Today’s News 18th February 2022

• So Predictable… Latest Propaganda Claims Liberty Activists Are Russian Pawns
  So Predictable… Latest Propaganda Claims Liberty Activists Are Russian Pawns

  Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

  A common misconception about the establishment power brokers of our era is that they have “created” a vast system of corruption and government control and that this reflects an element of “genius” on their parts. In reality, they only inherited the existing system from the elitists that came before them, and those elites inherited the framework from their forebears. One can already see the next generation of globalists being groomed to carry the torch of centralization, and maybe they will push the agenda forward a step further, or maybe they will be the generation that blows up the whole thing and leaves it in shambles.

  

  The construct of multi-generational conspiracy is nothing new. It has happened over and over again throughout history from monarchies to papacies to assassins, cartels and the mob. It has the advantage of superseding time, because it is not necessarily limited to the lifespan of a single set of conspirators. It can carry on forever if it is not identified and directly eliminated.

  That said, one of the biggest problems of nepotism within any empire, whether openly dominant or ruling from the shadows, is that power is often passed on to those who show fealty rather than those who show promise. That is to say, nepotism neglects to take intelligence and ingenuity into account.

  Something I have said for a very long time is that psychopathic and evil people do not have the capacity to create. They have no new ideas, no complex imagination and no intuitive intelligence. To make up for this inability to innovate they rely on theft of ideas from smarter and more creative thinkers, ideas they believe they can exploit. They also pursue the destruction of all ideas that might disrupt their efforts. Finally, they are highly repetitive and robotic in their decision making processes. They merely look back at plots that worked for them in the past and they copy and paste.

  This makes them incredibly predictable. If you have studied the behaviors and habits of the average narcissistic sociopath (psychopaths) then you understand exactly how globalists tend to think and plan. These people are not complicated, they are quite simple.

  There are two reasons why they get away with so much:

  First, the system has been broken over many decades of degradation and manipulation and repurposed to protect them. Tyranny doesn’t happen overnight, it takes many years of tip-toeing around and sabotaging the defenses whenever possible.

  Second, the average person is not taught about psychopathy or the traits for identifying psychopaths. In fact, the average person is taught all the wrong information on psychopaths by Hollywood entertainment and in many cases by the very universities that are supposed to educate us.

  Most people have no clue because psychopathy has never been a focus of our society, even though these creatures are the foremost catastrophic influence facing humanity. The average person has no relationship to evil, let alone any relationship to the existence of conspiracy. Our societal priorities are completely backwards and nothing will change until we correct them.

  With that in mind, I would use the analogy of a parasite – If you know about the characteristics of the parasite and you know the symptoms of the parasite then you can identify and remove the parasite. If you have never heard of the parasite or refuse to acknowledge that the parasite exists, then you will continue on in misery and decay until you die because the parasite is feeding off of you in perfect comfort.

  Many of us in the liberty movement understand very well the traits of the globalist parasite and this makes it much easier for us to predict what they will do. Specifically, it is every easy for us to guess the steps they will take to attack us.

  In an article I published last month titled ‘The Globalist Reset Agenda Has Failed – Is Ukraine Plan B?’ I posited in the article that regardless of how the Ukraine situation pans out, the narrative is certainly designed to trigger popular tensions with Russia which the establishment hopes will translate to fear and distrust among the US citizenry. Beyond that, I predicted that in the near future every action on the part of liberty activists will be blamed on “foreign collusion.” That is to say, on the back of events like those in Ukraine the media and globalist controlled officials will claim that the liberty movement is nothing more than an astroturf movement or a color revolution funded and instigated by Russia or some other foreign government.

  And, to once again demonstrate the utter predictability of the globalists and the media, it did not take long before I was proven right. Today I am seeing numerous insinuations in the corporate media that the trucker protest in Canada “might” be manipulated by “foreign agents,” possibly from Russia, and they directly link the conflict over Ukraine to this theory.

  They offer NO EVIDENCE whatsoever to support this theory, of course, and they never will.

  Many people reading this will note that this is nothing new.

  The Russiagate claims during Trump’s presidency have since been proven to be a complete fiasco backed by zero proof, and yet it’s we conservatives that get accused of “fringe conspiracy theory.”

  What many do not realize though is that the build up to the Russian “influence” narrative was going on well before Trump. Over a decade ago I warned liberty activists to be careful about associations with outlets like RT (Russia Today) which are government owned. Editorials and articles among leftists outlets were hinting of “influence” over the Tea Party and patriot groups back then. The propaganda didn’t develop to fruition because there was no hook.

  Today, they seem to be trying to conjure up a hook in the form of a “wag the dog” moment with Ukraine.

  I don’t have any affinity for Russia, nor do I have any particular hatred or fear of Russia either. I am very familiar with Putin’s history and his long time friendships with globalists like Henry Kissinger, so I’m not one of these people that is under the delusion that Putin is going to oppose the globalists and save the world. I do understand that conflict with a larger power like Russia is useful to the globalist agenda for a number of reasons.

  I think that one of the best ways to bring down the US right now would be to get us caught up in a regional conflict that turns into a quagmire we can’t escape, something that would accelerate our already fast moving economic troubles. It might be Ukraine, it might be Taiwan, it might be North Korea or Iran, it’s hard to say but I have little doubt there will be a call for the US to involve itself in one of these disasters in the near future. It doesn’t need to escalate into a nuclear war, it just needs to bog down the US and drain it of energy and stability.

  But beyond that, all corrupt rulers know they will eventually face opposition and rebellion against their draconian policies. We have seen this in the epic takedown of the World Economic Forum’s “Reset” plans in the US. The covid mandates and vax mandates were crushed in at least half the states in the country, a level of defiance not seen in almost any other nation on the planet. Now, because of conservative states fighting back and the defeat of vax requirements at the federal level, the mandates are being dropped in some blue states and even in nations overseas.

  Centralization requires fear and momentum to succeed.

  Liberty activist movements disrupt that momentum and cause doubt among the globalists. If they push too hard, will they make conservatives angry enough to target them directly in return?

  Their response is, again, always predictable. The go-to strategy for governments and elites facing mass popular revolt to centralization is to claim that the rebellion is “not a rebellion at all.” Rather, the rebellion is a “hoax” or it’s based on a con designed by foreign enemies “trying to divide the union.” In this way the power brokers can marginalize the rebellion and halt it’s growth because no matter how truthful and principled the arguments of freedom fighters there will always be suspicion that we are “foreign agents” serving foreign interests.

  The CCP did this recently with the Hong Kong protests, accusing them of being run by western powers. The debate is then derailed into claims and counter-claims of foreign entanglement instead of the more important issues of freedom vs. authoritarianism.

  They already tried the old standard of accusing activists of being “racists.” That failed because freedom is universal and millions of black and brown people also support the cause. Then they tried arguing that we “don’t have the freedom to put other people at risk” and so we must give up our medical autonomy for the “greater good.” In other words, the assertion is that our freedom is dangerous to everyone else.

  That garbage failed when more data about covid and the vaccines was released and leaked to the public. Vaccinated people are just as likely to pass covid to others as the unvaxxed, and they are more likely to be hospitalized or die from covid compared to unvaxxed people with natural immunity. The vaxxed are more of a threat to each other. There’s no proof that the unvaxxed are a threat to anyone. This is a scientific reality and the narrative of the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” propagated by covid cultists is now falling apart.

  On top of that, obviously, if the vaccines actually worked then we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. How can the unvaxxed be a threat to a vaccinated person unless the vaccines are ineffective?

  Next they tried calling us “terrorists” and “insurrectionists” because of a single and completely unarmed protest on January 6th. This isn’t sticking either and the more they froth at the mouth over that event the crazier they look. So, what trick comes next? They’ll stick with the terrorist claims, but that won’t be enough. They need to convince the public that freedom fighters are actually foreign fighters.

  To be sure, such a narrative will be widely embraced by the political left in the US. In fact it already has. I have seen hundreds of instances lately of leftists across various social media platforms attempting to attach Russian influence to conservative ideas, content, principles and protests. The claim is always that liberty content creators and protesters are either funded by Russia or they are being tricked by Russian psyops into adopting the positions we defend. Get ready to see this propaganda EVERYWHERE, it is so clearly the next tactic in the globalist playbook it makes me a little embarrassed for them.

  Why are leftists so quick to jump on this bandwagon? That’s easy; It’s because they have no logical or reasonable arguments to present in the face of the liberty position. The bottom line is that they want tyranny just like the globalists do and that’s a really hard stance to justify. It’s much easier to attack our characters than to attack our message of freedom; so we are called toxic, racists, sexists, insurrectionists and now we are foreign collaborators. Anything to avoid an honest debate on fair ground based on facts and morals.

  Ultimately, leftists love globalism. They are mouthpieces for the establishment because they see the establishment as an ally in their quest for socialism. They are too stupid to understand that the program is being run by the very same corporations and billionaires they claim they are fighting against. They also don’t understand that they will be among the first people sacrificed to see true globalism achieved. Like children, they think the future is going to be just like Star Trek. In truth it will be more like traveling backwards in time to the serfdom of the feudalist dark ages.

  The Russian collusion story is mostly meant for the political left in order to keep them on the plantation while also to sowing seeds of doubt among moderates and people still on the political fence. The globalists want to prevent as many individuals as possible from moving closer to reality. However, their strategy is rife with confusion. It tells me that they are in uncharted territory and they are falling back on worn out measures and tired schemes because they don’t know what else to do.

  A red state revolution against the mandates and vax passports and now a Canadian trucker rebellion? Good luck trying to shut it down at this stage. Even if they manage to force through their vax mandates or clear away the protesters, this will only inspire more resistance. Not only that, but no matter what governments do they will never be able to force truckers and conservative producers to work, and many of us cannot be replaced very easily. Without us they drown.

