- Are Cold War Treaties Beginning To Crumble?
Are Cold War Treaties Beginning To Crumble?
Authored by RFE/RL Staff via OilPrice.com,
-
The CTBT, signed in 1996, aimed to reduce the threat of nuclear war and the spread of radioactive material.
-
Despite the US not ratifying it, most signatories, including Russia and the US, have adhered to its terms.
-
Tensions and increased weapon development hint at Russia’s potential decision to withdraw, further eroding international arms control frameworks.
The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The Treaty on Open Skies. New START.
For years, the pillars of international arms control have been crumbling: agreements signed by Washington, Moscow, and others during and after the Cold War aimed at reducing the threat of nuclear war, costly arms races, or overall military tensions.
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty may be the next to go.
Signed in 1996, the treaty was a major step to preventing the spread of nuclear weapons technology and keeping a lid on the arsenals of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. Along with earlier treaties, the agreement, known as the CTBT, also aimed to reduce the spread of radioactive material that was blasted into the atmosphere and the oceans during the frenzied days of the Cold War.
Here’s the problem: The treaty never went into effect because a number of countries, including the United States, never ratified it.
Still, most signatories — including Russia and the United States, whose arsenals are by far the biggest in the world — have abided by the ban.
Now, however, Russia is making noises about backing out and “de-ratifying” the treaty.
Here’s what you need to know about the CTBT and its potential unraveling:
How’d It Come About?
The United States and the Soviet Union, as well as Britain, conducted hundreds of nuclear tests between 1945, when the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated in the U.S. state of New Mexico and 1961, when Soviet officials detonated the world’s most powerful weapon, the Tsar Bomba. France joined the nuclear testing club in 1960; China, in 1964.
The fallout, literal and figurative, from the testing led to a partial ban on atmospheric, oceanic, and space tests in 1963; underground tests continued to be allowed.
In 1974, India tested its first nuclear device, further expanding the nuclear club. A 1980 test by China became the last atmospheric test by any country anywhere.
Moscow’s final test — underground — occurred in October 1990 on the remote Arctic archipelago called Novaya Zemlya. Britain, the United States, France, and China all conducted their final tests in the years that followed, prior to 1996, mainly underground.
What’s It Do?
The CTBT basically bans all tests that result in a fission chain reaction, essentially a nuclear explosion.
Signed in 1996, the treaty was sent out to 187 signatory countries for ratification, but it has never come into effect because of a group of holdout countries.
Russia signed and ratified the treaty in 2000. The United States signed, but the U.S. Senate refused to ratify, citing concerns about verifying other countries’ compliance with the ban. Despite nonratification, the United States has complied with the moratorium. China signed but didn’t ratify.
Neither India, nor Pakistan, nor North Korea — all of which have conducted open nuclear tests since 1996 — is a member.
The treaty does allow for states to conduct subcritical, or zero-yield tests. Those involve explosives and nuclear materials but do not result in a fission reaction, the reaction that gives atomic weapons their terrible power. Both the United States and Russia are known to have conducted such tests.
Despite not ratifying the treaty, the United States does provide $33 million annually in funding for a system set up to monitor possible nuclear tests, as well as the Vienna-based organization charged with overseeing it.
What’s The Problem Now?
As relations between Washington and Moscow have worsened, major treaties between them have also frayed or collapsed entirely.
Washington unilaterally pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty in 2002, angering Moscow. Washington for years accused Moscow of trying to cheat on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty until it effectively collapsed in 2019. In 2021, Russia withdrew from the Treaty on Open Skies, which allows countries to conduct surveillance flights over one another’s territories in order to observe weapons and military sites.
Both countries have adhered to New START, which capped the number of warheads and “delivery vehicles” each could possess.
New START’s extension, by both Russia and the United States in early 2021, was a lone bright spot in the continuing erosion of arms control.
But the agreement expires in 2026 and cannot be extended. Unless a successor treaty can be agreed upon and ratified, there will be no limits on the countries’ arsenals after that year. Tensions over Ukraine have kept the two sides from even sending inspectors to one another’s countries, as stipulated for in New START.
Both countries have also moved to modernize and upgrade their arsenals. But in a sign of deepening distrust, the U.S. State Department suggested in a 2022 report that Russia had not adhered to the standard of “zero-yield” testing.
So Russia Wants To Pull Out Then?
For more than a decade, the Kremlin has increased spending not only on conventional weapons and force strength but also on modernizing and expanding its strategic arsenal.
In 2018, Putin boasted that Russia was developing new weapons like an unmanned, nuclear-capable, underwater torpedo, and a hypersonic “glide” missile. He also bragged of the development of a nuclear-powered cruise missile — the Burevestnik, which has had major problems.
In recent years, researchers have been monitoring a surge of activity on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago: satellite imagery showing an uptick of construction at one or possibly two settlements that researchers had identified as sites for a possible test of a nuclear device or the trouble-plagued Burevestnik.
A top Russian nuclear researcher called for Russia to resume testing, and on October 5 Putin announced a successful test of the Burevestnik, though he provided no details.
Putin also opened to the door to Russia resuming nuclear testing, saying it could “de-ratify” the CTBT. A week later, on October 12, the speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, introduced legislation to withdraw ratification.
The prospect of Russia withdrawing prompted alarm bells, including from the CTBTO, the Vienna-based organization charged with monitoring compliance.
What Happens Next?
Even if “de-ratification” ends up happening, as is likely in the Kremlin-controlled parliament, that does not necessarily mean Russia will start blowing up uranium or plutonium again, on Novaya Zemlya or otherwise.
“I think that withdrawal of ratification is a strictly political step — leveling status with the U.S.,” said Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian Foreign Ministry official and arms control expert.
“I think the main motive is the perception that ‘Russia tried too hard in the past and made too many concessions’ and now ‘We’re not interested in arms control more than other countries.'”
Leonid Slutsky, head of the Duma’s foreign affairs committee, emphasized that Russia would not be withdrawing its signature under the treaty or “withdrawing from the voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing.”
“We are withdrawing the ratification, thus restoring legislative parity with the U.S. Congress,” he told the newspaper Kommersant.
“It was especially important for [the CTBTO] to hear that revoking ratification does not mean that Russia intends to resume nuclear tests and implies that Russia will continue to fully participate in the work being done for the Treaty’s entry into force,” Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s ambassador in Vienna, told the state news agency RIA Novosti.
Still, it’s not a good sign, experts say — all the more so, given the demise of other treaties.
Russia or any major nuclear power backing out of the CTBT “would be a huge blow to the [global nonproliferation] regime and would undoubtedly lead to a cascade of nuke testing by other states,” Lynn Rusten, a former U.S. arms control negotiator, told RFE/RL.
There could also be other nonproliferation or arms control treaties that are at risk, since, according to Sokov, the Kremlin has initiated a review of all similar agreements.
One strong candidate for “de-ratification” or a downgrading of Russia’s involvement, he said, is the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention, which obligates members to destroy their stocks of chemical weapons.
Russia’s compliance with that treaty has been in question since the near-fatal poisonings of former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal in England in 2018 and opposition activist Aleksei Navalny in Siberia in 2020.
In both cases, Western scientists identified a powerful Soviet-era nerve agent and suggested that Russia had maintained a secret, undeclared chemical weapons program.
Tyler Durden
Mon, 10/16/2023 – 02:00 -
- Lipson: The Sick Alliance Between The Left And Muslim Extremists
Lipson: The Sick Alliance Between The Left And Muslim Extremists
Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClearPolitics.com,
The virulent anti-Israel protests across America and Europe throw a glaring light on the bizarre alliance between left-wing activists and militant Muslims. That odd combination has been the bedrock of political activism at universities and in the streets for years. It began in universities, where it now dominates political discourse, threatens Jewish students, and intimidates anyone brave enough to voice their dissent. We can now see how it has spread far beyond the campus.
What makes the alliance so strange are the deep-seated differences between leftists and Muslim fundamentalists over core beliefs.
The left supports women’s rights and full equality in the workplace and public sphere. Militant Muslims oppose them.
The left supports gay rights and gay marriage. Militant Muslims toss gays off buildings. None would dare hold a public march in Pakistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia.
The left supports abortion rights. Militant Muslims oppose them.
The left supports religious freedom, including the right to reject religion altogether. Militant Muslims believe heretics should be executed.
The left rallies against book banning. Militant Muslims embrace it for any book they believe insults Islam or supports Israel.
The left opposes the death penalty. Militant Muslims endorse it and praise their governments for using it.
These beliefs are not marginal for either group. They are foundational, and they are profoundly opposed to each other. Still, the two groups have formed a long-standing alliance. How do they deal with these profound differences? And why are they allied?
They deal with differences very simply: They never mention them when they act jointly, primarily against Israel and its supporters across the world. They have joined together to form a more powerful coalition against shared enemies. They would destroy that partnership by raising issues where they differ.
Far better to focus on their agreement, which goes beyond hating Israel to claim Western capitalism has oppressed, degraded, and ruined the world. Since the U.S. is now the world’s greatest power, it is tagged as the main source of that malignancy, at home and abroad. As they see it, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America are poor because they have been oppressed by capitalist nations and their corporations. If they have terrible governments, they have them only because the West has installed and sustained them.
This critique is based on a shared, but muddled, ideology. The heart of that ideology is its illiberalism. Both groups are fundamentally opposed to the forbearance of individual differences, including very different views and goals, that are essential to Western constitutional democracies. In their place, these opponents rely on a toxic brew of ideas drawn from:
-
Karl Marx, of course
-
Franz Fanon (“The Wretched of the Earth”)
-
Edward Said (“Orientalism”)
-
Herbert Marcuse (and the Frankfurt School of “cultural Marxism”)
-
And, for the most extreme Muslims, revolutionary theologians like Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its subsidiary in Gaza, Hamas
The mixture of these ideas makes a confused jumble. But “incoherent” doesn’t mean “useless.” It serves as a kind of makeshift glue that binds disparate groups in opposition to what they see as the West’s oppressive bourgeois culture, its tolerance for divergent views, and the unequal outcomes produced by market competition (softened by transfer payments). Overturn it all, they say, in the name of “social justice.” They have no idea of what to replace it with. In fact, the coalition would break apart if either side emphasized its proposed alternatives.
This negative, often nihilistic, ideology inverts the old adage, “might makes right.” Their implicit claim is that “weakness and poverty make right.” It doesn’t. What’s right or wrong has nothing to do with who has wealth and power and who does not.
These self-proclaimed champions of the poor add one more sloppy argument to the mix. They claim people are poor and weak only because they have been oppressed and exploited.
