- Whitehead: All The Ways In Which Our Rights Have Been Usurped
Whitehead: All The Ways In Which Our Rights Have Been Usurped
Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
– Abraham Lincoln
It’s easy to become discouraged about the state of our nation.
We’re drowning under the weight of too much debt, too many wars, too much power in the hands of a centralized government, too many militarized police, too many laws, too many lobbyists, and generally too much bad news.
It’s harder to believe that change is possible, that the system can be reformed, that politicians can be principled, that courts can be just, that good can overcome evil, and that freedom will prevail.
So where does that leave us?
Benjamin Franklin provided the answer. As the delegates to the Constitutional Convention trudged out of Independence Hall on September 17, 1787, an anxious woman in the crowd waiting at the entrance inquired of Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” “A republic,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”
What Franklin meant, of course, is that when all is said and done, we get the government we deserve.
Those who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights believed that the government exists at the behest of its citizens. It is there to protect, defend and even enhance our freedoms, not violate them.
Unfortunately, although the Bill of Rights was adopted as a means of protecting the people against government tyranny, in America today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.
“We the people” have been terrorized, traumatized, and tricked into a semi-permanent state of compliance by a government that cares nothing for our lives or our liberties.
The bogeyman’s names and faces have changed over time (terrorism, the war on drugs, illegal immigration, a viral pandemic, and more to come), but the end result remains the same: in the so-called name of national security, the Constitution has been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded with the support of Congress, the White House, and the courts.
A recitation of the Bill of Rights—set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and the like (all sanctioned by Congress, the White House, and the courts)—would understandably sound more like a eulogy to freedoms lost than an affirmation of rights we truly possess.
What we are left with today is but a shadow of the robust document adopted more than two centuries ago. Sadly, most of the damage has been inflicted upon the Bill of Rights.
Here is what it means to live under the Constitution, twenty-plus years after 9/11 and with the nation just emerging from two years of COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.
The First Amendment is supposed to protect the freedom to speak your mind, assemble and protest nonviolently without being bridled by the government. It also protects the freedom of the media, as well as the right to worship and pray without interference. In other words, Americans should not be silenced by the government. To the founders, all of America was a free speech zone.
Despite the clear protections found in the First Amendment, the freedoms described therein are under constant assault. Increasingly, Americans are being persecuted for exercising their First Amendment rights and speaking out against government corruption. Activists are being arrested and charged for daring to film police officers engaged in harassment or abusive practices. Journalists are being prosecuted for reporting on whistleblowers. States are passing legislation to muzzle reporting on cruel and abusive corporate practices. Religious ministries are being fined for attempting to feed and house the homeless. Protesters are being tear-gassed, beaten, arrested and forced into “free speech zones.” And under the guise of “government speech,” the courts have reasoned that the government can discriminate freely against any First Amendment activity that takes place within a so-called government forum.
The Second Amendment was intended to guarantee “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” Essentially, this amendment was intended to give the citizenry the means to resist tyrannical government. Yet while gun ownership has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as an individual citizen right, Americans remain powerless to defend themselves against red flag gun laws, militarized police, SWAT team raids, and government agencies armed to the teeth with military weapons better suited to the battlefield.
The Third Amendment reinforces the principle that civilian-elected officials are superior to the military by prohibiting the military from entering any citizen’s home without “the consent of the owner.” With the police increasingly training like the military, acting like the military, and posing as military forces—complete with heavily armed SWAT teams, military weapons, assault vehicles, etc.—it is clear that we now have what the founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits government agents from conducting surveillance on you or touching you or encroaching on your private property unless they have evidence that you’re up to something criminal. In other words, the Fourth Amendment ensures privacy and bodily integrity. Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment has suffered the greatest damage in recent years and has been all but eviscerated by an unwarranted expansion of governmental police powers that include strip searches and even anal and vaginal searches of citizens, surveillance (corporate and otherwise), and intrusions justified in the name of fighting terrorism, as well as the outsourcing of otherwise illegal activities to private contractors.
The Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment work in tandem. These amendments supposedly ensure that you are innocent until proven guilty, and government authorities cannot deprive you of your life, your liberty or your property without the right to an attorney and a fair trial before a civilian judge. However, in the new suspect society in which we live, where surveillance is the norm, these fundamental principles have been upended. Certainly, if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.
The Seventh Amendment guarantees citizens the right to a jury trial. Yet when the populace has no idea of what’s in the Constitution—civic education has virtually disappeared from most school curriculums—that inevitably translates to an ignorant jury incapable of distinguishing justice and the law from their own preconceived notions and fears. However, as a growing number of citizens are coming to realize, the power of the jury to nullify the government’s actions—and thereby help balance the scales of justice—is not to be underestimated. Jury nullification reminds the government that “we the people” retain the power to ultimately determine what laws are just.
The Eighth Amendment is similar to the Sixth in that it is supposed to protect the rights of the accused and forbid the use of cruel and unusual punishment. However, the Supreme Court’s determination that what constitutes “cruel and unusual” should be dependent on the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” leaves us with little protection in the face of a society lacking in morals altogether.
The Ninth Amendment provides that other rights not enumerated in the Constitution are nonetheless retained by the people. Popular sovereignty—the belief that the power to govern flows upward from the people rather than downward from the rulers—is clearly evident in this amendment. However, it has since been turned on its head by a centralized federal government that sees itself as supreme and which continues to pass more and more laws that restrict our freedoms under the pretext that it has an “important government interest” in doing so.
As for the Tenth Amendment’s reminder that the people and the states retain every authority that is not otherwise mentioned in the Constitution, that assurance of a system of government in which power is divided among local, state and national entities has long since been rendered moot by the centralized Washington, DC, power elite—the president, Congress and the courts.
Thus, if there is any sense to be made from this recitation of freedoms lost, it is simply this: our individual freedoms have been eviscerated so that the government’s powers could be expanded.
It was no idle happenstance that the Constitution opens with these three powerful words: “We the people.” As the Preamble proclaims:
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America.
In other words, it’s our job to make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.
We are supposed to be the masters and they—the government and its agents—are the servants.
We the American people—the citizenry—are supposed to be the arbiters and ultimate guardians of America’s welfare, defense, liberty, laws and prosperity.
Still, it’s hard to be a good citizen if you don’t know anything about your rights or how the government is supposed to operate.
As the National Review rightly asks, “How can Americans possibly make intelligent and informed political choices if they don’t understand the fundamental structure of their government? American citizens have the right to self-government, but it seems that we increasingly lack the capacity for it.”
Americans are constitutionally illiterate.
Most citizens have little, if any, knowledge about their basic rights. And our educational system does a poor job of teaching the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For instance, a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that a little more than one-third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, while another one-third (35 percent) could not name a single one.
A survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that only one out of a thousand adults could identify the five rights protected by the First Amendment. On the other hand, more than half (52%) of the respondents could name at least two of the characters in the animated Simpsons television family, and 20% could name all five. And although half could name none of the freedoms in the First Amendment, a majority (54%) could name at least one of the three judges on the TV program American Idol, 41% could name two and one-fourth could name all three.
It gets worse.
Many who responded to the survey had a strange conception of what was in the First Amendment. For example, a startling number of respondents believed that the “right to own a pet” and the “right to drive a car” were part of the First Amendment. Another 38% believed that “taking the Fifth” was part of the First Amendment.
Teachers and school administrators do not fare much better. A study conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis found that one educator in five was unable to name any of the freedoms in the First Amendment.
Government leaders and politicians are also ill-informed. Although they take an oath to uphold, support and defend the Constitution against “enemies foreign and domestic,” their lack of education about our fundamental rights often causes them to be enemies of the Bill of Rights.
So what’s the solution?
Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties” is the only real assurance that freedom will survive.
As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”
From the President on down, anyone taking public office should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts. One way to ensure this would be to require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution and pass a thorough examination thereof before being allowed to take office.
Some critics are advocating that students pass the United States citizenship exam in order to graduate from high school. Others recommend that it must be a prerequisite for attending college. I’d go so far as to argue that students should have to pass the citizenship exam before graduating from grade school.
Here’s an idea to get educated and take a stand for freedom: anyone who signs up to become a member of The Rutherford Institute gets a wallet-sized Bill of Rights card and a Know Your Rights card. Use this card to teach your children the freedoms found in the Bill of Rights.
A healthy, representative government is hard work. It takes a citizenry that is informed about the issues, educated about how the government operates, and willing to do more than grouse and complain.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “we the people” have the power to make and break the government.
The powers-that-be want us to remain divided over politics, hostile to those with whom we disagree politically, and intolerant of anyone or anything whose solutions to what ails this country differ from our own. They also want us to believe that our job as citizens begins and ends on Election Day.
Yet there are 330 million of us in this country. Imagine what we could accomplish if we actually worked together, presented a united front, and spoke with one voice.
Tyranny wouldn’t stand a chance.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 23:40 - Watch: US Army Conducts 'Drone Swarm' Exercise With Armed Quadcopters
Watch: US Army Conducts ‘Drone Swarm’ Exercise With Armed Quadcopters
While unmanned aerial vehicles such as the multi-million dollar General Atomics MQ-1 Predator are armed with missiles, a new generation of inexpensive “kamikaze” drones is reshaping the battlefield.
The US military worries that these low-cost and deadly-effective drones could shift the global strategic balance away from the US on the modern battlefield.
To counter such emerging threats, the Army decided to conduct a field training exercise involving “a swarm of 40 quadcopters all equipped with cameras, MILES, and lethal munition,” tweeted the Commanding General of the National Training Center and Fort Irwin.
The startling video (tweeted on Sunday evening) shows the quadcopters zooming by what appears to be a makeshift desert town. There was no confirmation on location though it could’ve been at the Fort Irwin training facility in southern California. There was also no confirmation of when the training exercise was conducted.
