Today’s News 15th April 2021

• Nearly 25% Of UK 'COVID Deaths' Were Not Directly Caused By Virus
  Nearly 25% Of UK ‘COVID Deaths’ Were Not Directly Caused By Virus

  As the people of England and Wales celebrate the end – or at least the beginning of the end – of the COVID restrictions that have stifled the economy for more than a year, new data from the Office of National Statistics have illustrated a startling conclusion: nearly 25% of registered COVID-19 deaths actually aren’t being killed by the virus, something that we have been discussing here at Zero Hedge since we first pointed out that motorcycle accident deaths were being labeled “COVID deaths” in Florida.

  

  This time, it’s not just accident deaths, but deaths of all kinds, that have been unduly counted in Britain’s COVID death numbers. As the Daily Mail put it, many of the coronavirus deaths which are registered are now people who have died “with” the disease rather than “from” an infection. Dying “with” COVID can land somebody’s death counted in the official data even if COVID isn’t listed as the primary cause of death on their death certificate.

  According to the numbers, 23% of Britons who died in the outbreak died “with COVID” rather than from COVID, as the Daily Mail shows in the chart below. For the record, 23% of the current death toll of 127,123 would be roughly 30K deaths misleadingly labeled.

  

  (Source: Daily Mail)

  In the wake of the data’s release, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has refused to expedite England’s reopening, and warned that cases will rise in the coming weeks as thousands of Britons rush to spend their cash now that pubs and indoor dining have reopened (which happened Monday, as we reported).

  

  The ONS also shared data putting COVID deaths within the context of all deaths recorded in the UK.

  

  While COVID deaths and cases have rebounded across Europe, the UK has been a notable exception, with just 23 deaths reported yesterday, according to data from the UK’s COVID dashboard. All together, coronavirus deaths now make up just 4.9% of deaths registered in England and Wales compared with 45% in mid-January.

  In reality, the UK has seen fewer than 30 deaths per day from COVID since the beginning of April, despite the government’s claims that daily deaths have been as high as 60. Part of this is due to the rush to release data to the public, as numbers in the daily update often actually died days or weeks earlier, and this delay isn’t explained to the public.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/15/2021 – 02:45

• Can We Win In The 'Gray Zone'?
  Can We Win In The ‘Gray Zone’?

  Authored by Richard Kemp via The Gatestone Institute,

  In March, US President Joe Biden issued his Interim National Security Strategic Guidance. Across the Atlantic, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson presented the Integrated Review of Security, Defense, Development and Foreign Policy to parliament. Both leaders expressed concern over the increasing challenges in the gray zone and promised measures to respond more effectively.

  

  The gray zone is the space between peace and war involving coercive actions that fall outside normal geopolitical competition between states but do not reach the level of armed conflict. Actions in the gray zone are conducted by states often using proxies including terrorists, and also by terrorist organizations in their own right. Gray zone actions are aggressive and often ambiguous, deniable and opaque. They are intended to damage, coerce or influence, to destabilise target states or undermine the international status quo. They usually seek to avoid a significant military response, though are often designed to intimidate and deter a target state by threatening further escalation.

  Gray zone actions are not new and have long been the prevalent form of conflict across the world. But as America and Britain both recognise, globalisation and technology are increasing the frequency and efficacy of such activities, and the speed at which they unfold. More actors are becoming involved, using increasingly powerful means of “gray warfare”, including cyber, space, internet, social media, digital propaganda and drones.

  Gray zone techniques can include terrorist attacks, sabotage, assassination, blackmail, hostage-taking, espionage, subversion such as funding and manipulation of political groups in a target country), cyber attacks, political warfare including lawfare, disinformation, propaganda, electoral influence and economic coercion. They sometimes involve military intimidation and conventional and unconventional military operations.

  Examples include Russia’s 2018 nerve agent assassination attempt in the UK, annexation of the Crimea and efforts to influence European parliamentary elections; China’s encroachment tactics and actions around disputed features in the South and East China Seas as well as military aggression against India in the Ladakh region and extreme pressure on Hong Kong; Iran’s repeated proxy terrorist attacks in the Middle East, South America, the United States, Europe and elsewhere, seizure and attacks on international shipping and proxy missile attacks against US installations in Iraq; and Pakistan’s active sponsorship of the Taliban against the US-led coalition in Afghanistan and terrorist attacks in India.

  Britain’s Integrated Review undertakes new capabilities to deal with gray zone challenges. Most notably it re-focuses the Special Air Service and other special forces against hostile state actors and creates the Ranger Regiment, a new special forces group akin to the US Green Berets and described by the Defense Secretary as “gray zone warriors”.

  The UK Ministry of Defense says these measures, together with a more “persistent” forward-deployed stance, will enable British forces to be “credible and capable to deter, and if necessary, defeat our adversaries in conflict as well as to allow us to compete below the threshold of armed conflict”. These enhancements may well provide the military capability to operate alongside allies in the gray zone, but do liberal democracies in the 21st Century have the political will to do the dirty work that is necessary to win?

  I exclude Israel from this question, as it has long proved highly effective at defending itself using gray zone military actions. A recent example includes a carefully calibrated mine attack on the Iranian IRGC vessel Saviz in the Red Sea on April 6, which some have interpreted as the latest in a series of Iran-Israel tit-for-tat operations against shipping and others believe may be a message from Jerusalem to either (or both) Washington or Tehran on the opening of the Vienna talks on the Iran nuclear deal. The opacity of such actions to outside observers is a characteristic of the gray zone but its meaning is certainly clear to those at whom it is aimed. One thing is certain: perhaps alone among western nations, Israel is unafraid to confront its enemies in the gray zone.

  Western nations have multiple pre-emptive and reactive options to respond to gray zone actions directed against them or their allies, most effectively involving multilateral coordination. The objective should be to frustrate or deter, avoiding escalation that might lead to all-out conflict. Broadly, options fall into four categories: diplomatic, informational, economic and military.

  With the exception of some informational responses, perhaps involving disinformation, the first three categories carry little political risk for democracies and have been used frequently and to varying effect. For example, after the nerve agent attack on its soil, Britain applied limited economic sanctions and rallied an international diplomatic effort against Russia, expelling more than 100 intelligence operatives across North America and Europe; and the Trump administration imposed counter-terrorism sanctions on Iran following numerous acts of regional aggression.

  Beyond symbolic demonstrations of force such as NATO deployments in Lithuania against Russian aggression and the forthcoming UK carrier strike group freedom of navigation patrol in the South China Sea, the military category of responses includes limited conventional combat, covert operations, cyber attacks and espionage. Each of these could be vitally important in confronting gray zone actions but are accompanied by significant political risk.

  A prominent recent example is the 2020 US missile strike against Iranian IRGC Quds Force chief Qasim Soleimani, himself a master of the gray zone, who had been involved — among other nefarious activities — for many years in orchestrating attacks against the US and its allies. The killing of Soleimani was an outlier in US operations in the gray zone and was condemned at the time by now-President Biden who likened it to “tossing a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox”, and predicted a “major conflict across the Middle East”.

  Democracies’ fear of escalation is a significant constraint against the use of violent military options in the gray zone, and that is exactly the fear that authoritarian states such as Iran wish to instil. As long as responses are carefully calibrated, however, escalation into the sort of conflagration President Biden warned of is unlikely. In fact the point of gray zone operations is to avoid escalation to all-out conflict with the US and its allies.

  Provided that the limited purposes of our opponents’ gray zone actions are properly understood, however, fear of escalation is not the greatest obstacle to the use of a military option — transparency is. In most countries the work of intelligence services and special forces are classified and do not normally have to be specifically reported or authorised in legislatures. Weighing a decision on even the most limited military intervention, however, political leaders will reasonably be concerned about the possibility of leaks and forced accountability, increasingly so in the era of social media. This is compounded by the reality that our opponents in the gray zone will often leave no stone unturned to reveal and publicise the actions of our forces. The all-pervasive Western media would inevitably seize on any leak or exposure and very often distort it to increase political damage — a problem more rarely encountered by authoritarian states.

  All military operations by Western forces must be conducted in accordance with domestic and international law, including in the gray zone, with clear determination by governments on whether conduct of hostilities or law enforcement paradigms apply in specific operations. Adherence to the law, nevertheless, is no guarantee that action that is exposed won’t be politically damaging, especially if it goes wrong, which is always a strong risk. This is complicated by the need in some circumstances to adopt an indirect approach — conducting gray zone military action against an opponent in a different country and against a different issue to the one that prompted it.

  Churchill famously said: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”. This applies equally in the gray zone where opacity and deniability surrounding military action are likely to be essential for its success, both before and after the event, and might also be a critical factor in avoiding further escalation. That puts democracies at a distinct disadvantage compared to authoritarian regimes, which suppress information about their operations, whether legal or illegal.

  The Ranger concept envisages UK forces accompanying partners on operations when necessary. In some instances that might expose British troops to legal hazard and is a further factor that is likely to deter political authorisation of gray zone operations. No matter how extensively schooled in the laws of war, there is no guarantee that the type of foreign forces that need British assistance in battle will adhere to them. I knew of a highly trained coalition-accompanied Iraqi unit that whenever attacked on the streets of Baghdad always responded with the “death bloom” — face outwards and empty your magazine at everything that moves. Potentially, accompanying British troops would be considered partially culpable in any such actions.

  That aside, opaque and undeclared gray zone military operations that are considered lawful and legitimate today might be seen through a different prism tomorrow. Thousands of British troops have been investigated over spurious allegations of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though operations were conducted more openly, and there have been threats to drag British troops into the dock at the International Criminal Court. Today, retired soldiers are facing prosecution for events that took place half a century ago in Northern Ireland, despite having been investigated and cleared of any wrongdoing at the time. New protective legislation currently going through parliament might limit such legal concerns for the soldiers and commanders involved, but is unlikely to allay the fears of political leaders.

  If the political risk is so high, is it necessary to respond in kind to military action in the gray zone? The UK Integrated Review says: “We will seek to deter states from aggressive acts: through the prospect of punishment — by detecting, attributing and responding accordingly.” Deterrence is not down to the military option alone. Where possible, diplomatic, informational and economic actions are preferable in providing punishments. But sometimes it is necessary to fight fire with fire, and gray zone opponents who are willing to use military action must also be confronted with a credible military jeopardy to them, and not just a paper capability which will quickly be seen for what it is. The threat or actual use of violent and sometimes escalatory gray zone operations, despite inherent risks, can not only mitigate or prevent potentially serious damage caused by our opponents but also reduce the prospects of the immeasurably worse option of all-out war.

  How confident can we be that liberal democracies mean business in the gray zone? When British (as well as American) troops were being killed and maimed in large numbers in Iraq by Iranian proxies using Iranian munitions more than a decade ago, the UK government would not even consider any form of gray zone military action, even non-lethal, against Iran, despite a clear capability to do so. Instead they relied on diplomatic démarches — and the killings continued. The consequences of such weakness are still being played out in Iran’s widespread gray zone aggression. If back then — in the face of the slaughter of their own troops — political leaders’ fear of escalation and political fallout caused such paralysis, how likely is it that they will seriously contemplate violent gray zone operations today, especially if the stakes are not as high?