One implication is that people in poor countries would be far better off if they had never been touched by the West and its institutions. They would thrive under their own social and political systems (and, in the West, some version of socialism). That, at least, is the unspoken claim underlying the coalition of the left and militant Islam. Some progressives (who aren’t poor) make common cause by self-flagellation. They are “repentant oppressors.” Their remorse has all the religious fervor of medieval monks who wore hairshirts and beat themselves with whips for their sins.
The idea that the West is responsible for the world’s poverty has a core of truthful criticism next to a mountain of lies. One doesn’t have to apologize for colonialism to note that almost everyone on planet Earth lived in grinding poverty until the cumulative effects of industrialization began to take hold after 1800. That process began in northwestern Europe and gradually spread across the world, lifting income, health, diet, and life expectancy. Where it failed was in countries racked by civil unrest or governed by rapacious regimes that didn’t provide public order or secure property rights and stole the revenues needed to provide essential public goods.
As for human liberation, no societies voluntarily ended human bondage until the West did it, mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries. Britain spent enormous sums stationing its navy off the African coast to prevent the transshipment of slaves, which had been captured and sold by local tribes. Britain gained nothing financially from that effort; it did it for moral reasons. In America, “free states” in the North and Midwest abolished slavery well before the Civil War. The war itself ended slavery, though blacks were still oppressed for another century by Jim Crow laws (in the South) and segregation (everywhere). Those practices were always inconsistent with the Western ideal of human equality and were finally outlawed in the mid-1960s by the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
The current fight over millions of illegal immigrants obscures one fact common to all modern states and two crucial features of American history. The common fact is that state sovereignty includes the essential right to control who can enter each country. What makes U.S. history so unusual is that it has welcomed tens of millions of legal immigrants and integrated them, by fits and starts, into a society where common citizenship transcends ethnic and religious heritage. Today, most Americans appreciate the fruits of that integration in art, music, food, and culture, drawn from multiple cultural traditions. The left, with its focus on identity politics, damns much of that sharing as “cultural appropriation.” It is a deliberate attempt to divide the country into separate, opposed camps, based on birth.
The depth of this ideological rot is most visible on college campuses, where some students (and a few faculty) hate America and Israel so much they have actually rallied in support of Hamas and attempted to justify its atrocities as somehow the liberation of the poor and oppressed. It’s a disgusting idea.
It’s high time Americans went beyond revulsion and defended their basic, liberal ideals and the constitutional democracy founded upon them. We don’t have to accept the mantle of “oppressors” because of events that happened long before we were born, for which we are not responsible, and from which we never profited. We don’t have to accept the damning slur that our success is due to “privilege” rather than hard work, time-tested values, and a good education. The greatest “privilege” is not inherited wealth or status. It is being raised in a stable home by loving parents, living in an orderly community, and growing up in a country where each of us is free to pursue our own goals and define ourselves as we choose.
We can and should recognize America’s flaws – and work toward correcting them – without falsely painting our nation’s past as primarily a legacy of slavery and stolen wealth (the “1619” project and its twin, “decolonization” studies).
America is a great nation, for all its flaws.
Its greatness lay in the experiment of 1776 and establishment of a democracy that has endured and slowly incorporated all its people into the body politic.
The values that undergird that democracy are worth remembering, worth cherishing, and worth fighting to keep, even as a vile coalition celebrates those who kidnap and murder in the perverted name of religion. That’s not “social justice.” That’s an age-old crime.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 23:45 -
- How The Dianne Feinstein Effect Wrecked The Future
How The Dianne Feinstein Effect Wrecked The Future
Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
“As interest costs go up in the United States, you get in this vicious circle, where higher interest rates cause higher funding costs, cause higher debt issuance, which cause further bond liquidation, which cause higher rates, which puts us in an untenable fiscal position.”
– Paul Tudor Jones, October 10, 2023
Feeling the Pinch
The difficulties that an overindebted economy will encounter from rising interest rates range far and wide. Though they shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Quite frankly, it’s real simple. As interest rates rise, borrowing money becomes more expensive.
Car payments are an obvious example of the effects of rising interest rates. The average new car loan today has a monthly payment over $750, with an interest rate of 9.5 percent. What’s more, the monthly payment for roughly 17 percent – or about 1 in 6 – of new vehicle loans is over $1,000.
Financing a house purchase has also become grossly expensive. The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage is around 7.65 percent. Several years ago, it was below 2.65 percent.
According to Zillow’s fall housing market outlook, “the monthly principal and interest to buy a typical home has increased 122 percent in the past three years.”
Homeowner’s insurance has also gone through the roof. In fact, from May 2022 to May 2023, the national average home insurance costs were up 21 percent. This is on top of a 12 percent home insurance increase between May 2021 and May 2022.
Naturally, housing affordability is at an all-time low. By one estimate, incomes would have to jump 55 percent for housing to be considered affordable.
But it’s not just those financing car or house purchases that are feeling the pinch. Some companies are also finding that higher interest rates are a great big problem for business operations. As borrowing costs rise, debt servicing takes a giant bite out of profits.
To adapt, businesses must either reduce costs or persuade customers to pay more for their products and services. Some businesses, through a combination of these alternatives, will succeed. Others will go bankrupt.
Net Interest Record
There were 16 bankruptcies filed by companies with more than $1 billion in assets during the first 6-months of 2023. According to Cornerstone Research, this is over 45 percent higher than the first-half-year average of 11 bankruptcies filed by companies with more than $1 billion in assets from 2005 through 2022.
The effects of rising interest rates on the cost of home loans, car loans and business loans, is putting a tight squeeze on the economy. When these loans go unpaid, and the debt goes bad, the banking sector will be in a world of hurt.
These same dynamics, of rising interest rates and increased loan payments, are also putting the squeeze on Washington. Federal debt has been completely out of control for decades. Higher interest rates are now increasing the annual cost of servicing the massive pile of federal debt, which has now amassed to over $33 trillion.
Net interest – what the Treasury pays to service the debt – in fiscal year 2023 came in at $660 billion. This marked a new record and was well above the prior record for net interest ever spent in the budget of $476 billion in FY2022.
The critical reason for the net interest disaster is the immense amount of debt the Treasury will have to roll over at higher rates over the next 12 months. Roughly $7.6 trillion of publicly held outstanding U.S. government debt will mature in the next year. This will have to be financed at interest rates that are dramatically higher than they were just a few years ago.
Fundamental Insanity
The fiscal fundamentals facing the U.S. Treasury are, in a word, insane. By all honest accounts there’s just too much doggone debt. There’s no way it will ever honestly be paid off.
Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, recently crunched the numbers. What he found is an unadulterated disaster.
“Even with no additional spending expansions — Washington is already scheduled to borrow $119 trillion over the next three decades, pushing the debt toward 200 percent of the economy. Even at the low interest rates projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), a debt this massive would leave interest payments as the largest federal expenditure, consuming more than one-third of all federal taxes. Any additional borrowing would just pour gasoline on the fire.”
Yet additional borrowing is the name of the game in Washington. For FY2023, the federal government ran a deficit of $1.7 trillion. Moreover, it is likely interest rates will be much higher than those projected by the CBO.
The 2-year Treasury note currently yields about 5 percent. In February 2021, its yield was 0.12 percent. So, the fundamental insanity Riedl identified will, in reality, be even more insane.
Thus, as the interest rate on government debt resets higher, taxpayers – including you – will see more and more of their tax dollars going to pay net interest.
Any honest observer knew this day would come. Though for government officials it was a mounting problem that was much, much easier to ignore.
Why stick your neck out for a problem that may be pushed off into the future, beyond your lifetime?
How the Dianne Feinstein Effect Wrecked the Future
Dianne Feinstein, for instance, was a U.S. senator for over 30 years. Now, after decades of terrible decisions, she’s up and kicked the bucket.
Feinstein will never have to face the full ramifications of her handiwork.
Many others, with zero respect for the future, also know the messes they’ve made will be left for others to contend with.
Joe Biden, George Dubya Bush, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Donald Rumsfeld (dead), Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid (dead), Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Lindsey Graham, Elizabeth Warren, Paul Wolfowitz, Barack Obama, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Barbara Boxer, Robert Byrd (dead), and many, many more.
“In the long run, we are all dead,” said 20th Century economist and all-around statist, John Maynard Keynes.
This, in short, was Keynes’ rationale for why governments should borrow from the future to fund economic growth today. This rationale provided the faux academic justification that allowed Congress to promise roses without thorns, rainbows without rain, and salvation without repentance.
Attempting to spend a nation to prosperity using borrowed money at everyday low rates courtesy of the Fed is not without consequences.
In the short run, an illusion of wealth can be erected. In the long run, that illusion slips into decay and disrepair. Rising interest rates expedite the failure of fiscal recklessness.
Contrary to Keynes’ dangerous claptrap, racking up massive amounts of government debt hasn’t delivered the nirvana of rising long-term living standards.
Rather it delivered the disparity of stagnating GDP and rapidly rising government debt, and an extreme wealth gap to boot.
No doubt, as Yogi Berra noted, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
In the long run, some of us are not dead after all. We’re all still here, living with the consequences of a failed state.
* * *
Today, more than ever, unconventional investing ideas are needed. Discover how to protect your wealth and financial privacy, using the Financial First Aid Kit.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 23:10 - Which Countries Receive The Most Foreign Aid From The US?
Which Countries Receive The Most Foreign Aid From The US?
The United States provided more than $50 billion in aid to over 150 countries and territories, regional funds, and NGOs in 2021.
Each year, Congress appropriates foreign assistance based on national security, commercial, and humanitarian interests.
In this map via Visual Capitalist’s Bruno Venditti, USAFacts uses data from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to highlight the countries that received the largest portion of aid.
<!–
<!–
<!–
!function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r//–>
//–>
Food Assistance and the War on Drugs
In 2021, the U.S. directed its aid towards nations grappling with internal conflicts and humanitarian crises.
Following the withdrawal of American troops that same year, Afghanistan emerged as the primary recipient of substantial aid, receiving billions of dollars annually as part of the humanitarian response.
Country Assistance (USD) Top Activity 🇦🇫 Afghanistan $1.5 billion Humanitarian Assistance 🇪🇹 Ethiopia $1.4 billion Emergency Food Assistance 🇯🇴 Jordan $1.3 billion Cash Transfer 🇾🇪 Yemen $1.1 billion Emergency Food Assistance 🇸🇸 South Sudan $1.0 billion Emergency Food Assistance 🇨🇩 DRC $891 million Emergency Food Assistance 🇸🇾 Syria $844 million Humanitarian Assistance 🇳🇬 Nigeria $828 million Global Health Supply Chain 🇨🇴 Colombia $761 million Counter-Narcotics 🇸🇩 Sudan $620 million Emergency Food Assistance Among the top countries benefiting from U.S. assistance are various African nations contending with both famine and internal conflicts. Notably, Colombia stands out in the top 10, receiving millions of dollars to combat drug trafficking.
