Aug 16

Today’s News 16th August 2022

  • Nuclear Deal Increasingly Unlikely As Iran Strengthens Ties With Russia
    Nuclear Deal Increasingly Unlikely As Iran Strengthens Ties With Russia

    By Simon Watkins of OilPrice.com

    There are several reasons to be short crude oil currently – economic recession in the U.S. and looming recessions in Europe, ongoing lockdowns in China, the vested interest of the U.S. in keeping oil below US$75 per barrel of Brent, to name but three – but the prospect of an imminent new ‘nuclear deal’ between the West and Iran is not one of them.

    It is true that the European Union (EU) last week tabled a ‘final text’ of a new iteration of the nuclear deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – to Washington and Tehran. However, it is equally true, as conveyed at length and exclusively to OilPrice.com last week by several senior political and oil industry sources close to proceedings, that there is virtually no chance of such a deal being done without a massive concession coming from Iran that it is impossible to see the current regime making.

    “Nothing has changed in the past few months from when the U.S. decided that Iran was just trying to buy time for its nuclear weapons development program by continuing to submit new clauses to the text of the new version of the JCPOA agreement,” a senior energy source who worked closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry, told OilPrice.com.

    “And Washington has told everyone else in the P5+1 group [the U.S., the U.K., France, China, and Russia ‘plus’ Germany] that it will not budge from its position on the IRGC, which is aimed – as Iran knows – at destroying the IRGC’s influence, and by extension Iran’s influence – in the world,” he said.

    “As far as the U.S. is concerned, everything is now focused on ensuring that Iran does not get the three months it needs to finish the guidance systems it requires, with the help of Russia, to deliver weapons-grade nuclear material in the missiles it already has,” he added.

    A cementing of the U.S. view that “we are not going to change a single word or add a single comma in the current draft [of the new version of the JCPOA] on the table” – as a senior European Union energy source told OilPrice.com last week – came on 9 August with the launch of Iran’s ‘Khayyam’ satellite, built almost entirely by Russia and powered into orbit from the Russia-controlled Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. According to Iran, the satellite will be “used to monitor Iran’s borders and improve the country’s capabilities in management and planning in the fields of agriculture, natural resources, environment, mining, and natural disasters.” According to the U.S., the satellite is to be used for spying on its neighbors. Neither statement is entirely true, although the U.S. did hint at how serious it is when a State Department spokesman said last week of the Khayyam launch: “Russia deepening an alliance with Iran is something that the whole world should look at and see as a profound threat.”

    What the Khayyam satellite was launched for is to provide the final piece of the missile guidance systems that Russia and Iran have been working on for years – this one relating to improving the accuracy of missiles (by up to 25 percent for short- and medium-range missiles and by up to 70 percent for long-range missiles) according to the Iranian source. During those past few years, Iran has sent several very small (50 kilograms or less) satellites of its own making into orbit, although none of them had the relative operational sophistication of the Russian-made Khayyam satellite (which weighs over half a tonne) launched last week. Prior to the launch of the Khayyam, there were five failed launches in a row for the ‘Simorgh’ program, which involved the same type of array as the Khayyam – a rocket launched that also carries a satellite (Khayyam was launched using a Russian Soyuz-2.1b rocket booster). Attempts by Iran to lunch more larger and more operationally sophisticated satellites – like Khayyam – have previously met with ‘unexplained’ setbacks, including most notably in recent times a massive fire at the Imam Khomeini Spaceport in February 2019 that also killed three key Iranian figures in its ‘satellite’ program. 

    This latest advance by Iran in its quest to be able to deliver a fully functioning nuclear warhead to anywhere within a few-thousand-mile radius should come as no surprise, given that the same sponsor for North Korea’s nuclear program – China – is the key state sponsor of Iran, as analyzed in depth in my latest book on the global oil markets. After the landmark 25-year deal was struck in August 2019 between Iran and China – a story exclusively broken by me in September 2019, nearly two years before it was officially announced or reported on by anyone else – China (and Russia) gradually and quietly began to increase their cooperation on key elements of Iran’s nuclear weapons development program. In China’s case, the level of intermediation between middle-men connected to it and to North Korea and Iran was stepped up using a triangular system of technology supplies (from China to North Korea via middlemen, and then from North Korea to Iran), and payment principally in oil (from Iran to North Korea, with some also sent from Iran to China directly). Russia had agreed to take a back seat to China in Iran’s nuclear weapons program in the year or two after the 25-year China-Iran deal had actually been made (in August 2019), but shifted back to a front seat position from September 2021 (when it began to activate its plan to invade Ukraine), as China remains wary of overtly challenging the U.S. outside its own perceived area of influence in the Taiwan Strait.

    Iran and Russia still need “two to three months to finalise its overall missile guidance system,” according to the sources spoken to by OilPrice.com last week, although it already has a vast array of missiles already in place with varying range applications. This leaves the nuclear material itself for the warheads as the third element it needs to line up before it rates as a clear and present nuclear threat. According to the 30 May 2022 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA): “Due to the growth of Iran’s 60 percent enriched uranium stocks, Iran has crossed a dangerous new threshold: its breakout timeline is now at zero. It has enough 60 percent enriched uranium, or highly enriched uranium [HEU] in the form of uranium hexafluoride [UF6] to be assured it could fashion directly a nuclear explosive. If Iran wanted to further enrich its 60 percent HEU up to 90 percent HEU, typically called weapon-grade uranium [WGU], used in Iran’s known nuclear weapons designs, it could do so within weeks utilizing only a few advanced centrifuge cascades.”

    Given this, it could be argued that bringing Iran back into the fold of global diplomatic relations by agreeing to a new iteration of the nuclear deal might be the way forward. However, for Washington, it appears that an inflection point has been reached in the Oval Office over the JCPOA in which, as OilPrice.com has been told: “We are not going to change a single word or add a single comma in the current draft [of the new version of the JCPOA] on the table.” The only thing that the U.S. will now accept from Iran is – in essence – the neutering of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which it is seeking to do via Iran signing up to the regulations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and then to becoming a fully-regulated and constantly-monitored FATF member. 

    With its 40 active criteria and mechanisms in place to prevent money laundering (an activity that is vital to the IRGC’s activities across the world) and nine criteria and mechanisms in place to do the same for the financing of terrorism and related activities (a core of the IRGC’s role in promoting Iran’s brand of Islam around the globe), the FATF has swingeing powers to wield against individuals, companies, or countries who transgress any of its standards and is extremely aggressive in using them by degrees, depending on whether the sanctioned entity is on its ‘grey’ or ‘black’ list. A sure sign of the U.S. has reached the end of the line regarding Iran is that – as of now – even if Iran does sign up to the FATF, Washington will not remove the designation of the IRGC as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organisation’ (FTO) immediately, as it had promised a while ago, but will keep the damaging designation in place for at least two years, whereupon it will be reviewed, a senior source close to Iran’s Petroleum Ministry told OilPrice.com exclusively last week. “This review,” he concluded, “will also assess whether all Iranian military and intelligence elements of influence have been removed from several countries, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, or Iran fails the review anyway.”

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 08/16/2022 – 02:00

  • WEF's "Global Intelligence Collecting AI" To Erase Ideas From The Internet
    WEF’s “Global Intelligence Collecting AI” To Erase Ideas From The Internet

    Via ‘2nd Smartest Guy in the World’ Substack,

    The World Economic Forum is becoming a little concerned. Unapproved opinions are becoming more popular, and online censors cannot keep up with millions of people becoming more aware and more vocal. The censorship engines employed by Internet platforms, turned out to be quite stupid and incapable. People are even daring to complain about the World Economic Forum, which is obviously completely unacceptable.