At sunrise this morning a swarm of 40 quadcopters all equipped with cameras, MILES, and lethal munition capable launched in advance of 11th ACR’s attack on a prepared defense by 1AD. Drones will be as important in the first battle of the next war as artillery is today. pic.twitter.com/zPQ2I8SoqN
— NTC Lead 6 (@NTCLead6) September 11, 2022
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“Drones will be as important in the first battle of the next war as artillery is today,” the Army’s Twitter account concluded.
Perhaps the Army has discovered the same quadcopters bought on Amazon have been powerful tools in the war against Russia in Ukraine. The weaponization of such drones is even more powerful as some have been turned into suicide drones.
The Pentagon has supplied Ukraine with over 700 Switchblade “kamikaze” military drones. The future of warfare appears to be clear to the Army: small suicide drones for precision strikes will be necessary on any modern battlefield.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 23:20 - National Security Threat: China's Eyes In America
National Security Threat: China’s Eyes In America
Authored by Peter Schweizer via The Epoch Times,
Chinese intelligence gathering in the US takes many forms and has different purposes. Most Americans are familiar with some of their means and tactics, but not with how widespread and persistent they are.
Americans may know about the malware contained in that infernal TikTok app that their children use. They may know the Chinese military’s cyber-intelligence service was likely behind many of the largest hacks of Americans’ personal data that have ever occurred. They may know from the news how US defense and intelligence policy have sanctioned Chinese telecom giant Huawei, and counseled America’s allies to reject Chinese-architected implementations of 5G networking, due to evidence that China has planted backdoors in commercial networking equipment designed to allow the Communist regime in Beijing to conduct surveillance and cyber-espionage anywhere in the world.
Do they know it extends to consumer-level drones?
Cybersecurity expert Klon Kitchen, writing for The Dispatch, recently detailed the problem with DJI, the Chinese company whose consumer and commercial grade drones control nearly 90% of the market.
These popular products are cost-effective, easy to fly and operate, and send every byte of data they gather to servers in China.
For this reason, they are banned by the US military and Department of Homeland Security, though still used by the FBI and increasingly by local police as “eyes in the sky” during crime events.
FBI use of DJI drones is especially ironic considering bureau director Christopher Wray has warned often of the dangers to western commerce posed by the Chinese, most recently in London.
The excellent reporting on DJI by Kitchen tracks efforts by the company to lobby against passage of a bill called the American Security Drone Act (ASDA), now before Congress, to outlaw federal government use of DJI products entirely. What is the risk? Not only the data gathered by the drones themselves, but everything collected by the mobile app with which users control their drones and manage their DJI accounts. Like many other mobile applications, this includes a user’s contacts, photos, GPS location, and online activities.
To repeat: Every DJI drone in the skies above America is as good as a hovering Chinese spy.
Like other Chinese government-controlled companies such as Huawei and Hikvision, makers of the artificial intelligence systems used in facial recognition and in the repression of China’s Uyghur minority, DJI is adept at playing the Washington game. The company is engaged in a fierce lobbying effort to prevent passage of the ASDA bill. So fierce that they have enlisted police officers from local jurisdictions to come to Washington and lobby congressional staffers about how great DJI drones are for their cash-strapped local forces. As Kitchen points out, the ASDA bill is directed only towards a federal ban on these drones, but DJI lobbyists from firms like Squire Patton Boggs, Cassidy & Associates, and CLS Strategies are taking no chances. The company spent $2.2 million in lobbying efforts in 2020 and $1.4 million last year on lobbying activities, according to OpenSecrets.org.
These lobbyists are using the classic argument that it would be wrong to ban the federal government’s use of our product because so many other people are using it. This is doubtless the dilemma currently facing the app stores of Apple and Google regarding the TikTok app, another Chinese product. The TikTok app has been identified by cybersecurity professionals as containing a keystroke logger, and both Apple and Google have been pressured by the Federal Communications Commission to remove it from their app stores. “Can we really ban something that so many people are happily using?” they must be asking themselves.
Therein lies the heart of the Chinese approach. TikTok was a mobile device application that no one was asking for, yet it became an overnight sensation in most western countries. We really must acknowledge, and grudgingly admire, the brilliant insight shown by the app’s creator company, Chinese-government-controlled ByteDance, into the psyche of large numbers of young, western people. The TikTok app, pitched initially as a way to share and watch silly dance video clips, has been adopted by younger “woke” schoolteachers to “out” themselves as scheming, haranguing social justice warriors intent on smuggling sexual ideology into their classrooms and bragging about it.
This adds some context to Republican Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-OH) exasperation at a Senate hearing about the ASDA legislation, where he said:
“Again, given what the FBI has told us, what the Commerce Department has told us, what we know from reports, I can’t believe we have to write legislation to force US agencies to ban the use of Chinese-made drones, particularly where the servers are in China, where the Chinese government is a part owner and a supporter of this particular company.”
The Chinese approach is to “capture” elite institutions and individuals in the US: politicians, leading universities, large pension funds, social media, and Hollywood among them. My latest book, Red Handed, documents this capture in the areas of politics, diplomatic and business consulting, Big Tech, academia, and on Wall Street. There is insight in the Soviet-era statement, attributed to Lenin, about capitalists “selling us the rope with which to hang them.” Yet, it is the Chinese that understood how to sell the rope at a good price.
Much as they are doing with products such as solar panels, the Chinese realize that cornering the market in an area where reach equals access is critical to their long-term plans to dominate. Their pattern includes stealing technology they cannot create themselves and using any means available to aid in that theft. Therefore, every bit of access to information they can scour is of more value to them than the product used to get it.
Understanding these patterns is crucial to recognizing that the Chinese do this to their own people as well. As Gordon Chang’s recent piece for the Gatestone Institute discusses, the Chinese Communist Party maintains tight control of Chinese people overseas through many different forms of what we may baldly call blackmail. The many stories of intimidation of Chinese students and academics in the US who speak up about human rights abuses by China, or in support for democracy in Hong Kong and Taiwanese independence, all demonstrate this.
Universities have put up with this in exchange for foreign funds for decades. They are only recently being confronted by the costs of this indulgence. For example, the former chairman of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department was convicted by a federal jury for lying to federal authorities about his affiliation with the People’s Republic of China’s Thousand Talents Program and the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in Wuhan, China, as well as failing to report income he received from WUT.
The Wilson Center, a bipartisan think tank in Washington, reported in 2017 that a small community of PRC students and diplomats have engaged in intimidation tactics ranging from intelligence gathering to financial retaliation. “A Preliminary Study of PRC Political Influence and Interference Activities in American Higher Education” examines PRC influence in American universities.
It was just those sorts of concerns that led the Trump administration to create the “China Initiative” within the Justice Department in 2018. This effort generated plenty of convictions of Chinese nationals in the US for technology theft and other forms of industrial espionage. The Biden administration ended the program this year, citing concerns that a broader approach was needed and in response to lobbying by Asian American groups that it unfairly targeted scientists with connections to China. Further, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen also said he heard concerns from the academic community that prosecutions of researchers for grant fraud and other charges was having a “chilling effect.”
Be that as it may, China’s strategy has for years hinged on infiltration by some Chinese scientists and researchers working abroad in the US and other western nations, with threats against their Chinese relatives as leverage for them to do so. This will remain a counter-intelligence problem regardless of what the effort to expose it is called.
It is all part of the pattern.
Call it sabotage by remote control.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 23:00 - US, Ukraine Are In Talks To Transfer Fighter Jets & Longer-Range Missiles
US, Ukraine Are In Talks To Transfer Fighter Jets & Longer-Range Missiles
The US and its allies are in talks over whether to send Ukraine more advanced weapons in the future, including fighter jets, US defense sources have said, according to the Financial Times. The Kharkiv counteroffensive has apparently emboldened Ukrainian officials to press Washington harder for more advanced and longer-range weapons, now that some degree of success in rolling back Russian forces can be demonstrated.
The idea is that if Ukraine’s forces can prove they’ve taken back significant territory with what defense systems the US has provided so far, they can ultimately make the case that the whole of the east and south is within their reach – and even the potential to liberate Crimea while they’re at it – if longer range and more advanced arms are made available.
US Army File image The Financial Times reports this week that active discussions between the US and Ukraine are underway concerning Kiev’s weapons wish list:
A senior US defense official said Washington and its allies were discussing Ukraine’s longer term needs, such as air defenses, and whether it might be appropriate to give Kyiv fighter aircraft in the “medium to longer term”. To date, the US and its allies have declined to do so.
But interestingly and quite tellingly, the report immediately follows with the acknowledgement that Ukrainian leaders are perhaps naturally incentivize to exaggerate battlefield gains at this moment. Here’s more from the FT as the Pentagon offers a “cautiously optimistic” assessment of Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensives in the east and south:
Ukrainian military officials have said in recent days they have taken more than 3,000 sq km of terrain in what has become Moscow’s biggest military setback since it was forced to scrap plans to conquer Kyiv. But late on Monday night President Volodymyr Zelenskyy practically doubled those claims as Ukraine’s forces continued to advance.
Something Ukraine has additionally long been asking for is longer-range missile systems. A Monday Wall Street Journal report detailed that Kiev is now requesting from the Pentagon the Army’s Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, a surface-to-surface missile system with the capability of reaching about 190 miles. This would be far and beyond the range of missiles transferred to Ukraine thus far in the conflict.
The Biden administration in the early months resisted sending longer range missiles, admitting its fears that doing so could draw the US and Russia into direct conflict – given longer range munitions means Ukrainian forces would have the capability of hitting inside Russian territory. This has already happened with Crimea, and even recently with bases inside Russia proper near the border.