Israel Leading in Aid Over Time
Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has disbursed more than $3.75 trillion in foreign aid (adjusted for inflation).
The post-war years saw foreign aid peak, primarily because of the Marshall Plan. This initiative aimed to assist in restoring the economic infrastructure of post-war Europe.
At its height in 1949, U.S. foreign aid totaled nearly $100 billion.
Israel has been by far the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance. Since the 1940s, Israel has received more than $300 billion, with most of it in military support, aiding the country in developing a missile defense system and other projects.
The primary reason for this foreign aid has been to guarantee U.S. interests in the region, given Israel’s proximity to Syria to the northeast, Hezbollah-influenced Lebanon to the north, and an Islamist insurgency in Egypt’s Sinai to the south.
After a two-decade conflict that took millions of Vietnamese lives and roughly 58,000 American lives, Vietnam is Washington’s second-largest recipient of financial support. This money is used for economic and technological cooperation, military support, and even to aid cleanup efforts from the U.S. military’s use of Agent Orange in Vietnam during the war.
Since 1975, Egypt has been a significant recipient of substantial foreign aid from the United States, primarily as part of diplomatic efforts to mitigate tensions in the Arab-Israeli context.
Washington also sent large aid packages to South Vietnam, South Korea, and other countries during the Cold War.
Since 2003, much of the money has been directed toward Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
The Debate Surrounding U.S. Foreign Aid
According to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, foreign aid can serve as a means to bolster the United States’ global influence, tackle worldwide challenges, and advance common values.
Nonetheless, the same report reveals that certain Americans and Members of Congress consider foreign aid an expenditure the country cannot afford, given current budget deficits and competing budget priorities.
In 2021, U.S. assistance to other countries accounted for around 0.7% of the federal government’s total expenditures.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 22:35 - Turley: New Evidence May Destroy Biden's Defense In His Classified Documents Case
Turley: New Evidence May Destroy Biden’s Defense In His Classified Documents Case
Authored by Jonathan Turley, op-ed via The Hill,
This month, the sudden appearance of Special Counsel Robert Hur caused as much of a stir as Bigfoot suddenly appearing on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Unlike his counterpart, Special Counsel Jack Smith, who has been aggressively prosecuting former president Donald Trump, Hur has virtually disappeared since his appointment to investigate President Joe Biden. Hur surfaced to interview Biden over his possession of classified documents, including some that go back to his time as a U.S. senator.
I have referred to Hur as a “neutron prosecutor” — a special counsel with no possible charge, under Justice Department policy barring the indictment of a sitting president. If that was not enough of a problem, Hur may have growing evidence that accounts offered by the White House over the discovery of the documents are false.
The new evidence could prove transformative, not only for the criminal but the impeachment investigation of the president.
This week, the House Oversight Committee released a new timeline on the discovery of classified documents in various locations associated with Biden. From the outset, many of us flagged problems with the account that had been given by Biden, who insisted that he had no knowledge or involvement in the removal or use of the documents.
The most glaring problem is that, after they were removed at the end of his term as vice president, the documents were repeatedly moved and divided up. Some were found in the Penn Center office used by Biden in Washington, D.C. Others were found in his garage and reportedly in his library.
Biden made clear from the beginning that he expected the investigation to be perfunctory and brief. He publicly declared that he has “no regrets” over his own conduct and told the public that the documents investigation would soon peter out when it determined that “there is no ‘there’ there.”
Now, however, it appears that a critical claim by the White House in the scandal may not only be false, but was knowingly false at the time it was made. The White House and Biden’s counsel have long maintained that, as soon as documents were discovered in the D.C. office, they notified the national archives. Many asked why they did not call the FBI, but the White House has at least maintained that, unlike Trump, they took immediate action to notify authorities.
However, it now appears that this was not true.
One of the closest aides to Biden and a close friend to Hunter Biden is Annie Tomasini. She referred to Hunter as her “brother” and signed off messages with “LY” or “love you.”
Tomasini was once a senior aide to Joe Biden and, according to the Oversight Committee, inspected the classified material on March 18, 2021, two months after Biden took office — nearly 20 months before they were said to be found by the Biden team.
The committee now alleges that the White House “omitted months of communications, planning, and coordinating among multiple White House officials, [Kathy] Chung, Penn Biden Center employees, and President Biden’s personal attorneys to retrieve the boxes containing classified materials. The timeline also omitted multiple visits from at least five White House employees, including Dana Remus, Anthony Bernal, Ashley Williams, Annie Tomasini, and an unknown staffer.”
If true, the evidence demolishes the timeline long maintained by the Biden team. That could have an immediate impact on both the criminal and impeachment investigations.
The timeline has been a critical distinction drawn by the White House in distinguishing this matter from the Trump indictment, in which Smith charged the former president with 37 counts, including retaining classified information, obstructing justice and making false statements, and other charges.
Biden insisted that he was entirely “surprised” by the discovery of the documents in Nov. 2021.
He echoed the narrative of both his lawyers and the media at large:
“And they did what they should have done,” he said.
“They immediately called the Archives — immediately called the Archives, turned them over to the Archives, and I was briefed about this discovery.”
In reality, Biden’s counsel and associates conducted repeated searches and declared repeatedly that no further classified documents were found. That was repeatedly found to be untrue.
Moreover, the concern is that Biden’s lawyers, in the course of these private searches, may have consolidated material and contaminated the scene by the time FBI agents conducted their searches. This includes changing how documents were originally stored and whether classified markings were visible to anyone working around the Biden home or garage.
Now it appears that the discovery had actually been made months earlier.
The timeline would now more closely mirror Trump’s timeline in the knowing retention of classified material, the failure to turn over all of the classified material despite assurances from counsel, and alleged false accounts about the document’s discovery.
It is not clear what Hur can do if he finds either from witnesses or forensic testing (including perhaps fingerprints on the documents) that President Biden lied.
I have long disagreed with the policy that the Justice Department has long held, that prosecutors should not indict a sitting president. Were he to seek an indictment, Hur would have to ask for reconsideration of the policy based on a decades-old memo issued by the Office of Legal Counsel under President Bill Clinton, who at the time faced calls for an indictment for perjury.
The DOJ policy will also put pressure on the House in its ongoing impeachment inquiry. In my recent testimony at the first Biden impeachment inquiry hearing, I mapped out four possible articles of impeachment. They included obstruction and abuse of power.
If this new timeline is accurate, the question is whether Biden knew that the account being put forward by his staff and counsel was false. It also raises the question of whether the president knowingly possessed classified documents and lied about their removal, use, and discovery. Finally, if Biden repeated his public denials to Hur, there could be added allegations of false statements to federal investigators, another commonly-charged federal crime.
We still have to see if there is evidence to support such crimes, but what is clear is that the past narrative may no longer suffice.
In his press conference announcing the criminal charges against Trump, Smith declared, “We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone….Nothing more, nothing less.”
The question for Hur is whether they can also apply to a sitting president. Likewise, if these allegations are true and Biden knowingly committed these crimes, the question for Congress could be whether he should remain as president.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 22:00 - And Now This: US Must Be Ready For Simultaneous Wars With China, Russia, Bipartisan Report Warns
And Now This: US Must Be Ready For Simultaneous Wars With China, Russia, Bipartisan Report Warns
It’s only appropriate that at a time when the senile commander in chief is preparing to unleash several mushroom clouds of “world peace” – which is code for the Nobel prize committee to give the “big guy” his long overdue Peace Prize as the world teeters over the edge of one or more world wars…
Afghanistan back under Taliban control. Proxy World War 3 in E. Europe and now all gains in the Middle East made over last 5 years erased,
Yeah give him the fucking Peace Prize.
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) October 16, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
…. that a congressionally appointed bipartisan panel said on Thursday that the United States must prepare for possible simultaneous wars with Russia and China by expanding its conventional forces, strengthening alliances and enhancing its nuclear weapons modernization program.
The report from the Strategic Posture Commission – which appears to be nothing more than a ghost writer for the Military Industrial Complex and its identical twin, the deep state, both of which stand to make quadrillions should the US jump right into the coming world war, comes amid tensions with China over Taiwan and other issues and worsening frictions with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.
“The United States and its allies must be ready to deter and defeat both adversaries simultaneously,” the Strategic Posture Commission said. “The U.S.-led international order and the values it upholds are at risk from the Chinese and Russian authoritarian regimes.”
Some more details: congress in 2022 created the panel of six Democrats and six Republicans to assess long-term threats to the United States and recommend changes in U.S. conventional and nuclear forces. The panel accepted a Pentagon forecast that China’s rapid nuclear arsenal expansion likely will give it 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035, confronting the United States with a second major nuclear-armed rival for the first time.
The Chinese and Russian threats will become acute in the 2027-2035 timeframe so “decisions need to be made now in order for the nation to be prepared,” said the 145-page report. The report also said the 30-year U.S. nuclear arms modernization program, which began in 2010 and was estimated in 2017 to cost around $400 billion by 2046, must be fully funded to upgrade all warheads, delivery systems and infrastructure on schedule.
Other recommendations included deploying more tactical nuclear weapons in Asia and Europe, developing plans to deploy some or all reserve U.S. nuclear warheads, and production of more B-21 stealth bombers and new Columbia-class nuclear submarines beyond the numbers now planned.
It wasn’t immediately clear if the report assumed that Russia and China would just sit there an quietly applaud as the US doubled its tactical nuclear weapons in Asia and Europe.
The panel also called for boosting the “size, type, and posture” of U.S. and allied conventional forces. If such measures are not taken, the United States “will likely” have to increase its reliance on nuclear weapons, the report said.
* * *
Cited by Reuters, a senior official involved in the report declined to say if the panel’s intelligence briefings showed any Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons cooperation.
“We worry … there may be ultimate coordination between them in some way, which gets us to this two-war construct,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
The findings would upend current U.S. national security strategy calling for winning one conflict while deterring another and – most importantly – require huge defense spending increases with uncertain congressional support. Which, one can argue, is precisely the impetus behind the report because at a time when the interest expense on US debt is about to surpass defense spending in the $1+ trillion spending category.
And sure enough: “We do recognize budget realities, but we also believe the nation must make these investments,” the Democratic chair, neocon Madelyn Creedon, a former deputy head of the agency that oversees U.S. nuclear weapons, and the vice chair, Jon Kyl, a retired Republican senator, said in the report’s preface.
Addressing a briefing held to release the report, Kyl said the president and Congress must “take the case to the American people” that higher defense spending is a small price to pay “to hopefully preclude” a possible nuclear war involving the United States, China and Russia.
