Today’s News 17th November 2021

• This Is Russia's Biggest Move Yet To Take Control Of The European Gas Market
  This Is Russia’s Biggest Move Yet To Take Control Of The European Gas Market

  Submitted by OilPrice.com

  • Russia has managed to secure the largest share in Iran’s huge Chalous gas discovery, a move that could have huge economic and geopolitical consequences

  • A senior Russian official believes this was the final act in securing control over the European energy market

  • While Iran appears to have lost out economically on this deal, it will provide the Islamic Republic geopolitical support and the IRGC a nice slush fund

  

  A deal finalized last week to develop Iran’s multi-trillion dollar new gas discovery, the Chalous field, will see Russian companies hold the major share in it, followed by Chinese companies, and only then Iranian ones, sources close to the deal exclusively told OilPrice.com. This is despite Chalous’s position unequivocally within the Iranian sector of the Caspian Sea, over which the Islamic Republic has complete sovereignty. Billions of dollars in additional capital investment are scheduled to come from financial institutions in Germany, Austria, and Italy, as the indications are that the size of Chalous’s gas reserves are even greater now than initially thought. According to one of the senior Russian officials involved in negotiating the deal: “This is the final act of securing control over the European energy market.”

  In context, the wider Caspian basins area, including both onshore and offshore fields, is conservatively estimated to have around 48 billion barrels of oil and 292 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in proven and probable reserves. As exclusively covered and analyzed by OilPrice.com in 2019, Russia was instrumental in manipulating a change in the legal status of the Caspian basins area that meant that Iran’s share of the total revenues from the entire Caspian site was slashed from 50-50 split with the USSR that it had enjoyed as from the original agreement made in 1921 (on ‘fishing rights’) and amended in 1924 to include ‘any and all resources recovered’ to just 11.875 percent. Before the Chalous discovery, this meant that Iran would lose at least US$3.2 trillion in revenues from the lost value of energy products across the shared assets of the Caspian Sea resource going forward. Given the latest internal-use only estimates from Iran and Russia, this figure will now be a lot higher.

  Previously, the estimates of Iran and Russia were that Chalous contained around 3.5 trillion cubic meters (Tcm) of gas in place. This equated to around one-quarter of the 14.2 Tcm of gas reserves contained in Iran’s supergiant South Pars natural gas field that already accounts for around 40 percent of Iran’s total estimated 33.8 Tcm of gas reserves and about 80 percent of its gas production. 

  As it now stands, though, revealed exclusively to OilPrice.com, following further studies by Russia, the Chalous discovery is now seen as essentially a twin-field site, nine kilometers apart, with ‘Greater’ Chalous having 5.9 trillion cubic meters (Tcm) of gas in place, and ‘Lesser’ Chalous having 1.2 Tcm of gas, giving a combined figure of 7.1 Tcm of gas. Therefore, the new Chalous figures would give Iran a total natural gas reserves figure of 40.9 Tcm, whilst Russia – for a long time, the holder of the largest gas reserves in the world – officially has just under 48 Tcm. That Russian figure, though, has not been revised to account for usage, wastage, and gas field degradation for many years, and, according to Russian gas sources, is around 38.99 Tcm as of the end of 2020. Consequently, the Chalous find makes Iran the biggest gas reserves holder in the world.

  These new estimates, on top of recent developments in the European gas market, have led to a change in the plan that had been agreed on between Iran and Russia and had remained in play up until around a month ago. The plan had been for Iran’s side of the development to be led by the Khazar Exploration and Production Company (KEPCO), with the additional principal participation of then-to-be finalized Russian companies. Following both the upgrading of the gas reserves estimates in Chalous and spiraling gas prices across Europe in the previous weeks, the new stake split in the combined Chalous twin-sites is as follows: Russia’s Gazprom and Transneft will together hold a 40 percent share, China’s CNPC and CNOOC together a 28 percent share, and KEPCO a 25 percent share only. “Gazprom will have overall responsibility for managing the Chalous development, Transneft will do the transportation and related operations, CNPC is doing a lot of the financing and providing the necessary banking facilities, and CNOOC will be doing the infrastructure parts and engineering,” said one of the sources. 

  Bad as this may seem for Iran, it is actually much worse than that for two key reasons, according to the sources close to the deal.

  • First, although KEPCO will nominally be in charge of Iran’s limited operations on the Chalous site, the real management on Iran’s side will be in the hands of hydrocarbons companies closely associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

  • Second, and the explanation as to why the IRGC has suddenly taken over the Iranian side of the project, is that the 7 percent left over after the stake splits above have been removed from 100 percent, is destined to be paid into two corporate accounts – one in Shanghai and the other in Macau – that are ultimately under the control of the IRGC. This is also the reason why the IRGC has played down the true level of the reserves in Chalous since OilPrice.com’s exclusive first report on the subject was published. 

  Although the IRGC has stated in a series of internal discussions within the Iranian government recently that the new terms of the Chalous deal that have placed Russian and Chinese interests above those of Iran are ‘the price we have to pay for Iran’s access to the technology and manufacturing capacity required for our missile program’, the ramifications of it are much greater than the size of future IRGC slush funds in Shanghai and Macau. Russia’s Transneft in just the past two weeks projected that Chalous alone can provide up to 72 percent of all of the natural gas requirements for Germany, Austria, and Italy every year for the full 20 years that the Chalous deal is set to run. Transneft has also reported to Moscow that Chalous alone could supply up to 52 percent of all of the European Union’s gas needs over the period as well. To gain effective control over these new Iranian gas flows through securing such a stake in Chalous, Russia privately assured Iran that, in addition to development and exploration expertise, and some funding, it will also ‘seek to support Iran’s interests in the matter of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] and in other matters at the UN’. 

  Aside from the enormous geopolitical value for Russia in adding the Chalous gas streams to the current gas supplies over which it has control, especially into the EU, Moscow is looking at an enormous financial payoff from its involvement in this field. Russia has calculated that, using an annual mean average figure of US$800 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas (it has been much higher than this, of course, in recent weeks), the value of exports from Chalous at a comfortable rate of recovery from the site is at least US$450 billion over the 20-year duration of the deal, which coincides with the next 20-year Iran-Russia deal. After the 20-year deal is up, the agreement currently is that the IRGC corporate vehicle Khatam al-Anbiya will take over ownership of Chalous for the next 50 years. Given the likely length of gas recovery at Chalous – and the fact that Russia intends to take less than 10 percent of it out over the course of its 20-year deal – sources close to the deal estimate the total value of the Chalous gas site at US$5.4 trillion.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/17/2021 – 02:00

• Why Bill Gates Is Pivoting On Existing COVID Vaccines
  Why Bill Gates Is Pivoting On Existing COVID Vaccines

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

  Does Bill Gates understand the difference between a computer virus and a human virus?

  

  In a surprising interview, Bill Gates said the following: “We didn’t have vaccines that block transmission. We got vaccines that help you with your health, but they only slightly reduce the transmission. We need new ways of doing vaccines.”

  It’s odd how he speaks of medicines as if they are like software. Try it out, observe how it works. When you find a problem, put the technicians to work. Every new iteration is an experiment. Free to try until you finally buy. Surely over time, we’ll find the answer to the problem of blocking or blotting out pathogens. 

  Software. Hardware. Applications. Subscriptions! This is how he thinks, as if the human body and its deadly dance with viruses is a recent problem and we are only at the very beginning of finding solutions, without realizing that this reality has been present for the whole of human existence and that we had tremendous success in the course of the 20th century minimizing bad pathogenic outcomes without his guidance and benefaction. 

  Essentially, he has long promoted the idea that traditional public health praxis was for the analog age; in the digital age, we need government planning, advanced technology, mass surveillance, and the ability to control human beings the way a software company manages personal computers. 

  Most people have no idea how such a rich and smart person could be so dim on essential matters of complex cell biology. Hacking the human body, improving it with uploads and downloads, is surely a more ominous challenge than inventing and managing man-made computers. So herein I try to present the reasons for Gates’s way of thinking. 

  The relative deficiencies of this vaccine to stop infection and transmission are now well known. There is some reason to believe that they achieve that much at least for the vulnerable population.

  What can we make of Gates’s passing statement: “We need a new way of doing vaccines”?

  Let’s travel back in time to examine his career at Microsoft and his shepherding into existence the Windows operating system. By the early 1990s, it was being billed as the essential brain of the personal computer. Security considerations against viruses were not part of its design, however, simply because not that many people were using the internet so the threat level was low. The browser was not invented until 1995. Security of personal computers was not really a question that Microsoft had dealt with. 

  The neglect of this consideration turned into a disaster. By the early 2000s, there were thousands of versions of malware (also called bugs) floating around the internet and infecting computers running Windows worldwide. They ate hard drive. They sucked out data. They forced ads on people. They invaded your space with strange popups. They were wrecking the user experience and threatening the future of an entire industry. 

  The problem of malware was dubbed viruses. It was a metaphor. Not real. It’s not clear that Gates ever really understood that. Computer viruses aren’t anything like biological viruses. To maintain a clean and functioning hard drive, you want to avoid and block a computer virus at all costs. Any exposure is bad exposure. The fix is always avoidance until eradication. 