    So, WEF author Inbal Goldberger came up with a solution: she proposes to collect off-platform intelligence from “millions of sources” to spy on people and new ideas, and then merge this information together for “content removal decisions” sent down to “Internet platforms”.

    To overcome the barriers of traditional detection methodologies, we propose a new framework: rather than relying on AI to detect at scale and humans to review edge cases, an intelligence-based approach is crucial.

    By bringing human-curated, multi-language, off-platform intelligence into learning sets, AI will then be able to detect nuanced, novel abuses at scale, before they reach mainstream platforms. Supplementing this smarter automated detection with human expertise to review edge cases and identify false positives and negatives and then feeding those findings back into training sets will allow us to create AI with human intelligence baked in. This more intelligent AI gets more sophisticated with each moderation decision, eventually allowing near-perfect detection, at scale.

    What is this about? What’s new?

    The way censorship is done these days is that each Internet platform, such as Twitter, has its own moderation team and a decision making engine. Twitter would only look at tweets by any specific twitter user, when deciding on whether to delete any tweets or suspend their authors. Twitter moderators do NOT look at Gettr or other external websites.

    So, for example, user @JohnSmith12345 may have a Twitter account and narrowly abide by Twitter rules, but at the same time have a Gettr account where he would publish anti-vaccine messages. Twitter would not be able to suspend @JohnSmith12345’s account. That is no longer acceptable to the WEF because they want to silence people and ideas, not individual messages or accounts.

    This explains why the WEF needs to move beyond the major Internet platforms, in order to collect intelligence about people and ideas everywhere else. Such an approach would allow them to know better what person or idea to censor — on all major platforms at once.

    They want to collect intelligence from “millions of sources”, and train their “AI systems” to detect thoughts that they do not like, to make content removal decisions handed down to the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and so on. This is a major change from the status quo of each platform deciding what to do based on messages posted to that specific platform only.

    For example, in addition to looking at my Twitter profile, WEF’s proposed AI would also look at my Gettr profile, and then it would make an “intelligent decision” to remove me from the Internet at once. It is somewhat of a simplification because they also want to look for ideas and not only individuals but, nevertheless, the search for wrongthink becomes globalized.

    This sounds like an insane conspiracy theory from hell: WEF collecting information on everyone everywhere, and then telling all platforms what posts to remove, based on a global decision-making AI engine that sees everything and can identify individual people and ideas beyond any given platform.

    If someone ever said that it would be contemplated, I would probably think that this person is insane. It sounds like a sick technological fantasy. Unfortunately, this crazy stuff is real, is in a WEF agenda proposal that is officially posted on their website’s “WEF Agenda” section. And WEF is not messing around.

    You will have no voice and you will be happy!

    Of course, this AI content moderation slots straight into the AI social credit score system. And if your social credit score dips below whichever technocommunist AI thresholds as set by the elites, then all kinds of punishments will be meted out, from slashed UBI credits to bug-food rationing to an early granting of the “freedom” to be euthanized.

    Do NOT comply.

    *  *  *

    Become a paid subscriber: support the “Do NOT comply.” It’s 8 cents a day.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 23:55

  • Monsoon Rainfall Waterlogs Vegas, While Pacific Northwest Braces For Heat Dome
    Monsoon Rainfall Waterlogs Vegas, While Pacific Northwest Braces For Heat Dome

    Wild weather across the western part of the US has sparked one of the worst monsoon seasons in Las Vegas in a decade, while California and parts of the Pacific Northwest brace for a heat dome that could push power grids to the max.

    Late last week, intense thunderstorms flooded parts of southern Nevada, including Vegas. Videos on social media show floodwater pouring into at least one casino while parking garages were transformed into rivers. This comes two weeks after another storm wreaked havoc on Sin City.  

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    Clark County officials report the latest series of storms in the Vegas metro area has meant the wettest monsoon season in a decade. Besides the flooding, this is good news for the region suffering from extreme drought. 

    “That makes this the wettest monsoon season in ten years,” the National Weather Service tweeted. 

    Meanwhile, near-record heat is expected this week in California’s Central Valley and parts of the Pacific Northwest as a heat dome builds across the region, worsening the drought-stricken area and pushing power grids to critical levels. 

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    California’s Central Valley could record temperatures as high as 109 degrees Fahrenheit. Another pocket of heat will scorch western Washington. 

    Bob Oravec, a senior branch forecaster with the Weather Prediction Center, said Sacramento could hit 105 Fahrenheit by mid-week, and Redding could record 109 Fahrenheit. 

    “It is going to be well above average,” Oravec said. “The heat will also eventually spread to the Northwest and Northern Plains.” 

    A linger heat dome over California could stress power grids. Demand is expected to peak Monday at around 43.8 gigawatts and could even jump to 45.2 gigawatts by mid-week, said grid operator California Independent System Operator. 

    In anticipation of increasing cooling demand, Southern California’s SP15 hub’s on-peak power prices soared 29% to $149.70 a megawatt for Monday, the highest in nearly a year. 

    Gary Ackerman, an independent energy consultant who founded the Western Power Trading Forum, told Bloomberg that power-supply shortfalls are unlikely at this point. 

    However, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a regulatory body that manages grid stability, recently warned before the summer that power supplies in the Western US could be overwhelmed by soaring demand due to extreme heat. We might add decarbonization efforts of grids have made things worse. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 23:30

  • Private Jet Usage "Flies" To Record Highs, Even Among Climate Outrage
    Private Jet Usage “Flies” To Record Highs, Even Among Climate Outrage

    As concern about the climate, or at least virtue signaling about the climate, ramps higher each day, so does private jet use. Especially among celebrities. 

    Funny how that happens, right?

    And now thanks to the Twitter accounts over at @CelebJets and @ElonJet, we are well aware when people like Kylie Jenner, Taylor Swift or Elon Musk take flight in their private jets. Such was the topic of a new Wall Street Journal report out over the weekend that looked at the backlash to private jet use. 

    The Twitter accounts make the world privy to each flight, even ones like the 17 minute flight Jenner took in July, resulting in her being branded a “climate criminal”. Jokes about Taylor Swift’s jet usage resulted in memes of her using her jet to go to Starbucks and her refridgerator. 

    “Taylor’s jet is loaned out regularly to other individuals. To attribute most or all of these trips to her is blatantly incorrect,” Taylor Swift’s spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. 

    The owner of the Twitter accounts, 20 year old Jack Sweeney, says he is hoping the data being public will force private fliers “to be more efficient”. 

    As the WSJ notes, so far the data has only caused climate outrage. But this hasn’t stopped private flights from rising 30% since 2019, the report says. The industry has seen “record growth” since the beginning of the pandemic. 

    Darren Banham, chief executive of Discovery Jets, a charter and jet management company, told WSJ: “I’ve been in the private jet market for the last 10 years, and on the aviation commercial side for 22, and I’ve never seen the private-jet business like this.” 

    New customers, including those interested in shared planes and on-demand charter services, are turning up. In fact, 75% of clients at one popular private jet firm, JB Jets, are first time fliers. Every time a celebrity posts about flying private, in addition to fueling outrage, it offers a “tailwind” to the industry. Sometimes people even rent the jets by the hour because of how easy they are to navigate and schedule.

    JB Jets founder Ben Parker said: “You can show up 15 minutes before, five minutes before. You can show up late, and the plane will wait for you.”