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 04/15/2021 – 02:00

• Can The Great "Awokening" Succeed?
  Can The Great “Awokening” Succeed?

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via AmGreatness.com,

  We all know that we are living in revolutionary times. The origins, ascendence, values, laws, and future of the United States are all under assault by self-described, though accurately described, revolutionaries.

  

  It is a Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist moment. All aspects of life, well beyond politics, are now to be ideologically conditioned. Everything from kindergarten messaging, cartoons, workplace reeducation, and television commercials to college admissions, baseball games, and the airlines are to be “fundamentally transformed” along racial lines.

  Long gone is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society. Gone, at least at the state level, is confidence in the melting pot of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage (although mixed marriages and multiracial children are at an all-time high).

  Gone are even the affirmative-action doctrines of proportional representation and disparate impact. (Yet the two mandates were always arbitrarily applied, in the sense that the U.S. Postal Service and the professional football and basketball leagues never paid much attention to racial quotas based on demographic percentages, which apparently only applied to white and Asian “overrepresentation” elsewhere).

  Wokeism, however, is essentially tribal. It seeks to identify particular nonwhite constituencies, unite them not by identical class, not by similar skin color, not by collective similar history, not by shared experience, not by mutual cultural affinities, not by longstanding historical alliances, but simply by two premises:

  1) Those of the woke collective are either claimants to being “nonwhite,” and thus victims of racism, or they are architects and supporters of the wokeist agenda, and:

  2) they can thereby all either directly leverage reparatory concessions in hiring, admissions, careers, compensation, and general influence or ensure the revolutionary guillotine exempts themselves.

  A cynic might add that much of this new racialism is a product of globalteering, and seeks to cater to huge foreign markets—China especially—by both “looking more like the world,” and delighting America’s critics, while appeasing far less moral audiences and consumers abroad than a perceived shrinking market at home.

  Still for the woke revolution to succeed, a number of experiments will have to go its way.

  Merit Was Always a Sham?

  Wokeism assumes that merit was mostly an arbitrary white construct. Its use was to insist on ethnocentric and culturally exclusionary criteria to ostracize the Other. Otherwise, “merit” had not much relation with real competency.

  Is that allegation true? We shall soon see.

  But note first that few are saying to keep bar-exam grading static, or SAT minimum scores for admission the same, and thereby instead create a Marshall Plan effort in the inner-city to stop the violence, turn failed schools into stellar academies, and honestly critique single-parent households, illegitimacy, and inordinate criminality—as an effort to ensure African American youth are not just qualified, but better qualified meritocratically than those who are deemed to hold these monopolies.

  Instead, take the United Airlines idea that it won’t necessarily train the most qualified would-be pilot candidates. Now it will target applicants by racial groupings and, by fiat, limit white males to 2,500 of 5,000 slots in its pilot-training schools. If a nonwhite applicant has less prior experience with flight, scores lower on a test, or compiled a less than competitive high school or college record, it won’t matter then. These were all always useless benchmarks apparently.

  In today’s age of computer-driven avionics, the prerequisite ability to do math, to know something about navigation, to understand computers, or to have the proper temperament to fly a plane doesn’t really matter. The fact that thousands will enter pilot training, and soon aircraft controlling, in part on the basis of their gender or race, will not in any way affect the safety or efficacy of travel.

  We will know fairly soon the answers to this woke experiment by two criteria: Will pilot error, whether fatal or incidental, increase? And will our elites, whether in Air Force One, or in their own Gulfstreams, follow suit and hire pilots on the basis of their diversity first, and avionics record second.

  We can ditto race-based criteria now used at the corporate and financial level, in high-tech, the military, entertainment, education, and in likely everything from movie roles to book contracts to national awards.

  Again, such emphases assume that our current managers, professionals, and directors of the last 50 years were heretofore racists or were hired by racists. Or at least they satisfied artificially constructed high standards that bore little relation to actual skills required on the job.

  Or they must no longer enjoy percentages in the workplace simply representative of their demographic percentages, but rather in reparatory fashion become underrepresented rather than just demographically correct.

  To sum up, in other words, if there were similar race-based/diversity criteria applied to the current meritocratic NBA, would it matter all that much?

  If African American athletes were by protocol and statute kept to between, say, 12-20 percent of the NBA player roster, to reflect the black 12-13 percent of the U.S. population, would it make that much difference?

  Would the starting L.A. Lakers five, with one African American forward, one white player, a Latino guard, an Asian center, and a Punjabi shooter be all that less exciting, skilled, or successful a team? Are the current standards that accept or reject an NBA player constructed or weighed to favor African Americans that can be judged by their “overrepresentation”?

  In the logic of wokeness, would the resulting appeal of a team—that “looks more like” a multiracial America—make up in diversity, unity, cohesion, equity, inclusion, and appeal what it lost in sheer abilities to make plays, dribble, shoot, rebound, dunk, or block? Were the all-white racialist and exclusionary teams of the 1940s really no different in skill and ability than the purely meritocratic 2021 teams? Of course not.

  Again, we are going to find out, and in a number of professions, what happens when traditional meritocratic standards are replaced by woke guidelines.

  Some Racism Is Not Racism

  Wokeism assumes asymmetry. That is, it assumes, for recompensatory purposes, that the spirit of slavery remains, that the hatreds propelling Jim Crow from 1879 to 2021 are very much alive, that the civil rights movement of “equality of opportunity” of the last 55 years was more or less a noble dud. And the result is wokeism’s doctrine that reparatory bias is not bias. Or if it is, the people will understand, Animal Farm-style, why some discrimination is good and different from other discrimination that is bad or why some prejudice is more tolerable than other prejudices.

  If asymmetrical wokeism then operates with a necessary and correct imbalance accepted by most, then there will be nothing wrong. There will follow no backlash, no social chaos, in using race to denigrate others collectively.

  There will be nothing wrong in ad nauseam using “whiteness,” “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and “white terrorists’” in pejoratively stereotypical terms—collectively to apply to all 230 million deemed whites‚ whether the unemployed welder or the part-time junior college instructor or Bill Gates—in a way that it would be terribly wrong to talk pejoratively and collectively in terms of any other group.

  If one collates all the things that have been said over the years about whites in general by Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, or Maxine Waters, and yet more recently in more sophisticated fashion by the new generation of racialist-obsessed intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Damon Young, or Elie Mystal, and then switched the terms white to black, would there be any outcry that it was becoming wrong to deductively extrapolate from individuals collective values and beliefs, and then, in circular fashion, reapply them to individuals as an innate trait?

  We shall soon discover whether this tenet of wokeism—asymmetrical use of collective stereotyping—is widely accepted by 330 million Americans. We will soon see one of three consequences from this unapologetic woke racial generalizing:

  1) The American people are so inured to their hateful origins and history, that they do not mind at all when whites are collectively demonized as enjoying positions they never earned and thus logically should not continue to enjoy.

  Or,

  2) Given that no one objects to stereotyping 230 million people, no one objects to anyone stereotyping others on the basis of race, in the manner that once fostered the civil rights movement.

  Or,

  3) We will all for survival, as Rwanda, the Balkans, and Iraq teach us, group together by first-cousin affinities and tribes. Recalling Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, we will freely stereotype, denigrate, and separate from other groups on the premises that our particular generalizations and deductions are the one and only true and accurate typecasting.

  

  Artur Widak/NurPhoto

  Dr. Frankenstein and His Woke Monster

  What made a 90 percent white population of the late 1950s and 1960s finally sicken of racial bias? Many things—protests, boycotts, the force of moral persuasion. But three things stand out.

  One, segregation and bias were always contrary to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

  Two, these assumptions of racial prejudice were not predicated on any discernible science, logic, or coherent basis other than tribal bias, hatred, and ignorance.

  Three, racial unfairness robbed the United States of critical talent by ignoring merit and substituting pseudo-scientific tribal affinities.

  Yet by the emerging 1960s did anyone really believe that Perry Como de facto had a better voice than Harry Belafonte or Sammy Davis, Jr., that Sidney Poitier must be a less gifted actor than Frank Sinatra, that Hank Aaron was innately less impressive than Roger Maris, or that Senator Edward Brooke was less competent an American senator than Senator Herman Talmadge? Again, no.

  Wokeness is returning to such tribal separation and crackpot categorization on the one assumption that its arbitrary rules will not alienate Americans as they finally did in the past.

  So now are we to believe that non-whites can pick the race of their future roommates in colleges without audit or complaint? Farm aid shall be doled out to all except whites? Welfare in Oakland must exclude poor white recipients? Vaccinations will be targeted to non-white groups first? Will 330 million Americans grow to accept that racial typology will govern all state policy—in following a noble and successful historical precedent?

  In each mass shooting, we shall broadcast the horror only if the shooter is white and his victims not so, but mute the story if the opposite should be true?

  For noble purposes, criminal suspects shall not be identified by race unless they are white? It will be fine in advance to announce the gender and race of a vice-presidential candidate that mostly alone will determine the selection? We will massage data, and suppress or publicize statistics depending on their usefulness to the woke movement?

  If blacks are disproportionately responsible for hate crimes against Asian Americans, we will keep still, or better yet nobly lie that whites are.

  Such wokeness assumes that the Eastern Europeans never tired of their ministry-of-truth propaganda, that the cynical Soviet citizen never ignored Pravda’s assertions, or that Cubans really believe the Castro communiques.

  Wokeness is either unaware of, or unconcerned with, the seething religious, caste, and racial tensions that plague India, or wrecked Lebanon, or unwound Yugoslavia. That is, the woke believe their Byzantine books of race-based exceptions, exemptions, and absolutions will convince 330 million Americans that segregation, or official untruth, are permitted, given historical circumstances and the common good.

  But they will not.

  Finally, wokeness takes for granted that its elite white Dr. Frankenstein architects will always control the prejudicial woke monster they created—on the assumption that one will never devour its creators. But history suggests ideologies often do just that.

  Over the last two weeks, many of America’s most elite colleges seem to have deliberately restricted white admissions to around 30-40 percent of their incoming classes—on the altar of diversity and post-George Floyd wokeness. Yet, not every high-earning, bicoastal white liberal can give $10 million to Yale or Stanford or sire a likely future Major League Baseball star.

  For the woke white elite, then, it will be hard to find some exemption from the rules that 70 percent of the population will be artificially recalibrated to 30 percent of the successful admissions.

  A white liberal may have said “Who cares?” when hard-working Asians who represent six percent of the U.S. population were deliberately restricted to no more than 30-40 percent of the nation’s “best” colleges. But now? Will he really preen, “Bravo, my super-prepped, hyper-achieving prodigy got rejected at all the good schools and I’m so proud he took one for the woke team?”

  Or what happens to the wannabe woke CEO who offered every sort of humiliating “unearned” confession, but nevertheless was still of the wrong color? Or what will be the mindset of the progressive, white male lieutenant colonel who found that his loud wokeness was mostly useful in preparing him to better understand why he should not be promoted to brigadier general?

  It is OK for woke whites to be constantly accused of “unearned privilege” as long as their bicoastal billets were tolerably reduced by just 20 percent due to racial gerrymandering. But does their magnanimity extend to a 30-40 percent white jizyah, that cuts so close to progressive homes?

  Will the brilliant actress in a blockbuster classic mumble, if even just privately, that she was the wrong color to be nominated as best actress?

