Today’s News 18th February 2024

• US Air Force Needs Robotic Wingmen In Fight Against Communist China: Report
  US Air Force Needs Robotic Wingmen In Fight Against Communist China: Report

  Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  The U.S. Air Force needs to pair its manned combat aircraft with next-generation drones—known as collaborative combat aircraft (CCA)—to gain the air superiority needed in a war against China’s communist regime, according to a recent report by the Washington-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

  

  The report, based on wargames run by the Mitchell Institute in counterair missions defending Taiwan against China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), demonstrates how CCAs were used as airborne sensors, decoys, jammers, or weapon launchers in cooperation with crewed aircraft like the Air Force’s 5th generation fighter F-35 and F-22 Raptor.

  The Pentagon has characterized China as its pacing challenge amid the regime’s rapid modernization of its military. According to a 2023 report from the Department of Defense (DOD), PLA Air Force and PLA Navy Aviation had about 2,400 combat aircraft, and China “probably will become a majority fourth-generation force within the next several years.”

  In comparison, the report notes that the U.S. Air Force currently “operates a force that is the oldest, smallest, and least ready in its history,” adding that it now consists primarily of 179 aging 4th-generation F-15C/Ds and 185 5th-generation F-22s.

  “The defense budget trends tell us it’s simply unreasonable to assume the Air Force, or DOD for that matter, will soon be able to match the PLA aircraft for aircraft, weapon for weapon, ship for ship, and so on,” said Mark Gunzinger—a retired Air Force colonel who leads future concepts and capability assessments at the Mitchell Institute, and one of the authors of the report—during the report’s rollout event on Feb. 6.

  “Instead, our military must invest in asymmetric capabilities that will disrupt the PLA’s operations, impose costs, and create the conditions for mission success. And that’s a key reason why the Air Force is developing CCA,” Mr. Gunzinger added.

  According to the Department of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, CCAs must be capable of “taking high level direction” from a pilot and then “autonomously implementing this direction.” The uncrewed aircraft must also employ “a distributed, mission-tailorable mix of sensors, weapons, and other mission equipment.”

  Acting Air Force Undersecretary Krysten E. Jones disclosed during an event held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in January that contracts had been awarded to five companies to build a fleet of 1,000 CCAs. Air & Space Forces Magazine later confirmed the five selected companies are Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Anduril, and General Atomics.

  “Failing to achieve air superiority in a conflict with China would greatly increase the risk of a costly defeat that has existential, long-term impacts on the security of the United States and its allies,” the report says.

  CCAs

  Mr. Gunzinger emphasized that CCAs can be more than adjuncts to crewed aircraft.

  “There’s a need to break from the mindset that CCA will always operate in support of crewed aircraft,” Mr. Gunzinger said. “CCAs—that are properly designed, have the right mission systems, [and] degree of autonomy—could also be used as lead forces to disrupt enemies’ air defense operations.”

  The report explains that expendable CCAs—cheaper models with less advanced features that come with a price tag of $15 million or less each—could be used as lead forces to “complicate the PLA’s counterair targeting” and “cause PLA defenses to partially deplete their air-to-air and surface-to-air weapons.”

  CCAs can also work with non-stealthy combat aircraft, according to the report.

  “Today, the Air Force’s non-stealthy combat aircraft may have to stand-off from Chinese air defenses at distances that are outside the range of current U.S. counterair weapons—possibly 800 [nautical miles] or more,” the report reads.

  When paired with CCAs, stand-off bombers and fighters could “directly contribute to the fight for air superiority,” according to the report. Meanwhile, crewed combat aircraft can become more lethal when paired with CCAs.

  “Using CCA as sensors and shooters could also reduce the need for crewed fighters to activate their radar, open their weapons bay doors, or perform other actions that would temporarily reduce their stealthy signature,” the report says. “This would help reduce crewed aircraft attrition rates, which has a force-multiplying effect over the course of an air campaign.”

  The report also highlights how CCAs can potentially be designed so that they are launched from either short runaways or no runways, meaning they can be stationed in many different locations, creating a “more dispersed, resilient forward posture.” Air-launching CCAs can have longer ranges since they don’t need to consume fuel to take off or climb to an operational altitude.

  “Because uncrewed CCA may not need to fly as frequently as crewed aircraft, they could be postured in forward locations along the Pacific’s First Island Chain like other pre-positioned materiel,” the report says.

  “Forward posturing CCA in this way could help the Air Force sustain its initial combat pulses to defeat Chinese aggression and reduce reliance on long-range supply chains that will be at risk of attack.”

  The first island chain includes the Japanese archipelago, Taiwan, and the northern Phillippines. Taking over Taiwan would allow China to break the chain and project its military power in the Pacific Ocean.

  “These CCA could be used in disruptive ways that will help offset the PLA’s ability to project superior combat mass to control the air over the Taiwan Strait and other areas of the South China Sea,” the report says.

  Costs

  Experts taking part in the wargames “unanimously agreed” that CCAs will be “additive and complementary” to crewed aircraft, according to Mr. Gunzinger.

  “They’re not going to reduce the Air Force’s requirements for F-35s, NGAD, and B-21s,” Mr. Gunzinger said. “The maximum combat value will be realized by taking full advantage of the attributes that crude and uncouth uncrewed aircraft [that] each bring to the fight.”

  The U.S. Air Force is looking to replace F-22s with sixth-generation fighter aircraft via the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program.

  “NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the ability to survive, persist, interoperate, and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments,” Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said in May last year.

  The report offers several recommendations for the U.S. Air Force, including carrying out analyses to determine the “right tradeoffs” to balance cost and design attributes for its future fleet of CCAs.

  “A CCA designed as an expendable decoy may not require as much payload capacity or the same degree of low observability as recoverable/attritable CCA that are designed to fly multiple sorties,” the report says. “Balancing CCA capabilities with their mission requirements and costs will be key to maximizing their combat utility and cost-effectiveness.”

  In November last year, Mr. Kendall took part in an event at the Washington-based think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS). During the event, he said the cost of a single CCA would be “on the order of a quarter or a third” of the current cost of an F-35—meaning that a CCA would cost about $20 million to $27 million.

  The report recommends that the U.S. Air Force develop “innovative operating concepts for using CCA to disrupt China’s advanced IADS [integrated air defense system] and other counter-intervention operations.”

  The U.S. Air Force should also develop smaller weapons to take maximum advantage of CCA payload limitations. The report explains that increasing the number of targets CCA can attack per sortie “is critical to rapidly halting a Chinese offensive.”

  The report also advises the Pentagon to work with Congress to increase U.S. Air Force funding.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 23:20

• Fentanyl Lollipops? Top Border Patrol Doctor Asked Staff For Narcotics Before UN Meeting In New York: Whistleblowers
  Fentanyl Lollipops? Top Border Patrol Doctor Asked Staff For Narcotics Before UN Meeting In New York: Whistleblowers

  Several whistleblowers allege that the chief medical officer for Customs and Border Protection (CBP) pressured his staff to smuggle fentanyl lollipops to a September United Nations General Assembly Meeting in New York last September, according to a report submitted to Congress on Friday.

