Aug 18

Today’s News 18th August 2023

  • Europe Braces For $3 A Pill 'Poor Man's Cocaine' To Flood Streets After Gulf Crackdown
    Europe Braces For $3 A Pill ‘Poor Man’s Cocaine’ To Flood Streets After Gulf Crackdown

    Bloomberg has described that what’s been dubbed “poor man’s cocaine” at as little as $3 a pill is threatening to proliferate across the Middle East and into Europe. It’s long been part of the underground party scene in what are otherwise strict Sharia law Arab Gulf countries, but that’s poised to change after authorities have prioritized its eradication.

    “Europe is bracing for the possible influx of a drug that’s hooked the Middle East as political shifts and crackdowns in the Gulf spur producers in Syria and Lebanon to tap new markets,” a fresh report warns.

    Image via Reuters

    But while acknowledging that the synthetic stimulant Captagon has been popular for years in parts of the Middle East and North Africa, Bloomberg blames the Assad government and allied militias for its now rapid spread.

    “Selling for around $3 to $25 per tablet, the amphetamine-type pill captagon is primarily produced and trafficked by individuals and groups tied to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and his ally the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, according to the US State Department and Treasury, the UK’s Foreign Office as well as independent researchers,” Bloomberg writes.

    Saudi Arabia and Gulf allies have reportedly recently urged President Assad to stem the flow of Captagon from Syria as part of restored diplomatic ties, also at a moment Damascus has been re-embraced by the Arab League. 

    The drug was produced in the 1960s in the Germany, and in its medical form typically treats ailments like attention deficit disorders and narcolepsy. 

    It is certainly ironic and dubious that the West now widely blames the Assad government for the proliferation of Captagon, given that for much of the last decade it was anti-government insurgents known to be the heaviest users. At one point the pill even became known as “the drug of jihad”.

    Reuters has previously detailed, “It was discontinued but an illicit version of the drug continued to be produced in eastern Europe and later in the Arab region, becoming prominent in the conflict that erupted in Syria following anti-government protests in 2011.”

    The same report noted its prominence on the anti-Assad or “rebel” side. “The illicit version – also nicknamed ‘the drug of jihad’ or ‘poor man’s cocaine’ – is thought to be made of a mix of fenethylline, caffeine and other fillers. It generates focus and staves off sleep and hunger,” Reuters wrote.

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

    It has also been seen widely in war-torn places like Libya and Sudan, favored among militants precisely as an energy-booster which staves off natural cravings.

    As for pro-Assad networks allegedly being deep in the current Captagon trade, this is a trend likely fueled by Washington having for years sanctioned Syria to hell. Currently the US-led sanctions on the Syrian government are among the most brutal and far-reaching in the world, unleashing runaway inflation, hunger, and lack of electricity — and the trend in the MENA region has been that wherever poverty and political instability persists, the Captagon trade ratchets up. 

    Currently, anti-Assad activists who are attempting to thwart Gulf-Damascus rapprochement are harping on the issue in order to argue that Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and other Arab states must resist normalization with the Syrian government.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 08/18/2023 – 02:45

  • Italian PM Meloni Under Fire As Illegal Immigration Soars To New Highs
    Italian PM Meloni Under Fire As Illegal Immigration Soars To New Highs

    Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

    Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is under pressure to deliver on her electoral pledge to curb illegal immigration after embarrassing figures published this week by her country’s interior ministry revealed more than 100,000 migrants have landed on Italian shores so far this year.

    A total of 101,386 migrants landed on Italian islands or the mainland between Jan. 1 and Aug. 16, more than double the 48,000 who arrived in the same period last year, and almost triple the 34,556 landings recorded in 2021.

    With migrant activity in the Mediterranean showing no sign of slowing down, the right-wing Italian government runs the very real risk of overseeing a record number of arrivals in a single year, surpassing the 180,000 arrivals recorded at the peak of the migrant crisis in 2016.

    This is despite promises from Italian conservatives to install stricter border controls, block boat landings, and establish offshore reception centers to evaluate asylum applications.

    The Italian government’s attempts to restrict the movement of NGO-operated rescue vessels in the Mediterranean have failed to stem the flow of illegal immigration into the country, and the Italian island of Lampedusa has once again been saturated with new arrivals.

    Regional politicians are now sounding the alarm, including hardline President of Veneto Luca Zaia of the League party, who in a recent interview with local media called on just 10 percent of new arrivals to be allowed to stay in the country.

    “I’m seeing worrying numbers. Veneto is already hosting 9,000 migrants… Italy cannot be the cushion of Europe and welcome all of Africa,” he warned.

    Opposition lawmakers have sensed the opportunity to take the government to task on its immigration failures, following the Italian right’s years on the sidelines hurling insults at centrist and center-left administrations over their inability to tackle the issue.

    “For years, Meloni and Salvini taunted us every summer for the number of migrant arrivals,” said former Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.

    “Now that arrivals have doubled, they try to divert attention and pretend not to see,” added the president of the left-wing Five Star Movement.

    “They’re always shouting ‘close the ports’ and ‘the gravy train for migrants is over’ and ‘Italians first,’ but the right is demonstrating a manifest failure in its management of immigration,” claimed Stefano Bonaccini, the governor of Emilia Romagna in the country’s north.

    Meloni’s administration, despite pledging a hardline approach, has in reality advocated a far more internationalist approach to the migration issue than many expected. In a bid to distance herself from initial comparisons to far-right administrations from the 19th century, Meloni has opted to pursue European cooperation over nationalistic attitudes as much as possible.

    Italy backed down from its opposition to the European Union’s proposed Migration Pact earlier this year and announced its intention to ease restrictions on legal migrants wishing to live and work in the country.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 08/18/2023 – 02:00

  • From Press-Room Raids To Indictments, Anything Goes When The Government Piles On
    From Press-Room Raids To Indictments, Anything Goes When The Government Piles On

    Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

    “When players are piled on top of each other after a mad scramble for a loose ball, it’s a free-for-all. There are no rules. Anything goes. That’s because there’s nobody in the pile to monitor what’s going on.”

    – Mike Thomas, sports editor

    What is playing out before our eyes right now should be familiar to any fan of football: it’s called the pile on, a brutal, frenzied, desperate play to seize control and gain power while crushing the opposition.

    In this particular analogy, “we the people” are trapped at the bottom of that pile, buried under a mountain of bread-and-circus distractions, economic worries, environmental disasters, power plays, power grabs, police raids, indictments and circus politics.

    The Maui wildfires. The Trump indictments. Hunter Biden’s legal troubles. The looming 2024 presidential election. The Ukraine-Russia conflict.

    In the midst of this pile on of woes, worries and semi-manufactured crises falling with sledgehammer-like frequency, monopolizing the media narrative and eclipsing all other news, it’s difficult to stay focused on what’s really going on, and yet something is brewing.

    Pay attention.

    Caught up in the partisan boxing match that is politics today, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s real.

    The indictments against Trump, the investigation of Hunter Biden, and the chatter of the political classes aren’t real; they are more sound and fury, signifying nothing in the end.

    As Aldous Huxley observed in Brave New World Revisited:

    “Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation… Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.”

    So what is real?

    What’s real is the $5,000 fine and five-year jail sentence that could be levied against anyone found driving an illegal immigrant in their car in the state of Florida.

    What’s real are the hi-tech policing tools such as robotic dogs equipped with all manner of weaponry and surveillance technology that are rewriting the ground rules when it comes to privacy and security.

    What’s real is the North Carolina pastor who was fined $60,000 for ministering to the homeless on church property without a permit.

    What’s real is the revelation that Boston officials created and sent police a watch list of the mayor’s most vocal critics, not unlike the government’s own growing databases for anti-government dissidents.

    What’s real is what happened in Marion, Kansas, on Fri., Aug. 11, 2023, when police raided the office of the Marion County Record, blowing past the constitutional safeguards intended to safeguard the freedom of the press.

    Are you starting to get the picture yet?

    The manufactured media spectacles, piled on one after another, have a very real purpose, which is to distract us from the government’s constant encroachments on our freedoms.