  Sure, some may feel that these are elite psychodramas. But for that reason, they will become mostly the angsts of the Left. The liberal white elite class engineered a system of woke racialism that they assumed rested on some sort of unspoken 70 percent white/12 percent black/10 percent Latino/six percent Asian, and two percent “other” formula that would always still leave them plenty of spoils while the unhappy consequences fell instead on Dotty the Deplorable, Charlie Chump, Cliff the Clinger, and Irene Irredeemable. They did not sign up for a 30-40 percent white allotment that cuts into the white woke; that is, the good and the morally superior whites.

  So this, too, will be another of wokeism’s greatest tests, when elite writers, professors, actors, lawyers, newsroom grandees, and CEO magnificoes learn that they, too, can be of the wrong color under the new tribal prejudice they fostered.

  Wokeism is creating a future group of politically incorrect Trotskyites on a proverbial rendezvous with a Mexican ice ax, given that by birth they will never be woke enough for the new Stalinism.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 23:40

• How Bill Gates Helped Drug Companies Maintain Their Monopoly On Vaccines During COVID
  How Bill Gates Helped Drug Companies Maintain Their Monopoly On Vaccines During COVID

  A few weeks ago, when President Biden held his first press conference since taking office, he promised that 200 million adults will have received at least one vaccine jab by the time his first 100 days have finished – a doubling of his initial target of 100M. Yet, in close to 130 countries, representing a population of 2.5 billion people, not a single adult has received a dose.

  The reasons why can be traced back to one man: Bill Gates. Gates has been warning about the dangers of a pandemic for years – since long before COVID first emerged in Wuhan. And when the pandemic struck and talk first turned to vaccine, one issue that was notably left out of the discussion was who deserved the proper credit, and the proper payment. As the New Republic reports in its latest piece in a series attacking the Bill Gates myth that he and the Gates Foundation are the world’s capitalist saviors – ready and eager to save poorer nations from the pandemic threat with billions of free vaccines.

  

  Proponents of the open-vaccine movement, who had hoped for an open-source “people’s vaccine” that could be produced cheaply and easily by various governments, quickly hit a wall, stymied by a global drug system founded on proprietary science and closely guarded market monopolies.

  In late May, the WHO launched the Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP, with the intention of pooling all of the publicly available vaccine knowledge in one central clearinghouse. Public and private actors would collect research and associated intellectual property in a global knowledge fund for the duration of the pandemic. It seemed pretty straightforward. But the seeds of this approach’s destruction had been sown one month earlier, when Bill Gates launched his own technology accelerator.

  In April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements.

  Crucially, and in contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.

  Gates has applied his model of corporate philanthropy, which he used to take on malaria in Africa, to defeating COVID. But unlike Malaria, COVID is a pressing global pandemic. Yet, Gates’s findings have dominated the global response, as a handful of drugmakers exercise enormous influence over the fate of the world.

  Gates not only dismissed these warnings but actively sought to undermine all challenges to his authority and the Accelerator’s intellectual property–based charity agenda.

  “Early on, there was space for Gates to have a major impact in favor of open models,” says Manuel Martin, a policy adviser to the Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign. “But senior people in the Gates organization very clearly sent out the message: Pooling was unnecessary and counterproductive. They dampened early enthusiasm by saying that I.P. is not an access barrier in vaccines. That’s just demonstratively false.”

  One of the main sources cited by the New Republic was James Love, founder and director of Knowledge Ecology International, a Washington, DC–based group that has emerged as a major critic of Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation and – particularly – the global COVID vaccine rollout. In the beginning, James said, things could have gone either way. But “Gates wanted exclusive rights maintained”  – and so they were.

  And now, thanks to Gates, the US is expected to reach herd immunity this year, while the most optimistic estimates for when poorer nations might reach that same benchmark is 2024.

  Few have observed Bill Gates’s devotion to monopoly medicine more closely than James Love, founder and director of Knowledge Ecology International, a Washington, D.C.–based group that studies the broad nexus of federal policy, the pharmaceutical industry, and intellectual property. Love entered the world of global public health policy around the same time Gates did, and for two decades has watched him scale its heights while reinforcing the system responsible for the very problems he claims to be trying to solve. The through-line for Gates has been his unwavering commitment to drug companies’ right to exclusive control over medical science and the markets for its products.

  “Things could have gone either way,” says Love, “but Gates wanted exclusive rights maintained. He acted fast to stop the push for sharing the knowledge needed to make the products—the know-how, the data, the cell lines, the tech transfer, the transparency that is critically important in a dozen ways. The pooling approach represented by C-TAP included all of that. Instead of backing those early discussions, he raced ahead and signaled support for business-as-usual on intellectual property by announcing the ACT-Accelerator in March.”

  While the ten or so leading developed economies have reported marked success with their vaccine rollout programs – including the US, UK, Israel and the EU – the rest of the world has struggled. One year later, Gates & company have failed to reach their goal of providing discounted vaccines to the “priority fifth” of low-income populations. The drug companies and rich nations that praised the initiative a year ago have opted instead to strike bilateral deals that have prompted an every nation for itself mentality.

  “The low- and middle-income countries are pretty much on their own, and there’s just not much out there,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine in Houston. “Despite their best efforts, the Gates model and its institutions are still industry-dependent”

  As a result, developing nations are fighting back in the only venue available to them: the WTO, where a battle over making vaccine technology open to developing nations is brewing – with Gates on the side of corporations.

  This easily anticipated market failure—together with the C-TAP’s failure to launch—led developing countries to open a new front against intellectual property barriers in the World Trade Organization. Since October, the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Council has been center ring in a dramatic north-south standoff over rights to control vaccine knowledge, technology, and markets. More than 100 low- and middle-income countries support a call by India and South Africa to waive certain provisions related to Covid-19 intellectual property for the duration of the pandemic. Although Gates and his organization do not have an official position on the debate roiling the WTO, Gates and his deputies have left little doubt about their opposition to the waiver proposal. Just as he did following the rollout of the WHO’s C-TAP, Gates has chosen to stand with the drug companies and their government patrons.

  The story of Gates’s domination of the global vaccine rollout brings us back to a story we shared last summer, after the Columbia Journalism Review shone an uncomfortable light on the influence that Gates and the Gates Foundation exercise over the western press.

  Few billionaires are more adept at managing their reputation, and the reputations of their organizations, than Bill Gates. He managed to convince the world that he was partnering with the WHO to extend vaccine access to the developing world. Instead, he’s literally standing in the way of sharing technology that could save hundreds of thousands of lives.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 23:20

• Australian Military Reminded Its Role Is "Lethal Violence" & Not "Woke" Activism
  Australian Military Reminded Its Role Is “Lethal Violence” & Not “Woke” Activism

  Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

  The Australian military has been reminded by MPs that its core mission is the “application of lethal violence” in response to concerns about it being too “woke” following a performance during which scantily clad dancers twerked on a Navy ship.

  

  The advisory came after awkward scenes where young women gyrated suggestively in front of military officials, some of them elderly, during a ceremony to formally commission the Navy’s newest ship, a debacle that was dubbed a “shitshow” by one member of the government.

  “We’re meant to be a fighting force,” he added, echoing comments by backbencher Phillip Thompson, who argued that the Australian Defence Force (ADF) had lurched “too far to the left” with its focus on social justice issues.

  “Our ADF shouldn’t be left or right, they should be straight down the middle of what their job is, and their job is to defend our nation, our interests, our values, our sovereignty, but also when we go on operations, have an unapologetic aggression and violence to get the mission done,” said Thompson.

  “We’ve got the CDF, we’ve got members of Parliament there, and the Governor-General’s there, I don’t think it’s appropriate to be twerking. I think our standards in the ADF, and definitely commissioning a ship, should be a little bit higher than that”. https://t.co/Nn1DwwdbeH pic.twitter.com/id6YAND9E7

  — Andrew Greene (@AndrewBGreene) April 13, 2021

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

  Noting that Navy standards should be higher, Thompson asserted, “We’ve got the CDF, we’ve got members of Parliament there, and the Governor-General’s there, I don’t think it’s appropriate to be twerking.”

  Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie was also prompted to reiterate the what the primary focus of the military should be, insisting that its core mission will always be the “application of lethal violence” and that “mission clarity” is a key component of their work.

  Hastie said that when the “role, identity and purpose” of the military becomes confused it leads to weakness and could even be “deadly on the battlefield, at sea or in an aerial dogfight.”

  “Inside government, there are frustrations over recent military decisions seen as too “politically correct”, such as a 2018 directive banning soldiers from wearing “death” symbols,” reports ABC Australia.

  The U.S. military really needs to learn from Australia’s approach given its current obsession with social justice, most recently exemplified by Joe Biden’s reversal of Trump’s ban on transgender troops.

  So long as the U.S. military distracts itself with inane woke diversity nonsense, China will continue to laugh heartily in America’s face while accelerating and perfecting its own fighting capabilities.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 23:00

• Boston Dynamics' Robot Dog Tested In War-Training Exercise 
  Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dog Tested In War-Training Exercise 

  Boston Dynamics’s robot dog has generally been used for corporate applications, such as surveying a Ford Motor Co. factory or working on a BP plc oil rig. Now it appears “Spot” is one step close to becoming a killer robot as it trains with the French Army.

  Last Tuesday, the Saint-Cyr Military Academy, a top French military academy, published pictures of a field training exercise between Mar. 30-31 on their Twitter account. There were several robots tested during the training session, including Boston Dynamics’ Spot. 

  

  The field training exercise was a two-day session with the aim of “measuring the added value of robots in combat action,” said school commandant Jean-Baptiste Cavalier.

  Local newspaper Ouest-France provided more details on the usefulness of the robot on the modern battlefield. 

  Quand robots et élèves officiers s’entraînent ensemble sur le camp militaire de Coëtquidan 🤖 🪖

  Pendant deux jours, 80 élèves officiers de l’EMIA ont manœuvré avec des alliés inattendus : les robots Spot, Nerva, Barracuda, Optio 20 et Ultro ➡️ https://t.co/avGjTaNYkc pic.twitter.com/t8xVoofRtC

  — Ouest-France (@OuestFrance) April 3, 2021

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  Boston Dynamics’ vice president of business development Michael Perry told The Verge that a European distributor, Shark Robotics, had given Spot to the military and that the US-based firm had not been informed about the training exercise.

  “We’re learning about it as you are,” said Perry. “We’re not clear on the exact scope of this engagement.” The company said it had some information on its robots being used by the French government, including the military. 

  

  The two-day exercise was offensive and defensive field training exercises. Each exercise was with and without Spot and other robots. The idea is that the French government wanted to collect data on the impact robots would have on the modern battlefield. 

  It’s still not entirely clear what role Spot played during the exercise as there was no evidence in the pictures within this note that the robot had any special optical sensors mounted on it. 

  

  Besides Spot, the French military included OPTIO-X20, a remote-controlled vehicle with tracks and autocannon built by Estonian firm Milrem Robotics; ULTRO, a wheeled “robot mule” made for transporting equipment manufactured by French state military firm Nexter; and Barakuda, a multipurpose wheeled drone that can shield soldiers for direct enemy fire. 