So… the US must double its defense spending (call it $1 trillion -> $2 trillion) to deter not one but two nuclear powers, just so there is no nuclear war?
That sounds awfully like the strategy that brought down the USSR. Which considering the level of Marxism in the US these days, may not be the worst strategy.
For now, the big guy hasn’t realized that his “10” will be much bigger if he greenlights the pursuit and prepayment of nuclear war on two fronts: the report contrasts with U.S. President Joe Biden’s position that the current U.S. nuclear arsenal is sufficient to deter the combined forces of Russia and China. But at the rate the walls are closing in on the Biden family, we expect it won’t be long before Biden realizes that to make the decisionmakers in Stockholm happy and receives the same ridiculous peace “award” that Barack also got, he will need to double down to war.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 21:35 - Shouting Your Pronouns In A Crowded Theater
Shouting Your Pronouns In A Crowded Theater
The following is a condensed version of “Shouting Your Pronouns in a Crowded Theater” by Dave Barfield, published at Law & Liberty.
Let’s try out a thought experiment. Imagine you’re in a crowded theater and someone yells, “Fire!” What happens? People flee the room in a panic. Rightly so. Now let me change the question slightly. When someone yells, “Fire!” what happens linguistically?
According to philosopher J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory in his influential book How to Do Things with Words, three things occur: locution, Illocution, and perlocution.
In locution, there is information transfer: a fire is present.
In illocution, the yelling affected the yeller: perhaps he or she became a hero in his or her own mind.
In perlocution, something happened to the listeners: they fled in terror. The exclamation of “Fire!” changed the scene dramatically.
Now, let’s alter our thought experiment. Imagine you learned the person who yelled “Fire!” was mistaken. Would you flee in terror? Would it be right to help others flee? Of course not. There was no fire.
Why would someone yell “Fire!” when there was no fire? Perhaps the person was confused or nefariously wanted to cause a scene. In such a speech-act, multiple things occur, regardless of the accuracy of the information.
Now to the matter of pronouns. When you replace “Fire” with someone’s chosen pronouns, more than just information transfer takes place. The speaker is trying to change the hearer. Thus, the communication of one’s preferred pronouns does more than just transfer information. It is an attempt to change the listener’s beliefs, actions, feelings, etc.
The trans community has made a concerted effort at changing how non-trans people think about them by insisting that an unsung part of speech do much of the work for them. Pronouns are displayed on nametags, social media profiles, class rosters, and other platforms. Failures to comply with someone’s chosen pronouns has led to public confrontations and moral castigations. Thus, many in the non-trans community use chosen pronouns out of fear. That’s perlocution at work.
Pronoun Impotence
Others, however, refuse to comply. They believe they are being pressured into saying something untrue, because the trans community has offered no compelling logic for their claims regarding genders. They believe the trans community has only communicated their feelings. In our thought experiment, this would be someone yelling “Fire!” when someone feels like there’s a fire, even though that person might be unsure, unsettled, or even unethical. Generally speaking, this would not be a problem. A free society should not overly care about feelings. However, the trans community has pressed the issue into society-altering actions: bathroom usage, prison assignments, tax money for healthcare, etc.
Despite these efforts by the trans community, the pronoun endeavor will fail. Why? Two reasons. First, pronouns will never sufficiently perlocute one’s gender because they cannot illocute one’s gender. Even as part of a multi-pronged strategy of hormones, surgery, and the like, pronouns will fall short in affirming one’s personal choice. These only reveal personal choice—the heart of the issue. Personal choice, while a luxury, is impotent against the juggernaut of nature. Choosing to fly off a bridge does not mean gravity will comply, and choosing one’s pronouns does not mean society must comply.
Second, it won’t work for pragmatic reasons. The accepted pronoun formula (He/Him, She/Her) has already been coopted by comedians, satirists, and even the trans community itself. Billionaire Elon Musk recently joked that his pronouns were “Prosecute/Fauci,” and the trans community has placed signage in New York stating that if you don’t comply, your pronouns will be “Was/Were.” Thus, the sacred pronoun formula produces the modern profanity of laughter and fear.
New Solutions
Perlocution is built on tacit trust in a free society. I trust you to yell “Fire!” only when there is one. If you betray that trust, you maintain the freedom to yell, but I am under no obligation to believe you. This goes for pronouns, too. We trust each other to tell the objective truth, not what one’s personal imagination says.
All this means we need an absolute, which Nature and Nature’s God has given us: biological sex. This binary has functioned extraordinarily well for millennia, and human endeavors to undo it are simply causing greater harm. Ironically, many of the people who religiously follow nature in other areas (evolution, racial justice, climate change, etc.) suddenly find themselves at war with healthy human bodies.
Furthermore, this male/female binary allows for a broad spectrum of gender expression. Masculine does not necessarily mean machismo, nor does feminine necessarily mean effeminate. Any attempt to generate genders at imaginary whims is as arbitrary as the moral demands to use someone’s chosen pronouns.
And finding arbitrary solutions would require an upending of Nature that goes beyond gender. It would mean Nature is no longer reliable for anything at all. Such a course leads to nihilism, and its accompanying violence. And we/they are already there.
Dave Barfield is the Executive Director of a Protestant church in Carmel, Indiana.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 21:00 - Experts "Quite Worried" About High Turnover Among Election Workers
Experts “Quite Worried” About High Turnover Among Election Workers
Nothing screams ‘secure elections’ like high turnover of local election officials and workers in key states.
According to The Hill, that’s exactly what’s going on, after a ‘surge of local election officials’ have left their posts in recent years. This could leave polling locations with understaffed and inexperienced teams (who might not know all the nuances behind scanning machines and which tables the extra ballot suitcases are stored under?).
UCLA election law expert Richard Hasen is “quite worried” about the turnover of election officials and workers nationwide, but says it’s “not surprising” given how the 2020 election played out.
“Some of the language that’s been used against these officials has been really shocking,” he told The Hill. “And why would you stay in a job that is high-stress to begin with, when you’re not going to be all that well-paid, and then to face this kind of abuse? People have to be really committed to democracy to want to stay in these jobs. And it’s asking a lot.”
Does that mean people who weren’t committed to democracy were counting the ballots in 2020?
A Brennan Center survey of local election officials taken in March and April, around the same time many White House candidates were jumping into the race, found that 1 in 5 are expected to be serving in their first presidential election in 2024.
The rate of turnover found in the survey is equivalent to “one to two local election officials leaving office every day since the 2020 election.”
Nearly a third said they’d personally been “abused, harassed, or threatened” because of their jobs, and nearly three-quarters said they felt threats have gone up in recent years. Nearly a quarter said they personally know at least one election official or worker who’s left the job due to threats, harassment or fear for their safety. –The Hill
“Your dedication to public service … can only take you so far, when day after day you have people showing up in your office, or you have phone calls or emails accusing you of not doing everything you can to provide the best election experience, but also secure elections,” said Lisa Bryant, chairwoman of the department of political science at California State University, Fresno, and an expert with MIT’s Election Lab.
Perhaps not covering windows in cardboard, blocking election observers, faking burst pipes to delay voting for two hours, and a national judiciary that dismissed the vast majority of election fraud cases over ‘lack of standing’ (i.e. no personal harm was suffered, therefore no jury gets to see your evidence), would go a long way to instilling voter confidence.
We digress.
In 2021, the Biden DOJ formed an Election Threats Task Force, citing a “significant increase in the threat of violence” against the ‘election community’ during and after the 2020 election.
While research hasn’t concluded that threats are driving workers out of the field, the turnover appears to be driven by various sources of burnout, such as interfacing with voters, responding to public records requests, fielding media inquiries and dealing with the public scrutiny.
“The job of an election official has gotten increasingly difficult over the last few years, and it has not been matched by how they’re being compensated or whether they have the resources to do all of the additional things on their plate,” said Rachel Orey, senior associate director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Elections Project.
Maybe if America had a national voter ID, perhaps election workers might feel more comfortable in their jobs?
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 20:25 - Victor Davis Hanson's Annotated Guide To American Middle East Madness
Victor Davis Hanson’s Annotated Guide To American Middle East Madness
Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via X (@VDHanson),
Take note that a trapped Hamas in extremis will go to desperate lengths to survive, from trying to prompt lone-wolf killings in Western cities to drawing in Arab nations to share in their jihad to enlisting Western elites and expatriate Muslims both to deny Hamas is a murderous organization and simultaneously to cheer on its macabre killing.
In this regard, the anti-Jewish nature of Iran and Hamas (read its 1988 Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement) should have been obvious, but Westerners suffered from a pathological desire to be deluded.
But to aid Israel in overcoming the current genocidal agendas of its enemies, we should remember first how we in the past have unfortunately contributed to this nightmare.
What follows are some brief annotated quotes of American Middle East insanity [with my annotations in brackets].
Consider our late point man in Iran, and supposed Obama-era expert on Hamas and ISIS, Robert Malley (2008):
It is “a mistake to only think of them [Hamas] in terms of their terrorist violence dimension.”
[Was it a mistake to envision the Third Reich also in terms only of its “terrorist violence,” given that it also promoted a green agenda?]
Malley also included Hamas in his groups of terrorist organizations that “are social and political movements, probably the most rooted movements in their respective societies.” …
[I agree that Hamas is certainly the “most rooted” of the movements in Gaza and perhaps the West Bank as well. And I concur that it is not a mere aberration in Palestinian society but reflects its collective “rooted” values.]
“There is so much misinformation about them …
[Please elaborate: does your “so much information” include things like our ignorance of the fact that Hamas likes to rape Jewish women and desecrate the dead bodies of Jews?]
“I speak to them and my colleagues speak to them [Hamas], and now we may disagree with them, but they have their own rationality … none of them are crazies,”
[Can you please provide transcripts of those occasions when you and your colleagues (also then in the Obama administration?) spoke to Hamas? That was also quite big of you, Mr. Malley, to note that you “may” disagree with Hamas. Was it over which of their killing methods is the most effective? I also agree that Hamas certainly has its own “rationality”. Its recent murder of 1200 Jews—the vast majority civilians—during a religious holiday, which followed a year-long carefully-planned blueprint for mass death and counted on the near-criminal naivete of Western diplomats, might rival the “rational” genocidal agendas of, say, the SS. As for “crazies”—do you mean that Hamas does not crazily fantasize about extermination, but carefully and rationally carries it out? If so, I concur.]
“It has a charity organization, a social branch; it’s not something you can defeat militarily either, and people need to understand that.”