  What their actions also tell me is that they know and have accepted the inevitability of mass revolt. They know it cannot be defused or undermined; it’s going to happen and they cannot stop it. So, they are trying to preempt the coming rebellion by injecting the lie of foreign influence ahead of time. They tried this years ago and it didn’t work; the fact that they are trying it with Russia yet again stinks of desperation.

  They might even believe they want the citizenry to fight back, assuming that this will make us look like criminals and justify government force. Globalist puppets like Justin Trudeau and Biden think that they can bulldoze the liberty movement through fascist declarations of “emergency powers.” I say let them try. I welcome such a foolish error which will indeed lead to war. It will be a war they WILL LOSE to true Americans and freedom fighters everywhere, not imaginary Russian agents.

  *  *  *

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  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 23:40

• China's Race Towards AI Research Dominance
  China’s Race Towards AI Research Dominance

  Since taking its first steps teaching computers board game strategies in the 1950s, research on artificial intelligence has come a long way.

  

  As Statista’s Florian Zandt points out below, in the 21st century in particular, machine learning and its promise for real-time improvements of algorithms through experience and providing access to more data has become the single biggest research focus in the field.

  As Zandt shows in the chart below, based on data provided by the OECD.AI project, China is well on its way to surpassing traditional artificial intelligence research powerhouses in the upcoming years.

  While the U.S. still leads the world with about 150.000 research papers on AI published in 2021, the People’s Republic’s output isn’t that far off thanks to an astronomical increase over the last two decades. The Eastern Asian country passed the number of AI research papers published in every single one of the 27 EU countries combined in 2008 and as of now sits in second place with roughly 138.000 papers pushed to publication in 2021. Overall, it increased its research output by 3,350 percent over the last two decades.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  Even though AI research has led to improvements in terms of productivity in almost every sector imaginable, it’s not without its downsides if left unchecked.

  For example, a Gizmodo investigation published in December 2021 revealed that PredPol, a predictive policing software based on AI, allegedly reproduced bias instead of giving neutral judgments due to the biased nature of the data it was trained on, mostly leaving predominantly white neighborhoods out of its equations.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 23:20

• Hillary Clinton's Greatest Masterpiece
  Hillary Clinton’s Greatest Masterpiece

  Authored by Victor Davis Hanson,

  Hillary Clinton’s never-ending shenanigans in 2015-2016 could be summarized as an attempted slow-motion coup.

  

  Four years of national hysteria, a divided nation, and dangerous new tensions with Russia were some of the wages of Clinton’s machinations.

  Clinton hired a British national and ex-spy, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on her election opponent, Donald Trump. She hid her likely illegal campaign payments to him through at least three paywalls – the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and the opposition research firm Fusion GPS.

  Partisans in the FBI helped her, by variously spying on minor officials affiliated with the Trump campaign, like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. To expedite its improper surveillance, a corrupt FBI hierarchy presented fraudulent documents to a FISA court that authorized the illicit surveillance.

  Clinton’s orbit of former subordinates and friends seeded the lies in the dossier throughout the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA.

  During the Trump transition, the FBI also tapped into the communications of national security advisor designate General Michael Flynn. The illegally leaked surveillance put an end to his service to the Trump Administration and ruined his life.

  The country went through 22 months and $40 million in legal expenses under special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Clinton-inspired Russian collusion hoax.

  When it was all over, Mueller’s “dream team” found no such actionable Trump-Russian collusion.

  Mueller himself ended up nearly humiliated, preposterously claiming under oath no knowledge about the Steele dossier or Fusion GPS – the twin pillars of deceit that prompted his own investigation.

  But Clinton was undaunted.

  According to a recent affidavit filed by Special Counsel John Durham, Clinton furthermore had previously hired members of the Perkins Coie law firm to contract with tech experts to leverage their own existing access to the White House and Trump servers – and tap into the top-secret communications data of candidate and then-President Trump.

  Their apparent desperate purpose was to find any dirt that the failed Steele dossier had not discovered.

  As a result, Clinton’s tech hirelings helped promulgate another “collusion” lie that Trump Tower computers were communicating back and forth with the Russian Alfa Bank.

  This additional Clinton investment in ruining Trump succeeded, as planned, in provoking media “collusion” hysteria that further paralyzed the Trump presidency.

  Nightly news still trafficked in the fake Steele dossier and the Russian collusion hoax. The additional phony Alfa Bank smear was cited as further proof that Trump should be removed from office.

  Clinton’s efforts created the general background landscape of hysteria and untruth that greenlighted the first Trump impeachment over a phone call to the Ukrainian president.

  “Collusion” helped prompt efforts to remove or discredit him through possible invocation of the 25th Amendment.

  And such skullduggery mainlined the once unthinkable scenario of a military coup. In this Clinton-created climate of collective madness, retired generals referenced their commander in chief as Hitler and Mussolini-like. A former Obama Pentagon official even wrote out a scenario of a military coup removing him.

  Nonetheless, Trump completed a solid record of accomplishment of border security, energy production, full employment without inflation, deregulation, and a deterrent, but not interventionist, foreign policy.

  The chief criticism of his administration was that Trump believed the Washington establishment and media were out to get him.

  In furor, he railed nonstop that the Left had conspired to monitor his communications and break the law to ruin him.

  Yet that supposed paranoia is proving to be an unpleasant reality.

  What would Trump’s presidency have been like had opponents like Clinton kept to normal adversarial politics? What if they had avoided spinning conspiracies, often through violation of federal laws? Could they have been content with just opposing him rather than seeking to destroy him?

  One of the reasons why American-Russian relations are poor, aside from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive efforts to reclaim the borders of the old Soviet Union, was the nonstop and politicized demonization of “Russia.”

  Americans were repeatedly and falsely told that “the Russians” had tried to destroy the Clinton campaign to partner with the traitor Trump and betray the United States. That was a slanderous lie.

  Former CIA director John Brennan fed such hysteria by libeling Trump as “treasonous.” The retired Director of National Intelligence James Clapper smeared Trump as a “Russian asset.”

  Will the nation ever demand an investigation to find out how and to what extent Hillary Clinton’s subordinates and contractors infiltrated the private communications of the president of the United States?

  Will the people ever learn how such false information was seeded throughout the government and media in a conspiratorial effort to destroy a sitting president?

  Hillary Clinton by now is an old master of scandals.

  Her lifelong oeuvre is vast – the cattle futures scam, Rose law firm missing documents, Travelgate, Uranium One shenanigans, missing emails, and the Steele dossier.

  But the ongoing effort of her paid associates to tap into the top-secret communications of a presidential candidate and further use such illicit information to ruin the American presidency will go down as her greatest masterpiece of deceit.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 23:00

• Californians Pay Record High Gas Prices As Pump Pains Send Biden's Approval Rating Lower
  Californians Pay Record High Gas Prices As Pump Pains Send Biden’s Approval Rating Lower

  Expensive crude means more pain at the pump. With West Texas Intermediate (WTI) bouncing between $90/bbl – $95/bbl, crude products, such as gasoline and diesel, will remain in an upward trajectory.

  

  According to American Automobile Association (AAA), the average price of a gallon of regular-grade gasoline in California stands around $4.719 per gallon on Wednesday, surpassing the previous record on Nov. 27. That’s higher than the national average, which stands around $3.52, an increase of more than 40% since the same time last year when it was $2.505 a gallon. 

  

  High pump prices are driven by a number of factors, from geopolitical risk premium over Russia-NATO tensions, to Biden admin energy policies, and globally tight supplies amid an emerging demand as COVID’s effects fade.

  A terrified Biden administration has already orchestrated a crude dump from strategic reserves, an initiative joined by allies worldwide, but such a ploy has failed. Rising pump prices have become a liability for Biden as polling data slump to a new low ahead of midterms. Democrats are in panic mode as they pitch a “federal gas tax holiday” to alleviate pump prices. 

  To deflect pain at the pump, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told Americans this week that if Russia invades Ukraine, it would have “an impact on energy prices, which could have an impact on prices at the gas pump.” 

  Californians are paying the highest prices for several reasons, taxation and state regulators only allow cleaner-burning grades of fuel that only a handful of refiners in the country can process. 

  Doug Shupe of AAA California told Bloomberg that even with gas prices at record high levels in the state, it’s not going to stop consumers from filling up and driving. Though we should add, high prices will crimp the pocketbooks of millions of Americans as their wages are eaten away by inflationary forces — this will have a significant impact on polling numbers for Democrats. 

  

  Readers may recall in early January, we cited Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy head of petroleum analysis, who said Americans should prepare for an average price of $4 by spring. With average US prices already around $3.488 as supplies dwindle amid geopolitical tensions, prices will remain in an upward trend. There’s also the start of the “multi-month transition to summer gasoline, further adding to the rise at the pump,” de Haan added. 

  The Biden administration already botched the strategic reserve release. Their attempts to quell Ukraine’s conflict with Russia have yet to provide any meaningful impact on energy markets. Democrat’s attempt for a tax holiday at the pump is another gimmick that won’t work. So in the meantime, Californians, enjoy paying the highest gasoline prices ever. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 22:40

• "No Valid Reason" To Withhold More Than 14,000 Hours Of 'Jan. 6' Video: Defense Attorney
  “No Valid Reason” To Withhold More Than 14,000 Hours Of ‘Jan. 6’ Video: Defense Attorney

  Authored by Joseph M. Hanneman via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The defense attorney for a member of the Oath Keepers charged with seditious conspiracy stemming from the U.S. Capitol unrest on Jan. 6, 2021, has filed a motion to intervene in a lawsuit that seeks to compel the U.S. Capitol Police to release more than 14,000 hours of video from surveillance cameras, smart phones and police body-worn cameras.