But now US defense officials are looking over a new strategy proposal and weapons request submitted by Valeriy Zaluzhny, the commander in chief of Ukraine’s force. WSJ details of the document:
They argued that Russia has long-range cruise missiles that greatly outdistance the systems in the Ukrainian inventory. A turning point could come if the Ukrainians also had longer-range systems, they argued, specifically mentioning the ATACMS.
“The only way to radically change the strategic situation is, without a doubt, for the Armed Forces of Ukraine to launch several consecutive, and ideally, simultaneous counterattacks during the 2023 campaign,” they wrote.
Currently, the HIMARS systems which are already being provided have a reported max range of 50 miles, and the US administration previously asserted Ukraine had given “guarantees” they wouldn’t be used to target Russian territory.
🎥🇺🇦 HIMARS#Russia #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/IDlIkpuCbB
— BlueSauron👁️ (@Blue_Sauron) September 13, 2022
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Meanwhile, on Tuesday the White House previewed that yet another fresh arms package for Ukraine is likely to be announced in the coming days. This as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has pledged that NATO allies are ready to support the war against Russia for the “long haul”.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 22:40 - 'Significant Proof' Air Force Discriminated Against Troops Seeking Religious Exemptions To Vaccine Mandate: Court
‘Significant Proof’ Air Force Discriminated Against Troops Seeking Religious Exemptions To Vaccine Mandate: Court
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Air Force members seeking religious exemptions from the U.S. military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate have provided “significant proof” that the military branch has discriminated against them, a federal appeals court ruled on Sept. 12.
A U.S. Air Force staff sergeant handles a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic in Massachusetts on Feb. 16, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images) A U.S. district court in July blocked the mandate for thousands of Air Force members who remain unvaccinated and have had their religious exemptions denied or not acted upon. In response, the government asked for an emergency stay. When that was denied, the government went to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, arguing that the ruling was wrong.
An appeals court panel said in its decision released Monday that plaintiffs had to provide significant proof that the Air Force had a policy to deny all requests for religious exemptions, and all indications are that they have.
“To establish a general policy … the plaintiffs need not show that the Department rejects 100% of requests for religious exemptions. And the Department’s own statistics show that, as of May 23, 2022, it had rejected more than 99% of them,” U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond Kethledge, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in the 11-page order.
“That the Department has granted only a comparative handful of religious exemptions, while granting thousands of medical and administrative ones, is itself at this stage of the case significant proof of discrimination,” he added.
Kethledge was joined by Circuit Judges Eric Murphy and John K. Bush, both Trump appointees.
Plaintiffs
The plaintiffs are all members who sought religious exemptions and were deemed by chaplains to hold sincere religious beliefs, but the military rejected many of their requests anyways. The others haven’t received final decisions but expect to be rejected, based on the treatment of like-minded airmen.
The group has said that evidence shows the military systemically denied requests for religious exemptions, denying federal law and the U.S. Constitution.
“This order by the Court of Appeals affirms that the Department of Defense and the Air Force violated religious free exercise rights of service members which is protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment,” Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, which is representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
“This is a great victory for religious freedom, especially for these Air Force service members who love God and love America. These mandates will continue to crumble one by one in the courts,” he added.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 22:20 - Can This Lawsuit Overturn California's 3D-Printed Gun Ban?
Can This Lawsuit Overturn California’s 3D-Printed Gun Ban?
In response to the recent signing of AB 1621 into law in California by Governor Gavin Newsom, Pioneers of the 3D Printed Gun, Defense Distributed has filed a pivotal lawsuit.
This lawsuit, Defense Distributed v. Bonta, could set a precedent for regulating privately made firearms, also known as “Ghost Guns.”
AB 1621 criminalizes the purchase, possession, and use of CNC machines & 3D printers to make a firearm or firearm parts. Defense Distributed’s lawsuit challenges the law under the recent Supreme Court decision, NYSRPA v. Bruen.
In Bruen, the Supreme Court ruled that Second Amendment challenges must be rooted in the amendment’s text, informed by history. In the same ruling, the court struck down the means-end scrutiny test often used by lower courts to uphold State level gun control laws.
Defense Distributed claims that there is no historical tradition of regulating the tools or parts used to make private arms. This means there is no historical precedent for California’s ban on CNC Machines & 3D Printers.
The Vice President of the Second Amendment Foundation Alan M. Gottleib had this to say:
“What we’re talking about is a milling process, which is common in modern manufacturing of a wide range of products, including firearm frames and receivers. Despite the long-standing tradition of personal firearms manufacture by private citizens, California has now criminalized the process.”
Additionally, as part of the lawsuit, Defense Distributed also addresses another California law: SB1327.
SB1327 makes any person who challenges California’s gun laws in court liable to pay the state’s attorney’s fees at any stage of the litigation. It’s a law that the American Civil Liberties Union described as using “flawed logic.”
“California responds to the historic Bruen decision by 1) banning your right to make a gun, and 2) booby-trapping their state courts for anyone who’d dare to ask for it back,” explained Cody Wilson, Founder of Defense Distributed, “Yet another example of liberals shredding the 1st Amendment to deny the 2nd.”
Defense Distributed has an established track record of winning similar cases. In 2018 the Justice Department settled a case with Defense Distributed (Defense Distributed v. United States Department of State), resulting in the publishing of 3D-printed firearms files online.
Defense Distributed & The Second Amendment Foundation are seeking a Federal Court Injunction against the enforcement of the laws (AB 1621 & SB1327).
Here’s Defense Distributed’s lawsuit against California:
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 22:00 - "It's A Horror Show": Bill Gross' "Short Of A Lifetime" Seven Years Later
“It’s A Horror Show”: Bill Gross’ “Short Of A Lifetime” Seven Years Later
By Ven Ram, Bloomberg markets live reporter and analyst
Bill Gross famously remarked in 2015 that bunds represented the short of a lifetime. He was seven years too early.
To watch German bonds this year has been like witnessing a horror show. Yet, we are only nearing intermission — meaning there is far worse to emerge in the months ahead.
The European Central Bank raised rates by an emphatic 75 basis points last week and flagged that there was more to come, spurring traders to factor in about 170 basis points of additional tightening. Markets expect the euro-area deposit rate to top out at around 2.35% in the current cycle.
Even so, that may be underestimating the work required of the ECB to curb inflation.
A crucial piece of calculus will be to work out where the elusive, unobservable neutral rate is for the ECB. Given a lack of inflation before the pandemic, the euro area’s r* was widely estimated to be between 1% and 2%.
However, in the post-pandemic world that has completely upended the region’s inflation outlook, a nominal neutral rate would perforce be higher than its 2% target assuming that the ECB targets a neutral real rate of at least zero. In fact, given that HICP is currently running at almost 9%, it may be argued that the short-term neutral nominal rate is somewhere between 2.50% and 3%.
In other words, it is possible that the ECB may raise rates all the way to around 3% should inflation prove to be stubbornly high in the coming quarters, with President Christine Lagarde having commented in May that “a progressive further normalization of interest rates toward the neutral rate will be appropriate.” According to the ECB’s own projections, inflation doesn’t converge to its 2% target even in 2024.
The benchmark policy rate for the euro area implied by the well-known Taylor Rule is, in fact, around 3.40%. While it may seem unlikely that the ECB will raise rates that high in the current cycle, the rule highlights the scale of the challenge the monetary authority faces. More importantly perhaps, it shows that risks are skewed to the upside.
All the above mean that two-year German bonds, whose yields have already surged almost 200 basis points this year, are not done with the phenomenal selloff. In fact, the yield may ascend to 2.50% and beyond by the middle of next year should the ECB continue with its tightening as priced by the markets.
In turn, yields on German 10-year bunds — now around 1.70% after soaring more than 180 basis points this year, may approach around 2.30%, with the lower peak for the longer maturity predicated on an inversion of the yield curve in sympathy with expected weakness in the euro-area economy.
Given the outlook for the ECB’s rate trajectory, there’s still plenty more downside on German bonds. Bill Gross’s portfolio may be up for it this time around.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 21:40 - US Military Introduces Exoskeleton Suit For Soldiers
US Military Introduces Exoskeleton Suit For Soldiers
The US Army is about to receive a lightweight, unpowered exoskeleton suit called the Soldier Assistive Bionic Exosuit for Resupply (SABER), which can increase the strength and endurance of soldiers, DEVCOM Army Public Affairs Office said in a press release.
SABER weighs just three pounds and is a harness that soldiers strap around their shoulders and legs. All a soldier has to do to activate the suit is press a button on the left shoulder. When activated, the exoskeleton suit reduces stress on soldiers’ backs by more than 100 pounds while lifting all sorts of heavy items, such as ammo boxes, artillery rounds, and .50 caliber machine guns. Testing showed that most soldiers had a 60% increase in endurance while wearing the suit.
Researchers at Vanderbilt designed SABER and worked with soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division to test exoskeleton suits in heavy-lifting field scenarios. The exosuit addresses the need to reduce injury and fatigue, which are critical to combat readiness.
“We spent the first few months focused on interviewing, observing, and spending time with Soldiers.
“We didn’t try to create Iron Man — a complex, full-body, rigid, unrealistic suit. Instead, we started by deeply understanding Soldier needs to develop a lightweight, low-profile, non-powered wearable tool that helps provide much-needed assistance without slowing Soldiers down or interfering with other operational tasks,” said Dr. Karl Zelik, associate professor of mechanical engineering, Vanderbilt University.
In the last five years, we’ve kept readers abreast with the Army’s development of exoskeleton suits, including Army Tests New ‘AI-Controlled-Exoskeleton’ Super-Soldier and Army Starts Testing “Ironman-Like” Exoskeleton For Future Hybrid Wars.
SABER received high marks after 90% of soldiers who wore the suits after operational field testing in May said they would perform their duties much better.
Production of the suits will start in late 2022 by HeroWear, a Nashville-based industrial exosuit manufacturer. The goal is for hundreds of soldiers to be utilizing the suits in 2023.
