliate against Japan for the decision. However, the US deemed Japan’s plans “acceptable”. Here’s more from the SCMP.

    In a statement on Tuesday, Beijing said safety concerns remain and that China had not been properly consulted by Tokyo over the decision.

    “The Japanese side has yet to exhaust all avenues of measures, disregarded domestic and external opposition, has decided to unilaterally release the Fukushima plant’s nuclear waste water without full consultation with its neighboring countries and the international community,” the foreign ministry statement said.

    “This action is extremely irresponsible and will pose serious harm to the health and safety of the people in neighboring countries and the international community.”

    China called on Tokyo to reverse the decision, adding that it would continue to monitor the development and “reserve the right to respond further.”

    What’s more, a representative for Greenpeace Japan warned the plan “disregarded human rights.”

    Greenpeace Japan said the discharge disregarded the human rights and interests of the people in Fukushima, wider Japan and the Asia-Pacific region. “Rather than using the best available technology to minimise radiation hazards by storing and processing the water over the long term, they have opted for the cheapest option – dumping the water into the Pacific Ocean,” said Kazue Suzuki, climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Japan, adding that the Cabinet’s decision failed to protect the environment and neglected the large-scale opposition and concerns of the local Fukushima residents, as well as the neighbouring citizens around Japan.

    PM Suga told a cabinet meeting on Tuesday that the decision, long delayed by public opposition and safety concerns, was the “most realistic option.” The meltdown at Fukushima is remembered as the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl and was triggered by a huge earthquake and tsunami that ripped through northeastern Japan in 2011. Suga said the Japanese government would “take every measure to absolutely guarantee the safety of the treated water and address misinformation.” But given the inherent unpredictability of the situation, it’s difficult to guarantee that there won’t be some kind of unforeseen blowback. He said his cabinet would meet again within a week to work out the details of the plan.

    Fukushima’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, better known in the press as Tepco, along with government officials say tritium, a radioactive material that poses little risk to human health in low concentrations, cannot be removed from the water.

    Japan is planning to eliminate other more radioactive materials, including strontium and caesium, from the water before its release.

    Of course, filtration methods, especially when it comes to radioactive material, aren’t always 100% effective and considering that these waters are used for fishing, neighbors probably have cause to worry.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 19:30

  • Matt Taibbi Interviews Noam Chomsky
    Matt Taibbi Interviews Noam Chomsky

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    Noam Chomsky has been a central figure on the American left for over five decades. His New York Review Of Books article from 1967, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” was called “the single most important piece of anti-war literature” from the Vietnam period. That helped launch him on a course to being “the most widely-read American voice on foreign policy on the planet,” as the New York Times described three and a half decades later, in 2004.

    ​

    Chomsky’s academic field is linguistics, where he’s won numerous prizes for work developing theories like universal grammar, but he’s famous mainly as an anti-propagandist. A chief attraction to his work for readers across the spectrum is his relentless, Cassandra-like habit of calling out official untruths, especially American ones, be they about war or domestic politics or the subject he seems lately to care most about, the environment.

    Chomsky calls himself a “libertarian socialist,” which he defines as a belief that “enterprises ought to be owned and managed in a democratic fashion by the people who participate in them.” The left has always claimed him as a champion and some on that side of the aisle regularly appeal to him to settle disputes, as something like a Papal authority (humorously, he seems to intensely dislike this). I’m not so sure any particular political label fits him, however.

    He’s certainly an internationalist — even in the interview below he argues for “citizens’ international solidarity.” One of the things that mainstream American pundits have always loathed and resented about Chomsky is his habit of blithely judging America as one would any other country. Ask him about al-Qaeda after 9/11, and he pivots to the “far more extreme terrorism” of American foreign policy in the third world. Ask him about China’s repression of the Uighurs, as Katie Halper and I do here, and he asks, “Is it as bad as Gaza? It’s very hard to argue that.”

    What grinds critics of Chomsky is that he seems to push the rejection of geographical chauvinism to unbelievable degrees. Phil Donahue once asked him, seriously, if he liked sports. Chomsky replied he didn’t really get it. What did he care which group of professional athletes won a game? None of them had anything to do with him.

    Donahue pressed: come on now, you really don’t get it? Don’t you remember being a kid, rooting for the home team, the smell of the field, the memories? “Why wouldn’t you celebrate that?”