  Spot’s terms and conditions prohibit the use of weaponizing the robot “to harm or intimidate any person or animal, as a weapon, or to enable any weapon.” One could argue that if Spot is used as a reconnaissance robot, it would indirectly harm a human being (a gray area). 

  Boston Dynamics’ told The Verge that the company had policies prohibiting suppliers or customers from weaponizing the robot.

  A few months ago, a company called MSCHF who is responsible for the most absurd viral stunts and products on the internet. Strapped a paintball gun to Spot and let online users shoot random objects in a staged museum. 

  MSCHF said the only “losers” of the event would be the “human race when remote-operated dogs of war become commonplace. As these war dogs become fixtures of militaries and militarized police, we will all learn a new meaning of fear: an oppressor who can pull the trigger without even needing to be physically present.” 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 22:40

• The Fed Has Convinced Investors That It Will Tolerate Higher Inflation
  The Fed Has Convinced Investors That It Will Tolerate Higher Inflation

  By Steve Englander, head of Global G10 FX Research and North America Macro Strategy at Standard Chartered Bank

  Suppose inflation surprised and nobody cared

  • March CPI surprised well to the upside: yields and the USD fell

  • The FOMC (lack of) reaction function has credibility, in our view

  • The broad USD drop reflects growing conviction that yields will lag activity and inflation

  Investors increasingly convinced of Fed inflation tolerance

  March CPI inflation came in like a lion and went out like a lamb, all in a day. The 0.34% m/m print on core inflation is the highest since 2006, other than July and August 2020, which were the bounce back from anomalously low readings during the height of the COVID-19 shutdowns

  

  But 10Y UST yields edged up briefly after the 8:30AM EDT release and were below their pre-8:30AM levels by 8:32AM. Inflation breakevens rose initially, but real yields fell even more, pulling down nominal yields; eventually, breakevens came off as well. The USD fell almost immediately and continued falling most of the day.

  The Fed appears to have convinced market participants that it is going to tolerate high inflation at least in 2021, acting on its flat Phillips curve, flat labor-market view. Many Fed speakers have essentially labelled any 2021 inflation surge transitory. Investors do not necessarily believe that the Fed is correct in its assessment, but most investors see fighting the Fed for eight or twelve months as a losing proposition. Given the Fed stance, bond-market hawks are backing off until there is unambiguous evidence that the Fed is wrong or the Fed shows some sign of reconsidering its stance.

  In retrospect, Fed Vice Chair Clarida’s statement that he would look at 2022 data to see if inflation pressure persisted was seen as message that the Fed was not likely to scrutinize incoming data for evidence that the inflation upturn could be more persistent than expected.

  This change in market perception has implications for FX as well. Our medium- to long-term USD view is largely predicated on the expectation that the Fed will not permit yields to rise as much as activity and inflation would suggest. The market reaction to the CPI release (and earlier in April to the payrolls release) suggests market participants are buying into this view as well.

  Strong demand, higher inflation and low yields tend to increase external imbalances and reduce the incentive for capital inflow. Earlier this year, expectations of stronger demand led to higher yields, and the unexpected upward adjustment in yields derailed our and the consensus short-USD view. The Fed’s success in capping market yield expectations has pushed real yields below -70bps and opens the door to renewed USD weakness if the moves are sustained. We had anticipated this renewed broad USD weakness in H2, but it could resume more quickly.

  The RUB, NOK, ZAR, SEK, BRL, CAD, AUD gained the most after the CPI release, so commodity currencies did well on higher inflation outcomes. Gold, oil and non-oil commodities had a pretty good day, as might be expected when there is a whiff of inflation and interest rates (particularly real rates) fall. Safe havens such as the CHF, JPY and even EUR were about c.0.4%, so relative-value trades favoured high-beta currencies, although the outperformance was not as pronounced as earlier in the year.

  Why did an upside inflation surprise lead to lower yields?

  Going into the CPI print, consensus expectations had been edging up. The average y/y forecast for core was 1.54%, so there was a significant minority who expected the higher print, especially forecasters with the most recent forecasts. Nevertheless, the outcome was a surprise and there was no special factor to explain a ‘perverse’ bond market reaction to an inflation surprise.

  We have noted at times that investors approach big anticipated market events such as FOMC meetings and US labour data with caution, often holding back on trades until the event has passed without a major shock. Once the event proves uneventful, investors feel comfortable entering positions that they had avoided in the run-up. At times when the surprise is modest, post-event trading can go in the opposite direction to the expected impact of the shock if that is the market bias.

  

  We think that the upward drift of yields in the two days preceding the CPI release may have reflected uncertainty on the market reaction to a high print as much as uncertainty on the CPI itself. Even though the surprise was higher CPI than expected, the market takeaway was that there was little reaction. This encouraged bond bulls to keep buying and signaled to bond bears that there was a low ceiling where yields were likely to head. Ever since the US labor release, we and investors have been carefully watching the market reaction to positive surprises as an indication of how much conviction there remains on the strong USD, short bond trade. Tuesday’s reaction signaled that an outcome that would likely have been viewed as deeply negative for asset markets a month or two ago is now viewed as benign.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 22:20

• ​​​​​​​Elon Musk's Futuristic Public Transport Tunnel Is "Lamest Thing In Las Vegas"
  ​​​​​​​Elon Musk’s Futuristic Public Transport Tunnel Is “Lamest Thing In Las Vegas”

  Elon Musk’s “futuristic” subterranean transit system under Las Vegas is like a boring amusement park ride.

  Musk’s The Boring Company has spent months drilling, digging, paving, lining, and electrifying tunnels under Las Vegas with a promise to whisk passengers in driverless Tesla vehicles at speeds of 155mph. But late last week, a handful of reporters were able to experience the tunnel in a far less exciting way. 

  

  Instead of futuristic vehicles zooming through the tunnels, Tesla vehicles hit a maximum speed of about 35 mph, far less than was initially promised. 

  The first section of the much-touted Vegas tunnel from one end of the Las Vegas Convention Center to the other is 4,475 feet. It’s the first of four sections, making a total of about 1.7 miles of tunnel. 

  

  According to tweets from Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Mick Akers, the media was invited to the tunnel last Thursday. 

  Footage of what it looks like when a @Tesla is traveling through the @boringcompany’s Convention Center Loop. #vegas #boringcompany pic.twitter.com/ph1DJoTYBi

  — Mick Akers (@mickakers) April 9, 2021

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  The latest unveiling of the underground transit system, hidden 40 feet beneath the Las Vegas Convention center, was “about as exciting as a sheet of unpainted drywall discarded in a closed office park,” wrote Jalopnik’s Jason Torchinsky. He called the tunnel “dumb” and said it was the “lamest thing in Vegas.” Watching Tesla Model 3s drive slowly through the tunnel was not exactly what Musk promised. But anyone who has followed the billionaire salesman over the years shouldn’t be surprised. 

  Remember when Musk tweeted this in December 2019? 

  “Boring Co is completing its first commercial tunnel in Vegas, going from Convention Center to Strip, then will work on other projects,” Musk tweeted. 

  Well, it’s 2021… 

  More on the disappointment: 

  Gizmodo wrote: “Elon Musk’s ‘Public Transit’ in Las Vegas still just humans driving cars slowly in a tunnel.”

  CNET’s Sean Szymkowski also concluded the tunnel was “lame.” He said: 

  “It seems like this project is quickly turning into Tesla cars driving people underground, rather than some sort of futuristic transport system.”

  Hopefully, the Boring Company remains in a testing phase, and the colorful, hyped-up tunnel can one day reach faster speeds. 

  “Unfortunately, for now, it looks sort of disappointing,” Szymkowski said.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 22:00

• Biden Advances Trump-Era Sale Of $23 Billion In F-35s & Armed Drones To UAE
  Biden Advances Trump-Era Sale Of $23 Billion In F-35s & Armed Drones To UAE

  Authored by Jake Johnson via CommonDreams.org,

  The Biden administration has reportedly informed Congress that it is planning to advance a $23.4 billion sale of weaponry to the United Arab Emirates that was inked under former President Donald Trump, a move anti-war critics denounced as a betrayal of President Joe Biden’s recent pledge to end US support for “offensive operations” in Yemen.

  One of the major members of the Saudi-led coalition that has been bombing and strangling Yemen since 2015, the UAE is set to receive 50 F-35 fighter jets, more than a dozen armed drones, and billions of dollars worth of munitions from the US if the deal receives final approval.

  

  A State Department spokesperson told HuffPost Tuesday that “the administration intends to move forward with these proposed defense sales to the UAE, even as we continue reviewing details and consulting with Emirati officials to ensure we have developed mutual understandings with respect to Emirati obligations before, during, and after delivery.”

  The spokesperson would not comment on the New York Center for Foreign Policy Affairs’ ongoing lawsuit against the State Department over the sale, which the nonprofit group says is illegal.

  “It is our hope that the Biden administration would put mitigating a humanitarian crisis of global proportions before putting arms in the hands of an aggressor nation like the UAE,” Justin Russell, principal director of the New York Center for Foreign Policy Affairs, told HuffPost, referring to UAE interventions in Yemen and Libya.

  Shireen Al-Adeimi, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, said the decision to advance the $23 billion weapons sale is “more evidence that Biden’s pledge to end the war on Yemen was only performative.”

  In December, the then-Republican-controlled Senate voted down a resolution that would have blocked the Trump White House’s lame-duck arms sale to the UAE, prompting calls for Biden to swiftly cancel the deal upon taking office.

  Shame https://t.co/mftaCkYMR8

  — Will Bunch Sign Up For My Newsletter (@Will_Bunch) April 14, 2021

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  During his first week in the White House, the Biden administration imposed a temporary freeze on arms sales to the Saudi kingdom and said it would more closely examine the UAE deal. At the time, the UAE ambassador to the U.S. Yousef Al Otaiba evinced no concern about the move, saying that “the UAE anticipated a review of current policies by the new administration.”

  Anti-war activists warned that the UAE agreement, which will likely take years to complete, would put more high-tech weaponry under the control of a country that has shown complete disregard for human rights in Yemen and elsewhere.

  “Just as you can predict the consequence of selling a loaded pistol to a serial murderer, you can anticipate the damage that will be wrought by this arms deal,” Michael Eisner and Sarah Leah Whitson of Democracy for the Arab World Now wrote for The Nation in December. “The UAE has a well-documented track record of using its advanced weaponry to launch aggressive and unlawful incursions into other countries, engaging in systematic human rights violations, and war crimes along the way.”

  Kate Kizer, policy director at Win Without War, said Tuesday that allowing the UAE deal to proceed “is an absurd decision that flies directly in the face of President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s stated commitment to centering human rights in our foreign policy.”

  “We have to stop choosing political expediency over human rights,” Kizer added.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 21:40

• America Lost Its Religion: Church Membership Plunges Below 50% For First Time 
  America Lost Its Religion: Church Membership Plunges Below 50% For First Time 

  Americans’ faith in organized religion continues to trend down at an accelerated pace. A new poll from Gallup shows for the first time since the public opinion polling company began asking questions in 1937, the number of Americans who view themselves as members of a church, synagogue, or mosque has plunged below 50%. Keep in mind, in 1937, when Gallup first asked the question, 73% went to church, synagogue, or mosque. 