    In the larger scheme of things, these individual incidents—the police raid of a small-town newspaper, a state ban on who gets to be inside your car, an outrageous fine for feeding the destitute, a politician’s use of an enemies list to silence critics—might easily go unremarked, yet they are all part of the police state’s tendency to pile on: pile on the distractions, pile on the retribution, pile on the show of force in order to completely eviscerate anything that even remotely resembles opposition.

    The police state has embarked on a ruthless, take-no-prisoners, all-out assault on anyone who even questions its authority, let alone challenges its chokehold on power.

    “We the people”—the proverbial nails to the police state’s heavy-handed tactics—will be hammered into compliance, intimidated into subservience, and terrorized into silence.

    It doesn’t matter which party dominates in Congress or the White House: all of us are in danger from these fear-inducing, mind-altering, soul-destroying, smash-your-face-in tactics.

    In this way, anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.

    Day after day, the government’s crimes against the citizenry grow more egregious, more treacherous and more tragic. And day after day, the prison walls holding the American people captive become ever more inescapable.

    The upcoming election and its aftermath will undoubtedly keep the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats, so busy fighting each other that they never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.

    Yet the winner has already been decided.

    As American satirist H.L. Mencken predicted almost a century ago:

    “All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

    In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, nothing will change.

    You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 23:40

  • China Launches War On Yuan Bears With 1000+ pip Fixing Gap Vs Estimates
    China Launches War On Yuan Bears With 1000+ pip Fixing Gap Vs Estimates

    Earlier, when discussing China’s recent surge in FX outflows, we said that while promoting growth remains a priority for Beijing, the PBOC is expected to follow up with more measures to slow the depreciation trend in the yuan,  such as more significant countercyclical factors in the daily CNY fixing, cutting FX deposit reserve requirement ratio, and/or adding FX forward sales reserve requirement.

    Of course, China can just keep doing what it has been doing now for several weeks, but never to the extent it just moments ago when the PBOC delivered its strongest ever pushback against a weaker yuan via its daily reference rate, as it sought to restore some confidence in a Chinese market that has seen an unprecedented collapse in confidence – not to mention prices – spooked by disappointing (and disappearing) data and heightened credit risks.

    The Chinese central bank set its yuan fixing at 7.2006 per dollar compared to the average estimate of 7.3047. The gap – an unprecedented 1,041 pips – was the largest gap to estimates since the poll was initiated in 2018.

    The offshore yuan extended gains to 0.2% after the fixing…

    … which was also set at a stronger level to the previous day for the first time in six sessions…

    “At this juncture, the PBOC might want to put a stop in the trend,” of a weaker yuan, said Kiyong Seong, lead Asia macro strategist for Societe Generale SA. “On a temporary basis, it’s possible the actions by policy makers can discourage more bearish betting.”

    As discussed earlier today, as part of China’s escalating support for the embattled yuan in recent days – which has so far failed to yield any notable results with the currency hitting an all time low yesterday…

    … Beijing told state-owned banks to step up intervention, while the central bank said it will resolutely prevent excessive adjustment in the yuan.

    That “request” came as the yuan touched on 7.35 per dollar, a level that Beijing has been paying close attention to as a line in the sand. The yuan traded around the 7.29 level offshore on Friday.

    “Going ahead, further measures such as potential cut to the foreign-exchange reserve-requirement ratio following the PBOC’s pledge to prevent overshoooting may prompt yuan bears to trim their short position,” said Ken Cheung, FX strategist at Mizuho.

    Still, as Bloomberg notes, the problem for China is that yuan bears had latched on to the fact that the fixing itself had been progressively weaker over the past weeks, regardless of its gap to estimates, and taken that as a sign the PBOC is ok with a slow depreciation in the currency. Of course, dismal economic data, plunging housing prices coupled with a spreading crisis in the property and shadow banking sector, and the biggest FX outflow in one year, have also hammered sentiment and led to further currency selling.

    “The PBOC has persisted in setting the fixings much stronger than expected, with the largest counter-cyclical factor since late last year, but they have been allowing the yuan to adjust,” Australia & New Zealand Banking Group strategists including Mahjabeen Zaman wrote in a note Thursday. “This is a sign that the authorities are prioritizing the need to support growth at the expense of the currency.”

    China’s currency has tumbled over 5% against the dollar this year amid a disappointing economic recovery and broad dollar strength. Adding insult to injury, while traditionally an FX decline of this magnitude would boost exports, those have also languished and in July plunged the most since the covid crash.

    Meanwhile, an unexpected PBOC rate cut earlier this week to re-ignite growth have just intensified the focus on the widening US-China yield gap and added more pressure to the yuan.

    “The authorities are preparing to draw a line in the sand and defend the currency from further weakness,” said Khoon Goh, head of Asia research at Australian & New Zealand Banking Group in Singapore. “But for a more sustained rebound in the yuan, we really need to see US 10-year bond yields come down from current high levels.”

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

    And that, as we explained yesterday, is unlikely to happen as long as the Biden admin keeps putting seasonally adjusted lipstick on the pig that is the US economy at least until the Nov 2024 election. So to all the EMs and DMs out there, condolences: your economies are about to get it because Biden has to get reelected.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 23:20

  • Victor Davis Hanson: The Great China-American Abyss
    Victor Davis Hanson: The Great China-American Abyss

    Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

    Imagine if the United States treated China in the same way it does us?

    What if American companies simply ignored Chinese copyrights and patents, and stole Chinese ideas, inventions, and intellectual property, as they pleased and with impunity?

    What if the American government targeted Chinese industries by dumping competing American export products at below the cost of production—to bankrupt Chinese competitors and corner their markets?

    What would the communist Chinese government do if a huge American spy balloon lazily traversed continental China—sending back to the United States photographic surveillance of Chinese military bases and installations?

    How would China react to American stonewalling any explanation, much less refusing to apologize for such an American attack on Chinese sovereignty?

    Envision a U.S. high-security virology lab in the Midwest, run by the Pentagon, allowing the escape of an engineered, gain-of-function deadly virus.

    Instead of enlisting world cooperation to stop the spread of the virus, the American government would lie that it sprung up from a local bat or wild possum.

    Washington would then make all its relevant military scientists disappear who were assigned to the lab, while ordering a complete media blackout.

    America would forbid Chinese scientists from contacting their American counterparts involved in the lab, despite the deaths of more than 1 million Chinese from the American-manufactured disease.

    And what if during the first days of the pandemic Washington had quietly prevented all foreign travel to the United States, while keeping open one-way direct flights from America to major Chinese cities?

    How would Beijing respond if American biotech company warehouses were discovered in rural China with unsecured vials of deadly viruses and pathogens?

    Would China be angered that it was never notified by an American company that it had left abandoned COVID and HIV viruses and malaria parasites in its facilities—along with rotting genetically engineered dead rats littering the floors with hundreds more lab animals abandoned in laboratory cages?

    What would Chairman Xi Jinping have done if American-made fentanyl was shipped in massive quantities to nearby Tibet on the Chinese border? And what if it would be deliberately repackaged there as deceptive recreational drugs and smuggled into China, where it annually killed 100,000 Chinese youth, year after year?

    What if 10,000 Americans this year illegally crossed the Indian border into China and disappeared into its interior?

    What if an allied Asian nation—such as South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan—went nuclear. And what if, in North-Korean style, it serially blustered to send one of its nuclear missiles into the major cities of China?

    What if almost monthly China discovered an American military operative teaching incognito at a major Chinese university or among the ranks of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army?

    Would China object if an American femme fatale agent was sleeping with a high-ranking Chinese official of the Chinese communist politburo?

    Or what if one of the chauffeurs of its top ranking Chinese officials was a nearly two-decade-long American agent?

    What would be the Chinese reaction if there were 350,000 American students attending schools all over the Chinese nation, with perhaps 3,000-4,000 of them actively engaged in national security espionage on behalf of the United States?

    These “what-ifs” could be expanded endlessly. But they reflect well enough the great asymmetry in the bizarre Chinese-American relationship.

    Obviously, China would not tolerate America treating it as it does the Americans.

    Why then does the imbalance continue?