[Everything you have stated could have equally applied to the murderous Nazi party: it too was a “political movement” (which did not preclude its use of systematic murder). It too had its own “rationality” (kill Jews and destroy elected governments). It too had “a social branch” and “even charities” (all the better to disguise its murderous agendas). And, yes, one can defeat Hamas “militarily,” as the Allies did Nazi ideology. And yes, “people need to understand that” it is quite possible to ensure that Hamas murders no more.]
John Kerry at Davos in 2016:
“I think that some of it [the millions released to Iran by the Obama administration] will end up in the hands of the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the terrorism specialists of the Iranian armed forces] or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.”
[As for “Are labeled terrorists?”—Mr. Kerry, does your use of “labeled” mean that Iranian terrorists are terrorists in name only?]
“You know, to some degree, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.”
[“To some degree” ? If American money cannot be prevented from being used by Iranians for terrorism, then does “some degree” mean only 50,000 missiles sent to Hezbollah and Hamas rather than 100,000? Or does “some degree’ perhaps mean,someday, 1200 Jews murdered—rather than, say, 120?]
“There is no way they [the Iranian theocracy] can succeed in what they want to do if they are very busy funding a lot of terrorism.”
[But, Mr. Kerry, what do you think Iran really “want[s] to do”? Isn’t Iran “busy” building nuclear bombs, not subways and hospitals? And their nuke program is complementary to, rather in place of, Tehran’s vast terrorism budget. Or do you mean that if Iran spends the money on terrorism, they won’t have enough funds to complete building their nuclear-tipped missiles?]
Antony Blinken in 2023:
“We have not yet seen evidence that Iran directed or was behind this particular attack, but there is certainly a long relationship.”
[At what upcoming date do you think you will need to amend this ridiculous declaration—in the same fashion you just deleted your recent tweet calling for a ceasefire the moment Israel was posed to strike back?]
State Department spokesman Ned Price (2023):
“Since April of 2021, we have demonstrated in very real and significant terms our commitment to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people. We’ve provided over $890 million for Palestinians, including over $680 in humanitarian assistance for refugees in the region through UNRWA … When Secretary Blinken was in Ramallah, he announced another $50 million in funding for UNRWA.”
[You certainly did show your commitment to the “needs” of the Palestinian people, which in the case of Gaza resulted in the most sophisticated, reinforced-concrete labyrinth of military tunnels in history, given the plethora of imported building materials purchased with fungible Western dollars to prepare for the mass murder that we just saw in Southern Israel.]
Ambassador Nicholas Burns:
“The Trump Administration’s decision to end U.S. assistance to Palestinian refugees is wrong on every level… heartless and unwise.”
[What was wrong on every level and certainly heartless and unwise was the Biden State Department’s nihilist decision in the very moments of taking power to resume hundreds of millions of fungible dollars to the Palestinians, much of which no doubt ended up in increased spending for rockets and tunnels. Note that in 2021 the Biden Administration was warned of just that danger by its own state department—and was ignored by diplomats such as yourself: “We assess there is a high risk Hamas could potentially derive indirect, unintentional benefit from U.S. assistance to Gaza.”]
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 19:50 - Anti-Gunners About To Meltdown After Elon Musk Says 'Armed Citizens Vital For Democracy's Defense'
Anti-Gunners About To Meltdown After Elon Musk Says ‘Armed Citizens Vital For Democracy’s Defense’
Elon Musk most likely upset anti-gunners at Everytown and Giffords this weekend with his post on X, stating, “As tragic as the mass shootings are, armed citizens are essential to the defense of democracy.”
Musk’s comment was in response to an X user named “End Wokeness,” who highlighted, “The past 3+ years have been one long infomercial for the 2nd amendment.”
As tragic as the mass-shootings are, armed citizens are essential to the defense of democracy
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 15, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
End Wokeness listed a series of events, including Covid lockdowns and lawless metro areas, as some of the reasons why law-abiding Americans panic-bought guns in recent years.
According to the latest data from the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which serves as a proxy for gun sales, because there is no national database tracking firearm purchases, gun demand surged during the early days of Covid. It continued erupting as Black Lives Matter protests/riots sparked concern for safety among millions of Americans. Gun demand has since plunged since panic buying was merely a bubble.
Musk’s pro-2A comments might spark anger among anti-gunners at Everytown and Giffords. Also, the White House’s ‘Gun Czar‘ Vice President Kamala Harris might not be thrilled with the billionaire.
Hip-firing my Barrett 50 cal pic.twitter.com/OkNnjWid0r
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 30, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
However, tens of millions of Americans will ignore Democrats’ cries to ban guns as their disastrous policies in metro areas and the southern border have transformed parts of the country into lawless hellholes.
Chicago last night 👇 pic.twitter.com/U0SOUbkUbQ
— Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) October 15, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“It’s encouraging to see Elon Musk and many others finally understanding what a gift our Founding Fathers gave us with the Second Amendment. The right to keep and bear arms empowers individuals to protect themselves, their families, and their communities from tyranny,” said Aidan Johnston, Director of Federal Affairs of Gun Owners of America.
The Second Amendment empowers individuals to defend themselves rather than be soft targets from criminals like mass public murderers.
You are your own first responder! https://t.co/AV5giBmkjE
— Aidan Johnston (@RealGunLobbyist) October 15, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Additionally, many people got a wake-up call after Hamas terrorists killed hundreds of unarmed Israelis last week. We penned this note, “Israel Shows Why Americans Have Right To “Weapons Of War” For Self-Defense.”
Watch this terrifying video taken by Hamas terrorists as they enter the home of a family in a peaceful Kibbutz.
Watch how they walk around looking to slaughter and kidnapp whomever they find.
This is not a video game.
This was the reality of hundreds of families!
Hamas = ISIS! pic.twitter.com/asB1oGmvTp— Guy Ben-Betzalel (@BenBetzalel) October 15, 2023
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Remember, the government ain’t going to save you when all hell breaks loose.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 19:15 - How About Hunter? Justice Department Adds FARA Charge To Menendez Prosecution
How About Hunter? Justice Department Adds FARA Charge To Menendez Prosecution
The Justice Department this week hit Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) with a superseding indictment including a new but all-too-familiar charge: being an unregistered foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
I cannot recall another sitting member of Congress being criminally charged as a foreign agent.
Yet even if this is the first such case, the charge has been freely used by the Justice Department in all but one case: Hunter Biden.
The indictment accuses Menendez of being a foreign agent on behalf of Egypt.
Also charged under the law is Menendez’s wife, Nadine, and Egyptian American businessman Wael Hana.
After they discussed various foreign policy priorities at one dinner, Nadine is quoted as asking her Egyptian counterparts, “What else can the love of my life do for you?”
The government alleges that the couple agreed to have Menendez “use his power and authority to facilitate such sales and financing to Egypt.” In addition to other benefits, the government alleges that Hana promised to put Nadine on the payroll of his company in a “low-or-no-show job.”
The indictment further alleges that the senator disclosed “nonpublic information about the United States’s provision of military aid to Egypt” during a dinner with Hana in 2018.
It also claims that the senator “secretly edited and ghost-wrote” a letter “on behalf of Egypt” trying to convince other senators to release a hold on $300 million in aid to the country.
The inclusion of the FARA charge against Menendez, his wife and his associate only highlights the absence of any such charge against President Biden’s son Hunter.
For years, some of us have raised the glaring contradiction in how the Justice Department has approached the Hunter Biden case with its treatment of past defendants like Donald Trump associate Paul Manafort.
The Justice Department has been quick to indictment Manafort and others on FARA charges, but continues to prevaricate over such a charge for the president’s son.
Indeed, when Menendez was charged, I wrote about the striking similarities in the cases, including the gifts and benefits showered on both men.
They remain similar in every way except the charges.
FARA covers anyone acting as “agent of a foreign principal,” including but not limited to (1) attempting to influence federal officials or the public on domestic or foreign policy or the political or public interests in favor of a foreign country; (2) collecting or disbursing money and or other things of value within the United States; or (3) representing the interests of the foreign principal before U.S. Government officials or agencies.
It is sweeping.
So is the definition of what a “foreign principal” encompasses, including “a foreign government, a foreign political party, any person outside the United States (except U.S. citizens who are domiciled within the United States), and any entity organized under the laws of a foreign country or having its principal place of business in a foreign country.”
It is easy to see why FARA charges have been quickly brought in cases ranging from Manafort to Menendez. It is less clear why such charges remains strikingly absent from the Hunter case.
In Hunter’s case, he was selling what associate Devon Archer called the “Biden brand” and asking, to paraphrase Nadine Menendez, “What else can [my dad] do for you?”
The House committees have confirmed not only millions transferred to Hunter and other Biden family members, but direct contacts made by Hunter with federal officials and agencies in relation to his foreign clients.
Archer described how Burisma executives told Hunter that they were worried about the anti-corruption investigation of Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Viktor Shokin.
Archer testified that Hunter immediately “called D.C.” in response to the plea.
Shokin was later fired at Vice President Joe Biden’s demand.
In shaking down a Chinese source for more money, Hunter reportedly sent a WhatsApp message that reminded him that “The Bidens are the best at doing exactly what Chairman wants.”
The message was to Gongwen (“Kevin”) Dong, a CEFC China Energy executive with close ties to the Chinese government, and included a threat that “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled … I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father.”
Throughout his open influence-peddling, emails show Hunter was fully aware of the risk of being charged under FARA.
The problem with FARA is that it would require the Bidens to publicly acknowledge their work as foreign agents and, by extension, their massive influence-peddling operation.
In one message, Hunter addressed his work for the Chinese CEFC energy company and warned:
“No matter what it will need to be a US company at some level in order for us to make bids on federal and state funded projects. Also We [sic] don’t want to have to register as foreign agents under the FCPA which is much more expansive than people who should know choose not to know. James has very particular opinions about this so I would ask him about the foreign entity.”
“James” is his uncle Jim Biden, who has also been regularly accused of corrupt influence-peddling tied to Joe Biden.
In the message, Hunter gets it.
The law is indeed “expansive.”
His uncle clearly gets it.
The question is why the Justice Department gets it in every case except those with targets named Biden.
For many, the question is not whether Hunter has acted as an agent of foreign principals but whether the Justice Department is acting as an agent of the principal Biden.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 18:40 - Rand Paul On Israel-Palestine: "I'm Not Really For Funding Either Side"
Rand Paul On Israel-Palestine: “I’m Not Really For Funding Either Side”
As the death toll soars on both sides of the Israel-Palestine chaos, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul told ZeroHedge that he’s not too keen on involving the U.S. in the Middle Eastern conflict.
“I’m not really for funding either side,” the senator said.
“Israel is a rich country. I think they can afford to do most things.”
If the Speaker situation in the House is resolved next week, Paul is concerned Congress will exploit the nascent war to goad lawmakers into funding Washington’s other proxies.