    Clients are interested in basic amenities, for the most part, Parker says. “People believe our clients want caviar and Champagne, but believe it or not, they usually want McDonald’s or Burger King. But we usually hear about it if the water is Essentia and not Fiji.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 22:40

  • Escobar: The Second Coming Of The Heartland
    Escobar: The Second Coming Of The Heartland

    Authored by Pepe Escobar,

    It’s tempting to visualize the overwhelming collective West debacle as a rocket, faster than free fall, plunging into the black void maelstrom of complete socio-political breakdown.

    The End of (Their) History turns out to be a fast-forward historical process bearing staggering ramifications: way more profound than mere self-appointed “elites” – via their messenger boys/girls – dictating a Dystopia engineered by austerity and financialization: what they chose to brand as a Great Reset and then, major fail intervening, The Great Narrative.

    Financialization of everything means total marketization of Life itself. In his latest book, No-Cosas: Quiebras del Mundo de Hoy (in Spanish, no English translation yet), the foremost German contemporary philosopher (Byung-Chul Han, who happens to be Korean), analyzes how Information Capitalism, unlike industrial capitalism, converts also the immaterial into merchandise: “Life itself acquires the form of merchandise (…) the difference between culture and commerce disappears. Institutions of culture are presented as profitable brands.”

    The most toxic consequence is that “total commercialization and mercantilization of culture had the effect of destroying the community (…) Community as merchandise is the end of community.”

    China’s foreign policy under Xi Jinping proposes the idea of a community of shared future for mankind, essentially a geopolitical and geoeconomic project. Yet China still has not amassed enough soft power to translate that culturally, and seduce vast swathes of the world into it: that especially concerns the West, for which Chinese culture, history and philosophies are virtually incomprehensible.

    In Inner Asia, where I am now, a revived glorious past may offer other instances of “shared community”. A glittering example is the Shaki Zinda necropolis in Samarkand.

    Afrasiab – the ancient settlement, pre-Samarkand – had been destroyed by the Genghis Khan hordes in 1221. The only building that was preserved was the city’s main shrine: Shaki Zinda.

    Much later, in the mid-15th century, star astronomer Ulugh Beg, himself the grandson of Turkic-Mongol “Conqueror of the World” Timur, unleashed no less than a Cultural Renaissance: he summoned architects and craftsmen from all corners of the Timurid empire and the Islamic world to work into what became a de facto creative artistic lab.

    The Avenue of 44 Tombs at Shaki Zinda represents the masters of different schools harmoniously creating a unique synthesis of styles in Islamic architecture.

    The most remarkable décor at Shaki Zinda are stalactites, hung in clusters in the upper parts of portal niches. An early 18th century traveler described them as “magnificent stalactites, hanging like stars above the mausoleum, make it clear about the eternity of the sky and our frailty.” Stalactites in the 15th century were called “muqarnas”: that means, figuratively, “starry sky”.

    The Sheltering (Community) Sky

    The Shaki Zinda complex is now at the center of a willful push by the Uzbekistan government to restore Samarkand to its former glory. The centerpiece, trans-historical concepts are “harmony” and “community” – and that reaches way beyond Islam.

    As a sharp contrast, the inestimable Alastair Crooke has illustrated the death of Eurocentrism alluding to Lewis Carroll and Yeats: only through the looking glass we can see the full contours of the tawdry spectacle of narcissistic self-obsession and self-justification offered by “the worst”, still so “full of passionate intensity”, as depicted by Yeats.

    And yet, unlike Yeats, the best now do not “lack all conviction”. They may be few, ostracized by cancel culture, but they do see the “rough beast, its hour come out at last, slouching towards…” Brussels (not Jerusalem) “to be born”.

    This unelected gaggle of insufferable mediocrities – from von der Leyden and Borrell to that piece of Norwegian wood Stoltenberg – may dream they live in the pre-1914 era, when Europe was at the political center. Yet now not only “the center cannot hold” (Yeats) but Eurocrat-infested Europe has been definitely engulfed by the maelstrom, an irrelevant political backwater seriously flirting with reversion to 12th century status.

    The physical aspects of the Fall – austerity, inflation, no hot showers, freezing to death to support neo-Nazis in Kiev – has been preceded, and no Christianized imagery need apply, by the fires of sulphur and brimstone of a Spiritual Fall. The transatlantic masters of those parrots posing as “elites” could never come up with any idea to sell to the Global South centered on harmony and much less “community”.

    What they sell, via their Unanimous Narrative, actually their take on “We Are the World”, is variations of “you will own nothing and be happy”. Worse: you will have to pay for it – dearly. And you have no right to dream of any transcendence – irrespective if you’re a follower of Rumi, the Tao, shamanism or Prophet Muhammad.

    The most visible shock troops of this reductionist Western neo-nihilism – obscured by the fog of “equality”, “human rights” and “democracy” – are the thugs being swiftly denazified in Ukraine, sporting their tattoos and pentagrams.

    The dawn of a new Enlightenment

    The Collective West Self-Justification Show staged to obliterate its ritualized suicide offers no hint of transcending sacrifice implied in a ceremonial seppuku. All they do is to wallow in the adamant refusal to admit they could be seriously mistaken.

    How would anyone dare to deride the set of “values” derived from the Enlightenment? If you don’t prostrate yourself in front of this glittering cultural altar, you’re just a barbarian set to be slandered, law-fared, canceled, persecuted, sanctioned and – HIMARS to the rescue – bombed.

    We still do not have a post-Tik Tok Tintoretto to depict the collective West’s multi-wallowing in Dante-esque chambers of pop Hell. What we do have, and must endure, day after day, is the kinetic battle between their “Great Narrative”, or narratives, and pure and simple reality. Their obsession with the need for virtual reality to always “win” is pathological: after all the only activity they excel in is manufacturing fake reality. Such a pity that Baudrillard and Umberto Eco are not among us anymore to unmask their tawdry shenanigans.

    Does that make any difference across vast swathes of Eurasia? Of course not. We just need to keep up with the dizzying succession of bilateral meetings, deals, and progressive interaction of BRI, SCO, EAEU, BRICS+ and other multilateral organizations to get a glimpse of how the new world-system is being configured.

    In Samarkand, surrounded by mesmerizing instances of Timurid art coupled with a development boom that brings to mind the East Asian miracle of the early 1990s, it’s plain to see how the heart of the Heartland is back with a vengeance – and is bound to dispatch the pleonexia-afflicted West to the swamp of Irrelevancy.

    I leave you with a psychedelic sunset facing the Registan, at the razor’s edge of a new sort of Enlightenment that is leading the Heartland towards a reality-based version of Shangri-La, privileging harmony, tolerance and most of all, the sense of community.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 22:15

  • The "Big Short" Michael Burry Liquidates Entire Portfolio, Holds Just One Stock At End Of Q2
    The “Big Short” Michael Burry Liquidates Entire Portfolio, Holds Just One Stock At End Of Q2

    At least the Big Short puts his money where his mouth is… or rather pulls his money as the case may be.

    After blasting the latest stock market meltup as “silliness” and claiming – correctly – that the US economy is facing a gruesome crash in tweets which he then promptly deletes (conveinetly, another accounts snapshots his tweets for posterity)…

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    … Michael Burry – who runs the smallish Scion Capital hedge fund – has done something few of his peers would consider doing: he has traded in line with his statement, and according to his just released 13F, the famed investor has liquidated his entire portfolio which as of March 31, had a notional value of just over $200 million (including $35 million in AAPL put notional), and instead held on to just one stock: private jail operator GEO Group, which he had previously invested in but had dumped all of his holdings at the end of 2021 only to sport a modest $3.3 million, or 501K share position, as of June 30. More notably, and as shown in the chart below, this was the only security he held on to as of the end of Q2.