    Do naïve Americans believe that the more China is indulged, the more it will respond in kind to American magnanimity?

    Does the United States believe that the more China is exposed to our supposedly radically democratic and free culture, the sooner it will become a good democratic citizen of the global community?

    Are we afraid of China, because it has four times our population, and believes its economy and military will overtake ours in a decade?

    Are we terrified that its ruthless Chinese government is completely amoral, utterly ruthless, and capable of anything?

    Or are our political, cultural, and corporate elites so compromised by their lucrative Chinese investments and joint ventures, that they prioritize profits over their own country’s national security and self-interest?

    And did the Biden family—including President Joe Biden himself—in the past receive millions of dollars from Chinese energy and investment interests?

    Did Hunter Biden’s quid pro quo decade of grifting result in millions in Chinese money filling the Biden family coffers—all in exchange for the current Biden and past Obama administrations going soft on Chinese aggression?

    No one seems able to explain the otherwise inexplicable.

    But one way to get along with China, and to regain its respect is to deal with it exactly the way it deals with the United States.

    Anything less, and America will continually be treated with even more Chinese contempt—and eventually extreme violence.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 23:00

  • The Hits Just Keep On Coming: China Suffers Biggest FX Outflow Since July 2022
    The Hits Just Keep On Coming: China Suffers Biggest FX Outflow Since July 2022

    And the hits just keep on coming for China.

    With its economy on the verge of a Japanification vicious loop, where record debts, lead to distressed selling, repayment of debt, contraction in the money supply, falling asset prices, a wave of bankruptcies, surging unemployment, a slowing economy, spiking unemployment and a crisis of confidence, which then leads to money hoarding and deflation…

    … not to mention a growing property crisis, shadow banking crisis, a youth unemployment crisis, a record collapse in foreign direct investment…

    … China is now also facing a sudden surge in FX outflows: according to Goldman’s preferred gauge of FX flows, China’s net outflows were around $26bn in July, the fastest pace of outflows since September 2022, in contrast to US$6bn inflows in June. While there was net buying of equities in both Southbound and Northbound of the stock connect in July, and on net basis small inflows through the Stock Connect channel, the goods trade FX conversion ratio declined and related inflows slowed in July, while services trade deficit widened. In addition, cross-border RMB transfers showed net outflows in the month.

    Here are the key points from the latest data:

    1. In July, China experienced $25BN in net outflows via onshore outright spot transactions, and $14BN inflows via freshly entered and canceled forward transactions. Another SAFE dataset on “cross-border RMB flows” showed outflows of US$16bn in the month. Goldman’s preferred FX flow measure therefore suggests a total US$26BN outflows in July, in comparison with US$6BN inflows in June. This was the biggest net outflow since Sept 22.

    2. The current account showed broadly balanced flows as goods trade related inflows declined meanwhile services trade related outflows rose: There was a net inflow of $18BN related to goods trade in July, lower than the $36bn in June. Goods trade surplus conversion ratio declined to 22% in July vs 50% in June on the back of continued currency depreciation. The services trade deficit was $11BN, more negative than US$8bn in June as outbound tourism continued to recover. The income and transfers account showed outflows of $6BN in July, smaller than $8BN in June.

    3. SAFE stated that foreigners continued to buy RMB assets on a net basis in July. Stock Connect flows showed net buying of $7BN of equities through northbound and $2BN net buying through southbound, which implies $5BN inflows through the Stock Connect channel, vs $3BN inflows in June. Foreigners’ holding of RMB bonds data are not released yet though.

    4. PBOC cut policy interest rates on August 15th, which added depreciation pressures on the currency. Promoting growth remains the priority, and the PBOC is expected to follow up with more measures to slow the depreciation trend in the next few weeks, such as more significant countercyclical factors in the daily CNY fixing, cutting FX deposit reserve requirement ratio, and/or adding FX forward sales reserve requirement.

    With China’s currency the weakest it has ever been, and with FX outflows accelerating sharply, one can’t help but remember the panic observed after the August 2015 devaluation, which not only shocked global markets but woke bitcoin from its long slumber as billions in Chinese savings scrambled to the safety of offshore bank accounts via one of the few still open cracks in China’s great monetary firewall. How long until we get a rerun?

    More in the full Goldman note available to pro subs.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 22:40

  • This 'Far-Right' Bit Is Getting Old
    This ‘Far-Right’ Bit Is Getting Old

    Commentary by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A great new country music song comes out, by a completely unknown performer, and takes the #1 spot in charts. The mainstream press decries the artist and song as “far-right.”

    Argentine congressman and presidential candidate Javier Milei delivers a speech with electoral proposals to agricultural businessman and representative of the agricultural unions at the Sociedad Rural Argentina in Buenos Aires on July 24, 2023. (Juan Mabromata/AFP via Getty Images)

    An exciting movie based on a true story of child trafficking blasts forward to earn more than the expected blockbuster. The mainstream press denounces the film as “far-right.”

    An insurgent campaign in Argentina by an economist rocks the election primaries. The candidate wants to crush the central bank and level state bureaucracies that interfere with freedom. The press universally decries him as “far-right.”

    [ZH: And Milei punches back]

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

    Your favorite newspaper covers facts that matter with tremendous accuracy. It’s called The Epoch Times. But your social circles says this paper is “far right.”

    You get the message? Anything that rocks the boat these days is called “far-right. The point of the phrase is to recall Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, maybe even Torquemada and Attila the Hun, and conjures up images of shock troops, black boots, goose stepping, and the darkest forms of intolerance and coercion.

    It’s all rather strange because each of the above is not about any of that. They are about the opposite. They are calling for ending oppression, curbing government, revealing the truth behind official lies, draining the swamp, ending corruption, and restoring freedom and dignity to the people against the elites.

    What in the world is this “far-right” thing the press has going on? It is designed to broadcast the message that anything that is not conventional or left-of-center is necessarily flirting with some dark interwar catastrophe. That is to say, it is a smear.

    The smear is so habitual at this point that it probably can’t be stopped. No journalist gets in trouble for deploying it. It cannot be challenged with defamation law, though it probably should be.

    In fact, the phrase “far-right” is so opaque, unfalsifiable, and still damaging that it is flung around with abandon by anyone threatened by the slightest change in society’s relationship to the state and its allied interest groups.

    Permit me a brief examination of the roots.

    If looking to the roots of right and left, historians often consider France. On the right side of the parliament sat the monarchists, established business interests, the ecclesiocrats, and champions of the Ancien Régime. On the left sat the reformers, the liberals, the free traders, the republicans, and the proponents of religious liberty.

    Is this where we get the idea? Not really. America didn’t really deploy the concepts of right and left in national parlance until the 20th century. Here the influence was not France, at least not directly, but Germany, especially the 19th century political debates between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the rise of Otto von Bismarck. It was during this time, particularly in the 1880s and 90s, that U.S. elite intellectuals frequently traveled to Germany to study under the fashionable gurus of the time.

    We are not talking about American popular culture but intellectual culture, a world set apart but ultimately decisively influential over the commanding heights of civilization itself. The U.S. Ivys were all invaded rather dramatically by a Prussian spirit: historicist, elitist, and thoroughly statist.

    Here is where we find the origin of American Progressivism. It was a Prussian/German import. And what was German politics and philosophy about in that period? The poet of the entire German intellectual scene was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a philosopher who came to prominence in the 1820s for his forecast of the inevitable return of the German empire and the unity of society, church, and state.

    At least that’s what the old Hegelians wanted, and Bismarck was their champion. They wanted a giant welfare state, a central bank, a powerful military empire, society organized as a unified family, an economically self-sufficient nation, and a state with overweening power to dominate the social order. In music, the leader was of course Richard Wagner: nationalistic, romantic, idealistic, and fundamentally statist. This was the right, or, one might say, the far-right (and yes anti-Semitism and racism were part of that).

    The left was more complicated because it was split between the old liberals as represented by champions of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johannes Brahms, who had nothing to do with Hegelianism, and the rise of the Marxists, on the other. The Marxists were the successors to the French socialists who appropriated Hegel to weave into the cockamamie economics a deterministic view of history, which ended up being called dialectical materialism.