We have noted the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants ‘Ironman-like’ suits on the modern battlefield.
#FunFactFriday – The Royal Navy has been testing Jet Suit assault teams to determine if the Iron Man-like suits could be used to rapidly swarm and board ships. U.S. Special Operations Command is also evaluating a jetpack that can reach speeds of more than 200 mph. pic.twitter.com/mo5FoGWkDu
— U.S. Naval Institute (@NavalInstitute) October 16, 2020
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Maybe a real-life version of Marvel’s Tony Stark jet suit will be fielded within this decade…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 21:20 - Zelensky Involved In Car Crash, No Serious Injuries
Zelensky Involved In Car Crash, No Serious Injuries
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s car collided with another vehicle early Thursday after a battlefield visit, but he was not seriously injured, his spokesman said.
Zelenskyy was returning to Kyiv from the Kharkiv region, where he visited troops in the recaptured city of Izium. A passenger vehicle collided with the president’s motorcade in the Ukrainian capital, his spokesman, Sergii Nikiforov, said in a Facebook post.
The driver of the other vehicle received first aid from Zelenskyy’s medical team and was hospitalized. Medics examined the president, who suffered no serious injuries and was not taken to a hospital, Nikiforov wrote. He did not specify what injuries Zelenskyy might have suffered.
The spokesman added that the circumstances of the accident are under investigation.
The Ukrainian president was accompanied by French celebrity Bernard Henri-Levy.
Just left #Kryvyi Rih, home town of #Zelennskyy. I hear that #Moscow committed a new war crime. Bombing the dam. Flooding the city. And creating thousands of homeless people. For this, too, #Putin deserves to end his life in a jail. #StamdWithUkraine #SlavaUkraini pic.twitter.com/5fvnf6OZtP
— Bernard-Henri Lévy (@BHL) September 14, 2022
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Zelenskyy was late in posting the nightly video address that he has given during the war, possibly because of the car accident, the AP reported.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 21:05 - Ted Cruz Calls To Defund "Biden's Army Of IRS Agents"
Ted Cruz Calls To Defund “Biden’s Army Of IRS Agents”
Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times,
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has called on his Republican colleagues in Congress to block funding for what he described as “Biden’s army of IRS agents” that the GOP has warned would be used to target Americans earning less than $400,000 a year.
Cruz made the remark in a Sept. 13 statement on social media, which came as President Joe Biden celebrated the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes nearly $46 billion in new funding for IRS enforcement out of the $80 billion or so total funding boost to the tax agency.
“Every single Republican should commit to not funding Biden’s army of IRS agents,” Cruz said in the statement.
While Democrats have portrayed the Inflation Reduction Act as an anti-inflationary measure that would lower the cost of healthcare, prescription drugs, and energy, Republicans have argued it would lead to higher energy prices and aggressive IRS audits.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building is seen in Washington on Sept. 28, 2020. (Erin Scott/Reuters)
In an interview on Fox News in which he elaborated on his position, Cruz argued that the extra funding for the tax agency should instead be used to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States.
“Every single Republican ought to say ‘we will not vote to fund these 87,000 new IRS agents, we’re not going to fund Biden’s army to harass Americans and we’re going to take that money and put it on our southern border to secure our border,‘” Cruz told the outlet.
Republicans have argued that part of the IRS funding boost would be used to hire 87,000 new IRS agents and that small businesses and Americans making less than $400,000 would be targeted with tax audits.
Higher Audit Rates?
Seeking to counter that view, the Biden administration has insisted that people making less than $400,000 a year won’t see higher IRS audit rates.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently insisted Republican claims that tax auditors will target lower- and middle-income Americans at higher rates are politically motivated falsehoods.
“I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Yellen said in an Aug. 10 letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.
“This means that, contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited.”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen speaks on the state of the U.S. economy during a press conference at the Department of Treasury in Washington, on July 28, 2022. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Rettig, too, has insisted that the tax agency would “absolutely not” be increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans “relative to recent years,” according to the IRS chief’s letter to members of the Senate on Aug. 4 (pdf).
Yellen’s and Rettig’s position that audit rates wouldn’t rise for those making less than $400,000 has been countered by Rachel Greszler, senior research fellow at the Grover M. Hermann Center.
In a recent op-ed for The Heritage Foundation, Greszler wrote that “despite the Biden administration’s claims, it’s almost certain that households making less than $400,000 a year would face increased audits” under the Inflation Reduction Act.
“And despite estimates from official congressional scorekeepers that the Schumer-Manchin-Biden tax increase indeed would raise taxes on those Americans, the administration has doubled down on the claim,” she added.
Congressional Republicans on Sept. 12 introduced a bill seeking to prevent the IRS from using the $80 billion cash infusion to squeeze more revenue from Americans earning less than $400,000 a year.
“Democrats needed billions to pay for their progressive Green New Deal climate-change policies in their bill, and their gimmicks and games are going to worsen our economic tailspin and higher costs for taxpayers in all income levels,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), co-sponsor of the bill, said in a statement.
The bill (pdf) seeks to codify into law that none of the $80 billion in additional IRS funding may be used to increase audit rates on small businesses and taxpayers making under $400,000 a year.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 21:00 - Anti-Green Blowback: T. Rowe Says "Increasing Difficult To Find Credible" ESG Bonds
Anti-Green Blowback: T. Rowe Says “Increasing Difficult To Find Credible” ESG Bonds
Some money managers are waking up to Wall Street’s ESG scam meant for green-minded investors who pretended to care about the environment but had found a quick and efficient way of fast-tracking gains. We’ve called this scam out during the ESG boom days early in the pandemic (see from Feb 2020 “Behold The “Green” Scam” and from April 2020 “The Fraud That Is ESG Strikes Again: Six Of Top 10 ESG Funds Underperform The S&P500“).
Now Matt Lawton, T. Rowe Price Group Inc.’s sector portfolio manager in the Fixed Income Division, has come out in an interview, slamming sustainability-linked bonds, or SLBs. He said these green corporate bonds are examples of the most “egregious behavior” by Wall Street banks and companies who take advantage of skyrocketing demand for green investments.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find credible SLBs,” Lawton said in an interview quoted by Bloomberg. “The banks are pitching these structures really hard so I definitely approach them with a healthy degree of skepticism.”
Companies have been rushing to issue SLBs to exploit cheaper borrowing costs due to the high velocity of money flowing into ESG investment funds. Sales of the bonds soared to a record $110 billion in 2021, and Moody’s ESG Solutions predicts $150 billion by the end of the year.
The Baltimore-based investment management firm with $1.4 trillion of assets under management is the latest heavyweight in the financial community to speak out against SLBs. Last year Nuveen, a Chicago-based asset manager, said there were issues with the bonds and understanding of how the use of proceeds was deployed.
“The banks are trying to structure them in such a way that is attractive for the issuer and right now investors are falling over themselves to buy these bonds. I don’t know how much discernment is actually happening on the investor side,” Lawson said.
Lawton noted the absurdity behind some SLBs. He pointed out UK-based grocery-store chain Tesco Plc’s green bonds that were priced in January 2021. The company raised 750 million euros in an 8.5-year bond to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 60% through 2025-26, though even before the deal, Tesco achieved a 50% reduction in emissions.
Lawton said the enforcement mechanisms behind SLB deals are lacking. Here are other examples of companies taking advantage of SLBs with call features that allow them to circumvent green goals via exercising call options:
For example, Level 3 Communications Inc.’s $900 million SLB deal, which also priced in January 2021, can be repurchased from investors in January 2024, before any penalties for not meeting the sustainability targets even kick in. Level 3 was acquired in 2017 for $34 billion by communications service provider Lumen Technologies Inc. (formerly known as CenturyLink).
Lumen’s global issues director Mark Molzen said in an emailed response that a call feature is common in these sort of instruments and a matter of financial prudence for any issuer to manage their interest rate exposure and balance sheet flexibility over time.
“The fact that we were able to successfully issue sustainability notes without having to forego these sort of basic features shows the natural demand for these sorts of instruments,” Molzen added.
Chemicals firm Nobian Finance BV also sold an SLB that’s callable before the targeted goals, meaning the company could evade any potential penalty simply by exercising the option to repurchase the securities.
In its emailed response, Nobian said that sustainability is one of its business priorities and the fact that it pays back debt at specific dates has “no impact on our commitment to reach our sustainability targets and our efforts to report transparently about our progress on an annual basis.” –Bloomberg
In June, the International Capital Market Association, which sets voluntary regulations in the ESG debt market, updated guidelines for issuing SLBs after it became evident transparency issues persist.
Lawton added the high demand for SLBs allows Wall Street banks to water down ESG targets for corporations:
“The banker could theoretically say to their issuer, ‘Here are the bare minimum targets you need,’ and the market will accept it,” he added.
ESG-related bond sales have been a boon for Wall Street, and many banks raked billions of dollars in advising and underwriting fees: It’s big business disguised as ‘saving the planet.’
Wall Street’s ESG craze is nothing more than a scam. Another investor, Vivek Ramaswamy, who authored the book “Woke, Inc.” has argued that business and politics should remain sequestered from one another and calls on corporations to slow spending on their energy transition and environmental plans.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 20:40 - Anthony Fauci: From AIDS To COVID-19, A Pharma Love Story
Anthony Fauci: From AIDS To COVID-19, A Pharma Love Story
Opinion authored by Lorenzo Puertas via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
After forty-eight years of leading the U.S. government’s responses to infectious diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci recently announced his plans to retire at the end of the year. His story warrants a closer look for what it tells us about American politics, business, and health care.
For decades before his recent fame, Fauci has been a medical researcher credited with important new understandings of the human immune response, particularly in HIV and AIDS. He also helped develop therapies for several previously fatal diseases, including a treatment of vasculitis which turned a 98 percent mortality rate into a 93 percent survival rate.