    Chomsky offered the following reply:

    I did the same thing. I can remember the first baseball game I saw when I was 10 years old, I can tell you what happened at it — fine. But that’s not my point. See, if you want to enjoy a football game, that’s great. You want to enjoy a baseball game, that’s great. Why do you care who wins?

    Note the use of “fine” there, a staple of Chomskyian argument! When Donahue later tried to tweak him with a comment about how it was “no wonder you grew up to be such a radical who doesn’t like high school football,” Chomsky doubled down: “Unfortunately, I did like it,” adding, “I’m sorry for that.”

    Chomsky’s Spockian insistence that his adult self is immune to such temptations has led some fiercer critics to scoff at his habit of batting away questions about atrocities committed by other countries as a kind of reverse chauvinism, a calculated pose rooted in some unknown pathology, leading to overcorrections back in the direction of America’s bad behavior. Surely he doesn’t really believe the U.S. government is worse than al-Qaeda?

    Then you watch “Collateral Murder,” or film of American cluster bombs dropped in the cities of Yemen, or our Air Force dropping thousands of tons of bombs on civilians in North Vietnam — speaking of sports, one such bombing campaign was called Operation Linebacker — and Chomsky becomes harder to argue with. Suddenly we’re glad he’s no flag-waver, because who else is going to point these things out?

    This is why I’ve always admired Chomsky a great deal, even if I sometimes disagree with his politics (or his takes on sports for that matter!). Unafraid of criticism, few people of his stature in American life are willing to do what he does. He is clearly a man of principle, a character trait that might have gotten him in even more trouble had he come of political age in the Internet era. His defense of the speech rights of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson is still brought up by critics and sticks to his name like flypaper on Twitter. He doesn’t care.

    More evidence that he’s honest broker lay in the fact, as Christopher Hitchens once noted, that over time, “the more Chomsky was vindicated, the less he seemed to command ‘respect’” from mainstream pundits. His fame has grown in inverse relationship to the quantity of his green room invites. Although American political life has moved toward him, as noted below, he’s still largely an unperson to the networks and the newsrooms of the great dailies like the Times, who’ll never forgive him for being right about everything from the civil rights movement to Vietnam to Iraq. Even his views on Russiagate (“farcical,” he said) identified him as an outside-the-tenter, confirmed in his shameful lack of deference to the manufacturers of consent.

    Chomsky has other, little-remarked-upon qualities that mark him as a true egalitarian, like his habit, still, of trying to answer every serious query sent to him. Although not a fan of tweets — “If you thought for two minutes… you wouldn’t have sent it” is his mordant assessment of a lot of Twit lit — he gives nearly every other kind of correspondence generous consideration. He’ll prioritize responding to an obscure blogger over a major daily newspaper if the blogger has the better question.

    Chomsky’s stubbornness is clearly his great strength, but it can make interviewing him a challenge. When I approached him before writing Hate Inc., which I initially tried to model after his great book of media criticism, Manufacturing Consent, I tried over and over to get his take on how the press had changed since he and Edward Herman first started looking at the subject forty-odd years ago. What about the role of Facebook, Google, Twitter?

    In the age of data mining and push notifications, couldn’t a company like Facebook — which has completely taken over the distribution authority regional newspapers once claimed for themselves — individually shape the news-reading habits of billions of people in ways never imaginable previously? I thought the new algorithm-fueled emphasis on divisive media was a truth-smothering innovation that fit with his famous propaganda model, but Chomsky wasn’t having any of it.

    “Take a look at the Facebook phenomenon,” he said. “Where are they getting their news from? They don’t have any reports. They’re just getting it from the New York Times, so it’s the same sources of information.” I tried again in the interview below, but he dunked on me quickly. Some issues are no-fly zones. But there are plenty he loves talking about.

    His most recent book, Chomsky for Activists, traces the aforementioned undeniable truth, that the arc of American politics has moved in his direction, thanks in large part to activism. Chomsky wrote The Political Economy of Human Rights and Manufacturing Consent around the same time that Howard Zinn was writing The People’s History of the United States. At the time, all three books (and especially Zinn’s) were almost universally denounced as scandalous anti-American provocations. Today there’s a debate over whether the Zinn/Chomsky view of American history has become too hegemonic in academia. I’m not sure The 1619 Project isn’t a clever subversion of Chomskyan politics rather than an affirmation of it, but the influence of his mode of thinking in modern American culture is clear from any angle.