  

  According to NBC News, Dr. Alexander Eastman’s staff thought it was really strange that their boss would need to order fentanyl lollipops to take with him. What’s more, his explanation was hilarious; he might need them as part of his duties in case any injured CBP operators needed pain management, should an emergency occur.

  “Eastman spent copious hours of his and Office of the Chief Medical Officer staff time directing the OCMO staff to urgently help him procure fentanyl lollipops, a Schedule II narcotic, so that he could bring them on the CBP Air and Marine Operations helicopter on which he would be a passenger in New York City,” the whistleblowers alleged in their letter. “Dr. Eastman claims that his possession of fentanyl lollipops was necessary in case a CBP operator might be injured, or in case the CBP Air and Marine Operations team encountered a patient in need.”

  Customs and Border Protection is the chief agency responsible for detecting and stopping the illegal flow of fentanyl into the U.S. across international borders.

  Eastman’s staff initially responded to his request by explaining that Narcan, which can save the lives of those who overdose on fentanyl, has been requested for CBP operations in the past, but not fentanyl itself. The whistleblowers say staff members raised questions about how he would store the lollipops and what he would do with unused fentanyl at the end of the operation, according to the report. -NBC News

  Eastman responded to his staff’s questions by writing his own policy regarding the procurement of Schedule II narcotics – which failed to outline how narcotics would be stored and disposed of, the whistleblowers allege. He was ultimately unsuccessful in his bid for the lollipops, because a vendor could not be found in time for the UN General Assembly – a meeting of diplomats and heads of state to discuss international issues. While it would be unusual for the CBP’s top medical officer to attend, he said that he needed to go because CBP’s Air and Marine Operations division was assisting Secret Service with security.

  The whistleblowers, represented by the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, also allege Eastman was under investigation by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility at the time regarding improper ordering and securing of narcotics for a friend who is a pilot for Air and Marine Operations. The friend worked as a helicopter pilot for Air and Marine Operations in New York during the General Assembly, the report says. -NBC News

  Eastman was promoted to acting chief medical officer in June after the agency made an abrupt change in leadership following the death of an 8-year-old girl in CBP custody, who died after on-site medical personnel allegedly ignored warning signs and ignored her mother.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 22:45

• Iran Transported $2.8BN Worth Of Oil In 2023 Under Washington's Nose
  Iran Transported $2.8BN Worth Of Oil In 2023 Under Washington’s Nose

  Via The Cradle

  Iran was able to transport $2.8 billion in oil to customers in 2023 using insurance from a US-based company, despite sanctions imposed on Iranian oil sales by the US Treasury, an investigation published by The New York Times (NYT) on Friday has found. 

  The oil was transported aboard 27 tankers, using liability insurance obtained by the New York-based American Club. Tankers are typically required to have liability insurance to enter international ports, meaning the US Treasury could have blocked the sale of this oil by demanding the American Club revoke insurance for the tankers.

  

  NYT says the 27 tankers were able to transport shipments across at least 59 trips during 2023. The Treasury Department did not respond to a question from the newspaper about whether it was aware the ships had transported Iranian oil while insured by the American Club.

  To identify the shipments, NYT relied on tracking data provided by TankerTrackers.com, SynMax, and Pole Star.

  The investigation showed the tankers were engaged in activities suggesting they may be involved in evading US sanctions. The ships are owned by shell companies, are older than average tankers, and use “spoofing” to obscure their locations.

  In response to the investigation, Daniel Tadros, the American Club’s COO, said it was difficult for his firm to determine if a tanker was carrying Iranian oil and that the US government should play a more significant role in investigating activity that might violate its sanctions. 

  “It’s impossible for us to know on a daily basis exactly what every ship is doing, where it’s going, what it’s carrying, who its owners are,” Tedros said. “I would like to think that governments have a lot more capability, manpower, resources to follow that.”

  A US Treasury spokesperson said in a statement: “Treasury remains focused on targeting Iran’s sources of illicit funding, including exposing evasion networks and disrupting billions of dollars in revenue.”

  Lawmakers in the US have criticized officials in the White House for their failure to curb Iranian oil sales and for releasing billions of dollars of seized Iranian oil revenue as part of a prisoner exchange this summer. 

  Republican lawmakers claim that Iran has been able to use funds from released oil sales to support “terrorism.”

  Meanwhile, let’s review other recent instances of Biden’s failed sanctions policy, and inability to enforce:

  “A US refiner imported 10,000 barrels of Russian oil through a blending loophole at storage terminals in the Bahamas.

  The crude, brought into Wilmington, Delaware in November, didn’t violate US sanctions because it was exported from Russia to the Bahamas prior to March 8, 2022, when the sanctions began, said Morgan Butterfield, an Energy Information Administration spokesperson. It was then commingled with other oil before being imported into the US, he said.”

  We can now publicly reveal that Russian crude oil is en route to Venezuela after LIGERA (9237072), a frequent sanctions violator, received roughly 1.7 million barrels via 2 STS transfers in the Laconian Gulf, Greece. She is heading most likely to the Punta Cardon refinery. #OOTT pic.twitter.com/F7cH0kwVIC

  — TankerTrackers.com, Inc. (@TankerTrackers) February 12, 2024

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  Iran provides essential support to various armed groups throughout West Asia, collectively known as the Axis of Resistance, including in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen. These groups are committed to ending Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the US occupation of Syria, and US troop presence in Iraq.

  “It is very concerning,” said Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat of New Hampshire, who has filed a bill to strengthen the enforcement of sanctions.

  “The United States must use every tool at its disposal to identify, stop and sanction these bad actors,” she said. “These new revelations highlight the stakes.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 22:10

• CDC Confirms Spread Of 'Unknown' Outbreak Aboard Cruise Ship
  CDC Confirms Spread Of ‘Unknown’ Outbreak Aboard Cruise Ship

  The CDC has confirmed that an “unknown” outbreak aboard a cruise ship is spreading, and has infected at least 154 people.

  

  In an update this week, the agency said that so far 25 crew members and 129 passengers on the Carnival-owned Cunard Cruise Line’s Queen Victoria have fallen ill, after an initial 15 cases were reported weeks ago. The Queen Victoria has 1,824 passengers and 967 crew members aboard.

  Those fallen ill have reported “symptoms of gastrointestinal illness,” however the CDC has yet to identify the exact illness.

  “Cunard confirms that a number of guests had reported symptoms of gastrointestinal illness on board Queen Victoria on voyage V405 which departed Florida on [Jan. 22] and arrived in San Francisco on [Feb. 7],” said Cunard Cruise Lines in a statement to news outlets. “They immediately activated their enhanced health and safety protocols to ensure the wellbeing of all guests and crew on board and these measures have been effective.”