    The news that Burry’s Scion only held shares of the Boca Raton, Florida-based Geo Group, sent its stock surging 12% to $7.68 extending its gain since the end of the second quarter to 14%.

    Among others, the hedge fund exited positions including Alphabet, Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Bristol-Myers, and also unwound Apple puts tracking some $36 million in notional value.

    To be sure, Scion’s 13F disclosure, which is required for all money managers overseeing more than $100 million in US stocks, only shows holdings in stocks that trade on the nation’s exchanges. It doesn’t reveal non-US traded securities or short positions. Such filings are also historical, providing a snapshot of a fund’s holdings at the end of a quarter which ended 45 days ago, and may not reflect current investments.

    It’s unclear when during Q2 Burry liquidated his entire portfolio. The 51-year-old investor rose to prominence after a winning wager against mortgages in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis; the outspoken anti-liberal has since become a cult figure on social media, with ominous predictions of a looming downturn. In a May tweet, he raised the specter of a crash similar to the one 14 years ago.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 22:11

  • Alec Baldwin Pulled The Trigger Of Gun That Killed On-Set Cinematographer, FBI Analysis Concludes
    Alec Baldwin Pulled The Trigger Of Gun That Killed On-Set Cinematographer, FBI Analysis Concludes

    Now we officially all know what we did back in October 2021 when Alec Baldwin mistakenly shot a cinematographer on the set of the movie “Rust”: guns do not fire unless a person pulls the trigger.

    That was the conclusion of an FBI analysis, released days ago, that found that Baldwin “pulled the trigger of the gun that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza,” according to the Post Millennial. 

    Baldwin had previously claimed that he thought the weapon was a “cold gun” and had also claimed that he never pulled the trigger.

    FBI analysis found that the .45 Colt single action revolver “could not have been fired without pulling the trigger, according to an FBI forensic report.”

    The report further went on to show that the hammer of the gun would have “had to have been fully cocked” instead of in a quarter or half cocked position. The analysis also showed that the gun “could not be made to fire without a pull of the trigger while the working internal components were intact and functional.”

    Recall, back in December 2021, Baldwin swore to George Stephanopolous during an interview that he didn’t pull the trigger. 

    “Well, the trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger,” he said. 

    He was then asked: “So you never pulled the trigger?”

    To which he replied: “No, no. I would never point a gun and pull that trigger at them. Never.”

    Baldwin said after the shooting: “There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours.”

    Baldwin claimed that a 24 year old armorer had handed him the gun and that he thought it was “prepared properly”.

    “I feel that someone is responsible for what happened, and I can’t say who that is, but I know it’s not me,” he said shortly after the shooting. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 21:50

  • Air Force F-35 Stealth Jets Return To Service After Groundings
    Air Force F-35 Stealth Jets Return To Service After Groundings

    At the end of July, the US Air Force grounded its fleet of Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter jets over concerns of a faulty component in the ejection seat that could endanger pilots during emergencies. Now Bloomberg reports most of the F-35s have returned to normal operational status after weeks of inspections.

    Air Combat Command spokesperson Alexis Worley said in a statement Monday that USAF’s 349-jet inventory returned to service after two weeks of groundings to inspect 706 explosive cartridges inside ejection seats that propel the seat — and the pilot — from the fighter jet during an emergency. 

    Worley said four cartridges were found defective, which could’ve led to a malfunction during an ejection. She said those cartridges were replaced and will “undergo further inspection.” 

    The issue began in April at Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah when ground crews found an “anomaly” with one of the Seat Cartridge Actuated Devices in an F-35. The issue was immediately traced back to a problem in the manufacturing process by defense company Martin-Baker Aircraft Company Ltd. 

    USAF has incrementally returned the stealth fighters to service in the US, Europe, and the Pacific. Other jets were affected by faulty ejection seats, including training ones that were grounded. We also noted United Kingdom’s Eurofighter Typhoons had similar problems with ‘non-essential’ flights grounded last month. 

    So far, Lockheed Martin has built 820 F-35s and strategically placed them in partner nations around Russia and China. Lockheed plans to produce 3,000 F-35s in the coming years, though the stealth jets have been fraught with problems and over budget. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 21:25

  • Roy Moore Awarded Over $8 Million In Defamation Case
    Roy Moore Awarded Over $8 Million In Defamation Case

    Roy Moore, a former Republican sheriff and US Senate candidate, has been awarded $8.2 million in a defamation case against a super political action committee (PAC) during his failed 2017 US Senate bid in Alabama.

    In a 30-second advertisement that ran nearly 1,000 times on local television networks, the ‘Senate Majority PAC’ accused Moore of “soliciting sex from young girls” at a mall, based on a report from the New American Journal – which cited anonymous sources – and later admitted that it was inaccurately reported.

    Moore won the 2017 Republican primary runoff election to replace Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), who then-President Donald Trump had tapped to be attorney general.

    Ahead of the general election, a group linked to the Senate Majority PAC ran a 30-second advertisement nearly 1,000 times on television networks in Alabama that accused Moore of “soliciting sex from young girls” at a mall, according to the complaint. The claim was based on a report from The New American Journal, which cited anonymous sources and later said was inaccurately reported.

    The ad also included quotes from news articles, such as “one he approached ‘was 14 and working as Santa’s helper.’” But those articles were not talking about soliciting sex.

    The juxtaposition of the quotes were meant “to create the false impression that Judge Moore solicited sex from a 14-year-old Santa’s helper at the mall. The very source they cite in the ad refutes that statement,” the complaint stated. –Epoch Times

    “I feel this is vindication and I give thanks to Almighty God and the jurors in this case for a great victory over our corrupt political system,” Moore said in a statement.

    Moore was accused of sexually abusing four girls 40 years ago – one of whom, Debbie Gibson, worked as a sign language interpreter for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and actively campaigned for Moore’s Democrat opponent, Doug Jones.

    Another Moore accuser, Leigh Corfman, claimed “several pastors at various churches made sexual advances at her.” This 3x divorcee who has also filed for bankruptcy three times.

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    Moore lost his bid for the Senate by around 21,000 votes.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 21:00

  • Sen. Chuck Grassley: Senate Will Investigate FBI Trump Raid If GOP Takes Majority
    Sen. Chuck Grassley: Senate Will Investigate FBI Trump Raid If GOP Takes Majority

    Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he intends to investigate the FBI’s raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort if Republicans take back the Senate during the 2022 midterms.

    Senate Judiciary Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) speaks at a hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington on July 12, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

    In an interview on Saturday, Grassley said that with Trump, “the FBI over a long period of time has kind of a double standard. You know, you can go back to the Steele Dossier.”

    “And it just seems to me like they there’s political bias in the FBI,” he told Breitbart News. “And then I have recently—you’ve heard me give evidence of political bias of starting a Trump investigation and then quitting a Hunter Biden investigation. So it’s legitimate to raise the question about the extent to which there’s still political bias and what we’re doing now.”

    Grassley then took issue with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s comments on transparency, saying that “he should make sure that the affidavits follow up on the warrant.”

    So far, the Department of Justice has not released the affidavit that would explain why the FBI needed to obtain a warrant to search Trump’s property. Garland and the FBI have remained mostly silent on the raid, with Garland issuing a brief statement during a news conference on Aug. 11.

    On Aug. 12, a judge in the case unsealed part of the warrant the FBI used to search Trump’s property. A property receipt said the FBI seized classified documents, although it’s not clear what they were.

    The search and seizure warrant shows FBI agents targeted “the ’45 Office,’ all storage rooms, and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by FPOTUS (former president of the United States) and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate.”