    Noam Chomsky at 92 is voluble, energetic, and quick. Except for the werewolf beard, which gets a big yes vote from me, he’s still the same far-ranging, defiant thinker he was twenty or thirty years ago. In a recent interview with Useful Idiots, he offered his thoughts on Joe Biden, Donald Trump, a rising nuclear threat, the media, and other topics:

    Matt Taibbi: Can you tell us a little bit about Chomsky For Activists, and what prompted you to do this book now?

    Noam Chomsky: Well, actually, I was prompted by a friend who is editing it, and he thought it might be a good idea to put together some discussions, and interviews and back articles, or the things about activism. So I went along.

    MT: The book is very optimistic in tone. You talk about the distance that people have traveled since the sixties. How do you account for the improvement in the level of engagement in political activism today versus, say, back in the early sixties?

    Noam Chomsky: Overall, it’s probably greater today. There were peaks in the sixties. There was a brief peak, and with regard to the civil rights movement, and roughly around 1963, a couple of years before that, and that terminated. Then there was a brief peak in the late sixties and early seventies, with regard to the antiwar movement. It was a couple of years. Meanwhile, other things were being developed, barely developing.

    You got the bare beginnings of what became later the feminist movement, the beginnings of environmental concerns, some labor concerns, a couple of others. A lot of them flourished later, the seeds were laid.

    But today it’s much broader, much more extensive. But one of the reasons for the book is there is a sense among young people that everything’s hopeless. It’s just, “You can’t fight City Hall. It’s too big.” That partly comes from not understanding what’s happened in the past. If you look at the differences that activism has made, just in half of my life, the fifties, sixties, to the present, that’s enormous. You go back earlier, it’s even more.

    MT: Especially since Trump was elected, there’s been a lot of this rhetoric that democracy doesn’t work, that people left to their own devices make bad decisions, etc. As a result of this pessimism, a lot of people believe the road to progress is lobbying big companies like Facebook and Google and PayPal, and even MasterCard and VISA, to create the society that we want. How do you feel about that kind of corporate-based activism, lobbying corporations to exercise their power?

    Noam Chomsky: Lobbying corporations is activism. If corporations are doing anything, it’s because they’re under pressure to do it. A corporation has one purpose, to profit. There’s variation, but very generally the fact is, that a corporation is following the principle that it should maximize its own gain and market share. Now, corporate executives are not stupid.

    If they realize that they’re losing a customer base, they’re facing what they call reputational risk, meaning, “The peasants are coming with the pitchforks, we better do something.” Then they’ll react and maybe do something, sort of generally decent, within limits.

    But to ask them to do it on their own, makes no sense. It’s like asking a totalitarian state to be nice. The corporations are sort of being dragged along slightly, but the real activism is having other effects. I mean, take the most important issue we face, by far, destroying the environment.

    Well, change is not going to come from corporations. In fact, take a look at this morning’s papers. Even with the pandemic and the reduction of economic activity, methane and carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere has increased. Because, for example, as oil prices have gone up, you’re getting the automatic reaction, the fracking industry revives.

    One of Trump’s great deeds was to eliminate the regulations on controlling methane release, which is extremely dangerous, in the short term, much more than carbon dioxide. So they do that. They can make more money that way. You’re getting more releases of poisons into the atmosphere, which reduces the time span that we have to try to deal with this. Well, that’s the way businesses are going to behave. They can make more money doing something, they’ll do it. You put plenty of pressure on them, or on the banks that finance them.

    But if you do things like what Sunrise Movement did, a young activist group, sit in, occupy congressional offices, get some support from the progressive legislators who came in, kind of on the Sanders wave, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in this case, pick up some support from a long term Democratic Senator who was interested in the environment, Edward Markey, then you can get the idea of the Green New Deal, which is essential for survival, in some form.

    You can get it from way off in the outer space somewhere, to the legislative agenda. Keep the pressure up, you can get something done. We can see it happening right before our eyes. Biden’s environmental program, climate program, it’s not what’s needed, but it’s much better than anything that preceded. And it’s not because he had a sudden revelation. There are pressures constantly.

    MT: How about on the antiwar front? Is there progress there?

    Noam Chomsky: If you want to take, say, the protest about the Vietnam War that began in the late sixties, it became really substantial in the late sixties. 1967, 1968, you’re getting huge demonstrations.