  According to CruiseMapper, the Queen Victoria is currently on a 55-day trip that will take it from Germany to Australia – with its final destination being Honolulu, Hawaii on March 4.

  Last month, nearly 100 passengers aboard a Celebrity Cruises ship, the Constellation, fell ill with norovirus after departing in early January from Florida.

  As the Epoch Times reports further;

  Common Outbreak Source

  While the CDC report still hasn’t revealed the cause of the Cunard cruise ship’s outbreak, norovirus has been the most common source of illnesses on cruise ships in recent years. The agency reported 14 illness outbreaks on cruise ships in 2023, with norovirus being listed as the causative agent in all but one of the incidents.

  Last year, for example, a norovirus outbreak sickened more than 170 people on a Celebrity cruise ship, with the main symptoms being diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, and headaches.

  In a normal year, according to the CDC, norovirus causes between 19 million and 21 million cases of vomiting and diarrhea, 109,000 hospitalizations, and 900 deaths across the United States. The virus also is associated with about 495,000 emergency department visits, mostly in younger children, the CDC says.

  If there is a new strain of the virus, the CDC says, there can be upward of 50 percent more norovirus illnesses in a given year.

  The CDC’s webpage for norovirus says the virus is very contagious and generally causes vomiting and diarrhea. “Anyone can get infected and sick with norovirus. Norovirus is sometimes called the ’stomach flu‘ or ’stomach bug,’” the agency says. “However, norovirus illness is not related to the flu.”

  Other than cruise lines, norovirus outbreaks often occur in health care facilities, long-term care facilities, restaurants, child care centers, and schools. Noting the association between norovirus outbreaks and cruises, the CDC says that more than 90 percent of “outbreaks of diarrheal disease on cruise ships” are caused by the virus.

  “These outbreaks often get media attention, which is why some people call norovirus the ‘cruise ship virus,’” the CDC says. “However, norovirus outbreaks on cruise ships account for only a small percentage … of all reported norovirus outbreaks. Norovirus can be especially challenging to control on cruise ships because of the close living quarters, shared dining areas, and rapid turnover of passengers.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 21:35

• Incest Is Best? The Economist Says Copulating-Cousins Cool "In Most Cases"
  Incest Is Best? The Economist Says Copulating-Cousins Cool “In Most Cases”

  With America facing population collapse thanks to a pandemic which compounded already-shrinking birth rates, petrified young men who don’t want to get #MeToo’d for trying to get past 1st base, and record numbers of young Americans identifying as anything but heterosexual, The Economist wants you to know that it’s “probably fine” to bang your cousin, which they also note is “illegal in 25 American states.”

  

  After a dig at Kentucky for a ‘quickly withdrawn’ proposal to remove “first cousin” from the state list of incestuous family relations, the article goes on to ‘ackshually’ explain that the risk of genetic mutations among the offspring of first cousins is ‘greater’ than non-incest relations, however ‘the increase is quite small.’

  Justifying ‘kissing cousins’ further, The Economist suggests that it’s unfair to prevent incest because “Many other couples face far higher risks of genetic complications for their offspring, and those unions are not banned,” such as people with recessive genes for certain disorders, such as sickle-cell anemia or cystic fibrosis, their offspring has a 25% chance of being born with that disorder, “Yet those marriages are allowed.”

  “The law against first-cousin marriage is a major form of discrimination,” said University of Washington Department of Medicine Director of Genetic Counseling, Robin Bennett (M.S., CGC, (she/her)).

  

  According to Bennett, “the risks are very low and not much different than for any other couple.”

  The Economist then goes on to let us know that ‘the Bible does not directly ban sexual relations between cousins,’ (“how else would all of mankind have descended from Adam and Eve?” they write), though “The Roman Catholic Church did later prohibit first cousins from marrying, though exceptions were made for a fee.”

  That said, there are limits, even for The Economist…

  Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary biology, who married his first cousin in 1839, was reportedly conflicted about his own arrangement. The Darwins had ten children, but three of them died during childhood and three of his surviving children never had any offspring with their spouses. Some historians surmise that the children suffered from genetic abnormalities due to their parents being closely related—the families of Darwin and his wife had a long history of intermarriage.

  Yet despite the fairly low genetic risk for most couples, the “ick” factor prevails in Western culture. The family dynamics can be difficult to explain to others. Many consanguineous couples choose to keep quiet, says Ms Bennett. For this reason it is difficult to know how many of these couples exist in America. -The Economist

  Maybe the plan is to either get people banging their cousins, or keep the border open while praising Biden’s amazing ‘jobs recovery’?

  NEW – The United States has just undergone its most substantial one-year population increase in history, with growth exceeding 3.8 million people in 2023, primarily attributed to illegal immigration, according to a recent report by John Burns Research and Consulting.

  Under… pic.twitter.com/2BRANQUrPF

  — KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 17, 2024

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  Also ‘probably’ just fine?

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 20:25

• Turley: Obscene Award Against Trump Is Testing New York's Legal Integrity
  Turley: Obscene Award Against Trump Is Testing New York’s Legal Integrity

  Authored by Jonathan Turley, op-ed via The Hill,

  In laying the foundation for his sweeping decision against former President Donald Trump, Judge Arthur Engoron observed that “this is a venial sin, not a mortal sin.” Yet, at $355 million, one would think that Engoron had found Trump to be the source of Original Sin.

  

  The judgment against Trump (and his family and associates) was met with a level of unrestrained celebration by many in New York that bordered on the indecent. Attorney General Letitia James declared not only that Trump would be barred from doing business in New York for three years, but that the damages would come to roughly $460 million once interest was included. 

  That makes the damages against Trump greater than the gross national product of some countries, including Micronesia. Yet the court admitted that not a single dollar was lost by the banks from these dealings. Indeed, witnesses testified that they wanted to do more business with Trump, who was described as a “whale” client with high yield business opportunities. 

  Undervaluing and overvaluing property is a longstanding practice in New York real estate. The forms submitted by the Trump organization cautioned the banks to do their own estimates and the loans were paid in full and on time. Yet, the New York law used by James is a curiosity because it does not actually require a victim. Indeed, everyone can make ample profits and still allow for an investigation into “repeated fraudulent or illegal acts.” 

  Having campaigned on bagging Trump on any basis, James turned the law into a virtual license to hunt him down along with his family and his associates.

  Engoron proved the perfect judge for the case. The opinion itself seems almost cathartic for the jurist who struggled with Trump inside and outside of court. In the judgment, Engoron fulfilled Oscar Wilde’s rule that the only way to be rid of temptation is to yield to it. He ordered everything short of throwing Trump into a wood chipper.