  With biological viruses, we have evolved to confront them through exposure and let our immune system develop to take them on. A body that blocks all pathogens without immunity is a weak one that will die at the first exposure, which will certainly come at some point in a modern society. An immune system that confronts most viruses and recovers grows stronger. That’s a gigantic difference that Gates never understood. 

  Regardless, the advent of the army of computer pathogens fundamentally threatened his proudest achievement. Microsoft frantically searched for a solution, but the creativity of the malware army moved too fast for its engineers. 

  Others sensed an opportunity. Companies specializing in anti-virus software had been doing business since the 1990s but grew more sophisticated in the early 2000s. Once the internet became fast enough, these software packages could be updated daily. There were ever newer companies, each with a different method and a different marketing and pricing model. 

  Eventually, the problem was mostly solved on the personal computer, but it took ten years. Even now, Microsoft’s products are less protected than Apple’s, and Microsoft has yet to come close to mitigating the problem of spam on its own native email client. 

  In short, keeping viruses out of computers constitutes the single biggest professional struggle in Gates’ life. The lesson he learned was that pathogen blocking and eradication was always the path forward. What he never really understood is that the word virus was merely a metaphor for unwanted and unwelcome computer code. The analogy breaks down in real life. 

  After finally stepping back from Microsoft’s operations, Gates started dabbling in other areas, as newly rich people tend to do. They often imagine themselves especially competent at taking on challenges that others have failed at simply because of their professional successes. Also by this point in his career, he was only surrounded by sycophants who would not interrupt his descent into crankiness. 

  And what subject did he pounce on? He would do to the world of pathogens what he did at Microsoft: he would stamp them out! He began with malaria and other issues and eventually decided to take on them all. And what was his solution? Of course: antivirus software. What is that? It is vaccines. Your body is the hard drive that he would save with his software-style solution. 

  At the beginning of the pandemic, I noted that Gates was pushing hard for lockdowns. His foundation was now funding research labs the world over with billions of dollars, plus universities and direct grants to scientists. He was also investing heavily in vaccine companies. 

  Early on in the pandemic, to get a sense of Gates’s views, I watched his TED talks. I began to realize something astonishing. He knew much less than anyone could discover by reading a book on cell biology from Amazon. He couldn’t even give a basic 9th-grade-level explanation of viruses and their interaction with the human body. And yet here he was lecturing the world about the coming pathogen and what should be done about it. His answer is always the same: more surveillance, more control, more technology.

  Once you understand the simplicity of his core confusions, everything else he says makes sense from his point of view. He seems forever stuck in the fallacy that the human being is a cog in a massive machine called society that cries out for his managerial and technological leadership to improve to the point of operational perfection. 

  The rich, their pretenses, their influence: sometimes charming, sometimes beneficent, sometimes deeply malicious. Gates’s influence over epidemiology has been tremendously baneful, but it’s unclear whether he even knows it. In fact, I don’t think that he does. In some ways, that’s even more dangerous. 

  Readers might be quick to point out that Gates has benefited enormously from lockdowns and vaccine mandates, both seeing his former company grow to enormous size and from his stock ownership in vaccine makers. So yes, his ignorance has been rewarded handsomely. As for his influence on the world, history will not likely be forgiving.

  Tyler Durden
  Wed, 11/17/2021 – 00:05

• Worldwide Search Trend For "Died Suddenly" Spikes To Record Highs 
  Worldwide Search Trend For “Died Suddenly” Spikes To Record Highs 

  We can’t help but notice one Google search trend that has erupted worldwide.

  The search term “died suddenly” has spiked to an all-time high in the last two months, with data going back to 2004. 

  
  Headlines in Europe piece together a mysterious trend of people suddenly dying. 

  

  Here are more of those headlines from the US. 

  

  We cannot definitively pinpoint the root cause of these mysterious deaths but want to direct readers to a piece noted last week titled “German Newspaper Highlights “Unusually Large” Number Of Soccer Players Who Have Collapsed Recently.”

  In that, we outlined German newspaper Berliner Zeitung reported an “unusually large number of professional and amateur soccer players have collapsed recently.” Though it’s not death, we find the sudden collapse of the sports players appears to be very strange and possibly health-related. 

  It’s too early to speculate if people are suddenly dying or collapsing due to COVID-19 vaccine-related issues such as heart muscle inflammation (myocarditis). This is a trend that should be closely monitored. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 23:45

• Escobar: Xi's New Communist Manifesto
  Escobar: Xi’s New Communist Manifesto

  Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

  Leader’s unshakeable ambition is that China’s renaissance will smash memories of the ‘century of humiliation’ once and for all…

  

  Marx. Lenin. Mao. Deng. Xi.

  Late last week in Beijing, the sixth plenum of the Chinese Communist Party adopted a historic resolution – only the third in its 100-year history – detailing major accomplishments and laying out a vision for the future. 

  Essentially, the resolution poses three questions.

  1. How did we get here?

  2. How come we were so successful?

  3. And what have we learned to make these successes long-lasting?

  The importance of this resolution should not be underestimated. It imprints a major geopolitical fact: China is back. Big time. And doing it their way. No amount of fear and loathing deployed by the declining hegemon will alter this path.  

  The resolution will inevitably prompt quite a few misunderstandings. So allow me a little deconstruction, from the point of view of a gwailo who has lived between East and West for the past 27 years.

  If we compare China’s 31 provinces with the 214 sovereign states that compose the “international community”, every Chinese region has experienced the fastest economic growth rates in the world.

  Across the West, the lineaments of China’s notorious growth equation – without any historical parallel – have usually assumed the mantle of an unsolvable mystery.

  Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping’s ’s famous “crossing the river while feeling the stones”, described as the path to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics” may be the overarching vision. But the devil has always been in the details: how the Chinese applied – with a mix of prudence and audaciousness – every possible device to facilitate the transition towards a modern economy.

  The – hybrid – result has been defined by a delightful oxymoron: “communist market economy.” Actually, that’s the perfect practical translation of Deng’s legendary “it doesn’t matter the color of the cat, as long as it catches mice.” And it was this oxymoron, in fact, that the new resolution passed in Beijing celebrated last week.

  Made in China 2025

  Mao and Deng have been exhaustively analyzed over the years. Let’s focus here on Papa Xi’s brand new bag.

  Right after he was elevated to the apex of the party, Xi defined his unambiguous master plan: to accomplish the “Chinese dream”, or China’s “renaissance.” In this case, in political economy terms, “renaissance” meant to realign China to its rightful place in a history spanning at least three millennia: right at the center. Middle Kingdom, indeed.

  Already during his first term Xi managed to imprint a new ideological framework. The Party – as in centralized power – should lead the economy towards what was rebranded as “the new era.” A reductionist formulation would be The State Strikes Back. In fact, it was way more complicated.

  

  Students wave flags of China and the Communist Party of China before celebrations in Beijing on July 1, 2021, to mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. Photo: AFP / Wang Zhao

  This was not merely a rehash of state-run economy standards. Nothing to do with a Maoist structure capturing large swathes of the economy. Xi embarked in what we could sum up as a quite original form of authoritarian state capitalism – where the state is simultaneously an actor and the arbiter of economic life.

  Team Xi did learn a lot of lessons from the West, using mechanisms of regulation and supervision to check, for instance, the shadow banking sphere. Macroeconomically, the expansion of public debt in China was contained, and the extension of credit better supervised. It took only a few years for Beijing to be convinced that major financial sphere risks were under control.

  China’s new economic groove was de facto announced in 2015 via “Made in China 2025”, reflecting the centralized ambition of reinforcing the civilization-state’s economic and technological independence. That would imply a serious reform of somewhat inefficient public companies – as some had become states within the state.  

  In tandem, there was a redesign of the “decisive role of the market” – with the emphasis that new riches would have to be at the disposal of China’s renaissance as its strategic interests – defined, of course, by the party.

  So the new arrangement amounted to imprinting a “culture of results” into the public sector while associating the private sector to the pursuit of an overarching national ambition. How to pull it off? By facilitating the party’s role as general director and encouraging public-private partnerships.

  The Chinese state disposes of immense means and resources that fit its ambition. Beijing made sure that these resources would be available for those companies that perfectly understood they were on a mission: to contribute to the advent of a “new era.”

  Manual for power projection

  There’s no question that China under Xi, in eight short years, was deeply transformed. Whatever the liberal West makes of it – hysteria about neo-Maoism included – from a Chinese point of view that’s absolutely irrelevant, and won’t derail the process.

  What must be understood, by both the Global North and South, is the conceptual framework of the “Chinese dream”: Xi’s unshakeable ambition is that the renaissance of China will finally smash the memories of the “century of humiliation” for good.   

  Party discipline – the Chinese way – is really something to behold. The CCP is the only communist party on the planet that thanks to Deng has discovered the secret of amassing wealth.

  And that brings us to Xi’s role enshrined as a great transformer, on the same conceptual level as Mao and Deng. He fully grasped how the state and the party created wealth: the next step is to use the party and wealth as instruments to be put at the service of China’s renaissance.