For most of his career, he has been the world’s most-cited researcher on AIDS and infectious diseases. He has received many awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Ironically, Fauci has also presided over a decades-long decline in the overall health of American citizens. During his time in public health, a great number of chronic illnesses have become commonplace. Food allergies, autoimmune diseases, and cancer now affect more than half of American children. Autism, once rare, now affects 1 in 44 children.
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies hearing, on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 17, 2022. (Shawn Thew/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) A Lifetime in Public Health
Anthony Fauci was born in Brooklyn in 1940, the son of a pharmacist. Pharmacy was the family business, and both his mother and sister worked in his father’s shop beneath their apartment. As a young man, Fauci studied medicine at Cornell University, graduating first in his class. After his residency in 1966, he took a research job at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and he has worked for the U.S. government ever since.
In his five decades in public health, Fauci has advised every President since Ronald Reagan. Since 1984 he has been the head of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease (NIAID), one of 27 institutes within the NIH, given the mission of researching and preventing infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases.
For many Americans, Fauci has been the trusted face of the U.S. government response to the pandemic. It was his confident explanations, both to the public and to policymakers, which led to the use of lockdowns, business closures, masking, and vaccines as the response to the virus.
His many critics see a different Anthony Fauci—a bureaucrat who seems to have made a career of putting politics and corporate profits above public health.
“Dr. Fauci has shaped the American medical world,” said Mary Holland, President of Children’s Health Defense, in an interview with The Epoch Times. “He’s moved American health institutions, NIH in particular, to a very intertwined relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.”
Holland’s nonprofit organization, chaired by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has been a prominent critic of Dr. Fauci’s policies—particularly the mass vaccination of American citizens.
Censorship and Control
“Dr. Fauci and his NIAID have played a very dark role in COVID,” Holland said. “The level of propaganda we have lived through in the last two years is unprecedented in my lifetime. I lived in the Soviet Union after law school, fighting for human rights and working against government propaganda and censorship. And now we are living through that in the United States.”
According to Holland, Fauci is the key player in the U.S. government’s efforts to control all information relating to the pandemic and the virus. “The documents are coming out that show that the government has been censoring us, suppressing factual information that relate to this virus and the pandemic.”
Even criticism of Fauci has been censored, says Holland. “Robert Kennedy’s new book, ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ has been suppressed at every turn,” she said. The 2021 book takes a hard look at Fauci’s career and his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Kennedy has found it almost impossible to promote his book.
“No major publication in the country would review the book,” said Holland. “The New York Times would not include it on their bestseller list, and he [Kennedy] was not invited on any major media platform, except for Tucker Carlson and The Epoch Times. The level of censorship has been astonishing.”
Kennedy isn’t the only one censored. For two years, mainstream media outlets have ignored the scientists who have questioned Fauci’s views. These scientists have seen their ideas rejected (or later retracted) by medical journals, denounced by government officials, and censored by social media platforms.
Fauci has been candid about his suppression of dissent. “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” Fauci told CNBC in a June 2021 interview.
In May, the attorneys general for Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden and other White House officials, accusing them of violating the First Amendment by colluding with social media giants to suppress information about the pandemic. According to recently released court documents, the Biden administration worked so closely with social media that Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg gave Fauci his personal phone number when the crackdown on COVID-19 information began.
But why this need for control? What information needed to be covered up? According to Holland, it’s the role that Fauci may have played in creating, and prolonging, this pandemic.
The P4 laboratory (L) on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on May 27, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images) “By all appearances they have tried to cover up their role in funding lethal gain of function research in China,” said Holland. “They have also suppressed the use of lifesaving early treatments like ivermectin and hydroxycholoroquine, and they have suppressed valuable research into preventive measures that could have saved countless lives.”
The result, says Holland and other critics, is a dark period in American history.
Fauci’s Pandemic?
Starting in early 2020, Americans faced unprecedented government intrusion in their lives. Business and school closures, lockdowns, mask mandates—and the man behind these government policies has been Anthony Fauci. In countless interviews and press conferences, Fauci positioned himself as the one true source of correct COVID-19 information and guidance.
Emergency orders at the federal, state, and local levels were based on Fauci’s opinions. Fauci himself took credit for the policy of lockdowns, saying in October 2020, “I recommended to the president that we shut the country down. That was a very difficult decision because I knew it would have very serious economic consequences.”
“Anthony Fauci is clearly at the very center of all things COVID,” Holland said. “And he has been in charge of controlling the information about the pandemic.”
“From the very beginning, when many scientists were pointing to a lab origin for this virus,” said Holland, “Anthony Fauci put a stop to that important debate.” Despite the discovery of NIAID’s funding of gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Fauci continues to say that the virus likely has a natural origin.
A similar thing happened with scientific opposition to Fauci’s policies. The Great Barrington Declaration, written in October 2020 and signed by over 60,000 doctors and scientists, opposed lockdowns and advocated a new policy of protecting only the most vulnerable populations while allowing the rest to live freely and develop natural immunity.
Fauci called the Declaration “ridiculous” and “very dangerous,” and led a campaign to attack the authors and signatories, instead of their ideas.
“It has been remarkable,” Holland said, “to see one of the most influential figures in American life purposely suppressing truthful information—about a lab leak, about scientists who said there should be no lockdowns, about the value of masks and the risks of vaccines.”
“In the COVID response we saw extraordinary corruption,” said Holland. “The origin of the virus was covered up. Important treatments were suppressed. And vaccines were authorized, and mandated, on inadequate science.”
Ivermectin tablets packaged for human use. (Natasha Holt/The Epoch Times) Suppression of Cures
One of the most astonishing aspects of Fauci’s leadership during the pandemic has been his strong opposition to any potential treatment. In two years, neither Fauci nor any U.S. government agency has published a single treatment protocol for COVID-19 patients.
In contrast, China had a treatment protocol online by mid-March of 2020. The result of an organized collection of data from hundreds of hospitals treating thousands of patients, the Chinese protocol included simple solutions like saline nasal lavage and antiseptic mouthwash to reduce viral loads, and cheap drugs like zinc, Pepcid, chloroquine, and antibiotics.
As of this writing, the United States still has no official treatment protocol. And no protocols have been proposed by any major American university or research hospital. Yet every American doctor who has tried to publish one has been quickly censored and ridiculed.
Dr. Peter McCullough knows this firsthand. The author of the protocol that became the most downloaded medical paper of 2020, McCullough was among the first American doctors to develop, test, and publish a successful treatment protocol, resulting in an 85 percent reduction in hospitalizations and death among his patients.
A medical doctor and author of over 600 peer-reviewed research articles, McCullough at first had no thought of developing his own treatment plan. But he soon became alarmed at the government’s failure to provide treatment advice to America’s doctors.
By May 2020, McCullough began taking action. He quickly set up a network of doctors to share information about effective treatments—something Fauci never did.
For his efforts, he found himself sued by Baylor University, had his Wikipedia page re-written to label him a source of “COVID misinformation”, and had his reputation attacked in print and online. All while major medical institutions did nothing to find a treatment.
“They didn’t even try,” McCullough is quoted as saying in “The Real Anthony Fauci.” “Harvard, John Hopkins, Duke, you name it. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America to fight COVID—other than vaccines.”
Across the country, Dr. Pierre Kory was fighting the same battle. The co-founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), Kory and a team of doctors were quickly developing their own protocol and putting it online. Like McCullough, Kory had discovered the effectiveness of ivermectin, hydroxycholoroquine, and a number of other inexpensive and easily available drugs.
Kory testified twice to the U.S. Senate explaining the success of his treatment protocol. He also submitted a formal paper to the NIH, which quickly dismissed the results as “insufficient data” lacking proper clinical trials. Another research paper explaining the protocol was retracted by the journal Frontiers in Pharmacology due to “unsupported claims”.
“The efficacy of some of these drugs… is almost miraculous. We could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks in the Spring of 2020,” said Kory. “Yet Dr. Fauci refused to promote any of these interventions. It’s not just that he made no effort to find effective off-the-shelf cures—he aggressively suppressed them.”
“You had Birx, Fauci, and Redfield doing press conferences every day,” Kory said in an interview. “And not one of them ever treated a COVID patient or worked in an emergency room or ICU. They knew nothing.”
“Dr. Fauci’s suppression of early treatments,” said Kory, “will go down in history as having caused the death of half a million Americans.”
But why would Anthony Fauci suppress effective treatments? Why attack doctors trying to find a solution? According to Robert Kennedy, it might be because safe and effective treatments for COVID-19 would make the new vaccines unnecessary.
Successful treatments aren’t just a marketing challenge for the vaccine manufacturers—they’re a legal obstacle, too. Once a successful treatment for COVID-19 is established, it becomes much less likely that the FDA will grant Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to new vaccines and new drugs. Under federal law, there must be no approved alternative way of treating or preventing a disease before authorizing an EUA.
The EUA under which the experimental vaccines were given to millions of Americans would never have been granted if COVID-19 was known to be an easily treatable disease.
In “The Real Anthony Fauci”, Robert Kennedy writes, “His bizarre and inexplicable actions give credence to the suspicions held by many Americans that Dr. Fauci is working to prolong the epidemic in order to impose expensive patented drugs and vaccines on a captive population.”
AIDS
COVID-19 isn’t the first time that Anthony Fauci has been accused of using public policy to benefit big pharma corporations. Forty years ago, at the height of the AIDS crisis in America, many AIDS activists called Anthony Fauci a sellout to the drug companies.
“You are responsible for all government funded AIDS treatment research,” said activist Larry Kramer in an open letter to Fauci in the San Francsico Examiner in 1988. “You are part of a government bureaucracy that values thriving pharmaceutical company entrepreneurism over the health of people with HIV.”