  The size of the damages is grotesque and should shock the conscience of any judge on appeal. Even if the Democrat-appointed judges on the New York Court of Appeals were to ignore the obvious inequity and unfairness, the United States Supreme Court could intervene. 

  State courts tend to get a significant amount of deference in the interpretation of their own laws. After all, if New York wants to turn Wall Street into a remake of “The Hunger Games,” it has only itself to blame as other businesses flee the state. 

  The impact on New York business is likely to be dire. New York is already viewed as a hostile business environment, with the top end of its tax base literally heading south as taxes and crime rises. This draconian award is only going to deepen concerns over the arbitrary application of the law by figures like James, who previously sought to disband the National Rifle Association. (She has shown less interest in cracking down on liberal organizations like Black Lives Matter or the National Action Network of Al Sharpton despite their own major financial scandals.)

  As James gleefully uses this law to break up a major New York corporation, it is hard to imagine many businesses rushing to the Big Apple. This follows Democratic politicians such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) campaigning against Amazon seeking to open new facilities in the city. After this week, drawing new businesses to the city is going to be about as easy as selling country estates during the French Revolution.

  The one hope for New York businesses may be the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the deference afforded to the states and their courts, the court has occasionally intervened to block excessive damage awards. 

  For example, in 1996, the justices limited state-awards of punitive damages under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In that case, BMW was found to have repainted luxury cars damaged in transit without telling buyers.

  An Alabama jury awarded $4,000 in compensatory damages for the loss of value in having a factory paint job, but then added $4 million in punitive damages. Even when the Alabama Supreme Court reduced that to $2 million,  the U.S. Supreme Court still found it excessive. Even liberals on the Court such as John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer agreed that such “grossly excessive” awards raise a “basic unfairness of depriving citizens of life, liberty, or property, through the application of arbitrary coercion.”

  The court may find almost half a billion dollars in damages without a single lost dollar from a victim to be a tad excessive.

  That prospect will not dampen the thrill-kill environment in New York this week. In electing openly partisan prosecutors such as James and District Attorney Alvin Bragg, voters have shown a preference for political prosecutions and investigations. 

  In “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe wrote about Sherman McCoy, a successful businessman who had achieved the status of one of the “masters of the universe” in New York. In the prosecution of McCoy for a hit-and-run, Wolfe described a city and legal system devouring itself in the politics of class and race. The book details a businessman’s fall from a great height — a fall that delighted New Yorkers.

  It is doubtful Trump will end up as the same solitary figure wearing worn-out clothes before the Bronx County Criminal Court clutching a binder of legal papers. But you do not have to feel sorry or even sympathetic for Trump to see this award as obscene. The appeal will test the New York legal system to see if other judges can do what Judge Engoron found so difficult: set aside their feelings about Trump.

  New York is one of our oldest and most distinguished bars. It has long resisted those who sought to use the law to pursue political opponents and unpopular figures. It will now be tested to see if those values transcend even Trump.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 19:50

• Conditions Not Right For Ukraine-Russia Peace Talks, China Says After Appeal From Kiev
  Conditions Not Right For Ukraine-Russia Peace Talks, China Says After Appeal From Kiev

  Starting last month the Zelensky government began calling for China to get more involved in the international effort to find a peace formula in Ukraine. “China needs to be involved in talks to end the war with Russia,” a Zelensky top aide said during January’s WEF meeting in Davos.

  But what Ukraine means by peace talks is that Beijing must get on board Kiev’s own peace formula, which demands the full withdrawal of all Russian troops from seized Ukrainian territory. This weekend, Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba is reportedly seeking a meeting with China’s FM to discuss the issue.

  Importantly, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has responded by saying conditions are not yet right for peace talks to end the war.

  

  The top Chinese diplomat delivered his response before the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. “There are not ripe conditions in place for parties to go back to the negotiating table,” he announced in an on-stage interview.

  “China has done a lot of constructive work and we will continue to play a positive role,” he added. Noticeably, China has never outright condemned the war or Russia’s invasion. Instead, it has issued a number of statements highlighting the role of NATO’s expansions in leading up to the crisis.

  Ukraine has been pressing to woo Global South countries and ‘fence-sitters’ to its side, also in preparation for a major summit in the near-future.

  “Ukraine has been pushing for a high-level summit to be held next month, though the date is likely to slip to April or May due to the lack of commitment from world leaders, according to people familiar with the plans,” Bloomberg writes.

  “Switzerland has said it’s open to hosting, and its diplomats have been looking to assess interest from counterparts — including in China,” the report noted.

  China is seen as key to getting Russia to make significant compromise, yet both Xi and Putin know that the latest Russian military successes in Ukraine means Kiev has no cards to play. Ultimately, without China being on board with such initiatives to convince the major Global South countries to take a firmer anti-Russian line, there’s little likely to come out of it.

  Still, it seems each side is at least inching toward possible near-future talks. “Liu Jianchao, head of the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, told an event in the US that Russia has showed enthusiasm to have peace talks with Ukraine, when Chinese officials talked with them,” according to statements issued last month.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 19:15

• Middle America Is Dying, And D.C. Doesn't Care
  Middle America Is Dying, And D.C. Doesn’t Care

  Authored by Salena Zito via The Washington Examiner,

  WEIRTON, West Virginia – Most people in this town will tell you they’d rather have taken a physical punch to the gut than get the news they received yesterday when Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate production plant, a move that directly cost 900 people their jobs.

  It isn’t just those workers who face catastrophic uncertainty; this closure also jeopardizes the jobs of thousands more people whose businesses supported the plant: the barber shops, gas stations, mom-and-pop grocery stores, the machine shops that make the widgets for the steel industry. And there’s also the demise of the tax base, which affects the school district and the quality of the roads.

  

  Thirty years ago, more than 10,000 people worked here at Weirton Steel. Now, the last 900 workers left have just lost their jobs.

  “It’s just another scar to add on what people in power have done to our lives and our community over the past 40 years,” said one employee who declined to give his name, adding, “Honestly, how many times does this story have to be told before someone in power cares about our lives.”

  He points to different buildings downtown, and all of them for him were “used to be this” and “used to be that.”

  Ryan Weld of Wellsburg, 43, grew up in downtown Weirton right behind the local funeral home.

  “When I was growing up in the ’80s, the mill was still going at full tilt with Weirton Steel employing 10,000 people, including my grandfathers,” he said.

  The Republican state senator said things started to slow down here in the mid to late ’90s after the North American Free Trade Agreement was enacted:

  “That dramatically changed the landscape of downtown, went from a bustling the last age group that remembers the shops and stores and restaurants of downtown.”

  He believes NAFTA, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, essentially made it hard for companies like Weirton Steel, which had to follow strict and expensive Environmental Protection Agency guidelines compete with places like Mexico.

  The towns all up and down the Steel Valley died hard.