    Early in the sixties, couldn’t get a whisper. I was giving talks in somebody’s living room, you’d get three neighbors together, that’s other people doing the same thing. When we’d try to have a meeting at the university, to bring in Vietnam, we had to have ten other subjects to bring somebody in. Well, it takes a lot of work like that, by lots of people, before anything finally breaks through.

    You may not see it for a long time, you may forget the people who were involved, but that’s the way things happen. The same is true today. And it is happening on a lot of fronts. Take, say, the demonstrations that took place after the Floyd murder. Pretty astonishing. There’s never been anything like that before.

    I mean, there was some real dedicated solidarity, black and white, all over the country, all over the world, in fact, enormous public support, way beyond anything that Martin Luther King achieved. That didn’t come because one black man was murdered by the police. It came from years of activist organizing and education. The New York Times published its 1619 series. That wouldn’t have happened a couple of years earlier.

    Katie Halper: In a recent interview, you emphasize that there wasn’t that much of a difference between Biden and Trump on foreign policy. You specifically go over the narratives about China and Russia, and the threat they do or don’t pose to the United States. What do you think the United States should be doing, in terms of cooperation? And also, if you think that having a kind of a multipolar world, in which the United States is not the most powerful, if that’s something that’s better for the world?

    Noam Chomsky: It’s better for the world to have less concentration of power than more concentration of power. The kind of multipolarity we need is citizens’ international solidarity. I was talking about China and Russia, because that was the question that was asked. But what we need today is international solidarity, at the public level, on the major issues that confront us. There are major issues. They’re all international in scope. The great powers aren’t going to deal with them.

    Take, say the immediate one, the pandemic. There are no borders. Everyone understands. So understand, on all sides, that unless we control the spread of the disease in the poorest countries in the world, not only will they suffer severely, but so will we. Not to do so is suicidal, but it’s not being done.

    So, to take ourselves, the United States happens to have a surplus of AstraZeneca vaccines, a big collection of them, because they haven’t been authorized yet, so they’re sitting there. Biden actually did distribute them to some other countries, which ones? Africa? No. Asia? No. Canada and Mexico.

    Canada has one of the biggest surpluses drugs of any country, and Mexico, it was kind of a payoff for keeping people from our border, who were fleeing from disasters that we were mostly responsible for. That’s not the way to do it.

    KH: How far apart, or not, are Biden and Trump on foreign policy?

    Noam Chomsky: Take nuclear weapons. Fortunately, Biden was able to renegotiate to agree, to agree with the Russian requests to maintain the new START treaty. Managed it, literally, by hours. It’s going to run out on February 5th. Trump vacillated, and refused to sign it. That’s the last of the arms control regime.

    But now we’re engaged in provocations provocative of NATO, military actions, right at the Russian border, not at the US border, in the Arctic. Russia responding with its own actions sharply increases the danger of some accident happening. It’s not the way to deal with the threat of nuclear weapons.

    Same is true elsewhere. There are lots of threats, but one of the most severe is in the Middle East. There’s this supposedly great concern, I would say alleged concern, about Iranian nuclear programs, that’s considered in mainstream circles the major threat to world peace, so what are we doing about it? Exacerbating the threat.

    There was an agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. The Trump administration, in 2018, pulled out of it, violating Security Council orders that all states are committed to observing, and imposed very harsh sanctions on Iran. It’s harmed the population, and our effective leadership, the way sanctions were insisted on, revoking the treaty altogether, and imposing a different one, with much harsher terms.

    US allies are totally opposed to this. They made it very clear, to the Security Council and elsewhere. It doesn’t matter. We’re the boss. Greatly increases the threat of confrontation.

    On the day in which the new negotiations began in Vienna, the Israeli Navy attacked an Iranian ship run by the Revolutionary Guards, which is hard to imagine that that wasn’t a signal to try to undermine the negotiations. All of this is going on.

    What are we doing? Basically taking over Trump’s program. The Biden administration has some nice words about wanting to renew the negotiations, but what does it mean? We pulled out, we’re imposing the sanctions. They have to make the first move. And we insist on Trump’s version, not the JCVOA.

    Biden’s not calling for going back to the joint agreement that we pulled out of. What he’s saying so far, at least according to Tony Blinken and the guys who talk for him, that we’re insisting on the Trump version. “Let’s negotiate to get to the harsher version, that we’re not going to stop the sanctions, until you agree to that.” Is that the way to reduce the threat of tensions in the Middle East, possibly leading to general war?