  Nothing, not even a nuclear war, will deviate Xi and the Beijing leadership from this path. They even devised a mechanism – and a slogan – for the new power projection: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), originally One Belt, One Road (OBOR).

  

  A mountain pass along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Image: Facebook

  In 2017, BRI was incorporated into the party statutes. Even considering the “lost in translation” angle, there’s no Westernized, linear definition for BRI.

  BRI is deployed on many superimposed levels. It started with a series of investments facilitating the supply of commodities to China.

  Then came investments in transport and connectivity infrastructure, with all their nodes and hubs such as Khorgos, at the Chinese-Kazakh border. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), announced in 2013, symbolized the symbiosis of these two investment paths.

  The next step was to transform logistical hubs into integrated economic zones – for instance as in HP based in Chongjing exporting its products via a BRI rail network to the Netherlands. Then came the Digital Silk Roads – from 5G to AI – and the Covid-linked Health Silk Roads.

  What’s certain is that all these roads lead to Beijing. They work as much as economic corridors as soft power avenues, “selling” the Chinese way especially across the Global South.

  Make Trade, Not War

  Make Trade, Not War: that would be the motto of a Pax Sinica under Xi. The crucial aspect is that Beijing does not aim to replace Pax Americana, which always relied on the Pentagon’s variant of gunboat diplomacy.

  The declaration subtly reinforced that Beijing is not interested in becoming a new hegemon. What matters above all is to remove any possible constraints that the outside world may impose over its own internal decisions, and especially over its unique political setup.

  The West may embark on hysteria fits over anything – from Tibet and Hong Kong to Xinjiang and Taiwan. It won’t change a thing.   

  Concisely, this is how “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – a unique, always mutant economic system – arrived at the Covid-linked techno-feudalist era. But no one knows how long the system will last, and in which mutant form.

  Corruption, debt – which tripled in ten years – political infighting – none of that has disappeared in China. To reach 5% annual growth, China would have to recover the growth in productivity comparable to those breakneck times in the 80s and 90s, but that will not happen because a decrease in growth is accompanied by a parallel decrease in productivity.  

  A final note on terminology. The CCP is always extremely precise. Xi’s two predecessors espoused “perspectives” or “visions.” Deng wrote “theory.” But only Mao was accredited with “thought.” The “new era” has now seen Xi, for all practical purposes, elevated to the status of “thought” – and part of the civilization-state’s constitution.

  That’s why the party resolution last week in Beijing could be interpreted as the New Communist Manifesto. And its main author is, without a shadow of a doubt, Xi Jinping. Whether the manifesto will be the ideal road map for a wealthier, more educated and infinitely more complex society than in the times of Deng, all bets are off.   

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 23:25

• These Are The World's Largest Sovereign Wealth Funds
  These Are The World’s Largest Sovereign Wealth Funds

  Did you know that some of the world’s largest investment funds are owned by national governments?

  Known as sovereign wealth funds (SWF), Visual Capitalist’s Joyce Ma and Marcu Lu detail below that these vehicles are often established with seed money that is generated by government-owned industries. If managed responsibly and given a long enough timeframe, an SWF can accumulate an enormous amount of assets.

  In this infographic, we’ve detailed the world’s 10 largest SWFs, along with the largest mutual fund and ETF for context.

  

  The Big Picture

  Data collected from SWFI in October 2021 ranks Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global (also known as the Norwegian Oil Fund) as the world’s largest SWF.

  The world’s 10 largest sovereign wealth funds (with fund size benchmarks) are listed below:

  

  SWF AUM gathered on 10/08/2021. VTSAX and SPY AUM as of 09/30/2021.

  So far, just two SWFs have surpassed the $1 trillion milestone. To put this in perspective, consider that the world’s largest mutual fund, the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSAX), is a similar size, investing in U.S. large-, mid-, and small-cap equities.

  The Trillion Dollar Club

  The world’s two largest sovereign wealth funds have a combined $2.5 trillion in assets. Here’s a closer look at their underlying portfolios.

  1. Government Pension Fund Global – $1.3 Trillion (Norway)

  Norway’s SWF was established after the country discovered oil in the North Sea. The fund invests the revenue coming from this sector to safeguard the future of the national economy. Here’s a breakdown of its investments.

  

  As of 12/31/2020

  Real estate may be a small part of the portfolio, but it’s an important component for diversification (real estate is less correlated to the stock market) and generating income. Here are some U.S. office towers that the fund has an ownership stake in.

  

  As of 12/31/2020

  Overall, the fund has investments in 462 properties in the U.S. for a total value of $14.9 billion.

  2. China Investment Corporation (CIC) – $1.2 Trillion (China)

  The CIC is the largest of several Chinese SWFs, and was established to diversify the country’s foreign exchange holdings.

  Compared to the Norwegian fund, the CIC invests in a greater variety of alternatives. This includes real estate, of course, but also private equity, private credit, and hedge funds.

  

  As of 12/31/2020

  A primary focus of the CIC has been to increase its exposure to American infrastructure and manufacturing. By the end of 2020, 57% of the fund was invested in the United States.

  “According to our estimate, the United States needs at least $8 trillion in infrastructure investments. There’s not sufficient capital from the U.S. government or private sector. It has to rely on foreign investments.”

  – DING XUEDONG, CHAIRMAN, CHINA INVESTMENT CORPORATION

  This has drawn suspicion from U.S. regulators given the geopolitical tensions between the two countries. For further reading on the topic, consider this 2017 paper by the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

  Preparing for a Future Without Oil

  Many of the countries associated with these SWFs are known for their robust fossil fuel industries. This includes Middle Eastern nations like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

  Oil has been an incredible source of wealth for these countries, but it’s unlikely to last forever. Some analysts believe that we could even see peak oil demand before 2030—though this doesn’t mean that oil will stop being an important resource.

  Regardless, oil-producing countries are looking to hedge their reliance on fossil fuels. Their SWFs play an important role by taking oil revenue and investing it to generate returns and/or bolster other sectors of the economy.

  An example of this is Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which supports the country’s Vision 2030 framework by investing in clean energy and other promising sectors.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 23:05

• Used Car Battery Problems Take Shine Off China's "Green" New Energy Vehicles
  Used Car Battery Problems Take Shine Off China’s “Green” New Energy Vehicles

  Authored by Shawn Li via The Epoch Times,

  In the last decade, China has rapidly expanded its “green” new energy vehicle (NEV) industry but recycling and disposing of hundreds of thousands of tons of used car batteries has become a pressing issue due to environmental concerns.

  

  Growth in China’s NEV industry took off in 2014 when nearly 78,500 NEVs were produced and some 75,000 were sold. As of September of this year, China’s NEV registration reached 6.78 million, of which 5.52 million are fully electric vehicles.

  The NEV industry predicts that its production and sales growth rate will remain above 40 percent in the next five years prompting the question of how to best manage the growing numbers of discarded lithium batteries from the NEVs.

  Industry data shows that the service life of lithium batteries used in electric vehicles is generally 5 to 8 years, and the service life under warranty is 4 to 6 years. That means, tens of thousands of electric car batteries will soon need to be discarded or recycled, and millions more down the road.

  According to the latest data from China Automotive Technology and Research Center, the cumulative decommissioning of China’s electric car batteries reached 200,000 tons in 2020 and the figure is estimated to climb to 780,000 tons by 2025.

  Presently, most end-of-life batteries are traded in the unregulated black market, raising serious environmental concerns. If such batteries are not handled properly, they could cause soil, air, and water pollution.

  “A 20-gram cell phone battery can pollute a water body equivalent to three standard swimming pools. If it is buried in the ground, it can pollute 1 square kilometer (247 acres) of land for about 50 years,” Wu Feng, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, once publicly stated.

  Electric car batteries are many times larger than cell phone batteries.

  According to Li Yongwang, a chemical engineering expert in China, pollution caused by NEV batteries is very likely far worse than the exhaust pollution from gasoline-run vehicles.

  If they are buried or discarded at will, Li said, they are not only toxic for the environment but they are a direct danger to people’s lives given they can explode from heat.

  

  This photo taken on March 12, 2021, shows workers at a factory for Xinwangda Electric Vehicle Battery Co. Ltd, which makes lithium batteries for electric cars and other uses, in Nanjing in China’s eastern Jiangsu Province. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

  Recycle Market

  Recycling of power batteries has become a pressing issue in China, and it’s considered a weak point that the Chinese authorities did not consider adequately when it heavily promoted the NEV industry.

  There are currently two different methods for recycling electric car batteries. One is to recover valuable raw materials after disassembly. The other is secondary utilization in other fields.

  At present, automobile power batteries are mainly divided into two types: ternary lithium batteries and lithium iron phosphate batteries.

  Ternary lithium batteries have a relatively high content of rare metals such as nickel, cobalt, and manganese, and it’s more worthwhile to recover these.

  The main ingredients in lithium iron phosphate batteries are lithium and iron, which are less worthy of recovering. This type of battery is often recycled through secondary utilization, as its service life is longer.