  

  Jonathon Moseley, who represents Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs of Dunnellon, Florida, seeks to intervene in Judicial Watch Inc. v. U.S. Capitol Police, a 2021 lawsuit that aims to unmask most of the Jan. 6 video footage now hidden from the public by court seal.

  “Having seen the documents and records under the court’s protective order, Jonathon Moseley can testify and affirm, and hereby does so, that there is no valid reason for the documents and records to be withheld from the public,” Moseley wrote in a Feb. 11 motion in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

  

  U.S. District Judge Florence Y. Pan denied Moseley’s motion to intervene, ruling he did not make sufficient effort to determine how Judicial Watch and U.S. Capitol Police viewed his motion.

  “The movants do not have a conditional right to intervene under a federal statute, nor do they state a claim or defense that shares with the main action a common question of law or fact,” Pan wrote.

  The U.S. Congress is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The U.S. Capitol Police, as a subsidiary of Congress, isn’t bound by the 1966 law that generally requires the federal government to disclose records and other information to the public upon request.

  Judicial Watch sued Capitol Police in January 2021 under the common-law right of access, a legal principle that the public has a right to access public records and documents.

  Judicial Watch sued for the release of all video recorded between noon and 9 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, and for emails between the U.S. Capitol Police executive team and the police board, as well as emails between police and the FBI, U.S. Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security.

  Capitol Police filed a motion claiming it isn’t bound to release records due to sovereign immunity, a legal doctrine that shields governments from being sued for civil wrongs.

  Despite the Capitol Police’s stated concerns that releasing the trove of video would expose security means and methods, Moseley said he sees a different reason for the secrecy.

  “They don’t want the public to see that the vast majority of what went on was very peaceful,” Moseley told The Epoch Times. “There were the violent videos they’ve shown, are all in just one location, or in a courtyard. You know, they keep showing over and over again this battle in the archway—that’s just one entrance out of a building that’s 700 feet long. So I think it would dilute their narrative to show everything.”

  Moseley said that on a recent tour of the Capitol arranged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, Capitol Police forbade the defense attorneys and investigators from photographing certain areas, including things that are visible from the street. They also prohibited photographs of the galleries in the House of Representatives.

  

  “They designated that as non public—we couldn’t take photographs of the galleries,” Moseley said. “I’m like, ‘What the heck?’ These will be visible during the State of the Union to anybody around the world.

  “So that’s one of the big things, their claim that this would compromise the Capitol’s security to show these things.” Moseley said. “It’s one of the things that I wanted to knock down and say, ‘You can’t hide behind that as an excuse.’”

  Moseley expressed frustration that the government’s selective release of video clips and the nearly constant condemnations of Jan. 6 defendants by some jurists and members of Congress have tainted the jury pool for the trials scheduled to begin in the coming weeks and months. He said he will seek a change of venue for the Meggs case.

  “There’s been nonstop condemnation of these defendants by the attorney general, by other judges as they’ve been sentencing people,” Moseley said. “They’ve made comments that go far beyond the individual that they’re talking about, made generalized condemnations of all the defendants, most of whom haven’t gone to trial yet.

  “There’s also the concern that the ability to pick and choose what’s released prevents a check and balance on the government and the Congress,” Moseley said. “If they knew everything was public, they might be a little more careful with what they say.”

  The jury pool in the District of Columbia has been “incurably influenced,” Moseley wrote in his motion to intervene in the Judicial Watch case.

  “Kelly Meggs as a criminal defendant is being personally prejudiced by the one-sided tsunami of false but prejudicial information,” Moseley wrote, “while the government—including the U.S. Capitol Police—pick and choose what information with which to smear these defendants in public and condemn them in public, while withholding an equal measure of exculpatory information.”

  In a filing in the Judicial Watch case, Thomas DiBiase, general counsel for U.S. Capitol Police, said the release of video footage could provide valuable security information to people who might seek to attack the Capitol again.

  Video can also be considered security information that is “sensitive with respect to the policing, protection, physical security, intelligence, counter-terrorism actions or emergency preparedness.” Of the more than 14,000 hours of footage, only about 17 hours to date was designated “security information,” DiBiase said.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 22:20

• Air-Taxi Startup Hits Turbulence After "Experimental Prototype Aircraft Accident"
  Air-Taxi Startup Hits Turbulence After “Experimental Prototype Aircraft Accident”

  Joby Aviation, the maker of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxi craft, announced in a filing that one of its “experimental prototype aircraft was involved in an accident during flight testing at our remote flight test base in California.” 

  The California-based eVTOL start-up said, “we have been expanding our flight envelope with a remote pilot and in an uninhabited area, especially as we operate outside expected operating conditions.” There were no reports of injures. 

  

  Joby is preparing to revolutionize transportation in metro areas with its electric eVTOLs. The vehicles can transport a pilot and four passengers as far as 150 miles, reaching a top speed of 200 mph. 

  Joby Aviation went public via a SPAC in August 2021. The deal to bring the start-up public was worth $4.5 billion. Shares in the company have slid more than 50% since the public debut. News of the crash sent prices down 6% on Thursday.  

  

  The filing also noted that the company would be working with “relevant authorities” to investigate the accident. There have yet to be any mentions of what exactly went wrong, nor if commercialization timelines have been shifted due to safety concerns. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 22:00

• Former Harvard Prof. Martin Kulldorff: 'Science and Public Health Are Broken'
  Former Harvard Prof. Martin Kulldorff: ‘Science and Public Health Are Broken’

  Authored by Charlotte Cuthbertson via The Epoch Times,

  Dr. Martin Kulldorff is one of the most qualified public health pandemic experts in the United States.

  To the narrative-shapers, he’s a pariah.

  

  As a prominent epidemiologist and statistician, Kulldorff has worked on detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks for two decades. His methods are widely used around the world and by almost every state health department in the United States, as well as by hundreds of people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

  Kulldorff has also worked on vaccine safety for decades, developing globally used methods for monitoring adverse reactions in new vaccines.

  His résumé on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website is 45 pages long and includes a list of 201 peer-reviewed published journal papers. His work has been cited more than 27,000 times.

  Since 2003, Kulldorff worked at Harvard Medical School, first as an associate professor of population medicine and later as a professor of medicine.

  In November, Harvard and Kulldorff abruptly parted ways.

  Kulldorff prefers to keep the reasons private, but it’s hard to ignore that he placed himself in the crosshairs of the pandemic narrative early on in the “15 days to slow the spread” lockdown and has since paid the price.

  It’s quite something for a public health scientist at the top of his game to admit that “both science and public health are broken.”

  “For some reason, a public official narrative was established, and you weren’t allowed to question it—which, of course, is very detrimental, both to the pandemic and how to deal with the pandemic, because you have to have a vibrant discussion to figure out how best to deal with these things,” he told The Epoch Times.

  The Swedish native said he tried to point out in March 2020 that there was a very steep age gradient on mortality for COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

  Kulldorff said he attempted to publish a paper both in U.S. medical journals and mainstream newspapers stating that while anyone could contract the virus, the focus should be on protecting the elderly and those at high risk. His paper was knocked back from all directions.

  “I was able to publish in Sweden, in the major daily newspapers there during the spring of 2020, so that was not a problem,” he said. “But the United States was not allowed to have a debate, which is very troubling.”

  

  The Great Barrington Declaration

  His early efforts culminated in the Great Barrington Declaration, published with Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in October 2020. The declaration called for a more nuanced approach to the one-size-fits-all restrictions that had been imposed on much of Western society.

  “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk,” the declaration states.

  The two other authors are also amply qualified in the field. Gupta is a professor at Oxford University, an epidemiologist with expertise in immunology, vaccine development, and mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. Bhattacharya is a professor at Stanford University Medical School, a physician, epidemiologist, health economist, and public health policy expert focusing on infectious diseases and vulnerable populations.

  Kulldorff said the Great Barrington Declaration proposed nothing new.

  “It’s just the basic fundamental principles of public health that existed in the pandemic preparedness plan that was prepared many years before,” he said. “It’s sort of astonishing that it wasn’t followed from the very beginning of the pandemic.”

  Conventional public health science had deemed it unnecessary and potentially harmful to close schools and small businesses, to impose masking on the general public, and to quarantine healthy people.

  Kulldorff said the document wasn’t for the politicians, or scientists, or even the doctors—although thousands of each signed it.

  “The most important audience was the public,” he said, “because it’s the public that ultimately will end these misguided public health policies. It’s the public, regular people, who are suffering the consequences.”

  

  He said the authors wanted to advise the average person that their intuition was correct, that the restrictions weren’t based on public health science—”so when you oppose them, you’re standing on firm scientific ground.”

  “The key thing was to break the pretense that there was scientific consensus for these lockdowns—which there wasn’t.”

  The appearance of a scientific consensus was formed through high-profile public health officials such as Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and Dr. Deborah Birx, as well as corporate media along with  the stifling of opposing viewpoints.

  “There’s really no public health arguments against the declaration. So if you want to criticize it, you have to … make up lies about it and then attack that, as well as slander the people behind it. And they did both of those things,” Kulldorff said.

  It wasn’t until a December 2021 email dump that Kulldorff and the American public got to peek behind the curtain of how the traditional pandemic playbook had been tossed and how swiftly dissenting voices were maligned.

  Following a Freedom of Information Act request, emails that involved Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), were released. An email to Fauci from Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, was sent days after the Great Barrington Declaration was published.

  “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention,” Collins told Fauci in the Oct. 8, 2020, email. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet—is it underway?”

  Collins’s four-line email mentioned that the declaration included “even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford.”