    Well, there are things like this all across the board, and those are the things that popular forces should be working on. You can’t trust the major power centers do it on their own. They go in different directions.

    KH: I know you signed a letter recently about Syria. What is your position about the U.S. intervening abroad? Is that ever appropriate? Is it appropriate now?

    Noam Chomsky: Depends on what kind of intervention. Biden just made a very good intervention, I applaud it.

    With the extraordinary savagery characteristic of the Trump administration, Trump withdrew all aid to Palestinians. Two million Palestinians in Gaza are facing some of the worst conditions anywhere in the world.

    The area’s becoming unlivable. They’re constantly under attack. The sewage system’s been destroyed, the power system. There’s no food, there’s no drinkable water. So what did Trump do? Withdrew the US aid to UNRWA, which was some sort of a slight lifeline, same in the West bank.

    Why? He said, because Palestinians weren’t treating him with enough respect. Okay. Biden did renew, he intervened, if you want to call it intervention, and renewed the US funding to UNRWA, that’s the right kind of intervention. And you can do things like that everywhere.

    KH: A lot of people criticize China’s human rights abuses, or will criticize the Assad regime. What should the United States government be doing around those two countries, if anything? What’s the American role in alleviating human rights abuses in other countries?

    Noam Chomsky: With regard to human rights violations, the US should be doing everything it can to alleviate and overcome them. What’s the easiest way to do that? Very simple, stop the ones we’re responsible for.

    That’s the easiest way to do it. So take Gaza again. There are severe human rights violations against the Uighur population in China. Is it as bad as Gaza? It’s very hard to argue that.

    They’re not under the kind of attack that Gaza’s under constantly. If we’re concerned with human rights violations, we can stop them right away. Namely, stop participating in them. Easy way.

    With regard to the Chinese rights violations, it’s much harder to do anything, just as they can’t do anything about our human rights violations. We can protest. Makes sense. We should try to raise international commitment, to pressure China to end them, lots of things we can do. But it’s limited.

    Suppose that China or Russia or anybody was imposing sanctions on the United States, because of the way American client states are treating people, say, in Gaza, because we’re talking about that. I could pick many other cases.

    How would we react? Would we say, “Okay, good. I’m going to stop doing it?” No, no, we’d make it harsher. If we really care about human rights violations, we’ll try to do something to alleviate them.

    Now, the real protest is fine, it should be protested. We should be accurate about it. Not make up charges on the basis of very dubious evidence, but keep the things that are well supported, same with Iran violations. We don’t look at Russian propaganda to find out what violations we are carrying out. We look at our own evidence, which is ample, and do something about it. Do something, do the things we can do, very easily.

    Take another example. There was just an interesting article that appeared by Helen Epstein in the New York Review of Books on Uganda. Major atrocities being carried up by the government, with our support.

    It’s not the main part of the article, but if you read it, we continue to support it. Do we have to? That’s a way to alleviate atrocities. There’s plenty of things like that all over the world.

    We can do the best we can with other people’s atrocities, but we should do it to whatever extent we can, and in a constructive way, not a way that’s just going to increase them, because you can get propaganda points that way. Not that.

    MT: Your famous media book is entitled Manufacturing Consent, which stressed the idea that the media can organize the population behind official deceptions. Now, it’s become harder and harder to organize “consent,” because the country is so divided, and the media has an enormous role in that. Is that a change in your model? And who benefits from all of this division that is now such a central feature of how the media operates?

    Noam Chomsky: Well, actually, manufacturing consent is much easier now. And it goes on at a level that’s never happened before. Fox News, Breitbart, the rest of them have succeeded, along with the administration and the GOP generally, in creating a large mass of the population, almost half of it, which is living in another universe.

    I mean, take a look at the poll results. They believe things that are just so far from reality, that it’s even hard to talk about. That’s very effective. The mainstream media, CNN, New York Times, the rest, have done the same on other issues.

    Take what we’ve just been talking about. Take, say, the so-called Iranian threat, the return, the efforts to deal with it. This is described everywhere as, “Iranian nuclear weapons is the greatest threat to world peace. We’ve got to do something about it.” Where’d that come from? What makes them a threat to world peace?

    I mean, is it the reports of US intelligence? No, not at all. What they tell us is, if Iran is developing nuclear weapons, it would be part of their deterrent strategy. Well, the US government doesn’t like a deterrent strategy, nor does Israel. That’s why they’re attacking Iran constantly.