  “The legacy of the federal government and its refusal to properly enforce trade laws is nothing but empty mills and unemployed workers,” Weld said.

  “That was true in the ’80s and ’90s, and that is true today.”  

  Forty years ago, the Democratic Party started to slowly shed its working-class base, but not quickly: Democratic officials would still show up for decades at union rallies, putting their arms around workers’ shoulders and telling them they have their back while at the same time enacting regulations and trade agreements that stripped them of their livelihoods and dignity and made ghettos of their once beloved communities.

  By the 2012 Obama reelection, they traded their New Deal Democrat legacy voters for ascendant groups: minorities, young people, college-educated elites, and single women, all done without so much as a Dear John letter.

  The Republicans inherited them, but most of their strategists running messaging and campaigns had no idea what to do with them, at least on the national level.

  And then there is the press covering the voter who will decide the next president: Few if any of them come from places like Weirton or Youngstown, Ohio, so they have little understanding of their worldview. Things that give people from here purpose, such as living close to extended family, are not as valuable to someone who has been transient for most of a career.

  In short, we are heading once again into an election where very few people in Washington truly understand how remarkably devastating this mill closure is.

  Instead, it is a wire story at best, soon forgotten if measured at all. They truly do not understand how much the loss of the dignity of work has changed American politics.

  That this tone-deafness is still happening 14 years after Barack Obama was given notice in the 2010 midterm elections and eight years after Donald Trump won the presidency is pretty staggering.

  The Democrats once attracted these voters, but they’ve moved on to the social justice crowd and don’t appear to want to anymore. I’m not sure if Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) does, the press does not, and the new “very online right” is certainly not the reflection of a center-right voter in middle America. The online right just seems hell-bent on making them seem like Taylor Swift conspiracy theorists. (P.S. They’re not.)

  Jeff Brauer, a political science professor at Keystone College, said Washington elites on both sides of the aisle, media elites, and now online conspiracy elites just don’t get Middle America even after this recent economically and politically difficult decade.

  “Few things bond people/citizens together like trying to make a living in the real world, the dignity of work, and raising a family,” he explained, adding these bonds that cut across all divides — geographic, racial/ethnic, religious, gender, ideological/party, and even at times socioeconomic.

  “If there is one thing we have learned over the past decade, it is that this bond over the difficulties of making an honest living can and does create unlikely coalitions of voters,” he said. “Even disparate voters from the likes of Bernie Sanders supporters to Trump supporters can agree on this.”

  Indeed, economic dignity and survival make strange bedfellows.

  Brad Todd, founding partner of OnMessage and co-author with me of The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, said one thing is for certain about 2024: “We are about to read a million new stories that quote zero people who are actually going to decide the election.”

  Brauer said the dignity of work is at the very core of the American experience, “Yet the elites of this country still just don’t understand, while average Americans just keep getting financially squeezed more and more.”

  Weld said it is incumbent on local elected officials such as himself to be the advocates of Middle America.

  “I do what I do because of that. The empty buildings were already there when I was in college and high school, and it pisses me off,” he said. “I don’t think anyone fought hard enough for that from happening. We shouldn’t keep having to read again, again, another story about a town dying hard and a vacancy of no one caring.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 18:40

• US Prepares New Weapons Transfer To Israel, Ironically While Pushing For Ceasefire
  US Prepares New Weapons Transfer To Israel, Ironically While Pushing For Ceasefire

  Just days ago President Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the military operation in refugee-packed Rafah “should not proceed” unless civilians are evacuated first.

  Yet at the same time, the Biden administration is preparing another major weapons transfer to Israel. Not only is Washington pushing for another ceasefire (ostensibly at least) but Biden recently called the Israeli operation in Gaza “over the top” amid the soaring civilian death toll.

  All of this serves to highlight that the White House is talking out of both sides of its mouth – on the one hand seeking to deflect international and domestic criticism by issuing statements warning over the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe, but on the other directly fueling the Israeli war machine.

  

  On this latter point, the Wall Street Journal has detailed in a fresh weekend report:

  The proposed arms delivery includes roughly a thousand each of MK-82 bombs, KMU-572 Joint Direct Attack Munitions that add precision guidance to bombs, and FMU-139 bomb fuses, the officials said. The arms are estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. The proposed delivery is still being reviewed internally by the administration, a U.S. official said, and the details of the proposal could change before the Biden administration notifies congressional committee leaders who would need to approve the transfer.

  Since the Hamas terror attack of Oct.7, the US administration has given Israel 21,000 precision-guided munitions to Israel, an estimated half of which have been used.

  This new proposed transfer is valued at “tens of millions of dollars”. Already the bulk of Israel’s arsenal is supplied from the US, also given it has historically been the biggest recipient of American foreign aid.

  The WSJ says that even now, with a reported over 28,000 Gazans killed and a massive refugee crisis, the Biden White House is not expected to attach any conditions to the use of these weapons:

  An assessment of the proposed arms transfer drafted by the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, and viewed by The Wall Street Journal, said the Israeli government requested “rapid acquisition of these items for the defense of Israel against continued and emerging regional threats.”

  The assessment said there were no potential human rights concerns with the sale. “Israel takes effective action to prevent gross violations of human rights and to hold security forces responsible that violate those rights. In the past, Israel has been a transparent partner in U.S. investigations into allegations of defense article misuse,” the assessment says.

  Below: an example of Biden’s change in rhetoric toward sharply criticizing Israel…

  Biden’s full answer on Gaza. He calls the response from Israel “over the top,” says he got humanitarian aid into Gaza adding “there are a lot of innocent people are starving. Lot innocent people or in trouble and dying. And it’s got to stop” pic.twitter.com/EZM01RP9HX

  — Andy Kaczynski (@KFILE) February 9, 2024

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

  But again, strangely Biden himself has highlighted the humanitarian disaster, and has warned Israel. This is yet another example of Biden’s contradictory policies and statements, while apparently having no long-term plan. The current policy is tantamount to Biden telling Netanyahu to stop killing so many civilians, while simultaneously handing him more guns and military hardware ‘with no strings attached’. Biden’s progressive supporters are taking note going into November too, and he’s likely to lose some of his base.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 18:05

• Cultural Marxism & The Corruption Of Common Law
  Cultural Marxism & The Corruption Of Common Law

  Authored by William Brooks via The Epoch Times,

  Peaceful and productive human societies depend on the maintenance of judicial principles that are consistent and impartial.

  During the 12th-century reign of Henry II, the English king began to establish a more trustworthy system of legal decision making. The king’s judges were asked to consider verdicts that had been reached in similar cases.

  Throughout the following centuries legal decision making was based on tradition and custom. This unified system of justice became known as “English Common Law.”

  The legal principle, commonly known as “stare decisis,” discouraged dishonest plaintiffs from seeking unprecedented settlements for specious allegations against parties whom they disliked or sensed they could take advantage of.