  Fauci appears to have been in full agreement with Collins’s proposal to take down the authors and their declaration, sending a one-line reply.

  “I am pasting in below a piece from the Wired [magazine] that debunks this theory,” he wrote. Collins replied. “Excellent.”

  Within a day of the Collins–Fauci exchange, Google began to censor search results for “Great Barrington Declaration.”

  In a subsequent interview, Collins said the declaration “is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.”

  Fauci called the declaration “ridiculous” and “total nonsense” in an interview with ABC.

  

  A cavalcade of articles from corporate media outlets ensued, with a common theme to disparage the declaration and its authors.

  The New York Times called focused protection a “viral theory.”

  BuzzFeed called it a “highly controversial recommendation.”

  Forbes called the declaration’s detractors “real infectious disease and public health experts.”

  “Anti-lockdown advocate appears on radio show that has featured Holocaust deniers,” a Guardian headline blared, referring to Kulldorff’s interview on the “Richie Allen Show.”

  Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale, called the focused protection strategy “a massacre” and a “straw man argument” produced by “fancy scientists,” in a Twitter thread a week after the declaration was published.

  Kulldorff, when asked if he’d ever considered himself a “fringe epidemiologist,” said, “No I have not, but I guess, when the public health leaders get it wrong, then it’s an honor to be a fringe epidemiologist.”

  

  Social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook jumped on the censorship bandwagon and started labeling certain posts as misleading, while permanently banning journalists such as Alex Berenson.

  Berenson’s final tweet before being purged was about the COVID-19 vaccines.

  “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission,” he posted on Aug. 28, 2021. “Think of it—at best—as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed in advance of illness. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.”

  Berenson, a former New York Times journalist, has since sued Twitter.

  “You always have to be allowed to question science,” Kulldorff said. “We should never silence that debate, pretend that there’s some person who is ‘The Science,’ who has all the truths.

  “I think that happened during this pandemic and that’s an embarrassment for the scientific community.”

  In an interview at the end of November 2021, Fauci lashed out at Republican senators who had criticized him.

  “They’re really criticizing science, because I represent science,” Fauci told CBS.

  Personal Life

  Kulldorff was 8 years old when he first came to reside in the United States. His father, also a scientist, moved the family from Sweden for a one-year university sabbatical in 1970.

  It was October, and two weeks after arriving in Texas, Kulldorff’s mother told him to don a costume and head out with the local children.

  “We walked around the neighborhood, and everywhere we knocked on the door, they gave us candy. So that was pretty nice for an 8-year-old. And I’ve liked this country ever since,” he said.

  Kulldorff returned to the United States for a couple of years in the 1980s for his doctoral work, and in the early ’90s, he made the move permanent.

  The original dream for Kulldorff was to teach high school math and history. He laughs about it still being a backup plan if his current career falls apart.

  

  He still sees fatherhood as his most important job. As a single father with a 19-year-old son and twin 6-year-olds, he spends a lot of time with his children.

  “I think the most wonderful and the most important thing in life is to be a parent and see your children grow up,” he said. “So I have always spent plenty of time with them since they were born. I’ve always prioritized that over my career.”

  He said the twins were fortunate during the pandemic restrictions in Connecticut to have each other as built-in playmates.

  His oldest son was 17 when the pandemic started.

  “I wasn’t concerned about him getting COVID because I knew that the risk for him is minuscule. But I was very concerned about his mental health. So I was urging him to go out there and play basketball with his friends, hang out with them, do those social things. I wanted him to have as normal a life as possible.”

  

  Why Take a Stand?

  Kulldorff has worked in both the Swedish and U.S. health science fields, and followed closely his native country’s very different, less invasive response to the pandemic.

  His family members in the Nordic country understood when he took a divergent tack to the U.S. mainstream narrative of harsh lockdowns, closing schools, and mandatory masking.

  “Sweden had a more sane approach to it, so they didn’t find it strange what I was saying,” he said.

  He didn’t set out to be a rebel, and there wasn’t much hand wringing behind Kulldorff’s decision to go against the grain when he saw the tried-and-true pandemic response being cast aside.

  “I don’t think I have a choice. Since I worked on infectious disease outbreaks for two decades and they instituted policies that go against the basic principles to public health, I can’t just be silent. I have to speak up. There’s no other alternative,” he said.

  “Otherwise, what’s the point of being a public health scientist?”

  He’s quick to show support for other scientists who agree with him but feel as if they can’t speak out due to potential loss of research funding or even their job. People such as Fauci, who oversees an annual taxpayer-funded budget of over $6 billion at NIAID, hold the purse strings as well as control of what’s published in journals.

  “If you dare speak out against [Fauci’s] views on the pandemic, you can lose funding. And if you agree with him and support him, you can gain funding,” Kulldorff said.

  Four prominent scientists who were instrumental in shaping the COVID-19 “natural origin” narrative received substantial increases in grant money from Fauci’s NIAID in the subsequent two years, The Epoch Times found.

  “So I fully understand that scientists are very afraid of criticizing the policies championed by the guy who sits on the biggest chunk of infectious disease research money in the world,” Kulldorff said.

  “We shouldn’t have those conflicts. Research should be very broad, and we should fund broadly different ideas, and some pan out and some don’t, but that’s how you do good science.”

  

  Collateral Damage

  One of the major precepts behind the Great Barrington Declaration is that public health is wide-ranging and needs a long-term view, yet many influential scientists had a singular focus on COVID-19 outcomes.

  “One of the principles of public health is, it’s not about one disease, like COVID, it’s about all of public health,” Kulldorff said.

  That singular focus resulted in government officials filling skateboard parks in California with sand and locking up children’s playgrounds with chains and yellow police tape. Millions of children were sent home from school and for almost two years were forced to learn virtually from home.

  Meanwhile, teen suicide rates have increased, drug and alcohol abuse has increased, domestic violence has risen, while childhood vaccinations decreased and cancer screenings plummeted.

  Health experts warned in May 2020 that as pandemic-driven hardship puts added strain on the mental health of Americans, as many as 154,000 extra lives may be lost due to drug or alcohol abuse and suicide, or “deaths of despair.”

  People were dying from cardiovascular diseases that, in normal circumstances, they would have survived, Kulldorff said,”because maybe they were afraid to go to the hospital, or they went too late.”

  “So these are all tragic consequences, collateral damage, of these COVID measures, restrictions that were imposed,” he said. “And you can’t just do that for a whole year or two and expect that it doesn’t have other enormously bad outcomes on public health.”

  Kulldorff anticipates that many of the ancillary health impacts have yet to surface.

  In January, a Johns Hopkins meta-analysis of lockdown data concluded that lockdowns didn’t save lives.

  

  What’s Next?

  Kulldorff is dedicating his next chapter to helping restore trust in science and public health—both of which he calls “broken.”

  “So it’s the heads of the funding agencies, the heads of the big journals, and the university presidents and deans who all went into the same bubble thinking that they knew what was right, and which turned out to be wrong,” Kulldorff said.

  “But all scientists now are going to have to suffer from that, because, for good reasons, the public won’t trust scientists anymore.”

  He’s working with the Brownstone Institute as the scientific director to navigate how to shore up public health again. He’s also part of Hillsdale College’s new Academy for Science and Freedom, which he says will promote and defend the importance of open, free scientific discourse.

  “It’s very clear that if we want to have vibrant science, and a vibrant scientific community, we have to reform the way science operates and the way public health operates,” he said.

  But, Kulldorff said, it’s up to the public—the truckers, farmers, nurses, pilots, and parents—as well as rank-and-file scientists to effect real change.

  It’s also time to compassionately help each other heal from the psychological and mental wounds, he said, especially those still living in constant fear of COVID and those who have been self-isolating for two years now.

  “I think we shouldn’t blame those who were afraid, because they were major victims of this pandemic strategy,” he said.

  “We shouldn’t blame people for believing Anthony Fauci and the CDC—that was the natural thing to do. We just have to help them realize that these measures were misguided so that never happens again.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 21:40

• Cities Where Homes Cost An Average Of $1 Million Or More Have Doubled In The Last 5 Years
  Cities Where Homes Cost An Average Of $1 Million Or More Have Doubled In The Last 5 Years

  As the real estate market continues to scorch higher, part and parcel with the brutal inflation the nation is facing, the idea of million dollar homes is now becoming commonplace.

  Houses over $1 million have become “the norm” in 481 U.S. cities, according to new analysis from Bloomberg. This is double the number from five years ago, the report says, citing Zillow data released Wednesday.

  

  146 cities reached the million dollar tier in 2021, the report says – it’s most ever in a single year. 10 years ago, the number of cities with million dollar average home costs was just 126. 

  And while some asset classes have pulled back thanks to the Fed’s hawkish (sounding) stance, real estate has endured. Home prices were up 19.6% last year, the report says. Idaho, Montana and Tennessee all had cities break the million dollar mark for the first time in 2021. California, Massachusetts and New York all had the most new cities with million dollar average home values.

  Newcomers to the list, per Bloomberg, include:

  • Garrison, Montana: Avg. home prices +26% in 2021 to $1.2 million.
  • Gallatin Gateway, Montana: Avg. home prices +33% to $1.2 million.
  • West Glacier, Montana: Avg. home prices +23% to $1.2 million.
  • Ketchum, Idaho: Avg. home prices +32% to $1.1 million.
  • Sun Valley, Idaho: Avg. home prices +31% to $1 million.
  • Hayden Lake, Idaho: Avg. home prices +47% to $1 million.
  • Brentwood, Tennessee: Avg. home prices +37% to $1 million.

  49 more cities are poised to break the $1 million barrier this year if price trends hold, the report says. 