    The countries that rampage in the region don’t want deterrence. How about telling people that? Anybody read that anywhere? How about simple ways of solving the problem, if you think it’s a problem?

    There’s a very simple way, if you think Iranian nuclear weapons are a problem. Let’s move to establish a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region, with intensive inspections, which we know work very well.

    US intelligence agrees that the inspection regime under the JCPOA was working perfectly. So let’s extend it, and make it a total weapons-free, WMD-free zone in the region, get rid of nuclear weapons.

    What’s blocking that? The United States, period. Everybody else is in favor of it. Iran’s strongly in favor of it. The Arab States have been in favor of it for 25 years, with no protests from Europe.

    Every time it comes up, the United States, most recently from Obama, it’s coming up again in a couple of weeks. It’ll be vetoed again. What is that? Everybody knows the reason. It’s just, you’re not allowed to say it.

    The reason is, the United States will not permit Israeli nuclear weapons to be inspected. In fact, the US does not recognize their existence, even though everybody knows they’ve got a huge arsenal. And there’s a reason for that, US law.

    According to US law, countries that have developed nuclear weapons systems outside the international framework, cannot receive US aid. Nobody wants to open that door. How about that for the triumph of manufacturing consent?

    Here’s what’s called the greatest threat to world peace, an elementary way to overcome it, we can’t carry it out, and nobody can talk about it. That’s way beyond the WMD story in Iraq. I mean, there, maybe some of them actually believed it? Okay. Here, there’s nothing.

    I mean, there are things like this all the time. That’s manufacturing consent at such a level, that you can’t even see it.

     

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 19:10

  • Trading Bonds In Venezuela? Bring A Gunman And Cash
    Trading Bonds In Venezuela? Bring A Gunman And Cash

    The Venezuelan bond market – described by Bloomberg as one of the ‘tiniest and almost certainly the most primitive’ in the world – is also one of the most dangerous.

    Based in Caracas where Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government is ‘ever so slowly freeing up the battered economy’ for capitalistic endeavors, the US dollar has become the defacto currency. Yet, there’s no electronic method to electronically transfer USD from one bank to another – which means having to get creative.

    So when a local rum maker decided to become the first company to sell dollar bonds in the country in at least two decades, investors shoved stacks of hundred-dollar bills into bags and lugged them over to the distiller’s bank in eastern Caracas. All sorts of techniques were employed — everything from an armed-guard escort to an incognito approach — to navigate the streets of one of the world’s most dangerous cities. And while the deal was minuscule — totaling a mere $300,000 — and limited to just investors with local bank accounts, its success late last year has triggered a wave of interest from both companies seeking financing and wealthy Venezuelans looking to get a return on their cash. -Bloomberg

    “What can a person who has dollars in Venezuela do with that money? Leave it the bank?” asked former Caracas Stock Exchange president, Juan Domingo Cordero, who retired two years ago as the president of brokerage Rendivalores. “The problem is clearing the operations. We can’t continue to operate in cash.”

    Another distiller, Ron Santa Teresa SACA – whose 1976 Ron Antiguo de Solera sells for around USD $40 per bottle – is offering local dollar-bond sales of zero-coupon notes (structured that way so investors wouldn’t have to deal with the danger of picking up cash interest payments). The one-year bonds were sold at 96 cents on the dollar, with investors paid back 100 cents at maturity funded by proceeds from exports.

    Until very recently, a dollar-bond sale would have been almost unimaginable. But thanks to years of economic policy (and of course, crippling sanctions) which have decimated capital markets and led to restrictions on foreign-currency transactions, Venezuela has embarked on ‘a reluctant embrace of private business and dolarization,’ according to the report.

    And as Bloomberg notes – daring investors are now asking if now is the time to swoop in and buy distressed Venezuelan assets. Yet, change is slow in the country, which is still grappling with regular blackouts and a lack of fuel.

    Corporate borrowing?

    Hindered by strict monetary policies and a drought of government subsidies, banking credit in Venezuela is next to impossible to obtain for average companies. Outstanding loans in the county total less than $200 million – just 0.5% of GDP, according to Venezuelan researcher Ecoanalitica.

    The country’s Latin American peers average 30% of output.

    Unsurprisingly, the number of commercial-paper sales in bolivars soared 60% last year, though that amounts to just $60,000 per day – down from $5 million in the 1990s.