Kramer’s criticism: instead of focusing on improving patients’ health, Fauci’s only answer to AIDS was the development of new drugs. “How long will it take you to start focusing on the immune system, how to boost it and how to prevent the opportunistic infections that are killing people with AIDS? Still, you give your blessing to clinical trials of highly profitable toxins…”
“You are a pill-pushing pimp that cooperates with drug companies in forcing dangerous concoctions down the throats of a desperate community,” wrote Kramer. “AIDS drugs are not sold to help people, they are sold to make a profit.”
White House Chief Medical Adviser on Covid-19 Dr. Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., on Feb. 11, 2021. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images) Conflicts of Interest
Despite the criticism Fauci endured, the AIDS crisis produced the most important opportunity of his career: using NIAID to develop, and profit from, new drugs. His collaboration with pharmaceutical companies quickly grew into a billion-dollar business.
The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act allowed NIAID and government scientists like Fauci to directly profit from drug development. Under the law, NIAID was now allowed to file patents on the new drugs that their research was creating, and then license those drug patents back to pharmaceutical companies. Individual government scientists could also put their names on patents and collect royalties.
This created a new income stream for Anthony Fauci: royalties on the sales of all drugs developed through NIAID-funded research. Drug development very quickly became the focus of Fauci’s NIAID, and millions of dollars in royalties started to pour in.
According to a 2006 investigation by the Associated Press, NIH and NIAID were concealing millions of dollars in royalties paid not just to the agencies, but to individual officials including Fauci, with little regard for the ethical and legal conflicts of interest. This information was not made public until the Associated Press obtained the information under the Freedom of Information Act.
In early 2022, OpenTheBooks.com, a government watchdog nonprofit, reported over 22,0000 royalty payments totaling nearly $134 million in royalty payments from pharma companies to the NIH and directly to over 1,600 NIH scientists. These payments occurred between 2009 and 2014. Data from 2015 onward is not yet available.
As a co-owner of drug and vaccine patents, Fauci himself receives royalty payments, including from the development of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. The amount of these payments has not been made public.
It is perhaps no coincidence then, that the Biden administration’s COVID-19 plan, “The Path out of the Pandemic”, consists of only one strategy: more government vaccination mandates.
“Think about it,” said Children’s Health Defense president Mary Holland. “NIAID is a joint venture partner with Moderna! How can the government be a joint venture partner with a for-profit corporation? And then set public policy to force the use of that product? The conflict of interest is astounding.”
Experiments in New York
Drug development for AIDS created a little-known episode in Fauci’s career. Starting in 1985, the NIAID provided funding for clinical drug trials on HIV-positive children, studies which included children in the New York foster care system.
According to a 2009 report by the Vera Institute of Justice, 25 of the children involved in these experiments died, though there is no evidence that they died as a direct result of the experiments.
“NIAID under Fauci exploited the most vulnerable in our society to develop new drugs,” said Holland. “These were poor children, without parents, many of whom were already very sick. Episodes like this, make one genuinely recall other medical atrocities in history, experiments conducted on vulnerable people without proper informed consent.”
Experiments in Africa
Experimentation on humans has been a key part of Fauci’s role in new drug and vaccine development, especially in Africa in the search for a solution to AIDS.
Since the mid-1990s Fauci has been the chief promoter of the quest for an HIV vaccine. Under Fauci’s advice, every American president since Clinton has pledged billions of taxpayer dollars to this project—foreign aid diverted away from food and infrastructure to vaccine manufacturers and their research projects, in the name of eradicating AIDS in Africa.
In early 2000, Fauci and Bill Gates formed a unique partnership to control this flow of money. By leveraging the research funding available through Fauci’s NIAID, Bill Gates’ celebrity philanthropy, the tragedy of AIDS, and the massive wealth of pharmaceutical companies, Fauci and Gates acquired tremendous influence over health policy around the world.
This Fauci-Gates partnership is detailed in a 2008 report in the Journal of European Molecular Biology, provocatively titled “The Gates Foundation: How Sixty Billion Dollars and One Famous Person Can Affect Spending and Research Focus of Public Agencies”.
As many human rights organizations have pointed out, Fauci and Gates have spent decades profiting from the use of Africans as test subjects for experimental drugs that often do great harm. And there still is no vaccine for HIV.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 20:20 - Ethereum's 'Merge' Will Happen Tonight
Ethereum’s ‘Merge’ Will Happen Tonight
The much-anticipated ‘Merge’ is upon us…
Based on the latest countdown, Ethereum users expect the massive network upgrade to begin around 10pm PST, with the second-largest crypto is set to shift to a more environmentally friendly model that may help attract investors who opine that bitcoin’s model uses too much electricity.
The Ethereum blockchain will transition away from its energy-intensive consensus mechanism Proof-of-Work as its execution layer merges with the new Proof-od-Stake consensus layer known as the Beacon Chain.
The so-called ‘Merge’ is like upgrading a rocket ship after its launch: “It is an epic engineering feat.”
As Cointelegraph previously reported the Merge will see ETH, the native currency of the Ethereum ecosystem, remain once the mainnet joins the Beacon Chain.
It is worth noting that some PoW miners that previously mined blocks and maintained the execution layer have indicated that they will continue to do so.
The PoS-powered Ethereum blockchain will continue to use ETH after the Merge, while another hypothetical PoW Ethereum network, dubbed ETHPOW, could fork away with the creation of an ETHW token.
The last 24 hours or so – thanks in large part to yesterday’s CPI-charged chaos – Ethereum has traded lower, but stabilized today around $1600…
As WSJ reminds, Bitcoin pioneered the proof-of-work model where a global, decentralized network of computers processes transactions and adds them to the blockchain by generating random numbers in hopes of finding the right combination to unlock formulas.
The miners receive newly minted bitcoins as rewards.
In the proof-of-stake model Ethereum is moving to, validators put their crypto holdings on the line to verify transactions.
The “staked” ether tokens act as collateral that can be destroyed or confiscated if the validators behave dishonestly.
The validators accrue interest payments on their staked assets as a reward.
For example, staking on the ethereum blockchain prior to the merge would fetch a 4.1% annual percentage rate, according to the Ethereum Foundation.
Simply put, ethereum’s big makeover means it will take a lot less energy to verify transactions, slashing energy consumption by more than 99% will also go a long way toward lowering the barrier to entry for institutional investors, who have been battling the optics of contributing to the climate crisis.
One River’s Sebastian Dae noted earlier in the week that, it’ll be boring if all goes according to plan, nothing like the excitement of watching the force of a rocket launch. Alas, the dream of every successful layer 1 is precisely that – to be a boring, secure platform that is eventually taken for granted, invisible to the users who demand more from their tools. The Merge is one step closer to that reality.
The actual process is expected to take about 12 minutes, during which time about 150 developers will be on high alert to address any potential hitches.
As Decrypt writes, the merge was originally called “Ethereum 2.0,” but that name was retired in favor of rhyming names for each step: merge, surge, verge, purge, and splurge.
The Ethereum Foundation is holding its own livestream to watch the transition from the current ‘proof-of-work’ network to its new ‘proof-of-stake’ paradigm…
Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Stake are arguably the best-known consensus mechanisms – but new ones are continually emerging.
PoW blockchains have long dominated the cryptocurrency landscape, with both Bitcoin and Ethereum using this model. This means miners are responsible for securing the network and validating transactions — and they get rewarded with new coins as a result.
However, a common criticism surrounding Proof-of-Work relates to how much energy it uses, and the impact such blockchains have on the environment. Miners need to use vast amounts of computing power to solve arbitrary mathematical equations. More advanced hardware has been required as the industry matured, with electricity usage surging too.
This has led Proof-of-Stake to be regarded as a more eco-friendly approach. Miners are replaced by validators — nodes that have a financial stake in the smooth running of the network. While proponents claim this can use 99% less energy than PoW, some fear PoS can lead to greater levels of centralization and censorship. Ethereum is currently in the process of moving to this consensus mechanism during The Merge — and it’ll be interesting to see how this high-stakes experiment pans out.
A new approach is known as Published Proof-of-Contribution, otherwise known as PPoC for short. Here, every single participant has a role to play in ensuring the ecosystem is decentralized, democratic and well-governed.
According to one estimate on the Ethereum Foundation’s blog, the merge will result in a reduction of at least 99.95% in total energy use, but not everyone is clear on the benefits.
“There are some misconceptions among the wider public around what kind of benefits the Merge is going to bring,” Henry Elder, Head of DeFi at digital asset management firm Wave Financial, told Decrypt.
“It’s not going to make Ethereum faster, more scalable and cheaper. It’s just Ethereum that goes from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.”
Additionally, MicroStrategy’s Michael Saylor shared a few high level thoughts on Bitcoin Mining & the Environment…
1. Bitcoin Energy Utilization: Bitcoin runs on stranded, excess energy, generated at the edge of the grid, in places where there is no other demand, at times when no one else needs the electricity. Retail & commercial consumers of electricity in major population areas pay 5-10x more per kwH (10-20 cents per kwH) than bitcoin miners, who should be thought of as wholesale consumers of energy (normally budgeting 2-3 cents per kwH). The world produces more energy than it needs, and approximately a third of this energy is wasted. The last 15 basis points of energy power the entire Bitcoin Network – this is the least valued, cheapest margin of energy left after 99.85% of the energy in the world is allocated to other uses.
2. Bitcoin vs. Other Industries: Bitcoin mining is the most efficient, cleanest industrial use of electricity, and is improving its energy efficiency at the fastest rate across any major industry. Our metrics show ~59.5% of energy for bitcoin mining comes from sustainable sources and energy efficiency improved 46% YoY. No other industry comes close (consider planes, trains, automobiles, healthcare, banking, construction, precious metals, etc.). The bitcoin network keeps getting more energy efficient because of the relentless improvement in the semiconductors (SHA-256 ASICs) that power the bitcoin mining centers, combined with the halving of bitcoin mining rewards every four years that is built into the protocol. This results in a consistent 18-36% improvement year after year in energy efficiency. More details on this are included in the BMC Presentation.