    It’s a wonder this gibberish ever caught on but there is something strange about the Hegelian virus and the German academic mind. As Ludwig von Mises wrote, it utterly wrecked German academia for a century and a half. More than that, it had a profound impact on 20th-century politics. Marxism spread from Russia to China to Latin America, and Nazism engulfed Europe and painted the map brown.

    Do you see where this is going? The Hegelians broke into two large branches: left for the Marxists and right for the nationalists, who ended up following Hitler to the doom of the entire project. That is a more precise way to understand the left and right as it came to be understood in the U.S. context from the turn of the 20th century and forward.

    Indeed, the American Progressives were themselves split into left and right, with the left pushing great scientific planning over economic life and the right wanting to deploy national power in war and unifying society in a single familial model that forced women not to work and large-scale industry to replace agriculture.

    In other words, in this parlance, left and right were both versions of statism, a basically insane confidence that experts with power, resources, and intelligence will improve the whole over what essential freedom would yield. They are two flavors of the same poison, both accusing each other of various forms of evil.

    It’s always the same thing: confidence that intellectuals can outsmart everyone else in the peoples’ evaluation of their own problems, risks, issues, faith, and solutions. The heck of it is that it is never true. And this truth invalidates centuries of dangerous ideological fantasies which invalidate both left and right.

    So when the media complains that people doing normal things and making justifiable complaints against the system as it is are “far-right,” what they are really confessing is their own ideological commitments. They are leftists in what they imagine to be a grand ideological struggle against the right. In this struggle, they want no one to be independent.

    The tragedy comes when people take the bait. They believe that because the left is so nuts, they themselves must associate with the right. I’m telling you that none of this is necessary. You can be independent. You can reject both flavors of top-down rule.

    Freedom is an idea that has always stood apart from the insane ravings of the intellectual class. It’s a cry for plain freedom itself, which is part of the normal human moral intuition. It requires no ideological structure. It just is what it is. And in this, it is neither left nor right.

    And that’s okay. But apparently, this desire to be left alone and not be manipulated by elites is so unfamiliar these days that everyone’s aspiration for freedom itself is conscripted into an ideological tribe. The best strategy for resistance is to trust those instincts and follow your gut. You have every right to be free, and also to like the latest song, movie, to follow media with facts and truth, and to celebrate the resistance.

    We are today battling all the powers that be. That doesn’t make us left or right but rather normal and hopefully free at some point in the distant future.

    Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 22:20

  • Resignation Calls Mount After Maryland Superintendent Public Records Destroyed In Test Score Scandal
    Resignation Calls Mount After Maryland Superintendent Public Records Destroyed In Test Score Scandal

    The nation’s fourth most funded school system has a grade rigging scandal and now a cover-up. There are mounting calls for Maryland Governor Wes Moore and the State Board of Education to remove Maryland State Superintendent Mohammed Choudhury for a Maryland Public Information Act violation. 

    Investigative journalist Chris Papst from Fox45 News’ Project Baltimore published a damning report (read: here) on Feb. 6 about how 23 Baltimore City Schools, with zero students, among those tested, scored proficient on the state math exam. The story went viral, forcing the state to cover up the education blunder. 

    In a public records request, Papst’s team found metadata for 98 text messages sent or received by Superintendent Choudhury in the first quarter of this year — around the time the state changed the grades that no longer can be seen. 

    Before

    2022 MCAP data from original upload (WBFF)

    After

    2022 MCAP data from revised upload (WBFF)

    Papst believes these text messages hold the answer to why the state government made the statistical cover-up. However, Choudhury’s text on the taxpayer-funded cell phone was automatically set to delete just after 30 days — something a government watchdog group has called foul while a local community group has called for Choudhury’s resignation. 

    “Most people would take a look at this circumstance and say it’s a cover-up,” said Adam Andrzejewski, the founder of Openthebooks.com, a non-partisan government watchdog group, told Papst. 

    The public records expert said the deleted text messages are a “big problem.” He said this is grounds for the superintendent to resign. 

    Here’s where the cover-up is very obvious:

    Project Baltimore filed the initial public records request on Apr. 10. At that time, according to the metadata of the 98 text messages, there were 12 texts that were not yet 30 days old. According to state law, as soon as the public records request was filed, those documents should have been preserved. But they were not. Those 12 text messages were also deleted.

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

    Papst said, “The State Board recognizes that text messages cannot be deliberately deleted after they are requested as part of a PIA [Maryland Public Information Act] request.”

    “This needs to be investigated immediately as record concealment or destruction of the public record,” said Andrzejewski. He added, “Those records belong to the people.”

    Calls mount for Governor Moore and the State Board of Education to remove the top school board official. 

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

    Why is the top school official in the progressive state not being transparent about student academic performance?

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 22:00

  • Here's What The Democrats Should Expect If A Republican Wins Back The White House
    Here’s What The Democrats Should Expect If A Republican Wins Back The White House

    Authored by ‘Carpe Diem’ via American Greatness,

    Now that the Democrat Party has established that it’s fair game to “reimagine” the rule of law — in an attempt to jail a former president of the United States for a maximum sentence of 700 plus years — or Moses’s lifespan three times over, that benighted party should be fully prepared to accept the consequences, in the not so unlikely event that a Republican takes back the White House come January 2025.

    Here is what should occur with a new GOP administration post haste.

    A special counsel should immediately be appointed to investigate how the Biden family raked in millions of dollars from some of our biggest adversaries, including China and Russia, as well as Romania and Ukraine, while Joe Biden was vice president.

    If the evidence becomes overwhelming (which it already appears to be) and it is uncovered that the Biden family did not provide any actual services to these shady oligarchs and foreign nationalists — other than using the office of the vice presidency to enrich themselves — then nothing less than a handful of indictments for bribery, extortion, and treason should be levied against Joe, his son Hunter, and anyone else involved in this disgraceful scheme.

    Simultaneously, a special counsel should be appointed to look into Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign to determine what she knew about the phony Russian dossier that her campaign funded and that was used in an attempt to take down a duly elected president of the United States.

    If the evidence is overwhelming (as it already appears to be) that Clinton not only knew about the dossier, but greenlit the idea — then a series of indictments for racketeering, falsifying business records and campaign finance violations should immediately be levied against her and any of her associates who were co-conspirators, including Jake Sullivan, Biden’s current incompetent National Security Advisor, former president Barack Obama, former disgraced FBI director James Comey, former CIA director and serial liar John Brennan, and perhaps the biggest fraud of them all, Rep. Adam Schiff.

    A special counsel should also be appointed to look at the behavior and state of mind of all 51 former intelligence “experts” who appeared to have knowingly and deliberately lied and defrauded the American public during the heart of the 2020 presidential election, when they claimed that Hunter Biden’s authentic and incriminating laptop was a Russian plant.

    If it can be proven that these “experts” knowingly and deliberately lied to the American people, then indictments, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, should immediately be brought against every single one of these corrupt individuals.

    A special counsel should also be appointed to look into what communication occurred between Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Jack Smith regarding the federal indictment of Donald Trump, as well as any communication that occurred between the White House, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, regarding possible indictments of Trump.

    If it turns out, there was communication and an attempt to “get Trump” then all of these individuals should be tried under 18 U.S. Code § 201 for Bribery of public officials and witnesses.

    Finally, a special counsel should look into every single Democrat politician, CNN news anchor, or Washington Post “reporter” who publicly supported and encouraged the 2020 Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots that left 2,000 police officers blinded or injured, more than two dozen people dead, and property damage that reached $2 billion.

    Anyone who promoted the summer of mayhem, death and destruction, including Kamala Harris who tweeted her support to bail out violent arsonists, as well as failed anchors, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon who encouraged and were sympathetic to these criminals that went around terrorizing communities night after night for months, should be indicted under 18 U.S. Code § 373 for Solicitation to commit a crime of violence.

    If everything you just read sounds completely absurd, remember the rule of law doesn’t matter anymore.

    I didn’t set the standards, the Stalinist regime in power did.