    Agents were granted authority to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed,” according to the warrant. That includes documents with classification markings and presidential records that were drafted between Jan. 20, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021—the entire time Trump was in office.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 20:35

  • Giuliani Told He's A 'Target' Of Georgia Election Probe
    Giuliani Told He’s A ‘Target’ Of Georgia Election Probe

    Rudy Giuliani, former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, was told on Monday that he’s a target of a “wide-ranging criminal investigation into election interference in Georgia,” according to the New York Times, which notes that the notification came on the same day that a federal judge rejected attempts by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) won’t be able to duck giving testimony before the Atlanta special grand jury hearing evidence in the case.

    Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York City, was instrumental in attempts to keep Trump in power following the 2020 election – and has emerged in recent weeks as a central figure in the inquiry, which is being conducted by Fulton County District Attorney, Fani T. Willis.

    One of Giuliani’s lawyers, Robert Costello, told the Times that he was notified his client was a target – suggesting that prosecutors believe an indictment is at least possible (though not guaranteed) based on evidence they’ve seen up to that point.

    Earlier this summer, prosecutors questioned witnesses before the special grand jury about Mr. Giuliani’s appearances before state legislative panels in December 2020, when he spent hours peddling false conspiracy theories about secret suitcases of Democratic ballots and corrupted voting machines.

    For Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, the developments are the latest in a widening swath of trouble, though he got some good news recently when it emerged that he was unlikely to face charges in a federal criminal inquiry into his ties to Ukraine during the 2020 presidential campaign. -NY Times

    Giuliani is scheduled to make an appearance before the grand jury on Wednesday at a downtown Atlanta courthouse – during which he’s expected to invoke attorney-client privilege if asked questions about Trump.

    “If these people think he’s going to talk about conversations between him and President Trump, they’re delusional,” said Costello.

    Lindsey Graham, meanwhile, is now set to testify on Aug. 23, after a judge found there was a “special need for Mr. Graham’s testimony on issues relating to alleged attempts to influence or disrupt the lawful administration of Georgia’s 2022 elections.”

    According to lawyers for Graham, he’s a ‘witness’ – as opposed to Giuliani, who’s a ‘target.’

    Graham reportedly placed two calls just after the 2020 election to Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, during which the Senator reportedly inquired about ways to help Trump by invalidating specific categories of mail-in ballots suspected of being fraudulent.

    Curious timing – right after the raid on Mar-a-Lago, and leading up to midterms.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 20:10

  • Nurses Describe 'Brutal' COVID-19 Treatment Protocols
    Nurses Describe ‘Brutal’ COVID-19 Treatment Protocols

    Authored by Matt McGregor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Nurses who witnessed “brutal” hospital COVID-19 treatment protocols kill patients paint a bleak picture of what is taking place in state and federally funded health care systems.

    “They’re horrific, and they’re all in lockstep,” Staci Kay, a nurse practitioner with the North Carolina Physicians for Freedom who left the hospital system to start her own early treatment private practice, told The Epoch Times. “They will not consider protocols outside of what’s given to them by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and the NIH (National Institute of Health). And nobody is asking why.”

    Staci Kay, nurse practitioner with North Carolina Physicians for Freedom. (Courtesy of Staci Kay)

    Fueled by cognitive dissonance amid an array of red flags, Kay said hospital staff is ignoring blatantly problematic treatments that performed poorly in clinical trials, such as remdesivir, and protocols such as keeping the patient isolated, just to adhere to the federal canon.

    “I’ve seen people die with their family watching via iPad on Facetime,” Kay said. “It was brutal.”

    As a former nurse in intensive care, Kay said she had seen her share of tragedy, but how she saw COVID patients being treated “had me waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with chest pains.”

    “I hated my job,” Kay said. “I hated going to work. I was stressed in a way I’ve never been before in my entire life.”

    Keeping families isolated was especially difficult, she said, because people couldn’t come to say goodbye to their loved ones.

    ‘We Can Do Better’

    Kay was looking for other options when she found an inpatient protocol designed Dr. Paul Marik, founding member of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, which purported to have a 94 percent success rate.

    However, after Kay pitched it to the head of the pulmonary critical care department, she was dismissed, and the physician boasted that the hospital had a 66 percent survival rate at the time.

    “I told him, ‘I feel like we can do better,’ but I was very quickly shut down,” Kay said. “I became very angry because I’m watching people die and I knew we could have been doing better.”

    It was as if formerly smart people had become brainwashed, “and then just dumb,” Kay said, lacking the mental wherewithal to discern true from false.

    This led Kay to begin treating patients in the outpatient setting to prevent their admission into the hospital system, which is now her full-time job after being fired for not submitting to what she described as illogical testing requirements for those who weren’t vaccinated.

    At her telemedicine business, Kay said she’s seeing multiple cases of people suffering from COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

    “I saw things on the inpatient side, too, that I suspected were vaccine injuries that went unacknowledged by our physicians,” Kay said. “I saw brain bleeds, seizures out of nowhere, cancer that just spread like wildfire, ischemic strokes, and I saw one person die horrifically from myocarditis.”

    On the outpatient side, she said she’s seen conditions resulting from the COVID-19 vaccine such as brain fog, cognitive decline, joint pain, gastrointestinal dysfunctions, and neuropathy, which is numbness and tingling in hands, feet, and extremities.

    ‘The Old School Becomes The New School’

    Kay’s business, Sophelina Counseling, provides telemedicine, mobile urgent care, and mobile IV therapies. It’s independent of corporate, federal, and state control, which she said is a solution to a health care system paralyzed with oppressive requirements.

    “As long as there’s corporate control over medicine, whether it’s Medicare or private insurance companies, you’re always going to have providers who are forced, pressured, and coerced to do things that they wouldn’t normally do,” she said. “Physicians don’t have the treatment they used to have.”

    Because of this corporate control, Kay said the list of boxes they must check takes time away from the actual patient.

    “Getting away from this corporate structure is going to be a game changer,” she said.

    Kay advocated for returning to the “old school” way, which is the direct, primary care model, in which the patient pays a monthly or annual fee to have access to the provider without the interference of a traditional insurance company that requires “too many hoops to jump through, headaches, and checkboxes.”

    Kay points to a health care model called GoldCare, designed by Dr. Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors.

    Gold, who was sentenced to two months in prison for her alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol, created GoldCare as a private membership association (PMA).

    Because much of what insurance companies do revolves around potential lawsuits, to be a member of the PMA, one must sign a clause, agreeing that they won’t sue.

    “What that does for us is we don’t have to order unnecessary testing or consults just to cover our back end because that’s most of what corporate medicine does,” she said.

    As a result, Kay said, both the patient and the physician are happier because the treatment process hasn’t been weighted down with bloated insurance requirements.

    For Kay, this model—an evocation of a simpler time in medical care when doctors were more connected with their patients—is key.

    “The old school is going to have to become the new school,” Kay said.

    NIH and the CDC did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for comment on COVID-19 treatment protocols.

    Boycotting the System

    Having taken salmon, eggs, and honey for payment, a nurse in Washington state who wished to remain anonymous shares Kay’s more traditional vision for the future of health care.

    She told The Epoch Times that people “need to boycott their health insurance.”

    “I think people who don’t need surgery to save their life should not go to the hospital,” the nurse said. “I think people need to find doctors who are private pay and pay for only what they need to be done.”

    The federal government must be removed from the health care equation, she added.

    “I especially don’t think any children should be going to these practitioners who are accepting state funding or Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements,” the nurse said

    The nurse requested anonymity because—in addition to being unvaccinated—in Washington and Oregon state, she said the government has made it possible for the public to submit anonymous complaints, “devoid of evidence,” against health care workers who promote treatments that deviate from the official protocols.