  Regardless of the type of battery, the recycling market in China is huge. China Orient Securities has estimated that China’s power battery recycling market, including the two methods of recycling, is expected to reach $37 billion by 2025.

  Black Market

  In August this year, Chinese authorities issued the “Administrative Measures for the Secondary Utilization of Power Batteries for New Energy Vehicles,” requiring new energy vehicle manufacturers to establish power battery recycling channels.

  However, these car makers only bear the extra costs and reap no profits from adding battery recycling to their business. Chinese state media quoted an expert as saying that power batteries are not produced by NEV companies. Therefore, these companies have no incentive to recycle end-of-life power batteries.

  

  A battery exchange robot changes the batteries to an electric car at China’s largest electric vehicle battery recharging station in Beijing, China on May 30, 2012. (Feng Li/Getty Images)

  In addition, according to Chinese state media, there are a series of problems associated with the current recycling policies: non-uniform recycling standards, non-standard processes, inconsistent resource utilization efficiency, non-uniform pricing, and an unclear distribution of profits.

  Another problem is that, although there are many companies engaged in battery recycling in China, there are only 27 companies that have the qualifications for secondary utilization and recycling of batteries used in electric cars.

  The huge market, coupled with slow official actions, thus created favorable conditions for a black market. Presently, countless services can be found on China’s largest second-hand commodity trading platform Xianyu when searching for used car batteries.

  On this black market, power battery recycling is generally priced in tons. According to Chinese state media, the recycling price of power lithium batteries ranges from $1,250 to $1,563 U.S. dollars per ton. Most of these businesses purchase end-of-life batteries from all over the county.

  In comparison, prices set by officially designated companies are often lower than on the black market, as the secret companies are able to cut costs by evading regulatory measures, according to China Energy News. As a result, the official companies cannot even obtain any batteries. An industry expert disclosed to Beijing News that about 80 percent of end-of-life power batteries flow into black markets for recycling.

  When recycling is not an option for black market companies, the environment loses out. In 2018, authorities in Tieling City of Liaoning Province seized an illegal lead smelting plant and 330 tons of waste batteries. Workers at the plant dismantled storage batteries and discharged 50 tons of sulfuric acid directly into nearby land without any treatment, causing irreversible pollution.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 22:45

• "Turn The Board Over" – Sukhoi Su-75 Checkmate Debuts At Dubai Airshow
  “Turn The Board Over” – Sukhoi Su-75 Checkmate Debuts At Dubai Airshow

  The brand-new fifth-generation fighter jet, the Sukhoi Su-75 Checkmate, was unveiled at the Dubai Airshow on Sunday for the first time outside Russia. 

  

  Military delegations worldwide visited the invitation-only Checkmate pavilion to gaze upon the inexpensive stealth fighter that costs just a fraction of the US Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. The new plane will fly in 2023 and be slated for deliveries in 2026. It’s estimated the stealth jet will cost between $20-30 million, compared with the F-35’s $80 million-plus. 

  Presentation of #Russian Su-75#DubaiAirshow2021 pic.twitter.com/SuWX68YvT9

  — Cyber_Viper☢️ (@Kaala_Nag) November 14, 2021

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

  “It is not a coincidence that the first international presentation of the new fifth-generation fighter is taking place here,” said Sergey Chemezov of United Aircraft Corporation (UAC), the parent company of Sukhoi. 

  “People in the Middle East appreciate the reputation of Russian weapons, show great interest in our advanced products and seek the development of partnership with Russia.

  “The Checkmate combines low visibility and excellent equipment, and is ideal in terms of combat effectiveness and flight-hour cost. All these factors make the aircraft a unique offer in the international arms market,” Chemezov said.

  The Checkmate was first introduced at the MAKS Air Show in Moscow in July. President Vladimir Putin examined the new plane at the time. The aircraft is expected to complement the Russian air force’s Su-57 stealth fighter. 

  A promotional video was published on UAC’s YouTube channel on Monday, detailing how Checkmate is a “solution that can turn the board over,” referring to a game position in chess in which a player’s king is in check, and there is no possible escape. 

  

  At the end of the video, a variant of the stealth jet appears to be an unmanned version.

  Checkmate could be the low-cost solution for Moscow to compete on the world stage and acquire a slice of the fifth-generation fighter jet market from the US. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 22:25

• Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, And The Inability To Think In Terms Of Principles
  Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, And The Inability To Think In Terms Of Principles

  Authored by Glenn Greenwald via greenwald.substack.com,

  The FBI has executed a string of search warrants targeting the homes and cell phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and several others associated with that organization. It should require no effort to understand why it is a cause for concern that a Democratic administration is using the FBI to aggressively target an organization devoted to obtaining and reporting incriminating information about Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies.

  

  That does not mean the FBI investigation is inherently improper. Journalists are no more entitled than any other citizen to commit crimes. If there is reasonable cause to believe O’Keefe and his associates committed federal crimes, then an FBI investigation is warranted as it is for any other case. But there has been no evidence presented that O’Keefe or Project Veritas employees have done anything of the sort, nor any explanation provided to justify these invasive searches. That we should want and need that is self-evident: if the Trump-era FBI had executed search warrants inside the newsrooms of The New York Times and NBC News, we would be demanding evidence to prove it was legally justified. Yet virtually nothing has been provided to justify the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and his colleagues, and the little that has been disclosed by way of justifying this makes no sense.

  The FBI investigation concerns the theft last year of the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, yet Project Veritas, while admitting they received a copy from an anonymous source, chose not to publish that diary because they were unable to verify it. Nobody and nothing thus far suggests that Project Veritas played any role in its acquisition, legal or otherwise. There is a cryptic reference in the search warrant to transmitting stolen material across state lines, but it is not illegal for journalists to receive and use material illegally acquired by a source: the most mainstream organizations spent the last month touting documents pilfered from Facebook by their heroic “whistleblower” Frances Haugen.

  On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link or on the player below). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.

  This not-a-real-journalist tactic was and remains the primary theory used by those who justify the ongoing attempt to imprison Julian Assange. In demanding Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “Mr. Assange claims to be a journalist and would no doubt rely on the First Amendment to defend his actions.” Yet the five-term Senator insisted: “but he is no journalist: He is an agitator intent on damaging our government, whose policies he happens to disagree with, regardless of who gets hurt.”

  This not-a-real-journalist slogan was also the one used by both the CIA and the corporate media against myself and my colleagues in both the Snowden reporting we did in 2013, as well as the failed attempt to criminally prosecute me in 2020 for the year-long Brazil exposés we did: punishing them is not an attack on press freedom because they are not journalists and what they did is not journalism.

  What is most striking about this weapon is that — like the campaign to agitate for more censorship — it is led by journalists. It is the corporate media that most aggressively insists that those who are independent, those who are outsiders, those who do not submit to their institutional structures are not real journalists the way they are, and thus are not entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. In order to create a framework to deny Project Veritas’s status as journalists, The New York Times claimed last week that anyone who uses undercover investigations (as Veritas does) is automatically a non-journalist because that entails lying — even though, just two years earlier, the same paper heralded numerous news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Mother Jones for using undercover investigations to accomplish what they called “compelling” reporting.

  I am very well-acquainted with this repressive tactic of trying to decree who is and is not a real journalist for purposes of constitutional protection. Many have forgotten — given the awards it ultimately ended up winning — that the NSA/Snowden reporting we did in 2013 was originally maligned as quasi-criminal not just by Obama national security officials such as James Clapper but also by The New York Times (the first profile the Paper of Record published about me the day after the reporting began referred to me in the headline as an “Anti-Surveillance Activist” and then, once backlash ensued, it was changed to “Blogger” (the original snide, disqualifying headline is still visible in the URL).

  

  As the New York Times’ own Public Editor at the time objected, by purposely denying me the label “journalist,” the paper was knowingly increasing the risks that I could be prosecuted for my reporting. Indeed, recent reporting from Yahoo! News about CIA plots to kidnap or murder Julian Assange reported that denying Assange the label “journalist,” and then re-defining what I and my colleague Laura Poitras were doing from “journalist” to “information broker,” would enable the U.S. Government to spy on or even prosecute us without having to worry about that inconvenient “free press” guarantee of the First Amendment.

  

  All of this demonstrates how dangerous it is to invoke this very same not-a-real-journalist tactic against O’Keefe and Project Veritas. Yet, if one warns of the dangers of the FBI’s actions, that is precisely what one hears from liberals, from Democrats and from their allies in the media: the FBI’s targeting of Project Veritas has nothing to do with press freedoms since they’re not real journalists. They are invoking the authoritarian theory that maintains that the state (or, in this case, the FBI) is vested with the power to decree who is a “real journalist” — whatever that means — and who is not.