    As Billy Joel might say, we didn’t start the fire.

    *  *  *

    Carpe Diem is the pseudonym for a writer who was a speechwriter in the Trump Administration.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 21:40

  • "Unlivable" – Iconic San Fran Business Blasts Democrats For "Litany Of Destructive" Policies
    “Unlivable” – Iconic San Fran Business Blasts Democrats For “Litany Of Destructive” Policies

    John Chachas, the owner of iconic luxury department store Gump’s, remained silent for years, much like many other business owners in San Francisco, as violent crime soared. This silence stemmed from concerns over the fear of being canceled by a thousand angry ‘Karens’ for pointing out that progressive policies were transforming the once beautiful town into a shit-covered hellhole. However, Chachas, like many other business owners who once thought they were powerless, have realized they have a voice, nevertheless the First Amendment, and railed against Democrats in the state. 

    “Today, as we prepare for our 166th holiday season at 250 Post Street, we fear this may be our last because of the profound erosion of this city’s conditions,” Chachas wrote in an open letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, Mayor London Breed and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, published as a paid ad in the Sunday edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.

    Chachas, who acquired Gump’s in bankruptcy in 2018, continued, “The ramifications of Covid policies advising people to abandon their offices are only beginning to be understood. Equally devastating have been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.” 

    He argued that current downtown conditions are “unlivable for its residents, unsafe for our employees, and unwelcoming to visitors from around the world,” adding the failed metro area suffers “from a “tyranny of the minority” – behavior and actions of the few that jeopardize the livelihood of the many.” 

    Chachas concluded: “We believe failed public policies must be abandoned and a renewed focus must be brought to restore the city we all love.” 

    We have some bad news for the store owner — the open letter is several years too late. There’s been a major exodus of chain stores like Whole Foods, Anthropologie, Office Depot, and CB2 from downtown, all citing out-of-control crime. Research firm Coresight said more than 39 retail stores have closed up shops in Union Square since 2020. 

    A commercial real estate crisis has unfolded, with parts of the metro area overrun with criminals, shit-covered streets, and a lack of office workers that make the local economy thrive. The latest is an 11-story office building on Sixty Spear St. dumped for a 66% discount versus the most recently assessed property value of $121 million. Also, things are so bad that some building owners are just walking away from properties:

    And defaulting… 

    We have shown readers parts of the downtown are nothing but… 

    People are even taking “Downtown Doom Loop Walking Tour” tours of the imploded metro area… 

    As we pointed out, Mayor London Breed made an embarrassing U-Turn to fund the police after her decision to defund the police backfired. 

    You get what you vote for. To the remaining business owners: Where were your voices several years ago? 

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

    Business owners in progressive metro areas across the country should consider taking a page out of Chachas’ book by placing ads in local newspapers highlighting the unintended consequences of failed progressive policies. The more folks understand that out-of-control crime is linked to failed policies — the quicker voters can hold these folks accountable at the election booths. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 21:20

  • How Did Big Pharma Buy So Many Governments?
    How Did Big Pharma Buy So Many Governments?

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

    Among the many alarming revelations from the “Facebook Files” is the discovery of a strange official policy that dominated the platform in the COVID-19 years.

    “For content that doesn’t meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions,” the company wrote on July 16, 2021.

    “For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts. Similarly, posts questioning whether you get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it’s government overreach. We demote those. That’s not false information but it leads to a vaccine-negative environment.”

    This formerly trusted platform had become a major source of news for millions. Users believed it to be an authentic expression of what their friends were thinking and doing. It turns out that, regarding any injury caused by the vaccine, people were silenced. Meanwhile, major media was screaming at everyone that these shots are necessary, safe, and effective—none of which was true. But users didn’t know that this was occurring.

    The policy was pushed by the federal government on all major social media platforms, which massively distorted public debate. Anyone who spoke about the downsides of the vaccine was treated as a crank and a public danger. All claims that contradicted the government and pharmaceutical line were demoted or deleted for creating a “vaccine-negative environment.”

    I was personally denounced in many articles for raising questions about the shots.

    It’s no wonder, then, why it has been so incredibly difficult to gain any real clarity about the risk profile of these shots. The age gradient of risk was widely obscured throughout the entire period, all in the interest of imposing universal lockdowns and then shots for everyone, even those who were at zero risk from the virus.

    To this day, there’s no honest discussion of this topic in official circles. No major media or tech company has apologized. We only have the above policy documentation because the House of Representatives under Republican control forced Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to cough it up. Now, we know that the official policy of government and its allied tech companies was to keep the public in the dark.

    The extent of the damage and death caused by the vaccine is left to independent researchers who are working from a tsunami of anecdotes and hard-to-find data. There’s a concerted effort to cover it all up, no doubt. It’s all done on behalf of the winning pharmaceutical companies and their deployment of a new platform technology for what they call vaccines, even though mRNA shots would never have been called that a few years ago.

    Some people aren’t surprised by the power of this industry. I am. It’s all new to me. When the lockdowns came, my operating theory was that a bunch of scary intellectuals were using the social order as an experiment in pathogenic control, one destined to fail. I never imagined a larger agenda aside from an appalling exercise of power. I certainly never imagined that pharma was the hand in the glove.

    When we first started hearing news of the coming antidote, I dismissed this possibility out of hand. I knew from my reading that vaccines were only workable for stable viruses with unchanging profiles. Smallpox, measles, mumps, polio, and others qualify. But a coronavirus is fast-mutating, especially because we knew that it spread widely because of a fairly low fatality rate.

    Incredibly, I never imagined that a vaccine for such a virus would ever gain approval. My operating understanding of the Food and Drug Administration was that it was bureaucratically risk-averse. It was more inclined to refuse approval than to grant it prematurely. This was wrong. Using the excuse of emergency, and smearing and deprecating all therapeutics as a condition for emergency approval, it sailed through.

    When uptake on the shots was low, the government went hardcore with mandates. Major cities actually segregated based on vaccine status. There were attempts to implement digital passports. These mostly flopped. People quit their jobs and moved to new cities, and vast numbers somehow managed to avoid the needle. Uptake was lower on the boosters and bivalents, which similarly sailed through the approval process.

    How can we explain this?

    The regulatory agencies get half or more of their own funding from pharmaceutical companies. Media broadcasts the propaganda because three-quarters or more of their advertising revenue comes from pharma. The development of the shots themselves benefitted from enormous government grants. The companies that are given approval are then given a complete patent monopoly on the drugs, so that they can take legal action against all attempts to reproduce them.

    More than anything else, these vaccines benefit from protection from liability for any harm that they cause.

    Just think about this.

    Why would any government ever grant such an exclusion from liability?

    It makes no sense. If the shots are safe, indemnification wouldn’t be necessary. If they aren’t safe, such indemnification would be grossly irresponsible.

    Nonetheless, in 1986, lawmakers approved 42 U.S. Code § 300aa–22, “No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable in a civil action for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death associated with the administration of a vaccine after October 1, 1988, if the injury or death resulted from side effects that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings.”

    The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act of 2005 further codified this.

    This was invoked in March 2020. The government might as well have announced to the country and the world: We’re coming to hurt you. It’s the very opposite of the Hippocratic Oath. Indeed, this case shows why such an oath was necessary in the first place.

    Adding all of this together, you have a completely indefensible industrial monopoly in operation and fully out in the open.

    These days, the FDA, having driven out anyone with integrity from its ranks, routinely approves drugs without proper successful trials. It seems to happen daily: RSV shots and an over-the-counter birth control pill are two recent cases. The new head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) introduced herself to the public with a big push for everyone to get the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine, especially infants.

    There’s simply no theory of political economy, medicine, political science, philosophy, or ethics—whether ancient or modern, left or right—that can justify such an absurdly dangerous system. It would be one thing if such an industrial monopoly made a mess of a single sector of life, but our times have revealed something much more shocking. Pharma has essentially bought most governments in the West and converted them into doing their bidding.