  

  Florida’s Indian Creek Village – a 300-acre island with less than 100 residents – is the most expensive, with an average home value at $28.3 million.  Atherton on the San Francisco Peninsula came in second, with an average home value of $7.7 million. 

  Jeff Tucker, senior economist for Zillow, told Bloomberg: “We’re seeing how the geography of wealth in the U.S. has begun to shift, as 2021 was the first year for both Idaho and Montana to place any cities on this list, and now those Western states boast three million-dollar cities each.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 21:20

• Futures Spike After Secretary Of State Blinken Accepts Meeting With Lavrov Next Week
  Futures Spike After Secretary Of State Blinken Accepts Meeting With Lavrov Next Week

  After a dismal day for risk which saw the S&P close down more than 2% and the Nasdaq tumble as much as 3% amid sharply heightened tensions in Ukraine where we got he-shot/she-shot reports of shelling in the Donbas regions and escalate diplomatic animosity to a fever pitch, moments ago futures jumped after State Dept. spokesperson Ned Price said  in a statement that Russia responded to a U.S. offer for meeting between Blinken and Lavrov in Europe with proposed dates for late next week, and the U.S. has accepted “provided there is no further Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

  .@SecBlinken noted in his remarks at the UN Security Council earlier today that, because we believe the only responsible way to resolve this crisis is through diplomacy and dialogue, he had proposed to meet Foreign Minister Lavrov in Europe next week.

  — Ned Price (@StateDeptSpox) February 18, 2022

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  Redundantly, Price added that “if they do invade in the coming days, it will make clear they were never serious about diplomacy.” Of course, this is trivial because if Putin really wanted to invade he would have done so by now, and as David Rosenberg also correctly notes,  Putin “knows better than blow up the Russian economy. Diplomacy will win out and he’s going to end up getting what he wants”…

  If Putin really wanted to invade, he would have done it already. He knows better than blow up the Russian economy. Diplomacy will win out and he’s going to end up getting what he wants. Best not to make investment decisions around this file.#RosenbergResearch

  — David Rosenberg (@EconguyRosie) February 17, 2022

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  … but not before a whole lot of huffing and puffing drama, so it appears that the US at least fought bravely.

  Russia told the U.S. in its official response to security proposals from Washington that it has no plans to attack, and officials in Moscow have repeatedly dismissed U.S. warnings of a possible move against Ukraine as “hysteria” and propaganda. Its foreign ministry handed over a document Thursday with its views, saying the U.S. response was unsatisfactory. The two sides in the conflict in eastern Ukraine — government forces and Moscow-backed separatists — accused each other of breaking cease-fire rules.

  Elsewhere, Biden will speak with transatlantic leaders on Friday about the Russian troop buildup, a White House official said on Thursday night. Also on Thursday night, the U.S. Senate passed a non-binding resolution in support of Ukraine.

  In kneejerk response to the news, S&P futures jumped more than 30 points and we trading back above 4400 last…

  

  … and the Nasdaq was up almost 1%, with safe havens like gold and Treasuries selling off, sending the 10Y yields back to 1.99%.

  

  And now, absent some further dramatic escalations, risk will likely squeeze for the next few days until the Putin-Blinked meeting, at which point we reset and we repeat this charade all over again.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 21:10

• Ex-CIA Official: A Major Concession Was Buried In All The Shrill US-Russia Back & Forth
  Ex-CIA Official: A Major Concession Was Buried In All The Shrill US-Russia Back & Forth

  Authored by Ray McGovern via AntiWar.com,

  “’Foiled again!’ rose the cry from those expecting Russian President Vladimir Putin to step out of character and risk war, just as he finally succeeds in getting the U.S. to take Russia’s security concerns seriously – and even address them.” Today we can simply recycle the above lede sentence from our article four weeks ago: Godot Likely To Arrive Before Russia Invades Ukraine.

  New this time, and so far unique, is the lack-of-spin headline and lede that the AP promptly used this week in reporting on the significance of the talks held in Moscow by Russian President Vladimir Putin and visiting German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. (Headline and lede sentences follow.)

  Russia ready to discuss confidence-building measures, Putin says after talks with Germany’s Scholtz

  Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Moscow is ready for talks with the US and NATO on limits on missile deployments and military transparency, in a new sign of easing East-West tensions. The statement came after Russia announced it is pulling back some troops from exercises that have raised fears of a potential invasion of Ukraine.

  

  Has AP Learned a Lesson?

  Over recent weeks, AP’s ace reporter Matthew Lee and colleagues had been repeatedly led down the White House garden path by the likes of broken-record “the-Russians-are-coming-and-it-could-be-Wednesday” national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Might it be that, this time, at least one AP honcho became so weary of this drivel, that s/he decided to go ahead and publish before receiving the customary Guidance Memo from the powers that be, telling the Establishment media how to spin major events?

  This time, the “guidance” came from President Joe Biden himself, who stuck to Sullivan’s ad-nauseam alerts that a Russia invasion “remains distinctly possible.” Reuters, too, apparently got the Memo in time and dutifully reported:

  The Kremlin sought to portray its moves as proof that Western talk of war had been both false and hysterical.

  “February 15, 2022 will go down in history as the day Western war propaganda failed. Humiliated and destroyed without a single shot fired,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.

  Russia’s defense ministry published footage showing tanks and other armored vehicles being loaded onto railway flatcars. But Western military analysts said they needed more information to judge the significance of the latest troop movements.

  Putin With Scholz

  At Tuesday’s press conference, Chancellor Scholz at times played straight man for Putin, calling the announcement of the Russian troop pullback a “good signal” and agreeing that diplomatic options are “far from exhausted”, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had reported to Putin on Monday. Here’s what’s important (and was given appropriate prominence in AP’s reporting).

  Putin at the presser with Scholz:

  “… as [Lavrov] reported yesterday, the [US and NATO] responses still contain a number of considerations that we are not only ready to discuss but that we have actually suggested to our partners over the years. I am referring to our proposals on European security, certain weapons systems, notably, intermediate and shorter-range missiles, and military transparency. We are ready to continue this joint work. … [Emphasis added.]

  “Top House Republicans are urging President Joe Biden to reject calls from Russia and China to limit U.S. deployments of intermediate-range and short-range ground-based missiles in Europe and the Pacific region” https://t.co/vB3HM27P98

  — Ankit Panda (@nktpnd) February 11, 2022

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  So far, the NYT has omitted that statement by Putin, which, coming together with the troop pullback, is highly significant. That the Times “forgot” to include it is yet another sign that even the most sensible, rudimentary negotiations on key matters of concern to Russia will be resisted tooth and nail by the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank) complex in which the NYT is right there in the middle, the fulcrum – the key “M.”

  Still, some Times editor apparently insisted on slipping in the important acknowledgment by Mr. Biden that:

  “Neither the US or NATO have missiles in Ukraine. We do not, do not have plans to put them there as well.” [Emphasis added.]

  Biden made this commitment to Putin during the telephone call of Dec. 30 that Putin had urgently requested. It amounts to a major concession and enabled Moscow to conclude that at least one or two of Biden’s retinue – or Biden himself – have their heads screwed on right.

  In sum, at the risk of boring Antiwar.com readers who have heard this many times before, this issue represents the most fruitful negotiating path. A key remaining question is whether the MICIMATT can thwart it. All in all, this week gave a glimmer of hope that if others of the MEDIA follow AP’s example, US citizens will become better informed of the realities and thus be chary of giving credulity to officials like Jake Sullivan. As President Eisenhower warned 61 years ago, only “an informed citizenry” can prevent inordinate accretion of power by the MIC, the Military-Industrial-Complex.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 21:00

• Cargo Ship Carrying Thousands Of Porsches, Bentleys & Audis Stranded At Sea After Massive Fire
  Cargo Ship Carrying Thousands Of Porsches, Bentleys & Audis Stranded At Sea After Massive Fire

  As if the global supply chain for large goods like cars wasn’t already hopelessly snarled enough, a massive cargo ship called the Felicity Age has caught fire near the mid-Atlantic islands, forcing its crew to abandon the ship (and its valuable cargo).

  According to The Washington Post, the ship and all 22 crew members have been rescued…but the Porsches, Volkswagens, Audis and other brand-new cars left on board are still adrift in the middle of the Atlantic.

  

  The cars were expected to be delivered to North America…but they hit a snag when the ship’s engine room caught fire earlier this month.

  The 656-foot long ship departed from its origin port in Emden, Germany on February 10, and was set to arrive at its destination port in Davisville, Rhode Island on February 23. On February 16, the vessel let out a distress signal after a fire broke out in the cargo hold. Shortly after, a Portuguese navy patrol boat, along with four merchant vessels, responded to help with the rescue.

  There’s an ongoing effort to bring the situation back under control, according to The Drive, though a photo taken from aboard one of the assisting merchant ships and shared by Greek publication Naftika Chronika on Wednesday shows the Felicity Ace seemingly ablaze from a distance.

  Given the number of cars being held on the ship, treasure hunters or perhaps mercenaries hired by the ship’s insurer may be going after it, hoping to rescue some of the cars for themselves. Approximately 2,500 cars is a significant number, considering the situation both in the US and around the world.

  Apparently, Porsche isn’t worried.Porsche gave the following statement to Road & Track:

  Our immediate thoughts are of relief that the 22 crew of the merchant ship “Felicity Ace” are safe and well.

  A number of our cars are among the cargo. We are in contact with the shipping company and the details of the cars on board are now known. Customers affected by the incident are being contacted by their dealer.

  While it remains too early to confirm what occurred and next steps, we are—along with our colleagues at Porsche AG—supporting our customers and our dealers as best we can to find solutions. Anyone concerned by this incident and the implications on the car they’ve ordered should maintain in contact with dealer with which their order was placed.