  There are so many ironies to the use of this framework. So often, employees of media corporations who have never broken a major story in their lives (and never will) revel in accusing independent journalists who have broken numerous major stories (such as Assange) of not being real journalists. At the height of the Snowden reporting, I went on Meet the Press in July, 2013, only for the host, David Gregory, to suggest that I ought to be in prison alongside my source Edward Snowden because I was not really a journalist the way David Gregory was. At the time, Frank Rich, writing in New York Magazine, noted how bizarre it was that the TV personality David Gregory assumed he was a real journalist, whereas I was a non-journalist who belonged in prison for my reporting, given that Gregory — like most employees of large media corporations — had never broken any story in his life. Rich used a Q&A format to make the point this way:

  On Sunday, Meet the Press host David Gregory all but accused the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald of aiding and abetting Edward Snowden’s fugitive travels, asking, “Why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” And, speaking to his larger point, do you see Greenwald as a journalist or an activist in this episode? And does it matter?

  Is David Gregory a journalist? As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he’s covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he’s conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin, or Chuck Schumer. Meet the Press has fallen behind CBS’s Face the Nation, much as Today has fallen to ABC’s Good Morning America, and my guess is that Gregory didn’t mean to sound like Joe McCarthy (with a splash of the oiliness of Roy Cohn) but was only playing the part to make some noise. In any case, his charge is preposterous. As a columnist who published Edward Snowden’s leaks, Greenwald was doing the job of a journalist — and the fact that he’s an “activist” journalist (i.e., an opinion journalist, like me and a zillion others) is irrelevant to that journalistic function. . . . [I]t’s easier for Gregory to go after Greenwald, a self-professed outsider who is not likely to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and works for a news organization based in London. Presumably if Gregory had been around 40 years ago, he also would have accused the Times of aiding and abetting the enemy when it published Daniel Ellsberg’s massive leak of the Pentagon Papers. In any case, Greenwald demolished Gregory on air and on Twitter (“Who needs the government to try to criminalize journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?”). 

  At the time — both in terms of that exchange with Gregory and my overall reporting on the NSA — I had significant support from the liberal-left (though it was far from universal, given that we were exposing mass, indiscriminate, illegal spying by the Obama administration). But few believed that I ought to be prosecuted on the grounds that, somehow, I was not a real journalist.

  So why are so many of them now willing to endorse this same exact theory when it comes to O’Keefe and Project Veritas, or even to justify the prosecution of Julian Assange? The answer is obvious. They are unwilling and/or incapable of thinking in terms of principles, ones that apply universally to everyone regardless of their ideology. Their thought process never even arrives at that destination. When the subject of the FBI’s attacks on O’Keefe is raised, or the DOJ’s prosecution of Assange is discussed, they ask themselves one question and only one question, and that ends the inquiry.

  It is the exclusive and determinative factor: do I like James O’Keefe and his politics? Do I like Julian Assange and his politics? This primitive, principle-free, personality-driven prism is the only way they are capable of understanding the world. Because they dislike O’Keefe and/or Assange, they instantly side with whoever is targeting them — the FBI, the DOJ, the security state services — and believe that anyone who defends them is defending a right-wing extremist rather than defending the non-ideological, universally applicable principle of press freedoms. They think only in terms of personalities, not principles.

  

  The FBI’s actions against Project Veritas and O’Keefe are so blatantly alarming that press freedom groups such as the Committee to Project Journalists and the Freedom of the Press Foundation (on whose Board I sit) have expressed grave concerns about it, including on their social media accounts for all to see. Even the ACLU — which these days is loathe to speak out in favor of any person or group disliked by their highly partisan liberal donor base — issued a very carefully hedged statement that made clear how much they despise Project Veritas but said: “Nevertheless, the precedent set in this case could have serious consequences for press freedom” (at least thus far, the ACLU has just quietly stuck this statement on its website and not uttered a word about it on its social media accounts, where most of its liberal donors track what they do, but the fact that they felt compelled to say anything about this right-wing boogieman demonstrates how extreme the FBI’s actions are). The federal judge overseeing the warrants has temporarily enjoined the FBI from extracting any more information from the cell phones seized from O’Keefe and other Project Veritas employees pending a determination of their legal justification.

  

  The reason this is such a grave press freedom attack is two-fold. First, as indicated, any attempt to anoint oneself the arbiter of who is and is not a “real journalist” for purposes of First Amendment protection is inherently tyrannical. Which institutions are sufficiently trustworthy and competent to decree who is a real journalist meriting First Amendment protection and who falls outside as something else?

  But there is a much more significant problem with this framework: namely, the question of who is and is not a real journalist is completely irrelevant to the First Amendment. None of the rights in the Constitution, including press freedom, were intended to apply only to a small, cloistered, credentialed, privileged group of citizens. The exact opposite was true: the only reason they are valuable as rights is because they enjoy universal application, protecting all citizens.

  Indeed, one of the most passionate grievances of the American colonists was that nobody was permitted to use the press unless first licensed by the British Crown. Conversely, the most celebrated journalism of the time was undertaken by people like Thomas Paine — who never worked for an established journalistic outlet in his life — as he circulated the pamphlet Common Sense that railed against the abuses of the King. What was protected by the First Amendment was not a small, privileged caste bearing the special label “journalists,” but rather the activity of a free press. The proof of this is clear and ample, and is set forth in the video we produced on Monday night.

  But none of this matters. If you express concern for the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe, it will be instantly understood not as a concern about any of these underlying principles but instead as an endorsement of O’Keefe’s politics, journalism, and O’Keefe himself. The same is true for the discourse surrounding Kyle Rittenhouse. If you say that — after having actually watched the trial — you believe the state failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in light of his defense of self-defense, many will disbelieve your sincerity, will insist that your view is based not in some apolitical assessment of the evidence or legal principles about what the state must do in order to imprison a citizen, but rather that you must be a “supporter” of Rittenhouse himself, his ideology (whatever it is assumed to be), and the political movement with which he, in their minds, is associated.

  On some level, this is pure projection: those who are incapable of assessing political or legal conflicts through a prism of principles rather than personalities assume that everyone is plagued by the same deficiency. Since they decide whether to support or oppose the FBI’s actions toward O’Keefe based on their personal view of O’Keefe rather than through reference to any principles, they assume that this is how everyone is determining their views of that situation. Similarly, since they base their views on whether Rittenhouse should be convicted or acquitted based on how they personally feel about Rittenhouse and his perceived politics rather than the evidence presented at the trial (which most of them have not watched), they assume that anyone advocating for an acquittal can be doing so only because they like Rittenhouse’s politics and believe that his actions were heroic.

  In sum, those who view the world through a prism bereft of principles — either due to lack of intellectual capacity or ethics or both — assume everyone’s world view is similarly craven. It is this same stunted mindset that saddles our discourse with so much illogic and so many twisted presumptions, such as the inability to distinguish between defending someone’s right to express a particular opinion and agreement with that opinion. In a world in which ideology, partisan loyalty, tribal affiliations, in-group identity and personality-driven assessments predominate, there is no room for principles, universally applicable rights, or basic reason.

  *  *  *

  https://greenwald.substack.com/p/kyle-rittenhouse-project-veritas?token…

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 22:05

• China Imprisoned More Journalists In 2020 Than Any Other Nation
  China Imprisoned More Journalists In 2020 Than Any Other Nation

  274 journalists were in jail due to their work as of 2020, a figure that exceeds the high of 272 recorded in 2016. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, this is the fifth consecutive year that over 250 journalists are behind bars.

  China is the worst jailer with 47 journalists identified as being in prison there. Turkey came second with 37 while Egypt came third with 27.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  China and Turkey have consistently vied for the unenviable title of the word’s worst jailer of journalists.

  In line with President Xi Jinping consolidating his control over the country and implementing tighter controls on the media, China has continued to imprison members of the media and it moved into first position in 2019. Arrests of journalists have been notable amid a Muslim crackdown in Xinjiang province and some of those have been incarcerated for journalism activity carried out years earlier. Arrests have continued amid the coverage of the pandemic’s outbreak in Wuhan.

  Turkey comes for imprisonments with its total noticeably in recent years. That decline is not as positive as it seems and does not represent an improvement in the fortunes of Turkish media. Rather, it reflects successful efforts by President Erdoğan to clamp down on independent reporting and criticism. Dozens of journalists that are not currently in jail in Turkey are still facing trial or appeal and could yet be sentenced while others who have been sentenced in absentia could face lengthy stints behind bars upon their return to the country.

  Egypt has continued to arrest and charge journalists with its total number reaching 27, matching a record set in 2016. According to the CPJ, the crackdown has continued sometimes because of rather than in spite of Covid-19 with at least three journalists arrested for their work covering the pandemic. Saudi Arabia’s attitude towards critical journalism hardly needs an introduction after the barbaric murder of Jamal Khashoggi. As of 2020, 24 journalists are in prison in the kingdom.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 21:45

• Skyrocketing Fuel Costs Will Lead To A Winter Of Discontent
  Skyrocketing Fuel Costs Will Lead To A Winter Of Discontent

  Authored by James Bovard via JimBovard.com,

  Get ready for a winter of discontent, thanks to Joe Biden.

  

  One year ago, President-elect Joe Biden warned that Americans would have a “very dark winter” because of COVID. Now that he is president, Biden may give Americans a Valley Forge winter – a season that could be both brutally cold and bitterly expensive. That could produce a political disaster that surpasses all of Biden’s previous bungling.