    This is simply intolerable. I’ve just about had it with the claims that the adverse effects of these vaccines are rare. We don’t know that. In any case, “rare” has no firm definition. Plus, if I’m dead on the street from having been run over by a bus, it does me no good for bystanders to stand around proclaiming that my death is rare. Indeed for me, my chance of getting killed by a bus is ex post facto 100 percent.

    What the vaccine-injured need is compassion, public attention, care, and compensation. It adds gross insult to injury to demote their plight as irrelevant because knowing about it contributes to a “vaccine-negative environment.” This isn’t the Soviet Union, and we don’t live in a country founded as a biomedical security state ruled by pharmaceutical monopolies using the people as guinea pigs in genetic experiments.

    The whole machinery must come to an immediate end, starting with the end of indemnification against harm. It never should have been granted. Moderna and Pfizer are already facing dramatic declines in stock valuation after the discrediting of their shots. What would happen to their stocks if they bore some financial repercussions for the damages that they have caused?

    Brownstone Institute is cooperating with The Epoch Times for a showing of the marvelous film “Unseen Crisis,” which is about vaccine injury. Finding a venue to host the film wasn’t easy. As soon as the “independent” theaters in town found out the subject, they figured out a way not to accept new showings. Fascinating.

    The crisis is indeed unseen. It must be seen if we expect to regain our status as a civilized and self-governing people.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 21:00

  • Project Veritas Implodes Six Months After Firing James O'Keefe
    Project Veritas Implodes Six Months After Firing James O’Keefe

    Update: PV CEO Tom O’Hara is out, and George Skakel 2 is in. So while it appears that many of the staff have been let go, the organization is still operating.

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

    *  *  *

    Project Veritas has reportedly imploded roughly six months after bad actors infiltrated the undercover whistleblower organization and orchestrated the ouster of founder James O’Keefe.

    Earlier Thursday, the Project Veritas X account tweeted: “SOS Hannah Giles just fired us all,” before it was quickly deleted.

    Sources tell the Post Millennial, however, that they’ve indeed ‘all been fired.’

    https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsMore details were provided by the Post Millennial:

    Giles, who became notorious for starring in the ACORN video with founder and former CEO James O’Keefe, took over for O’Keefe after he was summarily pushed out by the board of directors. She took over as CEO only to destroy the company entirely.

    “She came to all hands in April with her fat sidekick Ben Wetmore and all they did for 3 days was talk shit about James and relitigate all the terrible things he did to her/them 10-12 years ago. I knew right then her entire agenda was revenge,” a source said.

    On-air talent Christian Hartsock, James Lalino were both laid off after Giles told staff that a restructuring would be underway. Kalen Eriksson, Jaime Phillips, Alyssa Dehen, were also fired. The terminations were done via a Zoom call with HR, with a few of those in the New York office. Giles did not make an appearance.

    “She’s a lying sack of sh*t,” a source told The Post Millennial. “No one respected her anyway.”

    On Monday, five people were fired according to the report – including a more recent hire, producer Pam Browne, who was brought in by O’Keefe last year. Others who were fired were allegedly done so in retaliation for their undercover work (!?). The remaining employees are ‘primarily admin,’ after around 20 people were fired on Thursday.

    “Since James quit, the donations dried up…the donations never resumed,” one source told the Post Millennial, adding “The board were desperate to bring Hannah on board because they thought it would be cute but the problem is she’s a charlatan and a fraud. Everything she’s ever done has been a failure and she lied to everyone claiming she had all these donors she could bring in.”

    James O’Keefe, meanwhile, can be found here at his new venture, O’Keefe Media Group (OMG).

    Read the rest here…

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 20:40

  • Child Social Media Stars Can Now Sue 'Influencer' Parents Under New Illinois Law
    Child Social Media Stars Can Now Sue ‘Influencer’ Parents Under New Illinois Law

    Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Child social media stars in Illinois can now sue their “influencer” parents for pocketing the profits made from videos shared online under new legislation signed into law by Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Aug. 11.

    The logos of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat on mobile devices in a combination of 2017–2022 photos. (AP Photo)

    The legislation, Senate Bill 1782, was introduced by state Sen. David Koehler, a Democrat, in February and passed by lawmakers in Illinois—where Democrats hold a supermajority—in May with bipartisan support.

    It is set to go into effect on July 1, 2024.

    Under the measure, the Child Labor Law is amended to ensure that children under 16 who are featured in significant portions of their parents’ online videos—such as vlogs uploaded by their parents across various social media platforms—are fairly compensated for their work.

    The legislation also allows minors who were “engaged in the work of vlogging,” also known as “kidfluencers,” to request their parents permanently delete any video footage of them once they reach the age of 18.

    Additionally, the bill ensures that parents who feature their children in online videos or vlogs set aside a specified amount of gross earnings into a trust account for their children, who may access it once they reach 18.

    Illinois is the first U.S. state to sign such legislation into law.

    Kids Working in ‘Digital Environments’ Must Be Protected

    In a statement after the bill was signed into law, Mr. Koehler said the rise of social media has granted children new opportunities to earn a profit but noted how some parents or guardians are choosing to take the earnings for their own use.

    “Many parents have taken this opportunity to pocket the money, while making their children continue to work in these digital environments,” said Mr. Koehler. “This new digital age has given us tremendous opportunities to connect with one another, but it’s also presented legal issues that have never existed before. We need to work with our children to see the problems they face and tackle them head-on before any further harm is done.”

    Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker speaks during a rally at Federal Building Plaza in Chicago on April 27, 2022. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

    Mr. Koehler noted the legislation was inspired by Shreya Nallamothu, a 15-year-old high school student in Koehler’s district who had initially raised her concerns about the rise in child influencers and a lack of protections for them.

    “When scrolling on social media, I always saw young children and families, called family vlog channels, posting videos online. After finding that users could make money off of platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, I learned that, often, these kids are made to participate in videos without any guarantee of the income generated from the content,” said Shreya. “I wanted to work with Senator Koehler to protect the money that these kids have rightfully earned.”

    Specifically under Senate Bill 1782, parents must set aside a portion of their gross earnings from the video content that includes the “likeness, name, or photograph of the minor” into a trust fund for the child that can be accessed upon adulthood.

    Billion Dollar Industry

    The percentage of earnings is calculated based on how heavily the child features in the content. According to the legislation, a minor under the age of 16 must be compensated if, within a 30-day period, they feature in at least 30 percent of a video or online content for which their parent or guardian is being paid.

    However, the law only applies to video content made in Illinois that generates more than 10 cents per view.

    Parents who fail to comply with the new legislation could be sued by their child or children once they become adults for punitive and actual damages, according to the law.

    The legislation comes amid a booming child influencer industry.

    According to Humanium.org, highly successful child influencers generate roughly $26 million a year through advertising and the sharing of sponsored content, but many are under constant pressure to produce content on a regular basis.

    However, many studies have also noted the negative impacts social media can have on a minor’s well-being, including increased feelings of depression and anxiety.

    Research conducted by the University of Bath and published in May found that individuals who stopped using social media for one week saw substantial improvements in their well-being, depression, and anxiety.

    “The internet provides more opportunities for children to display their creativity than ever before,” a spokesperson for Mr. Pritzker told Gizmodo in a statement Monday. “In the event that minors are able to profit from that creativity, they deserve to be shielded from parents who would attempt to take advantage of their child’s talents and use them for their own financial gain.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 20:20

  • California Braces As Hilary Upgraded To 'Major Hurricane'
    California Braces As Hilary Upgraded To ‘Major Hurricane’

    Update (2006ET): Hilary has been upgraded to a ‘major’ Category 3 hurricane, and is expected to become a Category 4 hurricane by late Thursday night or early Friday morning. According to the National Weather Service, it will most likely hit Eastern San Diego County on Monday at around 6 a.m. as a tropical storm.

    Heavy rainfall may produce areas of flash flooding over part of the Baja California Peninsula between Late Friday and late Sunday, with hurricane-force wind impacts possible. 

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

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

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

    *  *  *

    Update (1215ET):

    Tropical Storm Hilary was upgraded to hurricane status off Mexico’s Pacific coast, according to the National Hurricane Center. 