    After the nurse was fired for not complying with the vaccine mandate, she started her own private care business that offers monoclonal antibodies, L-lysine and vitamin C infusions, infrared red light therapy, and nebulizer machines as treatments as needed and when indicated.

    ‘Widespread Data Suppression’

    With her newly launched business, she performed the early interventions that she said hospitals should be doing, “but refuse to do because they say there’s no evidence for it.”

    The nurse works with a growing network of physicians and providers that function as a “total parallel society” existing in the shadows beside the “crooked” health care system, she said.

    Read more here…

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 19:45

  • Former White House Chief-Of-Staff Never Witnessed 'Intentional Destruction Of Important Papers'
    Former White House Chief-Of-Staff Never Witnessed ‘Intentional Destruction Of Important Papers’

    President Trump’s former chief-of-staff Mick Mulvaney said during an Aug 11 interview with CNN that he never witnessed the “intentional destruction of important papers” during his 15-month stint in the White House.

    “I never saw the intentional destruction of documents for the purpose of keeping anything from the National Archives or the public in the future,” Mulvaney told host Brianna Keilar.

    “We knew the rules, we taped them back together, and we made copies. As long as copies are preserved, you can pretty much do whatever you want to with the other document,” he added.

     As the Epoch Times‘ Hannah Ng notes:

    Grilled by Keilar if he had ever seen Trump rip documents, Mulvaney said he had, but asserted that documents were all handled “in the ordinary course of business.”

    “The flushing,” the host said, referring to claims made by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. “You never heard about him flushing documents?”

    “Not a single time,” he said.

    Denied Report

    Mulvaney’s account contradicts Haberman’s report claiming, “White House staffers regularly found ripped-up printing paper in the toilet of the presidential residence during Trump’s term in office.”

    The statement came with a pair of photos from an anonymous source purporting to show notes written by Trump in a toilet allegedly at the White House.

    Trump swiftly denied her account, calling it “another fake story” when it first emerged back in February.

    “Also, another fake story, that I flushed papers and documents down a White House toilet, is categorically untrue and simply made up by a reporter in order to get publicity for a mostly fictitious book,” Trump said in an emailed statement to the New York Post.

    Haberman doubled down on her claim in an interview with CNN on Aug. 8, the same day that the FBI conducted a search at Trump Mar a Lago residence and just ahead of the October publication of her book on Trump, “Confidence Man.”

    Her account this time was again dismissed by a spokesman for the former president.

    “You have to be pretty desperate to sell books if pictures of paper in a toilet bowl is part of your promotional plan,” Taylor Budowich told Axios, referring to Haberman, adding that there are “enough people willing to fabricate stories like this in order to impress the media class—a media class who is willing to run with anything, as long as it’s anti-Trump.”

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    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 19:20

  • The FBI Is Now The Federal Bureau Of Intimidation
    The FBI Is Now The Federal Bureau Of Intimidation

    Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics.com,

    Nothing symbolizes the decline of the American republic better than the weaponization of justice that we saw last week when the FBI raided the home of former President Trump.

    And nothing better represents the divide that now exists between Democrats and Republicans than the fact that some people still have faith in the FBI.

    Aren’t they paying attention? Heck, that’s like a citizen of the old Soviet Union saying they had faith in the KGB – yeah, to crush dissent and lock up opponents of the regime in a Siberian gulag.

    The evidence is overwhelming. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now the Federal Bureau of Intimidation. Or more appropriately, the Federal Intimidation Bureau, whose acronym would spell out FIB, as in the Big Lie. Face it, nothing the FBI has said for the last six years since they joined with the Democratic Party to invent the Russia collusion hoax can be taken seriously.

    Is there any need to go through the whole laundry list of lies and fabrications that the FBI, with the aid and comfort of the Justice Department, has foisted on the American public?

    You can start with the extraordinary 2016 press conference when FBI Director James Comey detailed crimes committed by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton related to her improper use of a private email account to store classified material. Moments after saying she had broken the law, Comey announced with a straight face that “no reasonable prosecutor” would ever bring a case against her. Yeah, because she was a Democrat!

    A couple months later, Comey set up President Trump’s National Security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, by sending agents to interview him about his supposed contacts with Russians.

    “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” wrote Bill Priestap in a memo before the interview. Priestap was counterintelligence director at the FBI, and it became evident later that the agency’s goal was indeed to get him fired – and more importantly to get Trump impeached, fired, humiliated, you name it.

    Comey himself admitted that the FBI targeted Flynn and chose not to approach him through the White House legal counsel, but informally with a direct phone call to arrange an interview. As Comey later told a reporter, it was “something I probably wouldn’t have done or maybe gotten away with in a more … organized administration.”

    What about the FBI’s abuse of Carter Page and George Papadopoulos? The agency made up evidence in support of subpoenas, FISA warrants, whatever it took to get the desired result. What about the FBI and Department of Justice targeting parents at school boards as “domestic terrorists” because they demanded that their elected representatives actually represent them? What about the unilateral rescission of executive privilege and attorney-client privilege wherever it would have protected President Trump and his advisers?

    The purpose of all of this activity, along with the raid at Mar-a-Lago, was to intimidate not just Trump, but also his supporters. Anyone other than Donald Trump would have given up long ago. Who could possibly withstand the power of the state marshaled against you for six long years – through multiple FBI investigations, through two impeachments, through relentless persecution of your children and your friends and family?

    Finally, what about the double standard that allows Democrats and their government allies to go unpunished for a multitude of sins? Notwithstanding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s feigned indignation on behalf of the bureau, what about the FBI agents who lied repeatedly during the Trump-Russia investigation, sometimes under oath. Even more stunning has been the FBI’s monumental failure to investigate presidential son Hunter Biden, even though it received his laptop with extensive incriminating evidence of criminal activity in 2019.

    Even when the laptop was made public during the 2020 presidential election, the FBI stood silent and thus gave tacit approval to the cynical Democratic Party talking point that the laptop was somehow a GOP dirty trick. It would be interesting to know if the FBI had anything to do with the letter signed by 51 national security experts, falsely claiming that the laptop was “Russian disinformation”! Maybe, like Comey before him, FBI Director Chris Wray thought he could “get away with it.”

    That is certainly the only explanation for the raid on the president’s personal residence. It was not appropriate. It was not reasonable. It had no precedent. The FBI claims that the pre-dawn raid by more than 30 armed agents was for the purpose of collecting presidential papers that the National Archive wanted. The Washington Post says that Trump reportedly had documents with nuclear secrets on them, and the legacy media went ballistic with the story. But wait a minute, isn’t that the same Washington Post that won a Pulitzer Prize for collaborating with the FBI to invent the Russia collusion hoax?

    Don’t believe a word from either the Washington Post or the FBI. Trump had been cooperating with the National Archive and had already turned over 15 boxes of documents, all of which he could have made a claim to legally possess. If they wanted papers turned over, they could have gone through Trump’s lawyers. No, they wanted the spectacle. They wanted the sizzle. They wanted the headlines.

    This wasn’t about the rule of law; it was about the rule of the schoolyard. Bullies get what they want through force and intimidation, and there is no reason for any of us to believe that the raid had any purpose other than to intimidate Donald Trump into backing down from his plans to run for president in 2024.

    Essentially what the FBI was saying is “We know where you live, and we aren’t afraid to come for you.” They even rifled through Melania Trump’s closet, as if she might have been hiding top-secret documents in her hat box. When do we find out they also spent an hour sorting through her lingerie?

    This is sickening, no matter how much MSNBC and the Washington Post want you to think you can still trust the FBI. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me over and over and over again, and I must be a Democrat.