  We believe around 1,100 of our cars were among the estimated 2,500 vehicles on board the ship at the time of the incident.

  Nearly 200 Bentleys are also onboard the stranded vessel, along with “a number” of Audis.

  A Bentley spokesperson confirmed to The Drive that 189 of its vehicles are also on board the Felicity Ace, worth an estimated $30 million by themselves, according to the publication. The Drive also confirmed with Audi that a number of its cars were also aboard the now-abandoned ship, but the company declined to elaborate on just how many.

  Customers are commiserating online, sharing tips on message boards about what they can do if a car belonging to them remains aboard.

  It’s unclear right now what will happen to all of the cars aboard the now-abandoned cargo ship as it continues to float through the Atlantic. Buyers waiting for their cars to be delivered have shared their concerns both on Porsche forum Rennlist and Volkswagen forum VWIDTalk, while people on 718forum.com are reportedly receiving a message from the company’s “Track Your Dream” service notifying them the company is aware of the Felicity Ace situation, and to contact their dealer for more info.

  […]

  Not all hope is lost for the buyers of extra-special Porsches, though. Back in 2019 Porsche restarted production of the 911 GT2 RS after four of the last allocations were lost on a sunken cargo ship.

  If the cars are eventually lost, the manufacturers will more likely than not replace the new models that their customers are waiting for, even if that requires them to move mountains on the production side. Then again, it could still create some serious problems by forcing customers to wait, possibly for months.

  Keep in mind, according to Maritime Law, whoever recovers the ship is entitled to compensation under the “law of salvage”. Of course, if pirates get there first, they might take the entire cargo for themselves, if they could find a way to move or tow the ship away.

  

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 20:40

• Society Vs State: Canada Reveals The Core Conflict Of Our Age
  Society Vs State: Canada Reveals The Core Conflict Of Our Age

  Authored by David McGrogan via The Brownstone Institute,

  Justin Trudeau’s confrontation with the Canadian truckers may be the single most significant event of the Covid pandemic – not because of its eventual outcome, whatever that may be, but because of what it symbolises. It captures, in perfect microcosm, the tensions between the competing imperatives of the age: freedom versus security; the rule of law versus flexible ‘responsive’ governance; the priorities of the workers versus those of the Zooming bourgeoisie; the need for real-world human interaction and belonging versus the promises of splendid online isolation; the experiences of the common man, who knows where it hurts, versus those of the professional expert class, who know nothing that cannot be expressed as a formula. 

  

  More than all of that, though, it gives us a lens through which to view a much deeper, much older conflict of much larger scope – one which underlies not just the struggles of the Covid age, but of modernity itself. On the one hand, the state, which seeks to make all of society transparent to its power. On the other, alternative sources of authority – the family, the church, the community, the firm, the farm, and the human individual herself. 

  For centuries, the state has waged a quiet war against those competitors, and bent them to its will. It has done this not through conspiracy or deliberate strategy but merely through the single-minded pursuit, across generation after generation of political leaders, of one goal: legitimacy. Governments and other state organs derive their legitimacy, and therefore their positions of rulership, from convincing the population that they are necessary. 

  They do this by suggesting that without their intervention, things will go badly; left to their own devices, ordinary people will suffer. The family, the church, the community, the firm, the farm, the human individual – these are inadequate to the task of securing human well-being. That task, only the state is equipped to achieve, for only the state can keep the population educated, healthy, safe, prosperous and satisfied. Since this is the case, only the state is fit to deploy power – and only those who govern the state are fit to rule. 

  The logic of this argument is writ large, of course, in the Covid response across the developed world. What will keep us ‘safe?’

  Certainly not traditional sources of succour, such as the church or the family. Certainly not individual people, who cannot be trusted to behave responsibly or assess risks for themselves.

  No – it is only the state, first with its lockdowns, then with its social distancing, its mask mandates, its vaccine programs, and lately its vaccine mandates and ‘passports.’ It is only the state’s power that saves and secures. And since only the state can save, it is the only legitimate source of authority – along, of course, with its leaders. 

  The state portraying itself as saviour in this fashion is patently false and absurd given what has taken place over the past two years. But as false and absurd as it is, it remains the subtext behind all of Covid policy. Justin Trudeau must derive his legitimacy from somewhere to maintain power. And he senses – political animal that he is – that he can derive it from displaying the Canadian state (with himself at the helm, of course) as the only thing standing between the Canadian public and suffering and death. 

  It is the state, remember – in this case with its vaccine mandates – that saves and secures. Without it, the reasoning goes, the population would suffer and die as Covid ran riot. The political logic is inescapable. For a man like Trudeau, without principle except that he alone is fit to govern, there is only one path to follow. Insist that it is the state that saves and secures, and that anything that stands in its way – truckers beware – must therefore be crushed beneath its heel. 

  The truckers, for their part, represent everything that the state despises. They have a social and political power that is independent from it, and hence form one of the alternative sources of power which it hates and fears. This power derives not from some institution which the truckers dominate, but simply from their status amongst what I will refer to as the yeomanry classes – almost the last bastion of self-sufficiency and independence in a modern society such as Canada. 

  In a developed economy, most of the professional classes – doctors, academics, teachers, civil servants and the like – derive their incomes and status entirely or partially, directly or indirectly, from the existence of the state. If they are not civil servants, their status is built on regulatory apparatus which only the state can build and enforce. This is also, of course, true of the underclass, who are often almost totally reliant on the state for the meeting of their needs. The members of these classes pose no threat to the state’s legitimacy, because, simply put, they need it. It, as a consequence, is perfectly happy to tolerate their existence – and, indeed, it wishes all of society were that way inclined. A population entirely reliant on the state is one which will never question the necessity of the growth of its power and hence its capacity to buttress its own legitimacy. 

  But in the middle are those people, the modern yeomanry, who derive their incomes from private sources, as sole traders, owners of small businesses, or employees of SMEs. Independent-minded, seeing self-sufficiency as a virtue, and relying on themselves and their relationships with others rather than the state, these modern yeomen represent a natural barrier to its authority. Simply put, they do not need it. They earn their money through the use of a particular skill which others value and hence pay for on the open market. 

  Whether or not the state exists is immaterial to their success – and, indeed, it very frequently stands in their way. These are the type of people who, seeing a problem, tend to want to find a solution for themselves. And they are precisely the kind of people who want to make up their own minds about whether to take a vaccine, and to assess health-related risks in general. 

  The modern state has waged incessant and covert war against the yeomanry in particular. At every step, it seeks to regulate their business affairs, restrict their liberty, and confiscate their prosperity. There is always a purportedly ‘good’ reason for this. But it contributes to an incessant whittling away of their independence and strength. It is no accident that they are described in British parlance as the ‘squeezed middle’ – squashed as they are between the welfare-reliant underclass on the one hand, and the white-collar professionals who draw their wealth, directly or indirectly, from the state on the other. 

  It is also no accident that these modern yeomen have gradually seen their political representation diminish over the course of the last 100 years, in whichever developed society one cares to name; the politicians they would elect would be mostly interested in getting the state out of the way, and modern politicians’ incentives all incline in the opposite direction. Their interest is in the inexorable growth of state power, because that is from where their legitimacy derives.

  Justin Trudeau’s contempt for the truckers is therefore genuine and profound. He sees in them not an obstacle to Covid policy or a potential threat to public health. Not even he could possibly be so stupid as to think it matters whether or not these people take their vaccines. No: he identifies in them a barrier to forces in which his political future is entwined – an ever-increasing scope and scale for governmental authority, and the opportunities to buttress his own legitimacy that would follow from it. 

  And his contempt for them is outweighed, of course, by his fear. Because he surely recognises that his authority is wafer-thin. Legitimacy cuts both ways. If he fails to suppress the truckers’ revolt, the entire edifice on which his authority rests – as the helmsman of the Canadian state and its purported capacity to protect the population from harm – will come tumbling down. 

  This conflict is therefore not about Covid – it’s existential. Does it matter if the truckers win or lose? No. What matters is what their efforts have revealed to us about the relationship between the state and society in 2022. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 20:20

• Visualizing The Massive Jump In Anxiety & Depression Sparked By Pandemic Policies
  Visualizing The Massive Jump In Anxiety & Depression Sparked By Pandemic Policies

  Aside from killing more than 900,000 Americans to date and wreaking havoc on the country’s economy, the COVID-19 pandemic (and the accompanying draconian ‘health’ policies) has also taking a heavy toll on mental health.

  Statista’s Felix Richter notes that, according to data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics, more than 4 in 10 U.S. adults had developed symptoms of depression or anxiety by the end of 2020, a sharp increase over the results of a comparable survey conducted before the onset of the pandemic in 2019.

  The latest findings are derived from the Household Pulse Survey, which has been launched to produce data on the social and economic impacts of Covid-19 on American households.

  Since April 2020, tens of thousands of Americans have been asked to complete the web survey in order to “gauge the impact of the pandemic on employment status, consumer spending, food security, housing, education disruptions, and dimensions of physical and mental wellness.”

  Among other things, respondents were asked to report how often they have felt down, depressed, hopeless or anxious in the last week, how often they have been unable to stop worrying or shown little interest or pleasure in doing things – all symptoms that have been shown to be associated with diagnoses of generalized anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder.

  As the following chart shows, the share of respondents showing signs of anxiety or depression has roughly quadrupled compared to results obtained before the pandemic, with mental health issues particularly widespread towards the end of 2020.

  

  You will find more infographics at Statista

  The question remains then – which has cause the most suffering: the virus, or the elites’ response to it (for our own safety)?