“The rumor is they’re going to put Ukraine aid with Israel aid with Taiwan aid, and so God knows how big this thing will be,” he said.
“It’s like a $50 billion-dollar bill, all outside the spending caps they passed two months ago and makes a mockery that we really have any rules or fiscal restraint over here.”
“I will oppose it,” Paul said but added that he could support some foreign aid as long as it is paid for through other funding cuts.
The hands-off approach to foreign policy – one that allows other nations to work out disputes for themselves – is reminiscent of the senator’s father, former Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex.), who in 2009 said Gaza resembled a “concentration camp” and that U.S. policy exacerbated tensions by establishing a power imbalance in favor of Israel, which removes their incentive to “work out problems”:
“Israel knows… that we [United States] will do whatever is necessary to bail out Israel.”
“I think there is an argument for when you have unlimited support for one side,” Rand Paul said, responding to his father’s 2009 interview.
“It does give people a disincentive to negotiate.”
Drawing parallels to the war in Ukraine, Sen. Paul highlighted that U.S. support for the country, which is purported to help the Ukrainian people, actually achieves the opposite.
“Particularly with Ukraine, I think it goes on forever if we keep supplying it,” Paul said.
“Ultimately if you cared anything about the Ukrainian economy, the people, and the industry over there, you shouldn’t want a war that goes on forever.”
“That just becomes Afghanistan, so I have advocated for negotiation over there.”
However, back in Israel, the Senator cast doubt on the likelihood of diplomacy prevailing in this environment.
“There are times in which it’s easier to talk about negotiation and times in which it’s harder,” he said.
“Frankly, right now if you talk about negotiating with Hamas, it’s surreal in a sense because they just mowed down 260 people at a music concert.”
Paul said Hamas is too radical to trust as a good-faith negotiator, pointing to the competing Gazan faction, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), as the “more reasonable voice” because it recognizes Israel’s right to statehood.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 18:05 - Downward Mobility & Life On The Margins
Downward Mobility & Life On The Margins
Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
We can anticipate a sharp reduction in conventional financial security in the next decade as the waste is growth / Landfill Economy runs out of cheap materials to throw away.
There are many pathways to life on the margins of the economy and society. Let’s consider three:
1. Our character and upbringing leave us unable to fill the work slots valued by employers. Constitutionally incapable of fitting into the conventional slots, we find our way to (or end up in) the margins. (I raise my hand here.)
2. Opportunities to lock in the security of steady work that can support a family are scarce in one’s locale, class, caste, etc. Most people are thus relegated to life on the margins.
3. Circumstances change, and the foundations of our security melt into air. The conventional socio-economic slots that provide security become scarce and we slip-slide from predictable security to the insecurity of the margins. This is downward mobility, a slide accelerated by high-cost lifestyles that require reliably high incomes.
Those who find themselves incapable of fitting into the conventional slots still have to support themselves (unless they chose their parents wisely and are trust-funders living off family wealth). Despite their unconventionality, the unconventional still dream of conventional success (recognition, admiration, earning lots of money, etc.) arising from their creative endeavors.
A relative handful of creators manage to mint millions, as many sectors of conventional economy need “something new” to sell to meet the ceaseless demand for novelty to separate the avant garde and the wealthy from the merely aspirational bourgeois. (The acquisition of status is a struggle through shifting sands that is highly profitable to those selling the latest must-have signifier.)
Creative success follows a brutal power-law long tail distribution. The few at the top reap the vast majority of the royalties, recognition, etc., a small percentage earn a conventional middle-class income and the vast majority earn too little to support themselves.
To sustain their creative endeavors, they must find some other source of income, preferably part-time (so they have time to create) and doing work that doesn’t demand adherence to (what seem like nonsensical) standards. These more informal sources of paid work include much of the restaurant-food-service industry, light construction, non-profit organizations in the arts and social services, delivery and other 1099 gigs, etc.
These more fluid sectors offer more opportunities to take control of one’s work and life even as they offer minimal security and pay. There are always tradeoffs, and taking control of one’s work and life is never free.
The money is rarely enough to live large, and so the creatives live on the margins in seedy housing, scrounging cheap food, riding a bicycle or scooter when weather allows, etc.
A few manage to acquire a specialized skill that enables them to earn a good living working part-time. These tend to be professional or trade skills that command high hourly wages.
Others endure work they loathe until it breaks them. After they burn out and accept they’re not cut out for the conventional slots, they drift to the margins. The security offered by conventional slots came at too high a price.
Those in the second category–the economy has too few opportunities for conventional security and status–must scrape by on the margins, or they must move to a place with more opportunities. This is rarely easy, and despite their best efforts, they may end up on the margins in the new locale.
But life on the margins can be much better in places with more nooks and crannies in the economy and more affordable shelter and services–more niche enterprises, quirky corners, etc., better public transport that offers affordable mobility, and a wider diversity of like-minded people to connect with. Networks in the margins offer the same advantages of networks in the conventional economy: more connections means more opportunities to find work and collaborate, share one’s creative endeavors, etc.
We can anticipate a sharp reduction in conventional financial security in the next decade as the waste is growth / Landfill Economy runs out of cheap materials to throw away and the credit needed to buy replacements for what broke/became obsolete and was tossed out. Financialization and globalization have both hit intrinsic barriers to further expansion and so they’re stagnating and reversing.
Global asset bubbles inflated by financialization and globalization are bursting and cannot be reinflated a fourth time.
How many jobs can actually be replaced by commoditized (i.e. nearly free) AI is unknown, but even if it’s only 10% of the number projected by AI boosters, it may contribute to a systemic decline in the white-collar slots that were considered “safe and secure.”
When credit-fueled expansion reverses and asset bubble burst, this will trigger the breakdown of all the systems that only function if there is an endless expansion of credit, consumption and asset valuations. This includes many if not most systems considered integral to the status quo foundations of conventional security.
As a result, a great many people will experience downward mobility as the foundations of their financial security evaporate or crumble. Those who need less and control more of their life (the essence of self-reliance) will manage life on the margins much better than those who need high incomes to survive and who control very little of their lives.
Those with robust personal networks, few wants/needs and a wide spectrum of skills will find the margins are sufficient, or they may even thrive in the less structured churn of life on the margins.
* * *
My new book is now available at a 10% discount ($8.95 ebook, $18 print): Self-Reliance in the 21st Century. Read the first chapter for free (PDF)
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 17:30 - Earmarks Are Back: House Republicans "Opened The Bar" For The Spendaholics
Earmarks Are Back: House Republicans “Opened The Bar” For The Spendaholics
Democrats take every opportunity to spend your tax dollars. The GOP was supposed to know better…
Unfortunately, the first thing the GOP did after they took control of the U.S. House – before the new Congress was even sworn in – they held a secret vote on earmarks. Last December, 158 GOP members of Congress voted to include earmarks in the year-end omnibus spending bill.
House Republicans “opened the bar” for the spendaholics.
Those 158 secret-voting members caused $16,012,272,565 of your tax dollars to be spent on 7,509 earmarks.
Not only did those 158 members adopt earmarks, the Republicans spent more of your tax dollars than their Democratic earmarking colleagues.
In the fiscal year 2024 spending bills being debated this fall, the top 63 earmarkers in the U.S. House are Republicans. Eight of the top ten earmarkers in the U.S. Senate are Republicans.
The U.S. House has a bartender at the spendaholics earmark bar – Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas). She chairs the Appropriations Committee that approves every one of those earmarks. When she was elected to Congress in 1997, the federal debt was $5.4 trillion.
Here are a few examples of what these big spending members of Congress – in both parties – think is more important than the exploding federal debt.
Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) earmarked $302 million last December and $556 million stuffed inside the 2024 bills.
Maine’s population is only about 1.3 million and Collins earmarked $2,640 per family of four. When Collins was first elected in 1997, the federal debt was $5.4 trillion.
If every member of Congress earmarked the same for each citizen in their state as Sen. Collins did, the total amount of earmarks would be $220 billion!
Last December, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) earmarked $30 million to the University of Vermont Honors College. In May, the trustees renamed the college after Leahy. Leahy earmarked $34 million into the international airport at Burlington. In April, the city council renamed the airport after Leahy. Senator Leahy got his name on buildings after earmarking your tax dollars and every dime of it was borrowed against our national debt.
IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHETHER YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS TOOK EARMARKS, GO TO OUR WEBSITE. WWW.OPENTHEBOOKS.COM
When President George W. Bush took office, the federal debt was less than $6 trillion—this after 225 years of wars, Depressions, etc. In the last 20 years, the federal debt exploded, up nearly six times to $33 trillion—with no end in sight. In fact, the exploding debt is accelerating.
THE REBIRTH OF EARMARKS IS A STATEMENT FAR MORE DEVASTATING THAN THE NUMBERS:
-
It is a statement of the culture within Congress.
-
A culture that shows no respect for your tax dollars.
-
No respect for the lurking danger the exploding federal debt poses for our country.
IF OUR GREAT COUNTRY IS TO SURVIVE, THE CULTURE WILL HAVE TO CHANGE.
Voters need to hold their elected officials accountable for tax and spend decisions. OpenTheBooks.com gives them the tools to do just that.
Once the voters understand how much of their tax dollars are being wasted. Once elected officials know that, unlike the past, there is no place to hide financial irresponsibility, the culture within government will begin to change.
Doing so will not only work to diminish the federal debt, but it will also make our government more effective, more efficient.
Transparency can transform how we govern ourselves.
We greatly appreciate all of your help. Transparency has never been more important to the survival of our country as our founders envisioned it, as we have lived it.
THOMAS W. SMITH
Chairman
OpenTheBooks.com
ADAM ANDRZEJEWSKI
CEO & Founder
OpenTheBooks.com
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 16:55 -
- From Cyberspace To Outer Space: Will Fiat Imperialism Push Mining Off-Planet?
From Cyberspace To Outer Space: Will Fiat Imperialism Push Mining Off-Planet?
Authored by William Stebbins Jr. via Bitcoin Magazine,
Tension is building in the mines.
As the 4th Halving nears and the block reward trims to 3.125 bitcoin per block, miners must not only adapt to a significantly diminished reward, but contend with an increasingly profit-hostile future which might have surprised even the prescient Nakamoto. Indeed, despite widespread hope that fiat states will come to accept peaceful coexistence with bitcoin—I, too, would prefer this outcome—and despite some modest grounds for optimism, history would remind us that kings and emperors do not willingly relinquish power. This is no less true of modern fiat empires, as Lyn Alden’s survey of U.S. fiat interventionism explains.1 History, coupled with ongoing observation of federal actions—foreign and domestic—will be sufficient to calibrate our expectations and help guard us against understandable, yet self-deceptive naivete.