  America is losing its religion, and this trend of a more secular state has been accelerating since the Dot Com Bust (the early 2000s). The poll found 47% of Americans said they were a part of a church, synagogue, or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.

  

  The gradual decline of Americans losing their religion began in the 1950s and rapidly accelerated in the early 2000s. America’s unique combination of wealth (status quo power) and worship during the 20th century appears to be unraveling in the 21st century. 

  The obvious question that comes to mind is what the hell happened around the Dot Com Bust? 

  Perhaps, the shift away from organized religion is due to millennials. Polling data found membership at a house of worship correlations with age, with older Americans more likely to attend church, synagogue, or mosque than younger generations. 

  Since the early 2000s, the percentage of Americans who don’t associate themselves with religion has increased from 8% in 1998-2000 to 13% in 2008-2010 and 21% since 2017. 

  As millennials come to age and in the next couple of years will dominate the workforce, the loss of religion will undoubtedly continue, triggering a “religion crisis” for organized religious institutions. 

  Indeed, as the society-wide shifts in ideals and beliefs occur as the millennial generation takes power, their taste for organized religion sours. 

  There are a couple of major trends driving the plunge in faith in organized religion – millennials with no religious preference are soaring above all other generations, and religious membership is plunging among the youth. In fact, membership continues to decline across all generations, but millennials are increasing faster. 

  

  

  America is losing its religion. 

  

  So the next question: Why are millennials losing faith faster than all other generations?

  Well, maybe the American Dream of getting married, buying a home with a white picket fence, having kids, attending church or temple, and having a stable career is unattainable for the young generation as they’re bound by ball and chain to insurmountable student loans, credit card debt, auto loans, and crappy jobs.

  As America’s youth slips away from organized religion and past traditions, maybe this is a symptom of a dying country. 

  The much larger question of the sudden loss of religion is the social ramifications this may have for the country as a secular state could be in the making. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 21:20

• LBMA Acknowledges "Buying Frenzy" In Silver Market And Silver Shortage Fears
  LBMA Acknowledges “Buying Frenzy” In Silver Market And Silver Shortage Fears

  Submitted by Ronan Manly, BullionStar.com

  The London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) has just published a new report titled “Silver Investment 2021: Report” which looks at recent developments in the investment silver sector.

  While it’s not clear who actually wrote the report, as no author is specified, the LBMA states that it “acknowledges Metals Focus’ contribution to this report” so we can assume Metals Focus actually wrote it or was heavily involved. Metals Focus is a precious metals consultancy based in London, which also at times, writes the Silver Institute’s annual World Silver Survey.

  That the LBMA has decided to publish a specific report on investment silver at this time is notable in itself (as it hasn’t published this type of distinct report in the past), but beyond this, the report itself is worth reviewing for what it says, as much as what it leaves out.

  Pitched as a “Spotlight on Silver Investment, a report which explores the key developments in silver investment over the last 12-18 months”, the LBMA report (which is quite short at 15 pages) focuses on recent trends in demand for silver Exchange-Traded Products (ETPs), silver coins and bars, and the in silver futures market. It also surprisingly mentions the #Silver Squeeze in great detail, which is refers to the “much-publicised social media campaigns” and a “social media buying frenzy” of silver bars and coins, and silver ETPs.

  The report begins by commenting that “the past 12-18 months have witnessed some incredible developments in the silver investment market, including a dramatic improvement in investor activity”, and that the combined demand from silver bars, coins, ETPs and futures positioning rose by about 20% in 2020, with the growth in this trend carrying over into the first quarter of 2021.

  It was only a Matter of Weeks – The ETFs

  In chapter 2 on silver ETPs (more commonly called ETFs), the LBMA report notes that silver ETF holdings reached a record high on 1.2 billion ozs in early February 2021, and that London is the world’s largest storage centre for ETF silver, calculating that 725 million ozs is held on behalf of silver ETF’s such as the iShares Silver Trust (SLV) by LBMA custodians in London (the custodians being JP Morgan and HSBC and their sub-custodians Brinks, Malca-Amit and Loomis).

  Surprisingly, the LBMA report acknowledges that strong inflows into silver-backed ETFs in late January and early February, if they had persisted, could have led to the LBMA London vaults running out of acceptable (good delivery) silver bars for the ETFs. The LBMA report states that:

  “Early 2021 saw an unprecedented 110Moz added in just three days. Although some liquidations emerged, there were concerns that London would run out of silver if ETP demand remained at a high level.”

  and

  “this year, the location of the custodial vaults has come into sharper focus as ETP demand has jumped, leading to concerns about the potential availability of metal.”

  This is something I had highlighted in a BullionStar article on 8 February titled “Houston, we have a Problem”: 85% of Silver in London already held by ETFs” which concluded that:

  “A few more days of inflows like the ones seen over 29 January to 2 February would be a major emergency for these ETF providers, particularly the iShares SLV. Because there is just not that much physical silver left in the vaults of JP Morgan, Brinks, Malca-Amit, Loomis and HSBC, which is not already reported as being in these ETFs.”

  Back to the LBMA report, which continues:

  “As the social media frenzy gathered pace in late January, demand for coins, bars and ETPs all jumped. For the latter, global holdings surged by 119 mn ozs in just three days. This was concentrated in the iShares fund (SLV), where holdings rose by 110 mn ozs. Given that most of this metal was allocated in London, fears emerged as to whether there was enough silver should demand continue at this pace.”

  What the LBMA report fails to mention though is that this extra silver (3,416.11 tonnes in the form of 113,501 Good Delivery silver bars) could only be added to SLV over those 3 days by SLV’s custodian JP Morgan frantically tapping into silver bars which it claimed to have secured in 5 vaults all over London, namely Brinks vault in Premier Park London, Loomis London vault near Heathrow, Brinks Unit 7 vault Radius Park near Heathrow, Malca Amit London vault, and JP Morgan’s own London vault.

  More importantly, the LBMA / Metals Focus report also fails to mention that concerns about a lack of silver in London were so great that the iShares Silver Trust (SLV) actually changed its prospectus in early February, adding the wording that:

  “The demand for silver may temporarily exceed available supply that is acceptable for delivery to the Trust, which may adversely affect an investment in the Shares.

  … It is possible that Authorized Participants may be unable to acquire sufficient silver that is acceptable for delivery to the Trust” 

  Luckily, I did mention the SLV prospectus amendment it in an article titled “#SilverSqueeze hits London as SLV warns of Limited Available Silver Supply” from 14 February.

  The LBMA / Metals Focus report goes on to say that:

  “had demand in iShares continued at the frenetic rate of late-January/early February it would only have been a matter of weeks before London’s existing stock was used up.

  While it would have been surprising to see ETP demand maintain this pace of buying, the concerns were still very real.

  This reflects both the time required for a refinery to convert non-Good Delivery (GDL) material into 1,000oz bars approved by LBMA as Good Delivery and then delivery of this by sea freight into London.”

  If the above sounds like too much honesty from the bullion bank LBMA, you are not alone in thinking so. Perhaps no one from the LBMA read the Metals Focus draft of the report before they hit publish. Its a far cry from the bullion bank apologists of the silver market, for example see here and here. who said that there was no shortage of silver in the London market.

  

  Its also interesting to see from the above quote, that silver, since it is bulky, is not transported by air but by container truck when moving within a Continent such as Europe, and by sea, when moving between continents or to an island nation such as Britain. Silver enters London via container ports located in  the terminal ports to the east of London.

  Above Ground Stocks – Not So Much

  A section of the LBMA report also looks at identifiable global above ground silver stocks, commenting that “the recent jump in ETP demand has led to fears as to whether there are sufficient above-ground bullion stocks, should ETP holdings see a further sharp increase”

  But, are there sufficient above-ground bullion stocks, that could be called upon by the ETFs?

  LBMA / Metals Focus more or less say no, stating that:

  • “there is a gulf between the total of silver above-ground stocks and the portion which can be quickly allocated against ETPs.”
  • “Even though above-ground stocks are difficult to pin down, there is no doubt that bullion stocks account for a small share of the total.”
  • The biggest identifiable silver holdings are held in London, COMEX [New York] and Chinese approved vaults, which at the end of 2020, stood at a combined 1.694 bn ozs of silver.

  It’s interesting that the point about the 1000 oz silver bar market being far smaller than the above ground stock of silver is a point which exactly concurs with what was described by David Morgan in an interview which he recently did for BullionStar Perspectives. See relevant section of that interview video here.

  But how much of these identifiable silver holdings in London, COMEX [New York] and Chinese vaults are actually available to ETFs? The LBMA report would have you believe that the answer is ‘a lot’. But is this really the case?

  Regarding identifiable silver holdings held in London, the LBMA has just published its latest London vault holdings data, claiming that at the end of March there were 1.249 bn ozs (38,859 tonnes) of silver held in the London LBMA vaults. This data is then referenced in the new LBMA / Metals Focus report.

  Putting aside the fact that this was a massive 11% increase on the amount of silver that the LBMA claimed was stored in the London vaults as of the end of February, and that none of these claims are verifiable and none of the claimed silver is independently physically audited in real time, Metals Focus calculates that 725 mn ozs (or 58%) of this London silver was held by ETFs at that time.

  The LBMA report says that this ETF silver in London is held by “ten ETP funds”. Its unclear how LBMA / Metals Focus arrived at the figure of 10 ETFs, since there are actually 14 of these ETFs. See here for details. These ETFs are iShares SLV and SSLN, Wisdomtree PHAG and PHPP, Invesco SSLV, Aberdeen Standard SIVR and GLTR, ETF Securities‘ PMAG and PMPM, and five Deutsche Bank XTrackers ETFs. Perhaps they are counting all the XTrackers as one.

  

  LBMA / Metals Focus also fail to account for the silver held in London LBMA vaults by GoldMoney and Bullion Vault, which together store about 690 tonnes in total. This silver is not available to ETFs. Nor is the allocated silver holdings held in LBMA London vaults by investment institutions, family offices and High Net Worth individuals. And finally, the elephant in the room, the LBMA report does not acknowledge the massive outstanding unallocated silver positions which are claims against the bullion banks for silver which they have not got but would have to try to allocate from stocks of silver that are in the LBMA London vaults, if unallocated silver holders requested allocation.

  Regarding the COMEX approved silver inventories in New York (combined registered and eligible categories), the LBMA report says that there was a total of 393 mn ozs of silver in those vaults at the end of February, but concedes that of this total, over a quarter represents silver bars held by the SLV in JP Morgan’s vault in New York. This is something I first explained in the “Houston, we have a Problem” article in early February. See section ‘A Note about SLV and COMEX’ here.

  LBMA also fails to mention that a lot of other eligible silver in the COMEX vaults in New York may have nothing to do with COMEX trading. The CME have already gone on record to explain to the CFTC regulator that in the case of ‘Eligible Gold” in COMEX vaults, this is the case. It is also the case with silver to some extent.

  Regarding China, the LBMA report says that as of the end of 2020, the Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE) held 130 mn ozs of silver bullion stocks, and the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE) held 89 mn ozs. None of these SGE and SHFE silver stocks are related to ETP holdings, but they are stocks which are used in SGE and SHFE trading and can be quickly withdrawn into the Chinese silver market.

  Excluding LBMA London, COMEX and China, the report says that “silver bullion stocks that exist elsewhere and are in a deliverable form (specifically LBMA or COMEX Good Delivery compliant) appear extremely modest.”