  The adoption of English common law in America made the United States particularly attractive to free, hard-working people who sought to engage in honest commerce, acquire capital, remain secure in their persons, protect their property and reputations, participate in public affairs, practice their religion, and live well-ordered lives.

  When jurists feel compelled to make fair comparisons with precedent-setting cases, justice is generally well served.

  Transforming American Justice

  Things don’t always change for the better.

  Over several generations Marxist intellectuals have been transforming the American justice system. They regard a commitment to neutrality as a way of disguising “colonialist” and “patriarchal” power structures. Since the 1980s this has led to fierce partisan disputes over the nomination of judges and serious doubts about impartiality in American courts.

  Marxism is a conflict-oriented ideology, and Marxists view liberal conceptions of freedom, democracy, and justice as instruments of “oppression.” The American left defines pro-American descendants of European colonists as “oppressors.” More recently, this status has expanded to include African American conservatives, legal Hispanic immigrants, election fraud protesters, concerned parents, practicing Catholics, Jews, or anyone else President Joe Biden chooses to call a “MAGA extremist.”

  Cultural Marxists imagine victims of oppression at all levels of American society. The “oppressed” can include university-educated elites, radical militants, anti-American identity groups, drug addicts, homeless vagrants, habitual criminals, and millions of illegal migrants. “Social” as opposed to “actual” justice requires that people with victim status receive special protection while alleged oppressors are summarily prosecuted and punished.

  Justice Must Be Done and Seen to Be Done

  Legal scholars once insisted that “justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.” Everyone should be able to expect a fair trial that’s accurately covered by public news organizations.

  But unbiased judges and honest reporters are in short supply. While Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is facing unprecedented indictments, journalists are still insisting that American justice is fair and impartial.

  The left’s recourse to “lawfare” requires judges and journalists to conceal the truth rather than expose it. Legacy news organizations say there’s no evidence of the “weaponization of justice” or a “two-tiered” legal system. But, as specious allegations come before American courts, folks can’t help noticing that the so-called “oppressed” usually win.

  For example, in 2019 American advice columnist E. Jean Carroll suddenly accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman department store dressing room in the mid-1990s. Mr. Trump vigorously denied the allegations, but Ms. Carroll was permitted to sue him for defamation and battery.

  One could have guessed the outcome of this case before it began. The left views Donald Trump as an arch-oppressor, and E. Jean Carroll was seen as an “oppressed” victim.

  In May 2023, a New York jury found the former president liable for defamation and sexual abuse and awarded E. Jean Carroll $5 million in damages. In January of this year, Mr. Trump was found liable in a second defamation suit, and Ms. Carroll was awarded an additional $83.3 million. The second award was unprecedented.

  Late in January, Breitbart News reporter Hannah Bleau Knudsen revealed several facts about this case that she said the establishment media didn’t want the public to know.

  First, there were no witnesses and no surveillance video of the attack, which was alleged to have occurred in a downtown New York department store.

  The plaintiff came forward with her story while promoting a book titled “What Do We Need Men For?,” which featured a list of “The Most Hideous Men of My Life.” The dress she claimed to be wearing during the alleged attack was not for sale in the year she initially claimed the event occurred. Despite her public reputation for being very open about sexual matters, she didn’t accuse President Trump until some 30 years after the alleged encounter.

  Her entire story was very similar to a 2012 “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” episode, titled “Theatre and Tricks,” in which an individual talks about a rape fantasy in Bergdorf Goodman. In a November 1993 edition of Elle, before the alleged abuse, Ms. Carroll had made a joke associating sex with Bergdorf Goodman.

  E. Jean Carroll’s case was financially backed by anti-Trump Democrat mega-donor Reid Hoffman. One of her lawyers is Roberta Kaplan, whose wife is a Democratic Party activist. In fact, her lawsuit was only able to proceed after New York Democrats created a 2022 “Adult Survivors Act,” which allowed judges to overlook the usual statute of limitations for such charges.

  Judgments in cases that are tried in partisan-charged venues such as New York City or Washington DC, have almost become forgone conclusions.

  

  A steep decline of common law principles will not bode well for the future of the American Republic. Who would have thought that in 2024 American citizens would be witnessing a partisan special prosecutor seeking the U.S. Supreme Court’s permission to put the opposing party’s presidential candidate on trial months before a presidential election.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 17:30

• "F**k Around & Find Out": Truckers Warn Loads To NYC Will Be Rejected Starting Monday
  “F**k Around & Find Out”: Truckers Warn Loads To NYC Will Be Rejected Starting Monday

  Truck drivers transport between 70% to 73% of all freight in the United States. Therefore, when truckers begin discussing plans on social media to boycott loads to progressive hellhole New York City, it’s important to pay attention. 

  X user Chicago1Ray, who appears to be a Midwest truck driver, shared a video late Friday night detailing that a number of truck drivers will begin denying loads to NYC on Monday. 

  “I don’t know how far across the country this is – or how many truckers are going start denying loads to NYC – but I’ll tell you – you f**k around and find out,” Chicago1Ray said. 

  He continued: “We’re tired of motherf**king leftist f**king with Trump. Okay … Motherfu**ers start to get tired of this shit. Our bosses aren’t going to care if we deny loads. We’ll go somewhere else.” 

  “You know how hard it is to get in and out of NYC?” the trucker emphasized. 

  I’ve been on the radio for over an hour and I’ve talked to at least (10) Truckers who are gonna start refusing loads of Monday for (NYC) …I talked to (3) guys that I work with who texted the boss and told him no (NYC)

  Truckers are (95%) Trump… it’ll get overturned on appeal… pic.twitter.com/qVzx4RKUmd

  — Chicago1Ray 🇺🇸 (@Chicago1Ray) February 17, 2024

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

  By Saturday morning, the video had amassed nearly 3 million views. This comes after a New York judge handed former President Trump a penalty of $355 million plus interest on his civil fraud case. 

  

  Here’s what X users are saying about the potential trucker boycott of NYC:

  If truckers start denying loads to certain regime-controlled cities, it’s going to get spicy.

  — Albert Latham (@albert1776) February 17, 2024

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

  Boycot New York!

  — Mississippi RN (@TraceyOFlynn3) February 17, 2024

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

  God bless our truckers. The people need to show their power. Enough. Bud Light for NY it is.

  — Nomuck (@MagaNomuck) February 17, 2024

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

  Perhaps truckers in America have learned something from revolting farmers in Europe. 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 16:55

• 10 Reasons Why The World Can't Run Without Fossil Fuels
  10 Reasons Why The World Can’t Run Without Fossil Fuels

  Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World,

  • Banks, governments, and businesses would face failure due to the essential role of fossil fuels in the economy.

  • Critical infrastructure like electricity, internet, and trade systems would collapse without fossil fuel support.

  • Agriculture and home heating would become inefficient and inaccessible to many, leading to widespread social upheaval.