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 20:00

• Allianz Takes $4.2 Billion Charge Over Collapsed Hedge Fund Debacle
  Allianz Takes $4.2 Billion Charge Over Collapsed Hedge Fund Debacle

  2021 was a bad year for hedge funds, but few were hit as hard as insurance giant Allianz SE, which today announced it would take a €3.7 billion ($4.2 billion) charge tied to the implosion of some of its U.S. hedge funds.

  The provision will hit last year’s net income by €2.8 billion, the company said in a statement late Thursday. And while the insurer expects to settle with major investors in the funds shortly, bringing some clarity to months of uncertainty on the legal bill for the matter, discussions with other plaintiffs, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are ongoing. The company also warned that it can’t reliably estimate the total financial impact of the legal matter and expects additional expenses.

  Some background: the Allianz hedge fund investment strategy, known as Structured Alpha, used “complex option strategies” to generate predictable returns without excessive risk, but according to the investors, imploded in February and March 2020 after quietly removing hedges designed to minimize losses.

  What is remarkable is that the hedge funds offered by the AGI unit were designed to provide protection against a market crash. Instead, two of the Structured Alpha Funds were liquidated at the end of March 2020 after suffering massive losses, and Allianz has since wound down the rest.

  According to court papers, the Structured Alpha Global Equity 500 fund lost three-quarters of its value, lagging its benchmark by nearly 60 percentage points. Two other funds once worth $2.3 billion were liquidated, locking in investor losses.

  The collapse sparked a frenzy of lawsuits by investors alleging losses of some $6 billion, as well as an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

  Back in August, Allianz warned that the hedge funds implosion could “materially impact” future earnings, after the U.S. Department of Justice started a probe into the funds.  Then, in September, a U.S. judge said Allianz must face investor claims it wrongly “abandoned” the investment strategies it promised to use on hedge funds that suffered massive losses as the COVID-19 pandemic shook markets early last year.

  It wasn’t all bad though: Allianz said operating profit rose 25% to 13.4 billion euros last year, and the company announced a plan to buy back as much as 1 billion euros of its own shares. Indeed, as Bloomberg notes, the hedge fund debacle “overshadowed a strong rebound at Allianz from the impact of the pandemic, with higher prices and an economic recovery fueling underlying earnings.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 20:00

• Biden Admin Divided Over Redesignating Yemen's Houthis As Terrorists
  Biden Admin Divided Over Redesignating Yemen’s Houthis As Terrorists

  Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

  Foreign Policy reported Wednesday that the UN has been warning the Biden administration against redesignating the Houthis as a “foreign terrorist organization” due to the impact it will have on Yemen’s starving civilian population.

  The report said that Brett McGurk, the top Middle East official on the National Security Council, led the drive to redesignate the Houthis as terrorists after the Yemeni group launched attacks on the UAE. But McGurk encountered pushback from other US officials during a meeting on February 4th.

  

  The report said top UN envoys, some officials from the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and private importers that deliver goods to Yemen are all pressuring President Biden not to redesignate the Houthis. On the other side is the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, all pushing for the Yemeni group to be relisted. On February 8th, McGurk told UN envoy Martin Griffiths that the plan was on hold for now.

  The designation essentially criminalizes delivering food to Yemenis living in Houthi-controlled territories, which is about 60 percent of the country’s population. It means anyone that does business with the Houthis could be hit with US sanctions. The Biden administration said it would issue exemptions for aid groups, but the UN has pointed out that about 85 percent of Yemen’s food supplies come from commercial importers.

  “Yemenis need commercial imports to survive. Aid agencies cannot replace commercial imports,” the UN said in an internal memo that was obtained by Foreign Policy. “If the supply chain dries up, many more Yemenis will go hungry.”

  The Trump administration designated the Houthis as terrorists in January 2021. The move was quickly reversed by Biden, but even in that short time, many suppliers canceled orders to Yemeni importers. “There are already signs that food and other essential imports will fall if a new designation proceeds,” the memo reads.

  The Fahem Group, a large Yemeni importer, sent a letter to the UN warning of the consequences the designation could have. “The inevitable and immediate consequence of any designation will be that they will cease all trade with ourselves,” the Fahem Group said. “Cutting commercial imports to Yemen risks bringing famine and death to the Yemeni people who are already facing a grave humanitarian crisis.”

  The Fahem Group also said they were surprised that they were not consulted about the possible designation, signaling that the US has not bothered to really understand the impact the move would have. “To our knowledge, no consultations have occurred with any Yemeni importers (or the global businesses we work with) on the potential impact of a renewed designation,” the importer said.

  Yemenite gov pressuring US to reclassify Houthis as terrorists: “For us, it is clear that the Houthis are a terrorist organization because of their crimes committed against the Yemenis”https://t.co/2Z1NJr1NXe

  — Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) February 13, 2022

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  Biden quickly reversed the designation when he first came to office due to the warnings from aid groups that it would push more Yemenis into starvation. Over the past year, conditions have only gotten worse in the country as the US-backed Saudi-led coalition has escalated its air campaign.

  The recent Houthi attacks on the UAE are a clear response to the Emirate’s role in the coalition that has been waging war on Yemen since 2015. In response to the Houthi attacks, the US is helping the UAE intercept missiles and deployed a warship and warplanes to the Gulf country, marking an escalation in Washington’s role in the war.

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 19:40

• Pioneer CEO Warns US Shale Can't Increase Supply Even If Biden Asks
  Pioneer CEO Warns US Shale Can’t Increase Supply Even If Biden Asks

  Drilling economics has never been better as oil prices could soon cross the $100 a barrel mark if global supplies remain tight and demand robust, along with the prospects of Russia’s crude exports derailed by tensions with Ukraine. Even with this bullish macro backdrop, a top U.S. oil and gas exploration and production company said they wouldn’t raise oil production even if prices increased further.

  Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield told analysts Thursday morning that its strategy to boost oil production from 0% to 5% won’t be affected even if oil prices surpass $100. “There’s no change for us,” he said, adding, “$100 oil, $150 oil, we’re not going to change our growth rate.”

  Sheffield said Pioneer favors stock buybacks more than acquisitions and has raised stock buyback authorization to $4 billion. He expects the company to focus on profitability, returning money to shareholders, and avoiding oversupplied conditions like the decade before. 

  He noted private producers in the Permian Basin need to be “reined in” for their high growth rates. He said a few private firms are raising output “at 15-20% are going to run out of inventory fairly quickly.” High growth output isn’t sustainable, he continued. 

  Sheffield made a surprising comment that Pioneer wouldn’t be able to increase production if the Biden administration requested. He warned that high inflation inhibits shale growth. 

  According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. oil production remains well below a pre-pandemic level of about 11.60 million barrels per day versus 13 million months before the 2020 lockdowns. Sheffield doesn’t believe total US production will roar back anytime soon. 

  

  Even though total US production is languishing, the EIA shows that parts of the shale patch, including the Bakken Region, Eagle Ford Region, and Permian Region, are growing at exceptional rates. 

  Bakken Region

  

  Eagle Ford Region

  

  Permian Region

  

  Private companies operating in the shale regions above are the ones Sheffield wants production to be dialed back. He also spoke to Bloomberg, reiterating how there would be no production increase if war broke out, and the company would focus on returning money to shareholders. 

  With Morgan Stanley joining Goldman Sachs and calling for $100 oil, and Bank of America’s commodity strategist Francisco Blanch laying out the idea of $120 oil… JPMorgan has one-upped everyone with an adverse geopolitical event between Russia and Ukraine could easily spark $150 oil. 

  

  Separately, Reuters’ commodity analyst John Kemp warned, “U.S. distillate fuel oil stocks are on course to fall critically low between now and the middle of the year, creating conditions for a potential spike in both crude and fuel prices.”

  

  Soaring gas prices have been terrible for President Biden’s polling data ahead of midterms. 

  

  Sheffield’s comments dash any hopes the Biden administration could see falling energy prices in the near term. Their attempt at the global coordinated SPR release failed and Biden’s begging OPEC+ to increase production rapidly has yet to materialize. Now it’s up to the Federal Reserve to crash the economy via aggressive tightening measures to tame inflation and get energy prices under control. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 19:20

• Convoy Chaos: Organizers Arrested, Dogs Threatened, Accounts Frozen And Govt. Sued
  Convoy Chaos: Organizers Arrested, Dogs Threatened, Accounts Frozen And Govt. Sued

  Update (1904ET): The situation in Ottawa has gotten worse for the Freedom Convoy – with the arrest of key organizers Chris Barber and Tamara Lich.

  Here is video of the arrest of convoy organizer Chris Barber #cdnpoli #ottnews pic.twitter.com/WrQTDHCAQb

  — Mackenzie Gray (@Gray_Mackenzie) February 17, 2022

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  BREAKING— #FreedomConvoy organizer Tamara Lich has been arrested by ⁦@OttawaPolice⁩ pic.twitter.com/cK9CadOPaR

  — Joe Warmington (@joe_warmington) February 18, 2022

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  Barber is currently in police custody and is expected to face criminal charges as the now-global protest against vaccine mandates and other restrictions enters its third week, according to the CBC.

  Barber is also one of three protest organizers named in the class action lawsuit filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice by lawyer Paul Champ on behalf of his client, 21-year-old public servant Zexi Li.

  The suit names Barber along with fellow convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Benjamin Dichter. 

  Earlier this month, Barber responded to criticism the protest was negatively affecting Ottawa residents by saying organizers had “empathy” for local residents.

  “We understand your frustration and genuinely wish there was another way for us to get our message across, but the responsibility for your inconvenience lies squarely on the shoulders of politicians who have [preferred] to vilify and call us names rather than engage in respectful, serious dialogue,” he said at the time. -CBC

  Facist pig https://t.co/NMDpOQ9HrX

  — Joseph J Flynn (@JosephJFlynn1) February 18, 2022

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  Meanwhile, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association has announced its intention to sue the federal government for invoking the Emergencies Act in response to the ongoing protests and blockades, the CBC reports.