    *  *  *

    Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book, “What Matters Most: God, Country, Family and Friends,” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter or Gettr @HeartlandDiary.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 18:55

  • Putin & Kim As Leaders Of World's "Most Sanctioned Countries" Pledge Deeper Ties Against "Hostile" US
    Putin & Kim As Leaders Of World’s “Most Sanctioned Countries” Pledge Deeper Ties Against “Hostile” US

    The state medias of Russia and North Korea are reporting that leaders Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un have communicated mutual messages pledging deeper ties between the two nations, at a moment both find themselves heavily sanctioned by the United States and its allies.

    The pledge came in the form of an exchange of official diplomatic notes in which Putin wished Kim “good health and success” – and spelled out a desire for closer cooperation, coming at a key moment where Moscow has been on the offensive in trying to strengthen strategic alliances with non-Western countries, notably China and India also among them, as the Ukraine invasion has blown past six months.

    A 2019 visit between the two leaders, KCNA via KNS/AFP

    Putin’s message to Kim further expressed hope that deepened Moscow-Pyongyang ties “would entirely conform with the interests of the peoples of the two countries,” according to a translation.

    Kim, responded by highlighting the special friendship has led to…

    “The strategic and tactical cooperation, support, and solidarity between the two countries have put on a new high stage in the common front for frustrating the hostile forces’ military threat and provocation, and high-handed and arbitrary practices,” Kim wrote, according to KCNA.

    Without doubt, Kim’s reference to “hostile forces” has Washington in mind as topping the list. Starting in March as the Ukraine war continued to intensify following the Putin-ordered Feb.24 invasion, Russia became the “world’s most sanctioned country” – even surpassing Iran and North Korea.

    Pyongyang, similar to China’s government, has issued statements actively defending Russia’s ability to respond militarily to threats to its national security interests.

    Currently, there’s a European push – also based on repeat requests by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – to have Western countries designate Russia a “state sponsor of terror” – which would require sanctions to be ratcheted even further, and the severing of Russia’s participation in additional international institutions (such as cooperative anti-crime agencies like Interpol).

    Moscow has signaled that such a move by Washington would effectively mean the end of diplomatic relations altogether, as Rabobank explains: 

    Russia – which is deepening ties with North Korea and Iran (whom the West wants to get closer to again) – warns that if it is designated as a being a state sponsor of terrorism it will mean the complete end of diplomatic relations with the US.

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    As for ties with the DPRK in particular, earlier this month there widespread reports of a highly unusual offer: that North Kore said it is willing to send 100,000 “volunteer” troops to help Putin execute the ongoing war in Ukraine. While the Kremlin has apparently declined the offer given the immense logistical challenge that such an immense foreign force would present, it was widely perceived as symbolic of the deepening relations between the two militaries and governments.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 18:30

  • Here Is What Warren Buffett Bought And Sold In Q2
    Here Is What Warren Buffett Bought And Sold In Q2

    Ahead of this quarter’s 13F filing from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, we already knew it was going to be far less exciting than the last one we got. As the company recently reported, Berskhire racked up $3.8 billion in net stock purchases in the second quarter, far short of the $41 billion it bought up in the first quarter of this year (it also spent far less on stock buybacks during Q2).

    Additionally, some of the positions that aren’t being disclosed today include the company’s stake in Occidental Petroleum, even though we already are aware of these thanks to recent filings. Still, as Bloomberg notes, investors are always keen to see what the Oracle of Omaha is thinking, and this will provide a little more insight into the situation.

    With that in mind, here is what Berkshire did in Q2 (we warned you, it would be a dud):

    • Exited Verizon Communications and Royalty Pharma
    • Added to holdings in top position Apple (a very modest 0.4%), Chevron (1.4%), Occidental Petroleum (16.3%) Activision Blizzard (a merger arb which increased by 6.4% to $5.3BN in Q2) Paramount Global (13.75%) Ally Financial (234.5%) as well as Celanese, McKesson and Markel.
    • Decreased its stakes in U.S. Bancorp (-5.2%), General Motors (-14.8%) Kroger (-9.6%) and Store Capital (-53%)

    Apple remains Berkshire’s largest holding, representing 41% of total disclosed assets. And speaking of total assets, the fund disclosed just over $300BN in long, US positions as of June 30, a notable decline from the $363BN as of March 31.

    Overall, a very boring quarter for the world’s biggest non-central bank portfolio.

    Full details of all Berkshire Q2 moves can be found in the table below.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 18:10

  • CBO: Actually, The "Inflation Reduction Act" Will Cause More Audits For Working Class
    CBO: Actually, The “Inflation Reduction Act” Will Cause More Audits For Working Class

    Authored by Jazz Shaw via HotAir (emphasis ours),

    A disturbing pattern has emerged when it comes to the messaging we’re seeing out of the White House in general and the Press Secretary in particular. They seem to believe that if you keep saying something that’s wrong over and over again, it will eventually either become true, or at least people will start to believe it.

    AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

    That’s truly been the case with the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” that just passed in the House on a party-line vote. ‘This bill will lower inflation.’ (No, it will probably increase inflation or possibly not affect it.) ‘The bill will reduce the deficit.’ (Nope. That’s not what the models show.) ‘This bill will raise GDP.’ (Care to try again?) And then there’s the latest claim that the massive army of new IRS agents, many of them heavily armed but not trained in firearms handling very well, will not result in more audits of working-class people and will only impact those making more than $400k. They’ve said it over and over again. But the Congressional Budget Office begs to differ. (Free Beacon)

    A Congressional Budget Office report found that the Internal Revenue Service will collect billions of dollars from auditing low- and middle-income Americans under the White House-backed “Inflation Reduction Act,” contradicting Biden administration claims, according to Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee.

    Fox News confirmed the report, finding the CBO informed congressional Republicans that, under the act, audits of taxpayers making under $400,000 will account for about $20 billion in additional revenue.

    The news comes after high-ranking Biden administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, assured Americans that the IRS would not increase audits of people earning under $400,000.

    There was a time when the members of Congress didn’t generally make too many claims about the fiscal impact of new legislation until the CBO had scored it. Apparently, that quaint practice is no longer part of the day-to-day routine on the Hill. The CBO estimates that audits of people making less than Joe Biden’s claimed minimum income will produce an additional $20 billion in revenue for Uncle Sam. That’s a lot of money even in these days of freewheeling deficit spending. And it directly contradicts what the White House has been telling us. Of course, it’s too late now.

    I will agree that there have been some inaccurate claims about this bill making the rounds, particularly in conservative circles. The nearly 90,000 new IRS workers will not be hired all at once, for example. They will be hired over a period of ten years and some of them will replace current agents who will retire. But there will still be tens of thousands of new workers and many will come in the door very soon.

    The climate portion of the bill isn’t 100% hot garbage, though at least 90% of it certainly is. There will be some funding for improvements to the energy grid infrastructure and the easing of some regulatory hurdles for the construction of nuclear power plants. But most of those positive aspects of the plan will be effectively wiped out by all of the green energy subsidies and new fees imposed on the fossil fuel industry.

    But at the end of the day, the claimed purpose of this legislation is little more than a bad joke being played on the taxpayers. The supposed “inflation reduction” claims have already been fully debunked. The Wharton School of Business concluded that the bill’s impact on inflation will be “statistically indistinguishable from zero.” And it will actually have a negative impact on GDP for many years to come.

    These people in Congress and the White House are standing there on the world stage and lying to your faces in broad daylight. Yes, I realize that a story about politicians lying is generally a “dog bites man” type of report. But they could at least try a little harder to fool us, couldn’t they?