    “We no longer have a subsidized economy or cheap loans,” according to Jose Miguel Farias, finance director at Caracas-based brokerage Mas Valor. “And credit is the fuel that keeps businesses open.”

    Investors with dollars are ready to put their money to work. There is about $2 billion in cash circulating in the economy, and another $400 million is sitting in no-interest accounts at local banks. There’s no way for Venezuelans to transfer the money overseas. While Ron Santa Teresa’s bond spurred speculation that there would be an immediate wave of similar issuance, the ramp-up has been slower than expected.

    Other companies seeking to raise funds have been thwarted by regulatory and structuring issues, according to three people familiar with the process who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. Jose Maria Nogueroles, a former banker who opened the BNCI Casa de Bolsa brokerage last year, says his firm has sought regulators’ approval for three dollar-bond sales from local companies with no success so far. –Bloomberg

    “We need to democratize the market and simplify the process,” said Nogueroles. 

    Until then, investors – such as those who purchased Ron Santa Teresa bonds in the hopes that a dollar-clearing system would be implemented by maturity – will need to hit the streets of Caracas to transport their matured investments in the form of physical banknotes – trying to avoid criminal gangs and one of the highest murder rates in the world in order to earn some interest.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 18:50

  • NCAA "Unequivocally Supports" Transgender Biological Male Participation In College Women's Sports
    NCAA “Unequivocally Supports” Transgender Biological Male Participation In College Women’s Sports

    Authored by Janita Khan via The Epoch Times,

    The National Collegiate Athletic Association Board of Governors said on Monday that it “firmly and unequivocally supports” transgender biological male athletes competing in women’s sports at the college level.

    It comes amid an ongoing push by Republican-led states to enact measures that seek to protect female athletes, who are likely to have a biological disadvantage if forced to compete against male-born students.

    “The NCAA Board of Governors firmly and unequivocally supports the opportunity for transgender student-athletes to compete in college sports,” the board wrote in their statement.

    “The NCAA has a long-standing policy that provides a more inclusive path for transgender participation in college sports.”

    Under the association’s policy, a transgender female athlete is allowed to participate in NCAA women’s competitions if the athlete is being treated with testosterone suppression treatment. Similarly, a transgender male athlete is allowed to participate in NCAA men’s competitions if they have received a medical exception for treatment with testosterone.

    NCAA also addressed questions about how the association determines which states will host championship games.

    “When determining where championships are held, NCAA policy directs that only locations where hosts can commit to providing an environment that is safe, healthy and free of discrimination should be selected,” the board wrote.

    Several states this year enacted laws that would bar biological males from participating in women’s sports. The bills also acknowledges the inherent biological differences between male and female student-athletes. Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas are among the states that have signed such a bill into law.

    Meanwhile, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who initially had said she would sign a similar bill, sent the law back to the legislature over what she said were unrealistic requirements “in the context of collegiate athletics.” The state has since failed to enact the bill over disagreements about the changes.

    Noem has, however, formed a national coalition to “Defend Title IX” to protect the rights of female athletes and keep competition fair. The governor said at the time that one of the main motivators for creating the coalition is to build enough support to push back against any pressure from groups like the NCAA.

    “Once we have enough states on board, a coalition brought big enough where the NCAA cannot possibly punish us all, then we can guarantee fairness at the collegiate level,” Noem said.

    She has also signed two executive orders to protect fairness in women’s sports—one for K-12 athletics, and the other for college athletics. The executive orders came after the proposed bill HB 1217 failed to be enacted and seeks to temporarily address the problem, Noem said.

    Student-athlete Linnea Saltz, who participates in the highest level of U.S. intercollegiate athletics known as NCAA Division I, told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February that biologically female athletes shouldn’t be forced to compete with athletes who were born biologically male.

    She said that forcing biologically female athletes, who put extensive sweat and effort to train in the sport they love, to compete with biological men would result in less competitive women’s sports, see fewer female athletes, and cause current female athletes to lose motivation due to the perceived unfairness.

    “I feel as if women are going to be watching their own sports from the sidelines, we’re no longer going to be wanting to compete in sports where we don’t feel as if we’re competing on a level playing field,” Saltz said.

    “And if we’re allowing biological males that possess physiological advantages over biological females to compete in the female category, we’re no longer going to be interested in competing.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 04/13/2021 – 18:30

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