3. Bitcoin Value Creation & Energy Intensity: Approximately $4-5 billion in electricity is used to power & secure a network that is worth $420 billion as of today, and settles $12 billion per day ($4 trillion per year). The value of the output is 100x the cost of the energy input. This makes Bitcoin far less energy intensive than Google, Netflix, or Facebook, and 1-2 orders of magnitude less energy intensive than traditional 20th century industries like airlines, logistics, retail, hospitality, & agriculture.
4. Bitcoin vs. Other Cryptos: The only proven technique for creating a digital commodity is Proof of Work (bitcoin mining) deployed in a fair, equitable fashion (i.e. no pre-mine, no ICO, no controlling foundation, no primary software development team, no series of forced hard fork upgrades that materially change the monetary protocol). If we remove the dedicated hardware (SHA-256 ASICs) and the dedicated energy that powers those mining rigs, we are left with a network secured by proprietary software running on generic computers. That places all security & control of the network in the hands of a small group of software developers, who must create virtual machines doing virtual work with virtual energy in a virtual world to create virtual security. All attempts to date have resulted in a digital asset that meets the definition of an investment contract (i.e. digital security, not digital commodity). They all pass the Howie test and therefore look more like equities than commodities.
Regulators & legal experts have noted on many occasions that Proof of Stake networks are likely securities, not commodities, and we can expect them to be treated as such over time. PoS Crypto Securities may be appropriate for certain applications, but they are not suitable to serve as global, open, fair money or a global open settlement network. Therefore, it makes no sense to compare Proof of Stake networks to Bitcoin. The creation of a digital commodity without an issuer that serves as “digital gold” is an innovation (we have accomplished this only once in the history of the world with Bitcoin). The creation of a digital security or digital coupon on a shared database is utterly ordinary (it has been done 20,000 times in the crypto world, and 100,000+ times in the traditional world).
5. Bitcoin & Carbon Emissions: 99.92% of carbon emissions in the world are due to industrial uses of energy other than bitcoin mining. Bitcoin mining is neither the problem nor the solution to the challenge of reducing carbon emissions. It is in fact a rounding error and would hardly be noticed if it were not for the competitive guerrilla marketing activities of other crypto promoters & lobbyists that seek to focus negative attention on Proof of Work mining in order to distract regulators, politicians, & the general public from the inconvenient truth that Proof of Stake crypto assets are generally unregistered securities trading on unregulated exchanges to the detriment of the retail investing public.
6. Bitcoin & Environmental Benefits: There is an increasing awareness that Bitcoin is quite beneficial to the environment because it can be deployed to monetize stranded natural gas or methane gas energy sources. Methane gas emissions’ curtailment is particularly compelling and Dan Batten (https://batcoinz.com/) has written some impressive papers on this subject. It has also become clear that energy grids that rely primarily on sustainable power sources like wind, hydro, & solar can be unreliable at times due to lack of water, sunlight, or wind. In this case, they need to be paired with a large electricity consumer like a bitcoin miner in order to develop grid resilience & finance the buildout of additional capacity necessary to responsibly power major industrial/population centers. The recent example of major Bitcoin energy curtailment on the ERCOT grid in Texas is an example of the benefits of bitcoin mining to sustainable power providers. No other industrial energy consumer is so well suited to monetize excess power as well as curtail flexibly during periods of energy shortfall & production volatility.
7. Bitcoin & Global Energy: Bitcoin maximalists believe that Bitcoin is an instrument of economic empowerment for 8 billion people around the world. This is supported by the ability of a bitcoin miner to monetize any power source, anywhere, anytime, at any scale. Bitcoin mining can bring a clean, profitable and modern industry that generates hard currency to a remote location in the developing world, connected only via satellite link. All that is needed is some excess electricity generated from a waterfall, geothermal source, or miscellaneous excess energy deposit. Google, Netflix, and Apple won’t be setting up data centers in Central Africa that export services to their wealthy western clients anytime soon due to constraints on bandwidth, privacy, & requirements for consistent power flow, but bitcoin miners are not hampered by these constraints. They can utilize erratic power supplies with low bandwidth in remote locations and generate valuable bitcoin without prejudice, just as if they were in a suburb of NYC, LA, or SF. Even now, Bitcoin miners are everywhere and will continue to spread (though Africa, Asia, South America, etc.) wherever there is excess energy and anyone with aspirations for a better life. Bitcoin is an egalitarian financial asset offering financial inclusion to all, and bitcoin mining is an egalitarian technology industry offering commercial inclusion to anyone with the energy & engineering capability to operate a mining center.
Finally, we note that the average Ethereum user and ETH holder need not worry about losing their funds or making any changes to preferred wallets before the Merge. As the entire history of the Ethereum blockchain is carried across in the transition – all funds in wallets are still accessible and safe.
Most importantly – be wary of scams. Cointelegraph has compiled a list of the three most prominent ways malicious actors are trying to prey on the Merge event. Fraudulent staking pools, upgrade scams, and fake airdrops are being touted. You do not need to upgrade your wallet or send your ETH to receive new tokens.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 20:00 - 40% Of Americans Believe CCP Considers Itself At War With US: Poll
40% Of Americans Believe CCP Considers Itself At War With US: Poll
Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
An increasing number of Americans believe that China’s communist regime considers itself to be at war with the United States, according to the results of a new national survey.
University freshmen practice fighting skills during military training on Sept. 25, 2008 in Gaochun County in Jiangsu Province, China. (China Photos/Getty Images) Some 40 percent of likely U.S. voters said they think the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, considers itself to be at war with the United States. Less than 26 percent said the CCP doesn’t consider itself at war with the United States, while more than 34 percent were unsure.
The survey, conducted by nonprofit Convention of States Action and polling company Trafalgar Group from Sept. 2 to Sept. 5, polled more than 1,000 likely midterm voters across the political spectrum. The poll had a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
Notably, the polling also revealed a stark partisan divide in opinion about the seriousness of the CCP threat.
Slightly less than 60 percent of Republicans believed that the CCP considers itself to be at war with the United States, while less than 24 percent of Democrats said the same.
Regardless of affiliation, however, more Americans were unsure of the veracity of the claim than were confident that it’s untrue.
Regarding the U.S. response to the perceived threat, 67 percent of all respondents said they don’t believe the U.S. government considers itself to be at war with China.
In all, less than 9 percent believed that the United States considers itself to be at war with China, although Democrats were more than twice as likely to believe such a thing as Republicans.
“These are stunning results,” Mark Meckler, president of the Convention of States Action, said in a statement to The Epoch Times. “Americans clearly see that the Chinese Communist Party considers itself at war with the United States, and yet they acknowledge that the U.S. government doesn’t appear to have a clue this is the case.”
Congressional Republicans have long lambasted the Biden administration for a perceived failure to adequately respond to CCP aggression. The results of the survey appear to suggest that many Americans are at least sympathetic to the view that U.S. leadership isn’t meeting the regime’s provocations in kind.
Over the past decade, the CCP has led a widespread effort to undermine U.S. institutions. That campaign has included a plot to attack a U.S. Army veteran running for office, the arson of sculptures critical of the regime, and the stalking and intimidation of a U.S. Olympian whose father had spoken out against the regime.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 19:40 - US Navy Quietly Cancels Vaccine Requirement Order For SEALs
US Navy Quietly Cancels Vaccine Requirement Order For SEALs
The US Navy quietly rolled back Trident Order #12, an order denying religious exemptions for covid vaccinations, a few months after an injunction was issued by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in early 2022 as part of an ongoing lawsuit brought by First Liberty Institute. The suit was initiated on behalf of 35 active-duty SEALS and three reservists seeking exemptions to the mandate due to the possibility of covid vaccines being developed using cells and tissues from aborted fetuses.
This information has only become publicly available after a new filing in the case this week. Trident Order #12 made any non-compliant SEALS and other troops impossible to deploy and designated them as medically disqualified. This development runs in tandem with a growing trend among government institutions; they back away from their original draconian mandates but in a manner that reduces media exposure and avoids any admission that the mandates are unconstitutional.
A communication order was circulated by the Navy on May 23 with the subject: “NSWC CLOSEOUT TO TRIDENT ORDER #12 – MANDATORY VACCINATION FOR COVID-19.” NSWC refers to the Naval Special Warfare Command:
“This order rescinds reference A,” it states, referring to “Ref A” as “Trident Order #12 on COVID-19 Vaccinations.”
The May 23 communication order also said Navy commands “will continue to follow guidance, as appropriate, regarding COVID-19 vaccination, accommodation requests, and mitigation measures.”
The Navy along with every other branch of the US military is facing a severe recruitment crisis, with a record low number of Americans eligible to serve. In particular, far too many potential recruits are unable to meet the physical requirements to complete basic training. This has led to discussions on lowering standards, but even this would not solve low recruitment numbers for special operations and SEALS, which require highly capable candidates regardless.
An implosion in recruitment may have partially contributed to the Navy’s abandonment of vax restrictions, along with the flood of scientific evidence showing that the vaccines make very little difference in immunity and mortality, especially for young and fit individuals, when compared to natural immunity. Numerous studies show superior immunity among unvaxxed people that have already had covid.
The US government continues to refuse to acknowledge natural immunity as an acceptable status for the military or federal employees, though their attempts to enforce proof of vaccination (vaccine passports) have all but failed anyway.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 19:20 - China Back Among Top 10 Countries In Bitcoin-Usage Despite Ban
China Back Among Top 10 Countries In Bitcoin-Usage Despite Ban
Authored by Shawn Amick via BitcoinMagazine.com,
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China is back among the countries with the highest level of bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption in the world.