    When NHC published the advisory early Thursday, Hurricane Hilary was churning several hundred miles southeast of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and was moving west-northwest. Winds are sustained over 75 miles per hour, with higher gusts. 

    “Hilary rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to hurricane Wednesday into Thursday, and could top out at Category 4 intensity by Friday or Saturday,” The Weather Channel said. 

    Forecast models show Hilary could begin to impact parts of Mexico’s Baja Peninsula on Friday or Saturday, with Southern California in the crosshairs on Sunday or Monday. 

    Stefanie Sullivan, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in San Diego, told NYTimes: 

    The worst-case scenario for Southern California would be if the track shifted farther west and made landfall in California, which could produce much stronger winds and larger surf. The only tropical cyclone to truly make landfall in Southern California was an unnamed storm in 1939 that made landfall in Long Beach.

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

    Latest rainfall forecast via The Weather Channel:

    Meanwhile, the tropics are awakening in the Atlantic. 

    All eyes are on Hilary this weekend. 

    *   *   * 

    Tropical Storm Hilary formed earlier Wednesday off Mexico’s coast in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. It’s forecasted to bring heavy rainfall and strong winds to parts of Southern California and the US Southwest at the end of the weekend or early next week. 

    Hillary has sustained winds of 40 miles per hour, with higher gusts, according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm is moving west-northwest toward Baja California — and is 470 miles from Manzanillo, Mexico, around 1100 ET. 

    Here’s the five-day forecast track for the storm:

    “It appears that a corridor will open up between a sharp dip in the jet stream along the West Coast and the super-strong heat dome over the central US,” FOX Weather hurricane specialist Bryan Norcross said.

    Norcross continued, “Tropical moisture from likely-Hilary has a good chance of spreading north in that river of air into the highly populated areas west of the Southern California mountains and the desert areas to the east.”

    According to Fox Weather, Southern California is expected to receive between 2-3 inches of rain, with some areas getting 3-5 inches.

    While the Eastern Pacific hurricane season has been active, over in the Atlantic, it’s been quiet: “Historical Lull”: Global Major Hurricane Activity Hits Four Decade Low.

     

     

     

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 20:06

  • Student Loan Payments To Exceed Mortgage For Some Borrowers
    Student Loan Payments To Exceed Mortgage For Some Borrowers

    Thanks to people locking in historically low mortgage rates during the pandemic, many US borrowers will pay more on their student loans than their mortgage after a three-year pandemic-era student loan pause ends next month, Bloomberg reports.

    28-year-old Kentucky physical therapist Fikret Sabic, for example, will have to start making student loan payments of $1,130 per month to satisfy the student loan obligation. This is nearly $300 more than he and his wife Emina are paying on their mortgage.

    Fikret and Emina Sabic.Source: Fikret Sabic

    In total, Sabic is carrying around $94,000 in student debt from his undergraduate biology degree and doctorate of physical therapy, both from Western Kentucky University.

    The pandemic pause on student loan payments helped the couple buy a home in 2020 for $207,000 with a 3.25% interest rate, less than half what borrowing costs are now. Sabic knew debt payments would restart at some point, and he and Emina have been preparing their budget, but they still expect it to be difficult. -Bloomberg

    “It really does slow down a lot of your life decisions when you have such a big burden monthly to have to pay,” said Sabic, who agreed to said burden and then bought a house. That said, borrowers can be cut a little slack when factoring in crippling inflation thanks to ‘Bidenomics.’

    As Americans face the resumption of student loan payments, many will be cutting back on spending to make ends meet. Experts are predicting a wave of delinquencies hitting credit card, auto loans and student debt payments as people struggle to make ends meet.

    While the average student loan payment before the pandemic was about $400, one in five borrowers will be paying more than $500 a month. Almost 7% of debt holders face bills of $1,000 or more. At the same time, about 23.7 million homes in the US have a mortgage payment of $1,000 or less, according to Black Knight. -Bloomberg

    In Bloomberg‘s second example, Lexington, South Carolina attorney Chase Keibler and his wife Laura face $2,100 per month student loan payments next month – vs. just $1,850 for their mortgage. Chase has $75,000 in federal debt which he used to obtain an undergraduate degree in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and his law degree from the University of South Carolina. Laura has around $70,000 of debt, which is a mixture of public and private debt.

    In July 2020, the couple paid $346,000 and locked in a 3.2% mortgage rate.

    Now, they say the addition of their student loan obligations feels “daunting,” especially now that they’ve got two children under the age of two and Laura now a stay-at-home mom.

    “I expected to have law school debt, but it’s an incredible amount of money that is guaranteed out every month for the foreseeable future,” said Keibler, who also signed on the dotted line and then bought a house and had two kids and agreed that his wife would leave the workforce to raise their children.

    Laura and Chase Keibler pictured with their two children.Source: Chase Keibler

    More than rent too?

    It’s not just homeowners – renters are about to feel the pain too. Bloomberg highlights the plight of one Molly McGhee, a 28-year-old novelist living in New York, whose student loan bill will exceed her rent.

    The 28-year-old novelist has $120,000 in public and private loans from her undergrad degree at Champlain College in Vermont and her MFA in writing at Columbia, where she also works as an adjunct professor. She will soon pay $1,270 a month on her debt. That’s more than her $1,100 share of the $2,500 rent for an apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where she lives with her partner.

    McGhee said she needed to get an MFA to be taken seriously in her field, but her paychecks haven’t made up for that investment. She and her partner are putting off goals like getting married because of the loans. -Bloomberg

    “I’m finding myself at a juncture where I’m really considering having to move back home to Tennessee and get an office job somewhere where the cost of living is way less,” she said.

    Would could imagine that taking on $120k of debt wouldn’t be tenable on a budding novelist’s salary in NYC.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 20:00

  • China Imports The Most Iranian Oil In A Decade
    China Imports The Most Iranian Oil In A Decade

    By Tsvetana Paraskova of Oilprice.com

    China is expected to import as much as 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil from Iran in August, the highest since 2013, per estimates from data intelligence firm Kpler cited by Bloomberg.

    During the period January to July 2023, China received on average 917,000 bpd of oil from Iran, according to Kpler’s estimates.  

    The world’s largest crude oil importer, China, has been ramping up purchases of cheaper Iranian crude this year as competition with India for cheap Russian crude supply has intensified. Earlier this year, many private Chinese refiners in the Shandong province started buying increasing volumes of Iranian crude as competition for Russian oil from China’s major state-held refiners and from Indian buyers has made Moscow’s barrels relatively more expensive.

    There isn’t official data on Iranian imports into China, so the market relies on tanker-tracking companies that aim to capture the true picture of how much of Iran’s oil, sanctioned by the U.S. and going to very few destinations these days, is being shipped to China.

    Commenting on China’s crude oil imports in July, analysts at Vortexa said last week that private Chinese refiners, the so-called teapots, are likely to boost imports of Iranian oil, especially after Russia has pledged to reduce the volume of its oil exports this month and next.

    “With lower Russian crude supplies, Chinese teapot refiners that largely boosted Russian grades imports since Q2 last year, are expected to lean towards the deeply discounted Iranian barrels or other heavy feedstocks, as Shandong partially re-allowed non-crude imports recently,” Emma Li, China Market Analyst at Vortexa, said.  

    “State-run refiners, on the other hand, will likely import more crude from West Africa and the Americas, as attractive light-sweet crude margins encourage spot purchases against rising Saudi and Russian crude prices.”

    Meanwhile, Iran’s oil exports have recently jumped to a five-year high of 1.4 million bpd, and the Islamic Republic is looking to boost its oil production to 3.5 million bpd by the end of September.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 19:40

  • 9/11 Families Told That Plotters May Not Face Death Penalty
    9/11 Families Told That Plotters May Not Face Death Penalty

    Almost 22 years after their loved ones were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, surviving family members have been given official notice that government prosecutors are considering plea agreements that could remove the possibility of death penalties for five men accused of organizing the worst terrorist attack on US soil. 

    Those defendants, all imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people. 

    Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: The alleged mastermind of 9/11 (AP photo)

    The notification letter, obtained by the Associated Press, informed 9/11 families that, “The Office of the Chief Prosecutor has been negotiating and is considering entering into pre-trial agreements (PTAs)…[While no PTA] has been finalized, and may never be finalized, it is possible that a PTA in this case would remove the possibility of the death penalty.”

    Prosecutors assured the 9/11 families they’d take their opinions on the matter into consideration, giving them until Monday to provide their input to the FBI’s victim services division. 

    Jim Riches, father of a fallen 9/11 firefighter, Jimmy Riches, told AP that he laughed bitterly when he received the letter on Monday, as he’s running low on hope that justice will ever be served. “How can you have any faith in it?” he asked. Riches has concluded the military tribunal system has been a failure and that the alleged 9/11 conspirators should have been prosecuted in civilian courts — as many other terrorists have been. 

    United Flight 175, moments before striking the World Trade Center’s South Tower (Robert Clark, AP)

    The prosecution has been severely hamstrung by the US government’s use of torture in interrogating the defendants. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month, profoundly endangering the admissibility of his statements. Other torture techniques were widely employed against 9/11 detainees. Collaborating with the deep state, Hollywood wants you to believe that torture was fruitful, but credible insiders say otherwise. 

    Peter Brady, whose father was killed on 9/11, said the prosecution is about “holding people responsible, and they’re taking that away with this plea.” He wants a full prosecution, not a plea deal. 

    9/11 families who’ve been pursuing a civil case against the government of Saudi Arabia tell AP they’d want a plea agreement to stipulate that the defendants would be made available for questioning about Saudi links to the attacks. Declassified FBI documents have revealed a variety of links between Saudi government employees and agents — particularly in the Saudi embassy in Washington and the consulate in Los Angeles — and the 9/11 hijackers and those who aided them. 

    Thumairy, a Saudi consular employee, and Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi agent, helped two hijackers get situated in southern California (via Stark Realities)

    To the extent 9/11 defendants may have damning things to say about Saudi bureaucrats and royals providing financial and logistical aid to al Qaeda, the US government may have ulterior motives for pursuing plea agreements that ensure those things aren’t said in open court. Saudi Arabia aside, the US government could face direct embarrassment, considering al Qaeda sprang to life from American fertilization of Islamic extremism. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 19:20

  • Saudi Arabia Inks $1.3BN Worth Of Housing, Infrastructure Deals With China
    Saudi Arabia Inks $1.3BN Worth Of Housing, Infrastructure Deals With China

    Via The Cradle,

    Representatives from Saudi Arabia and China signed several housing and infrastructure agreements worth $1.33 billion on the sidelines of the Saudi-Chinese Business Forum hosted by Beijing on Wednesday.

    “[A total of] 12 agreements and memorandums of understanding were signed between the Saudi side and Chinese companies in the fields of infrastructure and financing,” Saudi Minister of Municipal and Rural Affairs and Housing Majid al-Hogail, who presided over Wednesday’s forum, said in a tweet.

    Getty Images

    Although the names of the companies involved were not made public, a press release from the Saudi government revealed that Hogail met with representatives of the Chinese state-owned investment conglomerate CITIC to discuss “construction in Saudi Arabia and green housing technology.”

    “These partnerships are set to foster advancements in key areas, including five focused on real estate developments, signaling a promising trajectory for the mutual growth of the Kingdom and China,” the state-run Saudi Press Agency (SPA) said on Thursday.

    During his speech at the forum, Hogail stressed Riyadh’s “dedication to enhancing its partnership with China” as he spoke about several recent achievements, including the summits led by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Saudi Arabia in December.

    “With the construction of over 300,000 housing units across 17 Saudi cities, covering an area of over 150 million square meters., and valued at over [$26.66 billion], the kingdom holds significant investment opportunities,” Hogail emphasized.

    Saudi Arabia has significantly increased its economic cooperation with China over the past few years as the kingdom moves away from Washington’s sphere of influence.

    In June, during the 10th Arab-China Business Conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Investment signed $10 billion worth of investment agreements with Chinese companies. Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan said in a speech during the conference that China remains the largest trading partner of Arab countries, with the volume of trade exchange reaching $430 billion in 2022, up 31 percent from the previous year.

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

    Furthermore, Saudi Aramco acquired a $3.4 billion stake in the Chinese petrochemical firm Rongsheng Petrochemical Co. Ltd last month. The two countries are also in talks to allow exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to list on each other’s stock exchanges.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 19:00

  • Leftist Establishment Dismayed By Rise Of "Populist" Candidate In Argentina
    Leftist Establishment Dismayed By Rise Of “Populist” Candidate In Argentina

    The Argentina peso plunged recently on the news that “populist” economist and candidate Javier Milei, which many describe as a libertarian, won the Argentina primaries with 30% of the vote.  The uproar from establishment media sources and western officials has been growing as the reality sinks in – Milei might just win the general election in October and dismantle nearly every socialist institution in the country once he’s in office.  

    Argentina’s economy has suffered under a series of progressive leaders, including Fernando de la Rúa, who was forced to resign after the inflationary crash of 2001 that led to mass civil unrest.  Then there was Cristina Fernández de Kirchner – who was president of Argentina for two terms between 2007 and 2015.  She has been arrested and sentenced to six years in prison for abuse of power and fraud, using her position to award at least 51 public works contracts and funneling over $1 billion to a friend of her husband through a shell company.  This occurred during the resurgence of inflation in Argentina which has now hit crisis levels under the current leadership (Alberto Fernandez) who is considered “center left.”

    Needless to say, the citizens of Argentina are fed up with the relentless lack of change and the relentless economic decline.  It is this same decline that has the International Monetary Fund circling the floundering nation like a hungry shark. 

    Enter Javier Milei, who is running on a platform of radical change which would include the dissolution of numerous socialist institutions and the very central bank which has led Argentina into multiple fiscal crisis events.  In a YouTube campaign video, Milei announced he would disband a number of ministries that he deems unnecessary. “Culture ministry – out! Environment – out! Ministry of women and gender diversity – out! Public works – out! Science – out! Labour and social security – out! Ministry of education and indoctrination – out!”

    Argentinians who support Milei suggest he is a “punishment vote” against the previous leftist regimes for their economic trespasses.  The sentiment has a similar ring to the widespread support in the US for Donald Trump as a message to establishment elites that the populace will no longer accept the status quo.  Whether or not Milei or Trump can or would institute any longstanding changes to an oligarch infested system is really a secondary issue; the public is simply making it clear that they are aware of the game being played with their future.

    The corporate media seems to have been caught off-guard by the popularity of Milei (just as they were caught off guard by Trump).  He was initially treated as a “joke” candidate with little chance of success, but now they are quickly moving to compile a list of buzzwords and negative descriptors as a means to undermine his image.  Thus far, they don’t have much – They cite his policies as dangerous and tie him to Trump as often as possible, while also noting his apparent history as a “tantric sex coach” with “long unkempt hair” who wants to “allow human organ sales.” 

    The truth is that Milei has not been shy about his political intentions.  He plans to cut government spending, do away with the largely socialized healthcare system, eliminate the public school system which he sees as a network of indoctrination centers and replace it with a voucher system, eliminate climate change policies and propaganda, eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion indoctrination, eliminate gender identity indoctrination for children, he values private property, wants to ban abortion, wants to return gun rights to Argentinians, wants to eliminate the central bank and flies the Gadsden Flag at his rallies. 

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

    All in all, he might be one of the greatest political candidates in South American history.  Milei’s biggest mistake is his dollerization plan, which would essentially replace the peso with a dollar that is likely on the verge of its own implosion as the BRICS move to unseat the currency as the world reserve. But his social policies are being met with increasing approval among the public, indicating a growing disgust with far-left ideology.  

    He has certainly drawn the attention of the leftist and globalist guard.  Only two days after Milei’s primary win, the Biden Administration is discussing a possible meeting with Brazilians President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at next month’s United Nations General Assembly in New York.   The expectation is that Biden will be pushing Brazil to reduce economic trade with Russia and China, but that Milei will be a primary topic of interest as well.  

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 08/17/2023 – 18:40

Digest powered by RSS Digest