  It is now popular to talk about leaving fossil fuels to prevent climate change. Pretty much the same result occurs if we run short of fossil fuels: We lose fossil fuels, but it is because we cannot extract them. Practically no one tells us about the extent to which the current system depends upon fossil fuels, however.

  The economy is extraordinarily dependent on fossil fuels. If there are not enough fossil fuels to go around, there is likely to be fighting over what is available. Some countries are likely to get far more than their fair share, while the rest of the world’s population will be left with very little or no fossil fuels.

  If losing fossil fuels completely, or nearly completely, is a risk for some of the world’s population, it might be useful to think through some of the things that go wrong.

  

  The following are some of my ideas about things that change, mostly for the worse, in a fossil fuel-deprived economy.

  [1] Banks, as we know them, will likely fail.

  Before banks fail in areas with virtually no fossil fuels, my guess is that we will generally see hyperinflation. Governments will greatly increase the money supply in a vain attempt to get people to believe that more goods and services are being produced. This approach will be used because people equate having more money with the ability to buy more goods and services. Unfortunately, without fossil fuels it will be very difficult to produce very many goods.

  More money will simply provide more inflation because it takes physical resources, including the proper types of energy, to operate machinery of all kinds to make goods. Creating services also requires fossil fuel energy, but generally, to a lesser extent than creating goods. For example, the pair of scissors used in cutting hair is made using fossil fuel energy. The person cutting hair needs to be paid; his or her pay needs to be high enough to cover energy-related costs such as buying and cooking food to eat. The shop where hair cutting is operated will also need to pay for the fossil fuel energy required for heat and light, assuming such energy is even available.

  Banks will fail because too large a share of debts cannot be repaid with interest. Part of the problem will be that while wages will rise, the prices of goods and services will rise even faster, making goods unaffordable. Another part of the problem is that service economies, such as those of the US and eurozone, will be disproportionately affected by a declining economy. In such an economy, people will get their hair cut less often. Instead, they will spend their money on essentials, including food, water, and cooking supplies. Service-providing businesses, such as hair salons and restaurants, will fail for lack of customers, leading to defaults on their debts.

  [2] Today’s governments will fail.

  With failing banks, today’s governments will also fail. Partly, they will fail because of attempts to bail out banks. Another problem will be declining tax revenue because fewer goods and services are produced. Pension programs will become increasingly difficult to fund. All these issues will lead to increasingly divisive politics. In some cases, central governments may dissolve, leaving states and other smaller units, such as today’s provinces, to continue on their own.

  Intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations and NATO, will find their voices becoming less and less heeded before they fail. Getting sufficient funding from member states will become an increasing problem.

  Dictatorships ruled by leaders who wield absolute power and aristocracies ruled by leaders with hereditary rights are the types of governments with the least energy requirements. These are likely to become more common without fossil fuels.

  [3] Nearly all of today’s businesses will fail.

  Fossil fuels are essential for all kinds of businesses. They are used in the extraction of raw materials and in the transportation of goods. We use fossil fuels to pave roads and to build nearly all of today’s buildings. Without fossil fuels, even simple repairs of existing infrastructure become impossible. Without adequate fossil fuels, international companies are especially at risk of breaking into smaller units. They will find it impossible to operate in parts of the world with virtually no fossil fuel supply.

  Fossil fuels are even used in making solar panels, wind turbines, and replacement parts for electric vehicles. Talking about solar and wind as “renewables” is to a significant extent misleading. At best, they can be described as fossil fuel “extenders.” They might help a problem of a slightly low fossil fuel supply, but they are far from adequate substitutes.

  [4] Grid electricity and the internet will disappear.

  Fossil fuels are important for maintaining the electrical transmission system. For example, restoring downed power lines after storms requires fossil fuels. Hooking up solar panels or wind turbines to the electric grid requires fossil fuels. Home solar panel systems may operate until their inverters fail. Once their inverters fail, their usefulness will be greatly degraded. Fossil fuels are needed to manufacture new inverters.

  Fossil fuels are also important for maintaining every part of the internet system. Furthermore, without grid electricity, it becomes impossible to use computers to connect to the internet.

  [5] International trade will be scaled back greatly.

  At this time of year, many of us remember the story of the three kings from the East coming to visit the baby Jesus with precious gifts. We also remember stories in the Bible of Paul traveling to distant countries. From these and many other examples, we know that international trade and travel can continue without fossil fuels.

  The problem is that without fossil fuels, some parts of the world will have very little to offer in return for goods made with fossil fuels. Countries with fossil fuels will quickly figure out that government debt from countries without fossil fuels doesn’t really mean much when it comes to paying for goods and services. As a result, trade will be scaled back to match available exports. Exports of goods will likely be very limited for parts of the world operating without fossil fuels.

  [6] Agriculture will become much less efficient.

  Today’s agriculture has been made unbelievably efficient using large mechanical equipment, generally powered by diesel, together with a huge number of chemicals, including herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers. In addition, fences and netting made with fossil fuels are used to keep out unwanted animal pests. In some cases, greenhouses are used to provide a controlled climate for plants. Using fossil fuels, specialized hybrid seeds are developed that emphasize characteristics that farmers consider desirable. All these “helps” will tend to disappear.

  Without these helps, agriculture will become much less efficient. Figure 1 shows that even with the small cutback in fossil fuel use in 2020, the share of employment provided by agriculture rose.

  

  Figure 1. World employment in agriculture as a percentage of total employment, as compiled by the World Bank.

  Employment in agriculture is essential. These workers did not get laid off, even as workers in tourism and workers making fancy clothes lost their jobs, so agricultural jobs as a share of total employment rose.

  [7] Future labor needs are likely to be disproportionately in the agricultural sector.

  People need to eat. Even if the economy is operating in a very inefficient manner, people will need food. The share of people in agriculture (including hunting and gathering) can be expected to rise considerably.

  Some people hope that a shift to the use of permaculture will solve the problem of the dependence of agriculture on fossil fuels. I see permaculture as mostly a fossil-fuel extender, rather than a solution for getting along without fossil fuels, because it assumes the use of many fossil fuel-based devices, such as modern fences and today’s tools. Also, at best, permaculture only partly solves the inefficiency problem because it requires a huge amount of hands-on labor.

  

  Figure 2. Comparison of US employment in agriculture as a share of total employment, with a similar ratio for the UN Least Developed Countries based on data of the World Bank.

  Today, there is a wide divide between the share of employment in agriculture in the United States and in the same statistic for the UN group of least developed countries. Most of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa. They use very little fossil fuels.

  The US share of employment in agriculture has recently been about 1.7%. In the part of Europe using the Euro, the share of employment in agriculture has recently averaged about 3.0%. In either the US or Europe, it would take a huge change in employment to get to 70% in agricultural employment (as seen early in the 1990s for the UN least developed group), or even to 55% (as experienced recently by the same group).