  These other locations would be, according to the LBMA report a) India, where some bonded warehouses hold good delivery silver bars, but these are for the local market, and rarely flow back to London, and b) Switzerland, which apart from silver allocated to Swiss silver ETFs, stores little other silver holdings.

  LBMA / Metals Focus go on to suggest that it’s possible to add both the silver in the London LBMA vaults to all the silver held in COMEX, and view them as a combined pool of available silver for the ETFs. The report says:

  “Another way to view this is to look at combined Comex/LBMA holdings, which at end-February were 1,518 mn ozs. ETPs vaulted in these locations stood at 880 mn ozs, which meant that 42%, or 638 mn ozs was in theory immediately available to meet new silver ETP demand.”

  But this is wrong. Why? Because silver not currently in ETFs is not necessarily available to ETFs, and besides, ETFs which hold their silver in London cannot hold silver in New York (apart from SLV). Its against their prospectus rules.

  This, however, doesn’t stop the LBMA report from sweeping the problem under the carpet by concluding that “the pool of available metal should be sufficient, for the foreseeable future at least, to meet new ETP demand.”

  Although in the next sentence they seem concerned about the potential lack of supply as they continue that “this also pre-supposes there is no repeat of the social media frenzy.” Note to LBMA – the social media frenzy is still on, and by being worried about it, it will now only get more frenzied.

  There then follows a bizarre line in the report which says – “Should this occur [repeated frenzy], higher prices would almost certainly be triggered, which would be met by heavy selling.” We therefore have to ask, “heavy selling” from who? The bullion bank members of the LBMA no doubt?

  Under the Radar – The Retail Market

  Chapter 3 of the LBMA report discusses the retail silver market. Briefly, some highlights from Chapter 3 are as follows (quotes from the report are in italics):

  • Retail investment in silver (coins and bar demand) recovered in 2020 and into 2021
  • The [retail] sector then burst into life this year, initially as a social media buying frenzy emerged
  • The industry was quickly beset with product shortages, in part due to logistical restrictions
  • While social media discussions have abated, silver coin and bar demand has remained extremely strong, especially in the US
  • Ongoing strength in the US coin and bar market, which also reflects some supply issues, extended product delivery lead times and premiums

  First some corrections to the above. Product shortages primarily arose due to huge demand, not logistical restrictions. And, if the LBMA / Metals Focus is not aware of it, ‘social media discussions have not abated.’ Far from it. Just look at Twitter and Reddit.

  This doesn’t stop the report condescendingly referring to ”the recent, if short-lived, social media phenomenon surrounding silver that emerged in the US in late-January this year and what legacy, if any, it leaves behind.”

  • Global retail investment in silver coins and bars in 2020 is estimated to have exceeded 200 mn ozs for the first time in four years. This was the result of higher demand in the US and Germany, while purchases in India weakened sharply.
  • Over the past decade, the US has been the largest retail investment market in all but two years (2018-19), when purchases fell sharply
  • During 2018-19, India occupied top spot, with retail investment in each year exceeding 50 mn ozs. ..In general, Indian demand has typically benefited from strong silver price expectations, with many viewing silver as being undervalued. This has often led to a surge in investment when prices have fallen.
  • In India, high net worth individuals tend to purchase large silver bars, such as 5kg, 15kg and 30kg bars. Others are consumers and investors who buy small-minted bars
  • Germany completes the top-three listing and has only emerged as a prominent market for silver bars and coins over the past two years.

  

  Social Media Storm becomes Folklore

  There then follows an entire section of the LBMA report titled ‘The Social Media Storm”, which begins:

  “The events of late January/early February this year have almost become folklore in the silver market. It is worth recalling how this emerged and its impact on retail buying even after the social media storm faded.”

  For obvious reasons, the LBMA would like to have people believe that the #silverSqueeze has faded. If anyone wants to check on Twitter and Reddit, they will, however, see that this is not the case. The LBMA / Metals Focus then show their hand by dismissing the existence of a bullion bank short position in silver.

  “Buoyed by this success, social media discussions soon focused on silver, and in particular longheld conspiracies that financial institutions were holding significant short positions.“

  Not content with hurling conspiracy theory accusations against anyone mentioning the Wall St silver short position, while trying to pretend the frenzy has faded, the LBMA report then doubles down, referring again to both in the same sentence:

  “Although the silver price achieved a six-year high of $30.10, the social media frenzy quickly faded – dynamics in the silver market are quite different to those behind the GameStop trade. In essence, there were no massive short positions in silver to force out.

  But then the social media frenzy was seemingly back:

  “As the social media frenzy was picked up by the mainstream media, silver benefited from widespread news coverage, particularly in the US.”

  “As dealer inventories were depleted the emphasis shifted to silver coin and bar manufacturers. Although many fabricators quickly ramped up production, three issues emerged –

  a) lockdown restrictions affected how much the manufacturers could respond to the jump in demand, c) the increase in retail sales was so great that delivery lead times grew, ..added to concerns about a shortage of silver, which further boosted sales, c) US Mint gold and silver Eagle coin minting scaled back due to switch of production to new design.”

  “As a result, February and March 2021 have seen retail silver investment demand remain exceptionally strong in the US.”

  Finally, the LBMA / Metals Focus report also notes it does not see recent inflows into silver ETPs as competing with the demand for silver bars and silver coins, as the retail investors are new buyers with a different profile to physical silver stackers:

  “[Silver] ETPs have attracted a large swathe of new buyers, including those active in the stock market who might not have previously bought precious metals. As a result, there appears to be little sign of an adverse impact on physical investment by the success of silver ETPs.

  Conclusion

  This new silver report published by the LBMA is indeed a strange report, discussing as it does the fact that if inflows into SLV and the other ETFs had continued , “it would only have been a matter of weeks before London’s existing [silver] stock was used up”. And its a far cry from LBMA CEO Ruth Crowell on 8 February, telling NASDAQ that there were ‘healthy’ silver stocks in London.

  Equally strange is the LBMA acknowledging the power of the social media buying frenzy in silver (cue memes of silver back Ape ‘frenzy’). Which would make a good story that the  report was written by Metals Focus, and published by the LBMA intern when the rest of the LBMA staff was out to lunch. Stranger things have happened.

  On a serious note, it’s increasingly obvious that those few days in late January and early February when there were huge inflows into SLV and when the silver price hit $30, terrified the powers that be within the bullion banks and within the central banks that the silver market was about to explode. Which is why the silver price was not allowed to rise any further and which is why the CFTC and US Treasury was monitoring the action closely.

  It should also give hope to the #SilverSqueeze movement that the LBMA thinks they have ‘faded’ and gone away. Because, as Sun Tzu once said on the art of war,  “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak“.

  For those who want to read the report, it can be downloaded here.

  This article was originally published on the BullionStar.com website under the same title “LBMA acknowledges “Buying Frenzy” in Silver Market and silver shortage Fears”. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 21:00

• Urban Flight During Pandemic Made Rent Less Affordable Across US
  Urban Flight During Pandemic Made Rent Less Affordable Across US

  Major cities like New York City and San Francisco experienced an exodus of residents, leaving the pandemic-plagued metro areas for more quiet areas in smaller towns, suburbs, and rural communities. As city dwellers fled, median rents in more affluent metro areas fell. In contrast, rents in less affluent areas surged, according to a new report via Zumper, an online apartment rental services company. 

  Zumper explained when the virus-pandemic triggered socio-economic turmoil across major cities, many urbanites fled to “cheaper, less-urban, neighboring locations”. These less affluent areas saw booming housing markets as demand surged, pushing up housing costs. Meanwhile, housing costs in urban areas plunged as urbanites exited. 

  “In the rental market, the more expensive a city’s pre-pandemic rent was, the more likely it was to decrease. Inversely, the cheaper a city was pre-pandemic, the more likely rents went up. This relationship can be visualized by comparing median rent prices in each city right before the pandemic (February 2020) to the growth in those median prices since the pandemic,” Zumper said. 

  

  Zumper shows this relationship below in its National Rent Report, which tracks rents for US cities. 

  

  “This is, at its heart, a migration story,” said Neil Gerstein, an analyst at Zumper and the author of the study, who Bloomberg quoted. “These prices are shifting because the pandemic caused a lot of people to move.”

  The chart below shows rents in many lower-income areas surged while rents in wealthier metro areas plunged. 

  

  Here’s another view of rents increasing in less affluent areas. 

  

  “Things will maybe get back to how they were pre-pandemic, but it will take a while,” Gerstein said. “At least for the near-term, people who live in these counties have to live with these price shifts.”

  The next chart shows rents in urban areas were flat while rents in suburbs and rural areas increased. 

  

  The takeaway here is clear: “rents grew substantially in suburban and rural regions while rents stagnated in urban areas. This largely also explains the inverse relationship between income and rents in 2020. Rural areas experienced substantially more rental growth than urban areas, but also are substantially less affluent,” Zumper said.

  The data is yet another example of how the virus pandemic deepened inequality over the last year. People who fled expensive large metro areas pushed up prices of rents and homes in small towns that were less affluent. 

  For example, we noted how city dwellers from New York City fled to a tiny town called Poughkeepsie, in New York State’s Hudson Valley. The town is small, with a population of about 30,000. Realtor.com shows homes in Poughkeepsieare are up 13.3% year-over-year.

  It’s becoming clear that one of the unintended consequences of urban flight is creating housing affordability issues in rural America. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 20:40

• A Third Bank Joins The Doom Chorus, Sees Painful Correction In 3 Months: Here's Why
  A Third Bank Joins The Doom Chorus, Sees Painful Correction In 3 Months: Here’s Why

  Quietly, one bank after another is telling its clients that the music is about to end.

  It started with Morgan Stanley, whose chief equity strategist Michael Wilson over the weekend said that while the S&P 500 has continued to make new all-time highs, “underneath the surface, there has been a noticeable shift in leadership which could be telling us something about the reopening that may not be obvious.” More specifically, the Russell 2000 small cap index has underperformed the S&P 500 by 8% since peaking on March 12. While this follows a period of historically strong outperformance, when relative strength like this breaks down, Wilson said that he has taken notice. Furthermore, some of the cyclical parts of the equity market we have been recommending for over a year are starting to underperform, while defensives are doing a bit better. If that weren’t enough, indices of IPOs and SPACs have underperformed by 20% and are both down for the year.

  

  But wait, there’s more: as the once most bullish Wall Street analyst warned, the breakdown of small caps and cyclicals is “a potential early warning sign that the actual reopening of the economy will be more difficult than dreaming about it” as small caps and cyclicals have been stellar outperformers over the past year. In essence, they were discounting the recovery and reopening that we are about to experience. However, “now we must actually do it and with that comes execution risk and potential surprises that aren’t priced.”

  And here a big problem emerges: while policymakers have provided tremendous support for the economy with both monetary accommodation and fiscal stimulus, the lockdowns have reduced supply, destroying it in some cases, and sending prices soaring while hammering profit margins.

  As a result, we are now seeing evidence of supply shortages in everything from materials and logistical support to labor. The punchline is that 1Q earnings season may bring bad news on costs and margins, particularly with respect to 2Q outlooks. We’ve been writing about this risk for weeks and believe it will be idiosyncratic in how it plays out, with some companies executing well while others don’t.