Accordingly, of all the imminent mining challenges, the most formidable might well be increasing state opposition. If accurate, then conditions may rapidly deteriorate such that off-planet mining might merit serious consideration.
THE MINERS’ EARTHLY DILEMMA
As the Halvings inexorably march on, the mining equation keeps changing. For example, in 14 short years mining has evolved from enthusiasts on personal computers to mammoth structures housing thousands of water-cooled Antminer S19s with 5nm chips pulling over 750 MW of electricity.
Each stage of mining evolution has faced unique challenges. Those anticipated with the 4th Halving this April will include, among others: assured access to cheaper energy, acquisition of more efficient ASIC chips despite a global shortage and shipment delays (exacerbated by U.S.-China-Taiwan animus), the possibility of 3nm chip miners, hashrate increase, hashprice decline, the impact of AI, environmental propaganda attacks, and maddeningly-inscrutable bitcoin value projections made no less easier by the advent of large investment firms in the bitcoin ecosystem—all within the context of a frangible, debt-bloated, de-dollarizing economy.
Were these the only issues to resolve they’d be sufficiently daunting. However, a more problematic attack vector, as I’ve presented previously,2 is the possibility of the fiat-empowered superpower and its retinue of dollar-subservient vassals hindering free market bitcoin activities.
Logically, the character and magnitude of state friction would be correlated and proportionate to bitcoin popularity over fiat’s existing sphere of influence and control. If the U.S. monetary system, reaping the ill effects of decades of manipulation and recent global de-dollarization, begins imploding while bitcoin strengthens, federal response will be strong. It will be unlikely to accept contraction of its fiat power and be open to a bitcoin standard. Rather, it will cling to the legacy system from which it so easily accumulated its power and attack the emergence. In so doing, upon realizing that it can’t kill bitcoin, it will first seek to isolate it from its owners in cyberspace.3 A complementary line of attack would then be to neutralize mining. With bitcoin isolated and mining disrupted, in their view, public trust in bitcoin would dissolve; the threat would be neutralized.
Elements of a mining attack might include two elements: First, a propaganda operation: facts notwithstanding, miners would be slandered as shadowy crypto profiteers irresponsibly increasing CO2 emissions and consuming vast stores of finite energy while driving prices up and diverting energy from socially-beneficial uses. Second, a bureaucratic operation: miners would face a torrent of regulation, from licensing and zoning requirements, environmental restrictions, energy and CO2 quotas, to unreasonable reporting requirements replete with unprecedented KYC intrusions, and punitive taxation. In short, the combined economic, regulatory, and propaganda challenges of such an attack would be near insurmountable.
In recent years, when a jurisdiction became inhospitable—one is reminded of China’s mining ban still in effect since mid 20214—the conventional playbook offered but two options: attempt to go underground (risky), or relocate to a bitcoin-hospitable jurisdiction (disruptive and costly).
THE SEARCH FOR NEW SANCTUARY
Analyzing this potential quandary militarily, we might turn to a concept from the field of counterinsurgent warfare: sanctuary. U.S. Army doctrine recognizes the historic principle that insurgents require areas of sanctuary within which to rest, reconsolidate, and sustain operations:
Access to external . . . sanctuaries [have] always influenced the effectiveness of insurgencies . . . provid[ing] insurgents places to rebuild and reorganize without fear of counterinsurgent interference. . . Sanctuaries traditionally were physical safe havens, such as base areas, and this form of safe haven still exists . . . [But,] modern target acquisition and intelligence-gathering technology make insurgents in isolation, even in neighboring states, more vulnerable.5
How might this apply to bitcoin mining? If we posit the State inevitably regarding bitcoin as a monetary insurgent against which it must act to preserve its fiat power, miners will scramble to find inviolable sanctuaries in order to continue operations.
Currently, miners possess adequate jurisdictions within which to mine. In fact, hope yet flickers as we see a few bitcoin-friendly jurisdictions emerging, such as Oman,6—usually within what the West calls the “third world,” but which might be accurately labelled the neo-colonial, fiat-wrecked world. Additionally, even despite the 2021 mining ban the hashrate in China quickly recovered and exceeded its previous rate.7 This situation, however, can change with astonishing speed. Accommodating jurisdictions today can quickly turn inhospitable tomorrow.
Viewed differently: Bitcoin already has existential sanctuary— anchored securely in the blockchain, it is existentially permissionless and will continue existing untouchable in cyberspace. Its existence may be said to be inviolate. However, it currently lacks reproductive sanctuary. Mining occurs not in cyberspace, but in geographic space, within nations where market hospitality, regulation, and energy access is unpredictable. Further, mining now largely occurs within extensive, immobile structures which cannot easily “go underground” or quickly relocate.
But even the above simplification is inaccurate in that bitcoin’s existence is not fully secure in cyberspace without mining. As Andreas Antonopoulos explains,
Mining secures the bitcoin system and enables the emergence of network-wide consensus without a central authority. . . The purpose of mining is not the creation of new bitcoin. That’s the incentive system. Mining is the mechanism by which bitcoin’s security is decentralized.8
Thus, mining is necessary to secure the bitcoin ecosystem as well as to forge new coin. As such, if earthly mining sanctuaries start dwindling under persecution of an ailing fiat geriatric, in light of recent commercial space success, miners might do well to look starward, to the ungoverned frontier of space. Space offers the ultimate physical sanctuary, freed from the hostile overreaches of earthbound authorities. It might provide the physical sanctuary elegantly complementing bitcoin’s cyber sanctuary.
EXTRATERRESTRIAL DREAMS
Inspired by Elon Musk’s Space-X and Starlink ventures which provide conceptual proof-of-principle for considering the feasibility of off-planet solar mining, what form might such an endeavor take?
One could visualize mining rigs nestled in modular, expandable mining satellites, minesats, outfitted with wings of ultra-light solar cells and inflatable mirrors placed into high, sun-synchronous orbits (SSO) (~ 600-1000 km above the Earth) perpetually facing the sun for uninterrupted energy harvesting. Incidentally, a number of nations including the U.S, China, Japan, and the UK, also see incredible potential in off-planet solar energy and are already pursuing Space-Based Solar Power (SBSP) for use on Earth.9
Ever the earthbound miner’s challenge, heat dissipation remains a problem even in frigid space as it cannot be dissipated through conduction or convection. Instead, satellites and other structures usually rely on radiation to offload heat. For example, the International Space Station (ISS) employs a system called the External Active Thermal Control System (EATCS) employing heat radiators positioned in the shade side.10 Minesats would likely use a similar system for cooling.
Again, borrowing from Musk’s Starlink example, these higher orbit, SSO minesats would either network to a constellation of lower orbit smallsats (small satellites) which provide broadband internet connectivity to the planet, or connect directly to the bitcoin nodal network themselves.
Operating from the frontier of space, ungoverned by nation states, mining would be freed of licensing and zoning requirements, as well as CO2 and energy propaganda smear campaigns.
To take our thought experiment further, one could imagine this fleet of solar-powered minesats transported to their orbits from launchpads in forward-thinking, bitcoin-embracing nations, such as El Salvador, and potentially Argentina (should the pro-bitcoin presidential candidate Javier Milei win his upcoming election). In the case of El Salvador, it could provide not only physical sanctuary for politically-attacked firms like Space-X11 but, located over a thousand miles nearer the equator than any U.S. launch location, would provide a geographically superior planetary location enabling spacecraft to achieve escape velocity more efficiently. One could even postulate the migration of bitcoin-specific mining chip research and manufacturing to such a visionary nation, symbiotically co-locating the essential elements and activities of bitcoin.
Not long ago the idea of a private company outperforming NASA by employing reusable, upright-landing spacecraft and deploying a constellation of satellites providing global internet access would have been considered quixotic and naïve. Equally outlandish: that a nation would declare bitcoin legal tender. Perhaps the idea of extraterrestrial, satellite-based bitcoin mining facilitated by a visionary company that is repeatedly taking NASA to school, and partnering with a bitcoin-embracing nation of the Global South is not such a long shot. Indeed, it might well be the bright orange path.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 15:45 - Chicago Giving Migrants $9,000 In Rental Assistance
Chicago Giving Migrants $9,000 In Rental Assistance
No wonder Chicago’s financial titans are pissed over an $800 million tax proposal aimed at plugging a $538 million deficit projected for 2024…
From left, Ald. Byron Sigcho-Lopez (25th) and Mayor Brandon Johnson meet migrants staying at the Near West Police District station in May. | Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-TimesAccording to Fox32, Chicago is providing up to $9,000 in rental assistance over a six-month period, which includes assistance with moving in, as well as a ‘starter kit’ to furnish their new digs.
“That rent lasts for six months and ideally people would have started their legal process, secured legal work authorization and be able to sustain that apartment. And so the cost, or I guess the payment toward the landlord is based on market rate, it’s based on the configuration of the parament – how many rooms, where it’s located – all those things. And so it varies from place to place,” said Cristina Pacione-Zayas, the city’s first deputy chief of staff.
This week, 41 buses have arrived in Chicago, bringing the total number of migrants in shelters to 11,000, with 4,000 still sleeping on police station floors and staying at airports.
Notably, 30% of migrants in Chicago are children, with the majority of them attending Chicago Public Schools. -Fox32
According to the report, Chicago has allocated $4 million to assist migrants with obtaining temporary housing, while the state of Illinois has contributed an additional $38 million.
In September, the city moved asylum seekers from police stations to “winterized base camps” (tents) that could potentially house up to 1,000 people.
Recently arrived migrants sit on cots and the floor of a makeshift shelter operated by the city at O’Hare International Airport. Photo: Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images There are currently 30-40 case management workers from Catholic Charities actively working to secure temporary housing for migrants, with plans to hire more.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 15:10 - Court Rules No Evidence Georgia's Voting Law Discriminates Against Black Voters
Court Rules No Evidence Georgia’s Voting Law Discriminates Against Black Voters
Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A federal judge in Georgia has declined to block several provisions of a sweeping election law while multiple legal challenges play out.
An election worker scans mail-in ballots in a file photo. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images) Several left-wing advocacy and civil rights groups, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ, sued in 2021 after Republican state lawmakers passed the measure amid claims about election fraud in the state in 2020. Those lawsuits claim that black voters are now denied equal access to voting, which violates the Voting Rights Act.
“Plaintiffs have not shown, at least at this stage of the proceedings, that any of the provisions have a disparate impact on black voters,” U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee wrote in an order issued Wednesday. The jurist also wrote that the court “cannot find that Plaintiffs have presented enough evidence to show that the Legislature foresaw or knew that S.B. 202 would have a disparate impact on minority voters.”