  At a CNN town hall in July, Biden declared, “The vast majority of the experts including Wall Street are suggesting that it’s highly unlikely that it’s going to be long term inflation is going to get out of hand.” After Wednesday’s federal report showing that consumer prices are rising more than 6 percent a year, the White House is changing its talking points. On Wednesday in Baltimore, Biden confided to an audience: “Did you ever think you’d be paying this much for a gallon of gas? In some parts of California they’re paying $4.50 a gallon.”

  But Biden’s newfound sympathy for victims of high prices won’t warm any homes this winter.

  Natural gas prices have jumped more than 180 percent since September 2020, and that will spur increases in electricity costs. Home heating oil prices have jumped 115 percent over the past year. Fuel oil is up almost 60 percent from a year ago. The federal government forecast last month that home heating costs could rise 54 percent this winter — but heating costs could actually triple, according to some private forecasts.

  Biden promised to “do everything in our power to stabilize the supply chain,” one factor in the rising prices. But regardless of the promises by White House aides, Biden has no magic wand to fix the problem. Biden’s unemployment pandemic bonuses paid people not to work, spurring labor force disruptions across the nation.

  Pervasive shortages of truck drivers and other occupations assure that the current problems will multiply. The federal Energy Information Administration warned last month that diesel stockpiles — used for home heating oil and other products — are at a 20-year low. “We potentially could see shortages in parts of the country unless the Biden administration treats this as the emergency that it is,” Fox News recently reported.

  Biden administration officials are insisting that the surge of inflation is “transitory.” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen promised last week, “I expect that next year, many of the supply bottlenecks that we’re experiencing now in opening up our economy will recede.”

  But the Biden infrastructure bill that Congress just enacted is expected to worsen inflation for key supplies.

  Shortly before Biden was elected, America had finally achieved energy independence. But while Biden is talking tough against Vladimir Putin, US imports of Russian oil have soared this year. As the Institute for Energy Research reported last week, “Biden is asking for help from domestic producers without giving them back any of the tools he took away — the Keystone XL pipeline . . . a ban on new oil and gas leases on federal land and waters, and pressure on banks not to lend to the oil and gas industry.” At the same time that Biden is beseeching OPEC to boost oil output, “the Biden administration is sending a strong signal that American energy is not welcome,” the institute notes.

  This mindset is epitomized by Saule Omarova, Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency, who graduated from college in the Soviet Union. Earlier this year, Omarova declared that “we want [oil and gas companies] to go bankrupt” in order “to tackle climate change.”

  How many Biden appointees are willing to see Americans shivering in the cold this winter as long as they can boast of reductions in US emissions at the next international climate summit?

  The Biden administration is far more enthusiastic on developing heavily subsidized offshore wind farms (despite their inefficiency) than permitting the private sector to continue fueling American homes and lives.

  Biden said on Wednesday that he has ordered “the Federal Trade Commission to strike back at any market manipulation or price gouging” in the energy sector. But there is no federal fix for the problems Biden and other politicians continue creating. Biden is already being widely blamed for the surge in inflation. Soaring home heating prices will embitter citizens who once trusted Biden’s pledges for a smooth return to normalcy and prosperity.

  For Biden and his allies on Capitol Hill, the bitter winter could last until the November midterm congressional elections — which could beget an Ice Age for the White House.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 21:25

• Biden & Xi Agree To Plan Unprecedented US-China Talks On Nuclear Arsenals
  Biden & Xi Agree To Plan Unprecedented US-China Talks On Nuclear Arsenals

  Among the prime national security issues tackled in the three-and-a-half hour Monday evening Biden-Xi virtual summit were nuclear issues and cyberspace conflict, with FT reporting later on Tuesday afternoon that the US and Chinese leaders agreed to start talks over nuclear arsenals.

  “The two leaders agreed that we would look to begin to carry forward discussions on strategic stability,” US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told a defense conference in Washington following the Biden-Xi meeting.

  This is perhaps the first practical application and major breakthrough related to Biden’s call for each side to agree on “guardrails” that would ensure competition between the two largest economies and strongest militaries “does not veer into conflict”. 

  

  Sullivan had disclosed the theretofore unreported details of that part of the summit during a Brookings Institution panel wherein Brookings president John Allen raised the issue of the recent Pentagon review assessing that China’s ambitions for near-future warhead production is “exceeding the pace and size” of past projections. The Pentagon assessment said China could develop over 700 nuclear warheads by 2027 and would likely seek to produce over 1,000 warheads by 2030.

  Allen asked Sullivan about China’s “potential to add as many as hundreds of warheads to their nuclear arsenal” and “the recent test of the fractional orbital bombardment system” – a reference to China’s advancing hypersonics testing and capability.

  Sullivan responded that Biden “did raise with President Xi the need for a strategic stability set of conversations around the sorts of issues you just described… that needs to be guided by the leaders and led by senior empowered teams on both sides that cut across security, technology and diplomacy,” according to FT.

  On the initial agreement reached Monday to pursue nuclear talks, Sullivan added, “It is now incumbent on us to think about the most productive way to carry it forward from here.” It appears we are merely still talking about a ‘hoped for’, ‘planned for’, or even ‘maybe’ there will eventually be nuclear talks stage.

  Thus whether US-China nuclear talks actually get off the ground remains unclear, given also the ambiguity which Sullivan acknowledged when discussing the issue: “There’s less maturity to [the nuclear aspect] in the US-China relationship, but the two leaders did discuss these issues. And it is now incumbent on us to think about the most productive way to carry it forward from here,” Sullivan said.

  It must be remembered that currently China is the only nuclear power with a definitive ‘no first use’ nuclear policy, and lately Beijing has called on Washington to revise it’s own policy. The US has across many administrations resisted international calls to adopt no first use. Likely the issue would be front and center during any potential US-China nuclear talks, also given the heated rhetoric over Taiwan has sparked new concerns over the potential for armed confrontation between the nuclear-armed superpowers over the island. This issue, along with the fact that the US has a much larger nuclear arsenal many times over, has prevented past talks. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 21:05

• "It's Terrifying" – Judge Andrew Napolitano Warns Federal Government's Behavior Crosses Constitutional Lines
  “It’s Terrifying” – Judge Andrew Napolitano Warns Federal Government’s Behavior Crosses Constitutional Lines

  Submitted By Daniela Cambone via Stansberry Research. 

  Without even hearing the federal government’s argument on the imposition of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, it’s very obvious they are in violation of the constitution based on the actions taken by seated judges’, according to Judge Andrew Napolitano, former Judge of the New Jersey Superior Court. 

  In an exclusive interview with anchor Daniela Cambone of Stansberry Research, Napolitano joins to share a gleamingly judicial perspective on current legislation passed from the federal government to circuit courts, which requires large employers to mandate employees to get vaccinated or submit to weekly COVID-19 testing. 

  

  This being a first time, as pointed out by Judge Napolitano to Cambone, the federal government has moved the goalposts when imposing federal powers related to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “The federal government, through the department of labor, through OSHA, has never claimed the right to force employers to enforce a federal regulation, [and] not a federal statute that was enacted by Congress.”
   
  Biden’s efforts to enact policies overstepping constitutional lines fall short of anything greater than a “whim,” Judge Napolitano says, and the congress won’t enact legislation because members know they won’t be there once their respective terms’ end due to the unpopularity of this position. 
   
  The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary order that blocked President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for businesses with over 100 employees from taking effect, siding with Utah and several other states on Friday.

  “It’s terrifying to me that [the U.S. government’s] behavior no longer shocks,” he says. “It is the dulling of our sensitivities and sensibilities, between right and wrong, that terrifies me,” Judge Napolitano concludes.

  Click the play button below to listen to Cambone’s interview with Judge Napolitano. 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 20:45

• Iran Restarts Production Of Advanced Nuclear-Program Parts Just Ahead Of Resuming Vienna Talks
  Iran Restarts Production Of Advanced Nuclear-Program Parts Just Ahead Of Resuming Vienna Talks

  Iran recently announced that its negotiators are set to resume nuclear talks with global powers at Vienna, including indirectly with the US, starting Nov.29 after JCPOA nuclear deal negotiations have been stalled since last June. 

  But this anticipated resumption date is itself looking shaky, after on Tuesday The Wall Street Journal cited diplomats familiar with the talks who say the Islamic Republic has resumed production of advanced nuclear-program parts while ignoring the oversight of IAEA inspectors. 

  The WSJ writes, “The renewed work has raised concerns among Western diplomats who say it could allow Iran to start secretly diverting centrifuge parts if Tehran chose to build a covert nuclear-weapons program, although they say there is no evidence at this point that it has done so.”

  

  After initially resuming “limited” work at an assembly plan in Karaj outside Tehran in August, WSJ says, a significant number of advanced centrifuge parts have since been produced, at a moment Tehran has admitted and even boasted doubling its enriched uranium stockpiles between the start of October to the first week of November. 

  “We have more than 210 kilograms [about 463 pounds] of uranium enriched to 20%, and we’ve produced 25 kilos [about 55 pounds] at 60%, a level that no country apart from those with nuclear arms are able to produce,” said Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi said over a week ago.