  

  Meanwhile, the underperformance in IPOs and SPACs is to Wilson “a signal that the excessive liquidity provided by the Fed is finally being overwhelmed by supply” who ominously notes that his experience is that “when new issues underperform this much, it’s generally a leading indicator that equity markets will struggle more broadly.” When combined with the fact that leverage in the system is very high, it could spell more trouble for riskier, more speculative investments, he concludes.

  Morgan Stanley’s concern was repeated by Bank of America whose chief quant and equity strategist Savita Subramanian today published a piece titled “Five Reasons To Curb Your Enthusiasm” (which we discussed earlier today) in which she said that “amid increasingly euphoric sentiment, lofty valuations, and peak stimulus, we continue to believe the market has overly priced in the good news. We remain bullish the economy but not the S&P 500.“

  She then listed 5 reasons why stocks are priced to absolute perfection and reality will most likely disappoint, including: i) the bank’s sell side Indicator < 1ppt away from euphoria; ii) S&P 500 valuation indicates paltry (2%) returns over the next decade; iii) Outsized (2+ std dev) returns precede losses 75% of the time; iv) BofA's Fair Value model spits out S&P 500 at 3635, v) the Equity Risk Premium dropping below 400bps – this is only the third time since the global financial crisis that the ERP dropped below 400bps, and the two prior instances were Jan 2018 (399bps) and Sep 2018 (394bps), after which the S&P 500 posted -10% and -20% peak-to-trough declines, respectively.

  

  Bottom line: while an amused Subramanian jokingly notes that in another measure of Wall Street bullishness: “we’re tied for last place among strategists’ forecast for the S&P 500”, she is quite happy with her year-end S&P500 target of 3,800, some 9% below today’s closing price.

  And now a third bank has joined the ominous chorus. In a recent note from Deutsche Bank’s chief equity strategist Binky Chadha, “When Growth Peaks”, he writes that historically, qquities have traded closely with indicators of cyclical macro growth such as the ISMs (correlation 73%), and growth (ISM) typically peaks around a year (10-11 months) after recession ends, “right at the point we would appear to be.”

  As a result, “very near term”, Deutsche Bank expects equities to continue to be well supported by the acceleration in macro growth, and see buying by systematic strategies and buybacks driving a grind higher, however, the bank also now expects a “significant consolidation (-6% to -10%) as growth peaks over the next 3 months.”

  The chart below shows a strong correlation between the ISM and equities and the simplified view is that when the ISM peaks a correction is likely. As noted above, Binky’s team has identified 36 peaks in the ISM in the post-WWII period. Two-thirds of these peaks (24) were an inverted-V shape, while the rest (8) saw the ISM stop rising and flatten out at an elevated level.

  Excluding episodes of a declining ISM that eventually ended in recessions, which currently appears unlikely and which led to far lower stock prices anyway, the S&P 500 sold off around these growth peaks by a median of -8.4%. But even episodes which saw the ISM flatten out rather than fall, saw a median -5.9% sell-off.

  

  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in terms of timing the sell-off began a median 2 weeks after the peak in the ISM and lasted for a median of 6 weeks.

  Although using historical experience as a guide argues for a near -6% pullback if growth flattens out near the peak, given positioning is unusually elevated so early in this expansion, Binky thinks the correction could be materially larger than average and in the 6-10% range.

  The good news is that with that hiccup out of the way, things return back to normal, and after this correction, the DB strategist says that “the ongoing strong growth means that equities will rally back” and later in the year the risks are mostly based around inflation and the Fed’s response. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 20:20

• Pathologist Blames Floyd Death On Heart Problem, Would Not Have Classified As Homicide
  Pathologist Blames Floyd Death On Heart Problem, Would Not Have Classified As Homicide

  A forensic pathologist testified on Wednesday that George Floyd died of a sudden heart rhythm disturbance due to his advanced heart disease, and not from lack of oxygen from the way he was restrained by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, according to the Associated Press. Chauvin, 45, is charged with murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death.

  

  Former Maryland chief medical examiner Dr. David Fowler said that the combination of fentanyl and methamphetamine in Floyd’s system, heart disease, and potential carbon monoxide poisoning from automotive exhaust were contributing factors in the 46-year-old Floyd’s death last May.

  “All of those combined to cause Mr. Floyd’s death,” said Fowler, who also said that he would have classified the manner of death as “undetermined,” not homicide as the county’s chief medical officer ruled. He added that some of the contributing factors could be ruled homicide and others could be ruled accidental.

  Chauvin attorney Eric Nelson is trying to prove that the 19-year Minneapolis police veteran did what he was trained to do and that Floyd died because of his illegal drug use and underlying health problems.

  Prosecutors say Floyd died because the white officer’s knee was pressed against Floyd’s neck or neck area for 9 1/2 minutes as he lay pinned to the pavement on his stomach, his hands cuffed behind him and his face jammed against the ground. -AP

  Potential factors listed by Fowler included: “Floyd’s narrowed arteries, his enlarged heart, his high blood pressure, his drug use, the stress of his restraint, the vehicle exhaust, and a tumor or growth in his lower abdomen that can sometimes play a role in high blood pressure by releasing “fight-or-flight” hormones” per the report, all of which could have acted together to make Floyd’s heart work harder and/or go into arrhythmia before it suddenly stopped.

  On cross-examination, prosecutor Jerry Blackwell attacked Fowler’s findings, getting the former chief medical examiner to admit that he didn’t take into account the weight of Chauvin’s gear when he analyzed the pressure on Floyd’s body, or that anyone who dies after being deprived of oxygen technically dies of arrhythmia.

  “And if a person dies as a result of low oxygen, that person is also going to die ultimately of a fatal arrhythmia, right?” asked Blackwell, to which Fowler responded: “Correct. Every one of us in this room will have a fatal arrhythmia at some point.“

  Blackwell also attacked the carbon monoxide claim.

  “You haven’t seen any data or test results that showed Mr. Floyd had a single injury from carbon monoxide. Is that true?” Blackwell asked. “That is correct, because it was never sent,” Fowler replied.

  Blackwell then countered by noting that Chauvin’s squad car was a gas-electric hybrid, and Fowler had no data on how much carbon monoxide was actually released – or if the engine was running at the time.

  While several medical experts called by the prosecution have concluded that Floyd died from lack of oxygen due to the way Chauvin restrained him, Fowler said that the knee on Floyd was “nowhere close to his airway,” and that Floyd’s ability to speak and groan showed that the airway was still open. He also said that there wasn’t enough pressure to cause bruises or scrapes on Floyd’s neck or back – and that Floyd did not complain of vision changes or other symptoms which would indicate insufficient oxygen to the brain.

  “The bottom line is, moving air in and out, and speaking and making noise is very good evidence that the airway was not closed,” said Fowler.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 20:00

• Iran’s Much-Troubled Nuclear Program
  Iran’s Much-Troubled Nuclear Program

  Submitted by South Front,

  Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility is an incredibly important piece of infrastructure for Tehran’s interests.

  One of its most important roles is that of providing leverage when the Islamic Republic is on the Nuclear Deal negotiating table. Natanz was largely built underground to withstand enemy airstrikes.

  Back in 2002, when it was established it became a focal point of Western fears regarding the potential of Tehran acquiring nuclear weapons. Despite many accusations, mostly from Israel, Iran maintains that it develops its enriched uranium for peaceful purposes.

  The fact that it also applies pressure on the other signatories on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (known as the Iranian Nuclear Deal) is an added, and needed bonus.

  The Natanz facility was subject to an alleged cyber-attack on April 11th. This led to a large blackout, and was considered a significant strike against Tehran. Iran’s nuclear program spokesman, Ali Akbar Salehi, confirmed that the electrical disruption at Natanz was a deliberate act of sabotage, calling it “nuclear terrorism.”

  Israel’s officials refused to provide any comment, and disregarded the incident. Israeli media, however, continue citing anonymous sources, claiming that it had been a Mossad operation, and that it had achieved great success.

  The timing of the attack was also said to not be incidental, coming the day after Iran celebrated its National Nuclear Technology Day.

  Iran itself didn’t blame Israel, but in statements, officials said that the attack came from those who oppose Tehran’s negotiations with  the West. The United States and the Islamic Republic have been involved in indirect negotiations in rescuing the Nuclear Deal.

  Anything conclusive is still far off.

  For any real progress to occur, Iran requires from the Biden Administration to lift all sanctions against it, related to the Nuclear Deal or otherwise.

  The result is a standstill, in which Iran refuses to accept the US back into the deal with significant concessions, and Washington not in a hurry to fulfill any demands.

  Tehran then continues incrementing various reductions of its commitments to the Iran Nuclear Deal, in loosely permitted margins.

  In this way, it not only attempts to gain leverage over the US, but also tries to push the EU signatories into entering into discussions with Washington to salvage the deal.

  The United States has admitted, without specifying clearly, that some sanctions that are inconsistent with the Nuclear Deal and could be lifted. Iran likely did not appreciate such a concession.

  Tehran, still, shouldn’t hold its breath, since the enemies of any such progress are many, and it is not put out of the question that if Israel was actually behind the incident in Natanz, that some from Washington’s fold were also present in the plot.

  Still, Israel and also many in the US oppose any form of normalization between Tehran and Washington, and the continuous MSM reports that attempt to stir the pot stand testament to that.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 19:40

• US Intelligence Issues Ominous Warning Over 'Sustained Economic Downturn' And Other Long-Term Threats
  US Intelligence Issues Ominous Warning Over ‘Sustained Economic Downturn’ And Other Long-Term Threats

  The US Intelligence Community has warned that the COVID-19 pandemic will have long-term fallout, and will impact political and economic realities across the globe.

  

  According to the Annual Threat Assessment – which comes on the heels of a separate intelligence report last week which offers a grim view of global challenges likely to be faced over the next 20 years – the pandemic is expected to contribute to “humanitarian and economic crises, political unrest, and geopolitical competition,” and will “strain governments and societies.”

  “The economic fallout from the pandemic is likely to create or worsen instability in at least a few—and perhaps many—countries, as people grow more desperate in the face of interlocking pressures that include sustained economic downturns, job losses, and disrupted supply chains,” the report warns.

  What’s more, food shortages and ‘uneven access’ to COVID treatments will contribute to humanitarian concerns, while the virus will remain a threat “to populations worldwide until vaccines and therapeutics are widely distributed.” The report also warns that a new wave of infections earlier this year “may have an even greater economic impact as struggling businesses in hard-hit sectors such as tourism and restaurants fold and governments face increasing budget strains.”

  In addition to pandemic-related warnings, the report also predicts that Russia and China will continue to hatch covert influence operations (to blame populist victories on?) – and that Iran will continue to violate the 2015 nuclear agreement. According to the report, China “presents a growing influence threat” in the United States, and has been “intensifying efforts to shape the political environment in the United States to promote its policy preferences, mold public discourse, pressure political figures whom Beijing believes oppose its interests, and muffle criticism of China on such issues as religious freedom and the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong.”