The Biden administration and the Democrat-affiliated groups also “failed to show a substantial likelihood of success on the merits as to their claims that the provisions” of the election law “intentionally discriminate against black voters in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Fifteenth Amendment and Section 2 of the [Voting Rights Act],” the judge ruled.
The plaintiffs, in their lawsuit, sought to prevent the law’s enforcement pertaining to drop boxes as well as the distribution of food, water, and other gifts to voters who are waiting at polling locations. The law also set a deadline to submit applications for absentee ballots, among other measures.
Another section of the law says that provisional ballots cast at the wrong precinct cannot be counted if they are case prior to 5 p.m. on Election Day. The final provision requires that a voter provide their driver’s license or state identification card number when requesting an absentee ballot.
In response, the plaintiffs said they were disappointed in Judge Boulee’s decision, with reports suggesting that the challenged provisions will remain intact during the 2024 election cycle. Georgia was a key battleground state during the 2020 election and during the January 2021 runoff election for two U.S. Senate seats.
“The fight for voting rights in the South has never been easy, especially for Black voters. We will never stop advocating on behalf of our clients and voters across the state. We look forward to presenting our case at trial,” Rahul Garabadu, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, said in a statement.
And Alaizah Koorji, assistant counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, one of the plaintiffs, claimed that the law will continue to present barriers to black voters, alleging they are “designed to dilute Black political power.”
The judge, however, said that the differences that were shown by the civil rights groups’ lawyers in the election case were not “statistically significant enough to demonstrate that black voters wait in longer lines at a meaningfully higher rate than white voters.”
In rejecting the claims that absentee ballots violate the Voting Rights Act, the judge wrote, “Without more, generalized evidence regarding the use of absentee voting is not sufficient to show that this particular provision, pertaining to one aspect of absentee voting, is discriminatory.”
He added that the plaintiffs also didn’t provide evidence suggesting that registered black voters could not obtain a state-issued identification card or driver’s license at a higher rate than white voters.
Some Democratic lawmakers, the judge wrote, were also in favor of several of the law’s provisions that required more election workers and equipment to be made available if a line occurs at a polling location on Election day. During the 2020 election, there were reports of lengthy lines at a number of precincts across Georgia, pushing the time back beyond the closing time to vote in-person.
On Thursday, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger hailed the judge’s ruling in a news release, saying that “the court confirmed what we’ve been saying all along.” The release added that the law “strengthens election integrity while increasing the opportunity for Georgia voters to cast a ballot.”
The Republican-controlled Legislature in Georgia passed the law in March 2021 before it was signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, weeks later.
The bill and law drew a wave of corporate backlash, which included Georgia-based firms like Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines. For example, Delta’s CEO, Ed Bastian, claimed at the time that the law is “unacceptable” and “based on a lie,” drawing backlash from Mr. Kemp and other Republicans.
“Mr. Bastian should compare voting laws in Georgia—which include no-excuse absentee balloting, online voter registration, 17 days of early voting with an additional two optional Sundays, and automatic voter registration when obtaining a driver’s license—with other states Delta Airlines operates in,” Mr. Kemp told CNBC more than two years ago.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 14:35 - New Zealand Ousts Leftist Lockdown Loons After Conservative Wins Election
New Zealand Ousts Leftist Lockdown Loons After Conservative Wins Election
Voters in New Zealand on Saturday ousted the party once led by Jacinda Ardern, and have instead elected the country’s most conservative government in decades.
New Zealand’s new Prime Minister elect Christopher Luxon Turns out forcing your citizens to take vaccines, decreeing state news the only ‘truth,’ and locking up peaceful protesters opposed pandemic authoritarianism did not go over well.
On Saturday, conservative Christopher Luxon was elected New Zealand’s next prime minister. While the exact makeup of Luxon’s government has yet to be determined, his center-right National party looks set to form a coalition government with one or two minor parties.
The National Party will likely combine its indicated 50 seats with the ACT party (11 seats), to give them 61 seats, providing a slim majority in the 121-seat New Zealand parliament. As Goldman notes, the results are largely in line with pre-election polling, with the incumbent Labour party on track to lose their outright majority in parliament for the first time since 2017.
“You have reached for hope and you have voted for change,” Luxon told supporters to rapturous applause at an event in Auckland, alongside his wife Amanda and their children.
Outgoing Prime Mininster Chris Hipkins, who’s held the job for nine months following the abrupt resignation of Jacinda Ardern, told supporters late Saturday that he’d called Luxon to concede.
Outgoing New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins Hipkins said that while the result wasn’t his desired outcome, “I want you to be proud of what we achieved over the last six years,” he told supporters in Wellington.
On the economic front, Goldman notes that Luxon’s party has vowed to reduce effective tax rates on incomes and investment parties. And while National has pledged to offset the fiscal impact of tax cuts with savings elsewhere, Goldman sees the risks as “skewed to more stimulatory fiscal policy in 2024” vs New Zealand’s current fiscal projections.
The proposed tax cuts and new spending amounts to around 0.8% of annual GDP, which would boost household disposable income by around 1.5% and also provide a tailwind to house prices in 2024. While National has pledged to offset the new spending and lower taxes with a reduction in spending and new taxes, overall we view the risks as skewed to more fiscal stimulus (compared to the current fiscal projections) and additional rate hikes from the RBNZ (GSe: base case on hold at 5.5%).
Luxon has also addressed crime in New Zealand, telling supporters that it’s “out of control,” adding “And we are going to restore law and order, and we are going to restore personal responsibility.”
He’s also vowed to fix the capital’s traffic woes with a new tunnel project.
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 14:00 - Climate Activists Seek To Save The Planet By Cutting-Down & Burying Trees
Climate Activists Seek To Save The Planet By Cutting-Down & Burying Trees
Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Cutting down trees to manage wildfires isn’t a new thing, although it remains a hotly debated practice.
(George Frey/AFP Via Getty Images) Tree thinning is a disputed procedure that has drawn as much criticism within the environmental community as support. Many scientists, researchers, and conservationists are against it, saying tree thinning can even worsen wildfires.
However, America’s woodlands have been culled for more than two decades for fire management. Now, climate activists are jumping into the conversation with a “carbon capture” argument for tree thinning.
Activists such as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates have thrown their weight, and checkbooks, behind the practice of cutting down trees and burying them to address fears over carbon emissions.
Through his foundation Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mr. Gates is a part of the $6.6 million seed investor pool backing Kodama Systems in its proposal to remove trees in California’s fire-challenged woodlands and bury them in Nevada to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2).
“We must dramatically accelerate forest thinning treatments,” the Boston-based firm says on its website. Kodama calls itself a “technology-driven forest restoration service.”
Mr. Gates is well known for his headline-grabbing methods of addressing his climate concerns—from buying up vast swaths of U.S. farmland to backing wild-card experiments such as solar geoengineering and, most recently, criticizing tree planting as a viable means of reducing CO2.
During The New York Times Climate Forward Summit in September, the billionaire didn’t hesitate to share his thoughts on the role of planting trees to mitigate climate concerns, calling it “complete nonsense.”
In an interview with NY Times reporter David Gelles, Mr. Gates responded dismissively to the idea that planting more trees can reverse adverse climate effects.
“That’s complete nonsense … I mean, are we the science people, or are we the idiots?” Mr. Gates asked rhetorically.
Bill Gates is a part of the $6.6 million seed investor pool backing Kodama Systems in its proposal to remove trees in California’s fire-challenged woodlands. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images) Critics are quick to point out holes in the logic surrounding the claimed benefits of culling trees and burying them.
“This is a spectacularly bad and counter-productive idea,” Chad Hanson, a research ecologist and co-founder of the John Muir Project, told The Epoch Times.
He says existing trees and forests are “by far, our best and most effective means” to reduce any “excess of carbon in our atmosphere.”
Additionally, selective culling poses a risk to old-growth trees, which research indicates capture vastly more atmospheric carbon than their younger counterparts.
Living trees store a massive amount of atmospheric carbon. One estimate puts the CO2 storage value of U.S. forests and grasslands at 866 million metric tons per year. For perspective, that equates to the annual emissions from 50 million gasoline- or diesel-fueled vehicles.
The U.S. Forest Service reports that the nation’s forests and forest products offset nearly 16 percent of domestic carbon dioxide emissions. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) Some research does support the theory that burying debris from cut trees can work as a form of carbon capture. One 2019 study showed that storing wood biomass can remove billions of tons of carbon annually.
“Trees continue to sequester and store more and more carbon as they get older, and this is true no matter how old they get,” Mr. Hanson said in countering that point. “Cutting existing trees and burying them eliminates their ability to draw down and reduce atmospheric carbon.”
No in-depth analysis exists on the asserted benefits or secondary environmental effects of tree thinning and debris storage.
“Research related to sustainability in the field of social and environmental impacts of carbon capture has not been done enough and this field of studies is still immature,” a study published in Science Direct states.
On its website, Kodama Systems notes that carbon accounting frameworks are being developed, but didn’t offer further details.
Representatives of Kodama didn’t respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
A man examines a stack of pine logs near Deer Lodge, Mont., on Sept. 12, 2019. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) The argument to leave mature forests and dense canopy intact—strictly for CO2 sequestration—has support from top scientific researchers.
William Moomaw, founding director of the Center for International Environment and Resource Policy at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, is among what he calls the “proforestation” school of thought on storing atmospheric carbon.
He’s an avid supporter of the planting of trees and advocates for leaving older and middle-aged forests alone, because of their superior carbon storage abilities.
“The most effective thing that we can do is to allow trees that are already planted, that are already growing, to continue growing to reach their full ecological potential, to store carbon, and develop a forest that has its full complement of environmental services,” Mr. Moomaw said during a 2019 interview with Yale Environment 360.
“Letting existing natural forests grow is essential to any climate goal we have.”
Culling to Mitigate Fire Risks
Tree thinning also has a debatable track record in wildfire management, but has a growing bench of supporters in the public and private sectors.
The U.S. Forest Service has made selective tree culling a critical part of its 10-year plan for wildfire management.
Firefighters cut down a burning tree during the Dixie Fire near Westwood, Calif., on Aug. 12, 2021. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) Officials hope to use the method on millions of forested acres by 2030.
“We estimate that a total of 50 million acres of forests in the U.S. need hazardous fuels and forest health treatments to address the growing wildfire crisis,” U.S. Forest Service spokesman John Winn told The Epoch Times.
He said 20 million of the acres are on national forests and grasslands, and 30 million acres are on other lands.
“Nearly a quarter of the contiguous U.S. remains at moderate to very high risk of severe wildfires,” Mr. Winn said.
He said some studies support tree thinning as a tool in forest fire mitigation.
Read more here…
Tyler Durden
Sun, 10/15/2023 – 13:25
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...