  “Emergency powers cannot and must not be normalized,” said CCLA executive director Noa Mendelsohn, who added that the use of the act “seriously infringes on the Charter rights of Canadians.”

  The Emergencies Act was invoked by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday in response to ongoing demonstrations against COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates.

  The convoy protest in Ottawa has gridlocked the downtown core for more than 20 days, while other demonstrations have blocked international border crossings in Windsor, Ont. and Coutts, Alta. -CBC

  Mendelsohn said that reports of “violent, racist and homophobic acts” don’t rise to the level of introducing measures which the CCLA considers a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

  “Protest is how people in a democracy share their political messages of all kinds, whether they be environmental activists, students taking to the streets, Indigenous land defenders, workers on strike, people who know that Black lives matter, and others who oppose government measures of all kinds,” Mendelsohn said.

  “Not every person may agree with the content of every movement.”

  *  *  *

  Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said Thursday that financial institutions have been actively freezing the accounts of people linked to the medical freedom protests in Ottawa, which has left an unknown number of protesters and donors in financial limbo, according to state-owned CBC.

  

  Freeland said that the RCMP and other law enforcement agencies have been gathering intelligence on convoy protesters and their supporters, and have been sharing that information with financial institutions in order to restrict access to both cash and crypto.

  “The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets have been shared by the RCMP with financial institutions and accounts have been frozen and more accounts will be frozen,” she said, referring to crypto exchange accounts.

  Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland: “The names of both individuals and entities as well as crypto wallets have been shared by the RCMP with financial institutions and accounts have been frozen and more accounts will be frozen.” pic.twitter.com/iA69DbRJl1

  — True North (@TrueNorthCentre) February 17, 2022

  https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsAs the CBC notes,

  The law also allows banks to target for account closure donors to the GoFundMe and the GiveSendGo fundraising campaigns that fuelled this protest. Freeland said she wouldn’t get into the “specifics of whose accounts are being frozen.”

  Citing terrorist financing laws, the government has forced crowdfunding websites and payment providers to register with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), the government’s financial intelligence unit.

  In a final warning to the assembled protesters, Freeland said those who have their big rigs on Ottawa’s streets will see their insurance cancelled and their corporate accounts suspended — a move that could make it difficult for these drivers to ever work again.

  “The consequences are real and they will bite,” she said.

  Update (1610ET): You know it’s bad when…

  HOLY FUCKING SHIT—NOW EVEN AHMADINEJAD IS DUNKING ON TRUDEAU FOR GOING OVERBOARD ON THE CIVIL RIGHTS ABUSES.

  THESE MUSHROOMS ARE STRONG AF. https://t.co/2i9WB6fXPM

  — INVESTMENT HULK (@INVESTMENTSHULK) February 17, 2022

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  *  *  *

  Meanwhile mainstream outlet reporters are taking a hacked list of donors the GiveSendGo Freedom Convoy fundraiser and have been harassing people who donated as little as $50.

  The “journalist” bragged about it on Twitter today pic.twitter.com/f08FyEKknt

  — Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) February 17, 2022

  The dude at the Salt Lake City paper harassing trucker convoy donors. pic.twitter.com/gG6QDyClWl

  — James Lindsay, encyclopedia of Theory (@ConceptualJames) February 17, 2022

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  Brown shirt journalists doing what brown shirts always do on behalf of their overlords. Good useful idiots that they are. First to be taken out by their own in the end. https://t.co/xpT8wr3z55

  — Dr. Bernie Shrugs/ Stupid SOB wannabe. (@bernieshrugs) February 17, 2022

  Oh, and if you’re arrested in Canada with your dog they’ll consider it ‘relinquished’ after 8 days.

  *bong rip – ‘what if we kill their dogs?’ https://t.co/MXEv6rcmwU

  — Ryan Long (@ryanlongcomedy) February 17, 2022

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

  pic.twitter.com/77PyaBnKvt

  — Jimbo Slice (@patriot_jimbo) February 17, 2022

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 19:04

• Biden's $770B Pentagon Budget Proposal Denounced As "Absurd" By Progressive Dems
  Biden’s $770B Pentagon Budget Proposal Denounced As “Absurd” By Progressive Dems

  Authored by Julia Conley via Common Dreams, 

  With legislation to reduce childhood poverty and advance renewable energy stalled in Congress, the Biden administration is expected to request more than $770 billion in Pentagon and related spending for the fiscal year beginning in October. “This is absurd,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said in response to the news.

  The expected budget request, first reported by Reuters Wednesday, is tens of billions of dollars more than former Republican President Donald Trump ever requested and contrasts with widespread public demand for increased investment in middle- and lower-class Americans and an end to bloated military budgets.

  

  The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) pointed to recent polling by the organization which showed that 54% of adults in the U.S. want “the exact opposite” of increased military spending. “In the midst of a pandemic, the growing climate crisis, and ongoing issues nationwide, we need to invest in solutions instead of enriching defense contractors,” said the AFSC.

  According to Reuters, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has been negotiating with the White House Office of Management and Budget, arriving at a proposed budget that far exceeds those requested by Trump. Modernization of the United States’ nuclear arsenal and development of weapons to “to fight any potential future wars against China and Russia” have been identified by the administration as “must pay[s],” according to Reuters. Shipbuilding, space defense capabilities, and spending on F-35 jets made by Lockheed Martin are also priorities in the requested budget.

  Congress is likely to build on the proposed spending package and arrive at a number that exceeds the one suggested by Austin and President Joe Biden, as lawmakers did after Trump proposed nearly $753 billion for the Pentagon, Reuters reported.

  The proposal is expected to be officially announced by the White House as negotiations over the Build Back Better Act, the president’s $1.75 trillion 10-year investment in anti-poverty measures and climate action, is still being debated by lawmakers.

  That package was drastically reduced last year due to objections by right-wing Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to paid family and medical leave, an extension of the child tax credits that lifted millions of children out of poverty, and provisions to cut methane emissions and incentivize the use of renewable energy, before the senator ultimately announced he would not support what was left of the bill.

  Calls to vaccinate the global population in order to keep new variants of Covid-19 from cropping up and reaching the U.S. have also been largely met with inaction on Capitol Hill. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has said the effort would cost a total of $50 billion.

  “Devoting this enormous sum to the Pentagon at a time when the greatest challenges to our security—from pandemics to climate change—are not military in nature is both misguided and counterproductive,” said William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute.

  Hartung noted that the proposal includes increased spending on modernizing the Pentagon’s “nuclear triad”—nuclear armed bombers, land-based missiles, and ballistic missile submarines:

  This buildup, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates will cost $634 billion over the next ten years, is dangerous and unnecessary.  The continuing commitment to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which former Secretary of Defense William Perry has called ‘one of the most dangerous weapons in the world’ because it could be launched on a false alarm and trigger an accidental nuclear war, is particularly troubling. Eliminating ICBMs would enhance our security. And a much smaller nuclear arsenal would be more than adequate to dissuade any nation from launching an attack on the United States.

  “It’s time to rethink U.S. military strategy to focus on the most urgent challenges we face and scale back capabilities for fighting unnecessary overseas wars and sustaining nuclear overkill,” Hartung added. “The Pentagon budget should be substantially reduced in keeping with such an approach.”

  Biden’s massive defense spending has outraged the far Left…

  $700 billion in ONE YEAR? That’s obscene. The largest part of the #BuildBackBetter—climate—is $500 billion over a TEN YEAR PERIOD. Why are we always told there’s no money for our priorities? Why can’t the Pentagon just hold a bake sale to buy a bomber? https://t.co/ekpuRLx0V8

  — Paul Hogarth (@paulhogarth) February 17, 2022

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  In addition to the AFSC’s recent polling, Pew Research Center released a national survey Wednesday regarding the U.S. public’s top priorities for 2022. Strengthening the economy was by far the most common priority named by respondents, with 71% saying it was most important. Reducing healthcare costs followed at 61% and 60% of respondents said dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic was their highest priority.

  Strengthening the military was named by just 37% of respondents and was a more popular response than only two others—dealing with global trade and dealing with drug addiction. “It’s time to stop pumping billions more each year into the bloated Pentagon budget,” said Jayapal. “We can and must cut defense spending and invest in our communities, families, and climate.”

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 19:00

• Tuitions At NYC's Elite Private Schools Are Now Topping $60,000 Per Student
  Tuitions At NYC’s Elite Private Schools Are Now Topping $60,000 Per Student

  Prices of everything are going up – that includes private school tuition.

  With things at least somewhat returning to normal in New York City, including school’s re-opening and loosening Covid mandates, tuition at some private schools is set to top $60,000. 

  For example, the well known Spence School has already announced 3.5% tuition increases for the upcoming year, the New York Post reported this week. This will make its annual tuition $60,880 per student, despite parents requesting a tuition freeze for the upcoming year.

  

  The school reportedly wrote in a letter to parents: “The Trustees appreciate your commitment and recognize that all of our Spence families sacrifice to make their children’s education a priority. We are judicious in setting the annual budget.”

  Horace Mann and The Dalton School will also raise their tuitions above the $60,000 mark, the Post reported. Tuitions at many of the schools have “roughly doubled” over the course of the last 15 years. For example, Horace Mann and The Dalton School charged between $30,000 and $33,100 in 2008, the report says. 

  Meanwhile, it isn’t just tuition that is on the receiving end of the benefits of inflation. Headmaster Bodie Brizendine at the Spence School made $886,000 in 2019. She has told parents in the past that faculty compensation has accounted for 73% of tuition. 

  Tyler Durden
  Thu, 02/17/2022 – 18:40

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