  But ironically it appears that Iran’s ramped up activity at previously monitored nuclear facilities has actually been hastened by a recent spate of Israeli sabotage efforts, which have become a bit of ‘an open secret’ in Tehran, Tel Aviv, and increasingly acknowledged on the world stage:

  “All of the recent work at Karaj has taken place without any official IAEA monitoring, the diplomats said,” the WSJ notes. “Iran significantly tightened security at Karaj after the June alleged sabotage, the latest in a series of explosions at its nuclear facilities over the past two years.”

  So on the one hand international inspectors and Western diplomats complain of the lack of access to nuclear sites, while Iran has been forced to shutter said sites to outside observers precisely due to threat of Israeli and US sabotage attacks. 

  This in turn has led to the kind of “could allow” “would allow” “might allow” type of speculation featured in Western media outlets, and seen in this latest WSJ piece, for example: 

  According to one of the diplomats familiar with Iran’s program, Iran has installed the centrifuges whose key parts were produced at Karaj at Iran’s underground, heavily fortified, Fordow site. The diplomat said there is no evidence the centrifuges parts have been diverted elsewhere but “as the number of unmonitored centrifuges increases, the likelihood for this scenario increases.”

  Meanwhile, Iranian leaders seem content to allow Western leaders to believe whatever they want to believe, while at the same time maintaining its consistent position that all nuclear development is for peaceful energy purposes. After all, such fears – founded or unfounded – will only give the Iranians more leverage and negotiating strength when talks finally resume in Vienne. 

  But for now the question of the Nov.29 resumption date is anything but settled, also as Washington has stated clearly its patience is running out, blaming the hardline Ebrahim Raisi government for dragging its feat.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 20:25

• Maryland Mayor Arrested On 50 Counts Of Distributing Revenge Porn On Reddit
  Maryland Mayor Arrested On 50 Counts Of Distributing Revenge Porn On Reddit

  Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times,

  A Maryland mayor was arrested and charged with 50 counts of distributing revenge porn, Maryland State Prosecutor Charlton T. Howard III announced Monday.

  

  Charges were filed against Andrew Bradshaw, the mayor of Cambridge, in the Circuit Court for Dorchester County, according to a statement from Howard’s office.

  Bradshaw allegedly created multiple accounts on the public Internet forum Reddit using variations of the name and birthday of a victim with whom he had a previous romantic relationship, according to court documents.

  The mayor is accused of having posted nude photographs of the victim to various Reddit and subreddit forums related to sexual activity, humiliation, degradation, race, and other topics, alongside racial slurs and sexually explicit language without her consent or knowledge and with the intent to harm her.

  As per court documents, the victim, who is in her 20s, contacted law enforcement on or around May 14, 2020 when she discovered that the nude photographs of her had been posted to Reddit without her consent.

  The victim told officers that she had only shared the photographs in question with one person, Bradshaw, when they were in an intimate relationship, but had not given him consent to share them.

  His alleged actions are in violation of Maryland’s Revenge Porn Statute, the state prosecutor said.

  Under Maryland’s Revenge Porn Statute, an individual may not distribute private images, video footage, or any reproduction of the image of another person that reveals their identity while exposing their intimate body parts or displays them engaged in sexual activity, without their consent and with the intent to harm them.

  If convicted, Bradshaw would face a maximum penalty of two years’ in jail and a $5,000 fine for each count.

  “Using someone’s private images without their consent is a serious breach of trust and invasion of privacy, and the power and breadth of the Internet makes such a violation even more egregious,” said State Prosecutor Howard.

  “Our office is committed to protecting victims from those who abuse their positions of power and trust.”

  In a statement posted to Cambridge’s website, the city said it is “aware of the matter involving the Mayor” but that “the business of the City is unaffected.”

  “The City is currently gathering information and will cooperate fully with the Maryland State Police and the Office of the State Prosecutor,” the statement said. “As this is an active legal matter, no further comments will be made at this time.”

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 20:05

• Pilot Flies "FJB" And Middle Finger Pattern Over Arizona Skies  
  Pilot Flies “FJB” And Middle Finger Pattern Over Arizona Skies  

  What began as an NBC reporter’s attempt to suggest NASCAR fans shouting “F@ck Joe Biden” were actually saying “Let’s go Brandon!” – has been a viral sensation for a month and a half. 

  Fans at football stadiums across the country have chanted “F@ck Joe Biden” to voice their discontent with the president. 

  The speed at which “Let’s Go Brandon,” a coded vulgar insult towards the president, has spread throughout stadiums and social media has been astonishing. 

  One can buy “Let’s Go Brandon” t-shirts, Christmas ornaments, stickers, and other merchandise to express how they feel about Biden. Even a “Let’s Go Brandon” rap recently made it to the number 1 rap song on iTunes. 

  “F@ck Joe Biden” or “FJB” for short has also made it to the sky. On Nov. 10, a pilot operating a Cessna commuter plane with the tail number “N23508” was recorded by flight-tracking website FlightAware. What’s unique about this plane’s flight route is that the pilot drew FJB and a middle finger.

  

  The pilot was at an altitude of 2,500 to 3,500 feet near Pheonix, flying around 85-100 mph for 37 minutes last week while they created their masterpiece in the sky. Here’s a playback of the flight. 

  

  Vulgar insults directed at the president show an ultra-polarized country ahead of next year’s midterms. So how long until the FAA interviews this pilot? 

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 19:45

• California Gas Prices Reach New Record High
  California Gas Prices Reach New Record High

  Authored by Christopher Burroughs via The Epoch Times,

  The average price of a regular gallon of gasoline in California reached a record high on Monday as sticker shock continues to anger drivers paying more at the pump.

  

  Today’s average price for a gallon of regular unleaded gas in California rose to $4.687, according to the American Automobile Association. The price broke the previous record of $4.671 set in October 2012.

  

  Mid-grade unleaded gasoline also rose to an average price of $4.868. Premium unleaded gasoline reached an average of $4.997, with diesel at $4.816.

  The jump is most noticeable when compared with gasoline prices one year ago. In California, the average price at the same time in 2020 was just $2.125 per gallon for regular unleaded fuel.

  The prices also make California, the most populated state in the nation, the state with the highest average gas prices in the nation, according to the data.

  

  The Automobile Club of Southern California noted the price increases come as millions of people across the state prepare to travel for the Thanksgiving holiday.

  “The Auto Club is projecting 4.4 million travelers for the Thanksgiving holiday, with 3.8 million of them driving to their holiday destinations,” Auto Club spokesman Jeffrey Spring said.

  White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday that increased gas prices show the federal government needs to invest more in green energy alternatives.

  “Our view is that the rise in gas prices over the long term makes it an even stronger case for doubling down our investment and our focus on clean energy options so that we are not relying on the fluctuations and OPEC and their willingness to put more supply and meet the demands in the market.  That’s our view,” Psaki said.

  “We’ve asked the FTC to look into the need for OPEC to release more—that are the larger issues here and that’s why we’ve been focused on those options,” she added.

  While some have suggested supply chain issues or other problems are to blame, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) believes the Biden administration is intentionally working to increase gas prices.

  “Most notably, more and more people tell me that they’re not even able to fill their pickup truck tank up for the entire week,” Cotton told Breitbart.

  “They’ve got to fill up half a tank and hope that the price comes down by the end of the week. That, in particular, is the intended effect of Joe Biden’s energy policy. It’s not unintended or some accident. They want gas to cost $4 a gallon because they want all of us to get out of pickup trucks and SUVs and get into small electric compacts or bicycles or scooters or whatever else Pete Buttigieg takes to work,” he added.

  And just in case you hoped for relief, San Diego Democrats have a better idea… tax you more….

  Did you know that in California you pay about $1.50 in TAXES & FEES for every gallon of gas?

  On top of that, Democrats in San Diego are pushing a new mileage tax, which aims to tax drivers for every mile they drive.

  Full Interview: https://t.co/1kTVOu3OfB pic.twitter.com/4LopL4q8Sz

  — KUSI News (@KUSINews) November 16, 2021

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  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 19:25

• Biden's $1T Infrastructure Bill Will Help The MTA Avoid Fare Hikes…For Six Months
  Biden’s $1T Infrastructure Bill Will Help The MTA Avoid Fare Hikes…For Six Months

  Today in “efficient government spending” news, the NY Times was caught celebrating the fact that President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill will keep MTA fares stable and MTA service “robust”.

  But the punchline is that the NY Times admits that the fares will only stay stable for “at least six months”, leaving the door wide open for hikes before the end of 2022. 

  All the result of “receiving billions of dollars” from the infrastructure bill. The Times also celebrated the fact that the bill would “defer drastic service cuts”, as if service from the MTA could possibly get any worse.

  Gov. Kathy Hochul commented prior to the bill being passed: “We anticipate there’ll be no fare hikes for the M.T.A.”. She also said service cuts are “off the table”.

  And it isn’t just the infrastructure package that is helping keep the same wonderful MTA service you’ve grown to know and love online for 180 more days, it’s also a result of the nearly $11 billion that NY received as part of Covid relief packages. 