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The findings come from a new Chainalysis report that details the adoption levels of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies per country.
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Vietnam leads the world in overall adoption, while India has the highest number of centralized purchases.
Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis has released its 2022 Global Cryptocurrency Adoption Index detailing global usage of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies with a unique ranking formula.
The report’s most staggering bits of information show that, despite last year’s ban, China has returned to rank among the top 10 countries in the world for adoption. Additionally, Vietnam is still ranked first and the U.S. has risen to fifth when it was previously ranked eighth in 2021.
Top 10 countries in Chainalysis’ Global Crypto Adoption Index. (Table/Chainalysis)
However, when one looks at this report it becomes far more interesting after realizing how Chainalysis ranks adoption.
Five separate indexes cumulatively provide the overall index score of each country, and the indexes allow for a weighted calculation based on the percentage of income spent to acquire bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
Thus, a country with the highest volume accumulated won’t rank as the highest ranking for adoption because it most likely represents a smaller portion of the population’s overall income.
Additionally, a country can have massive amounts of accumulation but rarely participate in the peer-to-peer (P2P) transfer of value, which could lower a country’s rank. This happens to be the case for India who ranks number one in all metrics, except for P2P transfers which led to the country being ranked fourth globally.
Therefore, accounting for a country’s use of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as not only a store-of-value, but as a medium of exchange, paints a more complete picture regarding adoption. This also accounts for emerging markets making up the bulk of the list as they participate in more P2P transactions.
The report concluded by detailing how adoption is still well above 2020 bull market levels and even though markets have experienced bearish momentum, “Bear markets can’t wipe out bull market adoption.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 19:00 -
- Here's Why Toyota Isn't Going All-In On Electric Vehicles
Here’s Why Toyota Isn’t Going All-In On Electric Vehicles
While many automakers have committed billions of dollars in recent years to develop all-electric vehicles, Toyota has approached the technology with far more caution – opting instead to continue investing in a portfolio of hybrid “electrified” vehicles, such as the Prius.
2021 Prius hybrid And while the Japanese automaker was a darling of US environmentalists and ‘eco-conscious’ consumers when the Prius came out two decades ago, given that it was among the cleanest and most fuel-efficient vehicles ever produced – Toyota has fallen out of favor with the ‘green’ crowd thanks to its hesitancy to jump into the fray with fully electric vehicles.
“The fact is: a hybrid today is not green technology. The Prius hybrid runs on a pollution-emitting combustion engine found in any gas-powered car,” said Katherine García, director of the Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All campaign, in a recent blog post.
As CNBC notes, Greenpeace has now ranked Toyota at the bottom of a list of 10 automakers’ efforts to ‘decarbonize,’ citing slow progress in its supply chain and sales of zero-emission vehicles, which are less than 1% of Toyota’s sales.
While automakers such as General Motors, Volkswagen and others vowed to invest billions of dollars in recent years to develop all-electric vehicles that don’t require gas-powered engines like the Prius, Toyota lagged, only more recently announcing similar investments. It also continues to invest in a portfolio of “electrified” vehicles – ranging from traditional hybrids like the Prius to its recently launched, yet underwhelming, bZ4X electric crossover. -CNBC
Toyota execs say the strategy is appropriate given the lack of EV-supporting infrastructure around the world, as well as the high cost of the vehicles.
“For as much as people want to talk about EVs, the marketplace isn’t mature enough and ready enough … at the level we would need to have mass movement,” said Jack Hollis, executive vice president of sales at Toyota Motor North America, during an August virtual meeting.
Toyota Crossover EV Concept That said, Toyota announced in December a $28 billion investment (4 trillion yen) in a lineup of 30 battery-powered electric vehicles by 2030, and will continue to invest in hybrids such as the Prius and other potential models.
“We want to provide each person with a way that they can contribute the most to solving climate change. And we know that that answer is not to treat everybody the same way,” said Gill Pratt, Toyota chief scientist and CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, during a media event last month in Michigan.
Meanwhile, the company announced several weeks ago that it would allocate $5.6 billion for hybrid and all-electric battery production in Japan and the US as part of the aforementioned 2030 plan.
And while this may seem like a significant amount of money, which it is, it’s dwarfed by commitments from competitors such as GM and VW – the former of which has announced it will exclusively offer “zero-emission” EVs by 2035. Other automakers have vowed to set targets for at least 50% of their vehicles sold in North America to be all electric.
Toyota, meanwhile, has a goal to sell 3.5 million electric vehicles per year by 2030 – over 1/3 of current sales, which include around 1 million units from its Lexus brand, which will exclusively offer EVs in Europe, North America and Chiny by then.
“I think they’re hedging their bets,” said Paul Waatti, manager of industry analysis at AutoPacific. “From a global perspective, a lot of markets are moving at different paces. U.S. is slower than Europe and China in EV adoption but there are other markets where there’s no infrastructure at all. To take a varied approach in powertrains makes sense for a global automaker.”
According to Toyota, electric vehicles are one solution, not the solution, for the company’s carbon-neutral goals.
“In the distant future, I’m not investing assuming that battery electrics are 100% of the market. I just don’t see it,” said Jim Adler, founding managing director Toyota Ventures. “It really will be a mixed market.”
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 18:40 - DOJ Official Who Exposed Themselves, 'Sexually Assaulted Civilian' Won't Be Prosecuted: IG
DOJ Official Who Exposed Themselves, ‘Sexually Assaulted Civilian’ Won’t Be Prosecuted: IG
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General’s Office won’t prosecute an assistant U.S. attorney who engaged in sexual misconduct with a civilian on a date.
Signage is seen at the U.S. Department of Justice headquarters in Washington on Aug. 29, 2020. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters) The office stated (pdf) on Sept. 12 that an investigation had determined the unnamed assistant U.S. attorney exposed themselves in a public place and then “sexually assaulted a civilian while on a date,” which it noted was “in violation of state law and federal regulations governing off-duty conduct.”
After an investigation, the office also found that the assistant U.S. attorney “lacked candor in discussing” the incident with investigators.
“Criminal prosecution of the [assistant U.S. attorney] was declined,” the report reads.
The name of the assistant U.S. attorney wasn’t disclosed, and it’s unclear if the person still works as an assistant U.S. attorney.
The Inspector General’s Office noted that it sent the Executive Office for the U.S. Attorneys and DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility its report. Assistant U.S. attorneys work for the various U.S. attorneys’ offices, which prosecute federal crimes around the country.
“Unless otherwise noted, the [Inspector General’s Office] applies the preponderance of the evidence standard in determining whether Department of Justice personnel have committed misconduct,” the Inspector General’s Office stated.
Another Incident
Also on Sept. 12, the DOJ Inspector General’s Office released a separate report stating that an unidentified assistant U.S. attorney (AUSA) abused their position after being stopped by police while intoxicated.
“The OIG [Office of Inspector General] investigation found that the AUSA had engaged in misuse of position when referring to the AUSA’s title in an attempt to influence local police officers during a traffic stop,” the report (pdf) reads. “The OIG investigation also found that the AUSA engaged in conduct that was prejudicial to the government, including ignoring instructions, cursing at officers, and kicking the door of the patrol vehicle, in violation of federal ethics regulations.”
The investigation also found that the assistant U.S. attorney “had been driving a personal vehicle while under the influence of alcohol,” according to the report.
After completing the investigation, the office handed its report to the Office of Professional Responsibility “for appropriate action,” the report states.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 18:20 - China Issues Highest Typhoon Warning As Storm Approaches World's Largest Container Ports
China Issues Highest Typhoon Warning As Storm Approaches World’s Largest Container Ports
China issued the highest tropical cyclone warning on Wednesday as Typhoon Muifa barreled toward Shanghai as Asia’s largest ports are at a standstill.
Chinese state media said Muifa is expected to make landfall between the cities of Wenling and Zhoushan on Wednesday, dumping torrential rains, unleashing high winds, and battering coastlines with massive waves. The areas of impact include critical commercial zones to global supply chains.
Source: Bloomberg Shanghai and Ningbo-Zhoushan Ports are in the direct path of the storm. The twin port cities are some of the largest in Asia and the world in cargo handling and are at a standstill as waves up to 5 meters (16 feet) are expected Wednesday.
Ports in eastern China face disruptions ahead of typhoon Muifa
Shipping activity in eastern China is set for further disruptions as a powerful typhoon approaches the region, including the key port cities of Ningbo and Zhoushan.
#typhoonMuifa #ports pic.twitter.com/9WZwWtJQXo— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) September 14, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
⚡The last container vessel left the #Yangshan port at 02:55 local time, all operations have been suspended before the landing of Typhoon #Muifa on Sept.14.#Shanghai raised the typhoon emergency response level to II from III this morning. https://t.co/Bc8jki6c51 pic.twitter.com/6Ni0PkAamn
— CN Wire (@Sino_Market) September 14, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
US Joint Typhoon Warning Center said wind gusts over 100 mph are expected for the next 12 hours as it approaches Shanghai.
China issued the highest-level typhoon warning on Wednesday for the first time this year, according to state media.
Typhoon Muifa (formerly Inday) will make its landfall tonight over eastern China – in the country’s joint second busiest port Ningbo and Zhoushan and in the main financial hub Shanghai.
More than 40M people live in these three cities. pic.twitter.com/4YRh2IYQ3B | via @arielrojasPH
— ABS-CBN News (@ABSCBNNews) September 14, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Besides shipping disruptions, all flights in the region have been canceled for Wednesday, flight data platform Variflight told Reuters.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Steven Lam said the storm could inflict almost a billion dollars in damage to coastal areas in eastern China.
Tyler Durden
Wed, 09/14/2022 – 18:00
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