  The report also warns of domestic extremism – as the threat from foreign terrorist orgs such as ISIS and Al Qaeda has apparently abated. Instead, white supremacy is now the threat – which have led to “at least 26 lethal attacks that killed more than 141 people and for dozens of disrupted plots in the West since 2015.” For the sake of comparison, that’s fewer people killed in six years than the 170 homicides in Chicago, year-to-date, primarily committed by ‘black extremists’ against other ‘black extremists’ so to speak.

  “While these extremists often see themselves as part of a broader global movement, most attacks have been carried out by individuals or small, independent cells,” the report reads. “Australia, Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom consider white racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, including Neo-Nazi groups, to be the fastest growing terrorist threat they face.”

  “The American people should know as much as possible about the threats facing our nation and what their intelligence agencies are doing to protect them,” said Avril Haines, director of national intelligence in a statement accompanying the report.

  In short, fear everything and expect the aforementioned go-to narratives.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 19:20

• The Racist Incident That Wasn't
  The Racist Incident That Wasn’t

  Authored by Dinesh D’Souza via The Epoch Times,

  The students, administration, and faculty of Albion College in Michigan were driven into a frenzy two weeks ago when racist and anti-Semitic graffiti surfaced in a dorm stairwell and photos were posted in a local news Facebook group.

  The photos included messages such as “White Power” and “KKK.”

  

  Now the campus police have discovered that a 21-year-old black student is responsible.

  He has admitted creating the graffiti, and video evidence corroborates his confession, police said.

  Here we go again! Another fake racial incident, another hoax perpetrated by a supposed victim.

  This is Jussie Smollett all over again.

  

  Fake racial incidents are now commonplace both on the campus and in the culture. So the first interesting question is: why would someone seek to orchestrate a horrific event that didn’t really happen?

  It can’t be that the perpetrators, from Smollett to the black student at Albion, are merely trying to call attention to a social problem so that it can be promptly addressed. Blacks didn’t have to stage lynchings in the late 19th century, because tragically there were a lot of them going on in plain sight. Moreover, why would Smollett and his campus counterparts seek to pin the blame on innocent parties for what they did not in fact do?

  A good way to understand this bizarre phenomenon is to turn to the discipline of economics, and specifically to the law of supply and demand.

  It seems that, both on the university campus and in the culture, the demand for racism exceeds the supply. To put it differently, there’s an enormous desire to find racism, and there’s not enough racism to be found.

  This is especially true on the progressive campus, which Albion certainly is. On such campuses, white students do backward somersaults to accommodate blacks and other minorities. It would be interesting to perform a sociological experiment in which black students approach whites and ask them to kiss their feet. I predict that many would. Of course the experiment could not even be attempted in reverse. It would cause a national uproar!

  So evidently this black student wanted to find racism at Albion but couldn’t. So he decided to manufacture it. And what might his motive have been for doing that? Perhaps he was sincerely frustrated that the racism he blamed for his personal failures was scarcely in evidence. Consequently, by “bringing out” what he fervently believed to be hidden, he would then find corroboration for his own self-perception as a victim of wicked forces on campus he could not otherwise identify.

  That the student was psychologically disturbed in some way, I do not doubt. But the reason I feel no sympathy for him is because, in an effort to assuage his own anxieties, and also perhaps to achieve some public recognition as a poster figure for racist victimization, he’s willing to falsely accuse others. He’s like the cop who plants the evidence he wants to find, so that he can arrest the guy he’s convinced is guilty. A horrific abuse of power!

  These staged racial incidents remind me of false #MeToo accusations that have also become quite common. Once again, the motives are psychological: a desire to take revenge on someone for a perceived offense or slight. Or they can be political: an attempt to vindicate the claims of widespread sexism, or even an attempt to keep a nominee who might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade off the Supreme Court.

  But this is where the plot of the Albion story gets even more interesting. Having been vindicated by the student’s confession, the college pleads guilty anyway. Here is its statement:

  “We know the acts of racism that have occurred this week are not about one particular person or one particular incident. We know that there is a significant history of racial pain and trauma on campus and we are taking action to repair our community.”

  This statement is, on its face, a lie.

  There were not “acts of racism” that occurred; there was only a series of orchestrated acts that created a false impression of racism. This was in fact the act of one particular person. Yet weirdly, the college minimizes the wicked act of false accusation by implying that its own history of racism somehow drove him to do it. In other words, even though the specific incident was false, the college intends to treat it as if it were true.

  It would be as if Brett Kavanaugh, upon being cleared of accusations of sexual predation, would then turn around and acknowledge that even though the specific actions attributed to him did not occur, he was nevertheless conscious of many insensitive and sexist actions he had taken as a teenager, and therefore he was assuming the responsibility of being a sexual predator anyway. This would of course never happen, which is why the college’s actions require an explanation.

  Here, then, is the explanation.

  Most campuses like Albion, like many other institutions in our culture, have created massive race industries within their bureaucracy. Campuses typically have innumerable deans and other bureaucrats whose full-time job it is to fight racism. Faculties have anti-racism committees. There are racism consultants on hand to provide assistance. Student groups are mobilized to combat racism.

  We can see how it becomes an institutional problem for the race industry when there’s little or no racism to be found. Consequently, a bogus incident like the one this 21-year-old kid faked becomes not only useful to the perpetrator, but also useful to the campus bureaucracy. They were waiting and hoping for something like this, so that they could spring into action. It helps people understand why there’s a race bureaucracy in the first place.

  I can only imagine the frustration and disappointment of these race professionals when the incident turned out to be fake. No wonder Albion is trying to recover, not from any genuine racism, but rather from the public impression created by the guilty student’s confession that racism on campus is so scarce that it has to be invented. Albion is eager to dispel that impression, so that it can justify its race industry and the resources devoted to sustaining it.

  Bottom line: As long as the demand for racism outstrips the supply there will be a market for faked racial incidents. Moreover, such incidents are encouraged, as in this case at Albion, by the failure of the college to turn its wrath on the perpetrator, the way it would surely have done had the perpetrator been a white kid or some sort of white supremacist. As it is, the student has been temporarily suspended—not expelled—and neither the school nor the cops have released his name.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 19:00

• ​​​​​​​Corn Prices Rally To Highest Since 2013 On Cold Blast Slowing US Seeding
  ​​​​​​​Corn Prices Rally To Highest Since 2013 On Cold Blast Slowing US Seeding

  Chicago corn futures rallied to 2013 levels Wednesday as concerns about cold weather slowing US seeding caught traders’ attention, according to Reuters. 

  Temperatures across the Corn Belt, mainly in the midwestern US, roughly covering western Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, eastern Nebraska, and east Kansas, will experience well below average temperatures through this weekend. On a separate note, we covered how the cold spell has led to another Texas power crisis. 

  

  The cold blast has likely delayed seeding across the Corn Belt as farmers wait for warmer temperatures. Planting corn in cooler climates is still possible, but colder soil can take corn kernels much longer to germinate and increases the risk of seedling death. 

   Here’s the difference between planting corn early and late. 

  

  Corn prices today hit the highest level since June 19, 2013. Prices have nearly doubled since August 2020. 

  

  The latest estimates from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) show farmers could face another year of high corn prices after initial planting estimates came in below expectations. This is happening as US exports of corn nears a record high following increased demand from China. 

  While US farmers celebrate, food prices are undeniably soaring faster than inflation and incomes around the world.

  

  … prompting a very worried Albert Edwards to warn about rapid food inflation could result in socio-disturbances unless food prices stabilize and revert to much lower levels (see “Why Albert Edwards Is Starting To Panic About Soaring Food Prices.”) The first places where unrest could happen due to higher food prices are in emerging market countries.  

  In the meantime, soaring corn exports and prices are a blessing for US farmers who have had their farm incomes collapse in recent years. 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 18:40

• 'Out To Kill A Cop' – Sniper On The Loose In Maryland 
  ‘Out To Kill A Cop’ – Sniper On The Loose In Maryland 

  Update (1856ET): Local news WDVM’s Timothy Young quoted Chief GPD Mark Sroka, who said police are still searching the area for the gunman. At least 75 police officers were stationed at the Lakeforecast mall to help in search efforts. 

  Gaithersburg Chief Mark Sroka said police are searching the immediate area. He told me at least 75 police officers are stationed at the Lakeforest Mall right now.

  — Timothy Young (@TheTimothyYoung) April 14, 2021

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  * * * 

  A gunman is on the loose in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a city located approximately 20 minutes north of Washington, DC, after police say someone opened fire on officers from “higher elevation.” 

  Gaithersburg Police Department (GPD) received a call around 1500 ET for a “parking hazard” at 392 N Summit Avenue. When officers responded, they were shot from above. 

  Officers from @GPDNews were dispatched to 392 N Summit Ave for parking hazard at approx 3:00 pm. As officers responded to call, reported being shot at from higher elevation. Add’l officers, to include MCP officers, responded. MCP & @GPDNews are actively searching for suspect(s).

  — Montgomery County Department of Police (@mcpnews) April 14, 2021

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  GPD reports no injuries have been reported, but they warn residents to stay away from the area.

  No reported injuries. Avoid area.

  — Montgomery County Department of Police (@mcpnews) April 14, 2021

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  GPD has advised, “residents to shelter in place as this is an active scene.” 

  We are encouraging residents to shelter in place as this is an active scene. https://t.co/Y4ryqlxs7q

  — Gaithersburg Police (@GPDNews) April 14, 2021

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  Here are more details of the ongoing situation in Gaithersburg from the local paper The Chesapeake Today: 

  Shelter-in-place in Gaithersburg, Maryland as gunman on the loose after shooting at police responding to parking hazard. Gaithersburg police responded to a report of a vehicle blocking the roadway near 392 N Summit Ave at approximately 3 pm. As officers were responding to the scene, shots were fired at them from a higher elevated location. A shelter-in-place is in order and everyone in the area of the 390 block of N Summit Ave / Girard St. is asked to keep out of the area. Police are actively searching for suspect(s).

  

  Local news WTOP’s Ken Duffy said GPD is searching for someone who fired at officers from an “apartment balcony.” 

  Gaithersburg Maryland police searching for whoever shot at 2 officers on North Summit Avenue

  Police chief says one shot was fired from an apartment balcony as search continues for shooter

  Residents in immediate area of 300 block of N Summit Ave still asked to shelter in place

  — Ken Duffy (@KenDuffyNews) April 14, 2021

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  Fox 5 DC reports all high school athletics events in Gaithersburg are canceled this evening after a shelter-in-place order has been issued. 

  All high school athletics events in Gaithersburg have been canceled after police issue a shelter in place order as officials search for a gunman who reportedly fired at officers from what they described as a “higher elevation” this afternoon.

  THE LATEST: https://t.co/gmnbw2XQOa pic.twitter.com/8QAzz443ZW

  — FOX 5 DC (@fox5dc) April 14, 2021

  The latest from Gaithersburg is that shooter is still on the loose. 

  VIDEO: The scene outside Lakeforest Mall in Gaithersburg at this hour.

  About a half mile from here, police continue to search for whoever fired shots from “a higher elevation” in the direction of officers. No reports of injuries. @mcpnews @wusa9 pic.twitter.com/iKA1WytpV4

  — Tom Dempsey (@KCTomDempsey) April 14, 2021

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  Swat with military vehicles have been called in to assist local police. 

  

  *This story is developing… 

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 04/14/2021 – 18:28

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