  

  Several paragraphs down in the article, the Times admits that the MTA is “facing a staggering financial crisis in the wake of the pandemic, which decimated ridership and the agency’s revenue”.

  Janno Lieber, acting chair and chief executive of the MTA, said: “Incentivizing people to come back means maintaining the pretty robust service that we have. And it also means that for the time being, we need to stand on the fare.”

  The agency had previously planned a 4% increase in fares earlier this spring. The MTA usually raises fares every two years and the agency has been mum on whether or not they plan on raising fares between the 6 month and 2 year period. 

  Lieber said that the MTA was “taking fare hikes off the table for at least six months and maybe well beyond that.”

  Maybe? Maybe we’ll check back in six months.

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 19:05

• China's Bitcoin Ban Is The Unnoticed Geopolitical Event Of The Decade
  China’s Bitcoin Ban Is The Unnoticed Geopolitical Event Of The Decade

  By Rob Price of Bitcoin Magazine

  China kicking out miners and banning crypto may be the biggest geopolitical mistake the country has made this century.

  — zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 20, 2021

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

  The political and economic sun has been rising in the East over the past century with China playing an increasingly important role in global geopolitics. Despite this trend, I have long been skeptical of China’s centralized and autocratic governance structure, and 2021 could be a monumental year, exposing the frailties of excessive control. If Bitcoin proves to be as important a technology as I think it is, then the CCP’s decision to ban bitcoin mining could prove to be the biggest geopolitical faux pas of the next decade. In summary, while decentralized Bitcoin has displayed its resilience to regulation, bans and decreased the probability of a 51% attack, centralized China may have handed a critical technology of the future to its peers.

  U.S.–China Conflict Is Not Just A Donald Trump Phenomenon

  The U.S. and China have been at loggerheads in recent years with flashpoints over controlling companies, tariffs and trade, Xinjiang, the Olympics, coronavirus origins, Hong Kong, spying, Huawei, Taiwan, the South China Sea, TikTok and WeChat, Tibet, and so on. Hopefully the world’s two largest nations do not end in a hot war, but they will likely remain in a cold war for many years to come as the U.S. withdraws from its position as global hegemon, China rises in the East and we jostle for a new world order. Despite all this conflict, the geopolitics of bitcoin mining has fallen under the U.S.-China radar.

  Bitcoin Geopolitics — Who Cares?

  Most people do not properly comprehend Bitcoin — let alone politicians and mainstream media outlets — so ignorance of Bitcoin geopolitics is unsurprising. But just like Bitcoin is growing in financial and economic importance, so will its geopolitical significance.

  There is a fascinating geopolitical shift underway in Bitcoin where power is shifting from the East to the West.

  China and the U.S. are both trying to exert control over their populations. The Chinese centralized apparatus is far swifter and more effective than the U.S. Some would argue there are benefits to the Chinese approach — like fighting the COVID-19 pandemic — but there are certainly consequences too. While China is turning away bitcoin miners, Western entrepreneurs are capitalizing and entrenching this industry in the West.

  “Strategic China” Has Ignored Innovation Because Of Centralized Governance

  We have established over recent quarters that Bitcoin is a powerful technology with immense potential for the world. The future is uncertain, but a digital, decentralized, secure and scarce asset has the potential to be a cornerstone of a new digital financial infrastructure. With each passing cycle, the probability that Bitcoin has a role to play in global financial infrastructure increases and smart individuals, institutions and funds are securing their exposure to the network.

  Miners are a critical component of the Bitcoin network; they secure the network and process transactions. At the start of the year, China sat in the kingmaker seat in this industry with approximately 75% of global bitcoin mining resources. This dominance was potentially a powerful tool for the Chinese economy. Yet in Q3 2021, China decided to ban bitcoin mining. Rather than tax, coerce or confiscate the equipment, miners were allowed to leave China en masse in Q3 2021.

  The reasoning for China’s decision is uncertain but what we do know is that it would be very difficult to execute this type of blanket ban in a moderately free country. Imagine your country wiping out an industry at a whim. The U.S. is struggling to pass an infrastructure bill; how are they going to pass a ban on an asset they do not even understand? I wrote more about this in “Worried About A Ban? Then You Need Bitcoin More Than You Think.”

  The Western world is far too swayed by tax revenue, fear of making mistakes and immediate political pressures to implement a blanket ban on bitcoin mining. By contrast, China is only able to implement a ban because it is centralized and autocratic. I expect this rash centralized decision could be the biggest geopolitical faux pas of the next decade, ceding technological power and resources to global peers.

  Bitcoin Miners Could Have A Profound Impact On The Energy Industry

  Not only do miners secure the network, they convert energy into a digital monetary network, which has potentially profound implications for the broader energy industry. I recommend reading Nic Carter’s recent article “Bitcoin Mining Is Reshaping The Energy Industry And No One Is Talking About It” for more information . I also covered much of this ground in “The ESG Solution.”

  1. Miners can utilize energy at times when normal consumers have low demand. Often this energy is wasted because we do not have a cost effective means of large-scale energy storage nor long-distance transportation.

  2. Miners can provide a base load for intermittent electricity producers. Renewable energy producers are often the most intermittent, so miners can support renewables investment and ESG goals.

  3. Miners can make an energy grid more robust because they can also be turned off if energy is required elsewhere.

  

  China has just handed over one of the most exciting new industries to the rest of the world. Miners have relocated across the globe, and the U.S. has been the biggest beneficiary. Most U.S. politicians probably have no idea what is going on, but some do. I know Ted Cruz is not everyone’s cup of tea but listen to this interview he gave on bitcoin mining. I think he understands a thing or two about the potential positive impact mining could have in America.

  Key Implications

  • Prior to this shift, a 51% attack on the Bitcoin network was already an unlikely event. But with China holding 75% of global hashing power, a nation-state coordinated 51% attack was a possibility.

  • Bitcoin mining is far more decentralized and the likelihood of a 51% attack has reduced, enhancing Bitcoin security.

  • Bitcoin displayed resilience to a massive reduction in hash rate (a measure of bitcoin mining power), processing transactions as normal through Q3 2021.

  • After falling more than 50%, hash rate has recovered to within 10% of its previous peak, further solidifying the resilience of Bitcoin.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 18:45

• Biden Reportedly Begged China To Release Oil Reserves During Xi Call; Quid Pro Quo?
  Biden Reportedly Begged China To Release Oil Reserves During Xi Call; Quid Pro Quo?

  Unless you live under a rock, or have been high for 11 months, you will be well aware of two things: filling up your car (or grocery shopping) has never cost you more money and the president seems completely unable to do anything about it.

  

  ‘X’ marks the spot in the chart above – as gas prices (et al) have soared, President Biden’s approval rating has plummeted, and while The White House keeps telling Americans that it has lots of “tools” (to deal with near record high gasoline prices), it appears in reality their options are limited.

  As we detailed earlier, the two main options being discussed: releasing oil from the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) and/or instituting a ban on US crude exports; are both expected (by experts) to result in higher oil/gasoline prices (and only provide very brief, if any, relief at the pump).

  

  Well now we know there is/was a third option being considered…

  The South China Morning Post reports that President Biden asked President Xi, during their virtual meeting overnight, to release China’s oil reserves as part of an economic cooperation pact.

  

  According to a person familiar with the matter, the US has asked China to release oil reserves to help stabilise soaring international crude oil prices.

  The issue was also broached during a phone conversation between Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken two days earlier.

  “One of the pressing issues for both sides is energy supply,” the person said, which made us wonder just what China would want to give up some of that ‘supply’ for to help out its arch-competitor on the global hegemon stage?

  SCMP reports that “currently, the energy departments from both sides are negotiating the details,” the person said, adding that China is open to the US request but has not committed to specific measures yet, citing the need to consider its domestic consumption needs.

  We find that very hard to believe as it merely sounds like yet anothe China nod-and-plod as they commit to nothing.

  As if confirming that belief, SCMP reports that Wang Yongzhong, a senior energy researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a Beijing-based governmental think tank, said that the current crude price of around US$80 per barrel does not necessitate China’s immediate release of strategic reserves.

  “From a technical perspective, it’s not the time for China to do so. But the US indeed has the motivation because of its high inflation.”

  So now China really knows how desperate America is?

  Additionally, although China has built a strategic oil reserve in the past 14 years, estimates suggest that China‘s crude reserve is equivalent to only about 40-50 days of its imports, compared to the US size of 90 days of consumption.

  So why would China ‘help’ the US?

  The big question – obviously – is what did President Biden offer in return for this ‘favor’ from China?

  

  Quid pro quo?

  Does this kind of “political lobbying” reach impeachment-level actions? And what exactly is the US SPR for if not for this (ignoring the fact that, as we detailed previously, a modest SPR release would do little to help the average joe filling up his tank, and in fact could make it worse). Did Biden just tell China just how exposed he is domestically, politically?

  Make America China-Dependent Again?

  Tyler Durden
  Tue, 11/16/2021 – 18:25

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