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 18:05

  • Foreigners Sold A Record Amount Of US Stocks In The Last 12 Months, China Dumped More USTs In June
    Foreigners Sold A Record Amount Of US Stocks In The Last 12 Months, China Dumped More USTs In June

    According to the latest data on Treasury International Capital flows, foreigners sold $231.5BN in US stocks in the past 12 months – the biggest trailing-twelve-month sales on record…

    Foreigners have sold US stocks for 6 consecutive months (that is the 2nd longest stretch on record with only the non-stop selling in mid-2018/early-2019 was longer)…

    Aside for stocks, which saw $25.4BN in sales in June, every other asset class was bought: TSYs +$58.9BN, Agencies +$23.7BN, Corporate Bonds +$14.BN

    That is 6 consecutive months of corporate bond purchases and 16 of the past 18 months…

    Meanwhile US Treasuries were bought 7 of past 8 months and 11 of past 13, even though China dumped US Treasuries for the 7th straight month – the longest stretch of selling on record – to its lowest level of holdings since June 2010…

    Overall, Treasury holdings continue to trend lower as gold holdings increase…

    …as de-dollarization continues.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 17:45

  • Turley: Why The Case Against Donald Trump Remains Incomplete
    Turley: Why The Case Against Donald Trump Remains Incomplete

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    Below is my column in the Hill on the lingering questions concerning any prosecution of former President Donald Trump for the retention of classified or sensitive material. As previously discussed, the three referenced criminal provisions do not require classified status of documents to be the basis for prosecution. However, if the documents were declassified, it would make any prosecution very difficult, if not untenable, though the obstruction count could be based on affirmative false representations made to the government.

    The point is only that we still do not have sufficient information to judge the basis for the raid or the prospects for prosecution despite the often breathless coverage. 

    The affidavit remains key to ending this speculation and quelling conspiracy theories. That is why Attorney General Merrick Garland should call for its unsealing.

    Nevertheless, figures like John Dean are saying that defenders of the former president will “have egg on their faces” when this case is done and presumably Trump is prosecuted. Perhaps, but what is clear is that there is no such risk in others claiming an array of proven crimes for six years that were never charged. Figures who pushed the debunked Russian collusion, incitement, or bizarre attempted murder claims are now claiming with the same certainty that conviction is finally at hand.

    Once again, before the eggs fly, the release of actual evidence would be useful.

    Here is the column:

    The FBI’s raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence was received by many with joy bordering on ecstasy. Comedian Stephen Colbert declared the raid to be Christmas come early, while others joked about the possibility of executing Trump as a spy. Yet the celebration may be another triumph of hope over experience, with pundits again declaring an open-and-shut case without seeing the actual evidence.

    The problem is that much in this investigation remains unknown and much of the analysis seems more visceral than legal. While details may be forthcoming that will fill in the glaring gaps, any prosecution on the record we know today would face novel — and potentially insurmountable — questions.

    At the risk of being a killjoy, here is what we know and don’t know about these charges.

    We know at least one set of the documents recovered from Trump’s home was marked as “classified/TS/SCI” or “top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information.” There were four sets of top-secret documents, three sets marked “secret” and three marked “confidential.” Trump has no right to retain classified information after leaving office, particularly information classified at the high TS/SCI level.

    The warrant used by the FBI in its search expressly allowed the gathering of “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 793, 2071, or 1519.”

    The inclusion of an alleged violation of the Espionage Act (Section 793) lit up the internet. It seemingly doesn’t matter that the Espionage Act has long been denounced by civil libertarians as a vehicle for political abuse by the Justice Department. It also doesn’t matter that a charge under the act does not mean there is actual espionage or foreign intelligence involved in the case. Rather, it addresses alleged acts of unlawfully “gathering, transmitting or losing … defense information.”

    Surprisingly, the warrant did not specify which section of law might be the basis for a criminal charge. One possible provision is Subsection (d) covering those who lawfully possess documents but had “reason to believe [the information] could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.” This subsection allows for a charge of willfully retaining or failing to deliver such material “on demand” to an officer or “employee of the United States entitled to receive it.”

    Subsection (f) is even more generous to prosecutors. It allows a criminal charge for “gross negligence” leading to protected information being “removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed.”

    Section 793 was cited as the basis for the 2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton in her email scandal. Clinton gathered and transmitted classified (including “top secret”) information as secretary of State. She and her staff also were criticized for failing to promptly supply evidence. Nevertheless, then-FBI Director James Comey declared that “although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

    The Justice Department explained in an Aug. 16, 2016, letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on the Clinton investigation that, although the statute allows for gross negligence charges, prosecutors have long balked at the “constitutional implications of criminalizing such conduct without requiring the government to prove that the person knew he or she was doing something wrong.” The Justice Department said it also rejected 18 U.S.C. § 2071 with regard to Clinton — the same section referenced in the Trump warrant in willfully and unlawfully concealing, removing or destroying federal records.

    The final provision mentioned in the Trump warrant, 18 U.S.C. 1519, concerns destruction, alteration or falsification of records in federal investigations. This charge could be based not just on government documents in Trump’s possession but on allegedly false inventories or lists given to federal officials during months of discussion about the documents.

    These crimes still require intentional or knowing acts. (They do not require classified status as an element). With Trump lawyers negotiating the status of the documents and previously turning over some material under subpoena, there is a plausible defense based on Trump’s belief that the material was no longer classified and that his team was cooperating with officials in trying to resolve any disputes. If Trump believed the material was declassified and relied on legal advice to resolve any disagreements, then prosecutors would combine an unprecedented legal case with a heavily contested factual record.

    At the heart of such a case would be a very novel legal question. While many legal experts have cited the detailed, demanding process for declassification, some fail to note that presidents have long exempted themselves from declassification procedures. Indeed, Trump claimed the right to declassify material unilaterally and orally at the start of his term.

    Other presidents have asserted exemptions from declassification authority. An order by former President George W. Bush stated such an exemption for “information originated” by a president. That order was reaffirmed by former President Obama in Executive Order 13526 in 2009 and expressly exempts presidents, vice presidents, their staffs and “other entities within the Executive Office of the President.”

    Trump also reportedly had a standing order that declassified any material he removed from the White House to take to Mar-a-Lago or other locations. We have not seen that order, and it is not clear if such an order was shown to the FBI.

    If that standing declassification order existed, it ended with his presidency, of course. However, it still existed when these boxes were taken to the resort. There may also be complicating logistics for investigators: If the documents were taken out of the White House on the last day of his presidency, the classification markings on the cover pages and internal headings might not have been crossed out.

    There has never been litigation on the scope of this exemption or a president’s declassification authority. Nor is it clear whether any standing order was disclosed to the judge who approved the FBI’s warrant — but it could create a threshold legal challenge to a criminal charge.

    The Trump team insists this defense was raised when an earlier subpoena was served at Mar-a-Lago in June. Nevertheless, it reportedly turned over 15 boxes of material, including classified documents, and replaced a lock on the storage area for enhanced security. But it is not clear whether the FBI raised concerns over the remaining material or sought its return before this week’s raid.

    In asking the judge to unseal the warrant and the list of documents seized, Attorney General Merrick Garland declared that “the Department of Justice will speak through its court filings.” But he omitted the key filing that would speak to these issues: the underlying FBI affidavit.

    In the meantime, pundits are discussing Trump’s disqualification from future public office based on his expected conviction. Even if convicted, such a disqualification would be flagrantly unconstitutional — but, when it comes to Trump, neither the law nor the evidence ever seems particularly important to the analysis.

    However, a judge may have slightly greater expectations before these charges ever see a day in court.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 08/15/2022 – 17:25

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