  [8] Home heating will become a luxury item available only to the wealthy.

  Without fossil fuels, wood will come into high demand for its heat value. Wood will be needed for cooking food; it is very difficult to subsist on a diet of all raw foods. Wood will also be in demand for making charcoal, which in turn can be used to smelt some metals. With these demands on wood, deforestation is likely to become a major problem in many parts of the world. Wood in general will be quite expensive, given the considerable cost of harvesting and transporting it over long distances without the benefit of fossil fuels.

  People living in sparsely populated wooded areas may be able to gather their own wood for home heating. For other people, home heating will likely become a luxury, affordable only by the very rich.

  [9] Living alone will become a thing of the past.

  Without enough heat, and with barely enough wood for cooking, people (and their animals) will have to huddle together more. Homes housing multiple generations, built over a place for keeping farm animals, may again become popular. It will be more efficient to cook for large groups than for one person at a time. People in cold areas will huddle together with each other in beds to keep warm. Or they will huddle together with their dogs, as in the saying, three dog night, meaning a night that is cold enough to need to have three dogs to keep a person warm.

  Even in warm parts of the world, people will live together in groups, simply because maintaining a household for a single person will become impossibly expensive. Food and fuel for cooking will take up a huge share of a family’s income. There will be little left over for other expenses.

  [10] Governments and their laws will shrink in importance. Instead, new traditions and new religions will play a greater role in keeping order.

  Governments have made dozens of promises, but without a growing supply of fossil fuels (or an adequate substitute), they will not be able to keep them. Pensions will be gone. The ability of governments to enforce ownership laws will likely disappear. Without any good substitute for fossil fuels, mass disorder is a likely outcome.

  People crave order. Without order, it is impossible to conduct business. We know from recent experience that “sustainability groups,” put together by people with a common interest in sustainability tend not to work well enough to provide order. They tend to fall apart as soon as obstacles arise.

  What has seemed to work to provide order in the past is some combination of traditions and religions. With a changing world, both traditions and religions are likely to need to change. In the book, Communities that Abide, by Dmitry Orlov et al., the authors point out that having a strong (non-elected) leader, and a shared set of religious beliefs, helps keep a group together. In fact, it helps if the group is somewhat persecuted. Fighting for a common cause is part of what keeps the group together.

  The Ten Commandments in the Bible are interpreted in a way that strongly suggests that they are rules for behavior within the group, not for behavior in general. For example, “Thou shalt not kill,” applies to other members of the group; wars against other groups were very much expected. In those wars, killing of members of another group was expected. This would seem to allow Israel’s killing of members of Hamas, today. Without enough fossil fuels to go around, fighting becomes more frequent.

  Conclusion

  In my opinion, the problem the world is facing today is like one that smaller economies have faced, over and over, in the past: The population has become too large for the economy’s resource base, which now includes fossil fuels. Today’s leaders reframe the problem as voluntarily moving away from fossil fuels to prevent climate change in order to make the situation sound less frightening.

  As I see the situation, the world needs to scale down its use of fossil fuels because, ultimately, the laws of physics determine selling prices for fossil fuels. We extract the inexpensive-to-produce fossil fuels first. The problem is that fossil fuel selling prices cannot rise arbitrarily high. Prices must be both:

  • High enough for producers to make a profit, with funds left over for reinvestment and for adequate taxes for their governments.

  • Low enough for consumers to afford to buy food and other consumer goods produced with these fossil fuels.

  If we assume that all the fossil fuels that seem to be under the ground can really be extracted, climate change from burning them may indeed be a problem. But it is hard to see that they can really be extracted, given the affordability issue. Politicians will hold down prices to get voters to vote for them if nothing else.

  Researchers have been working diligently to find solutions, but to date, their success has been poor. Every supposed solution requires significant use of fossil fuels. So, we need to think through what might happen if we are forced to get along without fossil fuels and without an adequate substitute.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 16:20

• Fani 'Tainted' Whole Case: Trump
  Fani ‘Tainted’ Whole Case: Trump

  Embattled Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis – who gave her lover Nathan Wade’s law firm five Fulton County contracts totaling nearly $1 million, has “badly tainted” her case against Donald Trump, according to the former president.

  

  “It is so badly tainted. There is no case here,” said Trump in a statement to Fox News while Willis was giving a trainwreck testimony last week in a Georgia courtroom over allegations that she had an “improper” relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, her lover.

  “By going after Trump, she’s able to get her boyfriend more money than they ever dreamed possible,” Trump continued.

  Several of Trump’s co-defendants in the case have moved to disqualify Willis over the relationship.

  

  “The case will have to be dropped,” Trump continued. “There’s no way they can have a case. The whole thing was a scam to get money for the boyfriend.”

  Willis claimed that her relationship started in early 2022, after Wade was hired. But Robin Yeartie, a college friend of Willis who remained friends for several decades (even renting Willis an apartment), testified that the romantic relationship began “shortly after” Willis and Wade met at a 2019 municipal conference.

  

  Yeartie, who says she stopped talking to Willis sometime in 2022 after she was told to resign or be fired from the Fulton County DA’s office, directly contradicts testimony by both Willis and Wade.

  Ms. Yeartie said she had “no doubt” the pair were in a romantic relationship from 2019, adding that she saw them “hugging” and “kissing” that year.

  President Trump told Fox News that Thursday’s courtroom testimony shows Ms. Willis is “disgraced” and that Mr. Wade’s trips to the White House add to signs that the case is another example of “election interference” meant to thwart his 2024 bid for the presidency. –Epoch Times

  Trump co-defendant Micahel Roman has alleged that Willis’ relationship with Wade allowed her to benefit from taxpayer funds, after Wade took her on several lavish vacations.

  Willis claims she reimbursed Wade in cash for everything, so there was no benefit to her.

  On Monday, Judge Scott McAfee said that Willis could be disqualified from the case if the evidence shows “an actual conflict or the appearance of one,” adding that the purpose of Thursday’s hearing was to determine “whether a relationship existed, whether that relationship was romantic or nonromantic in nature, when it formed and whether it continues.”

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 15:45

• RFK Jr. Scores Big Win In Lawsuit Accusing Biden Admin Of Censoring COVID Vaccine Info
  RFK Jr. Scores Big Win In Lawsuit Accusing Biden Admin Of Censoring COVID Vaccine Info

  Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

  Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has notched a victory in his legal battle against alleged government censorship of statements he made on social media that were critical of the COVID-19 vaccines.

  

  A federal court has granted a preliminary injunction against the White House and other federal defendants in a lawsuit brought by Mr. Kennedy Jr. that accuses the Biden administration of orchestrating a campaign to pressure social media platforms to censor vaccine criticism.

  Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued the ruling on Feb. 14, stating that Mr. Kennedy Jr. has demonstrated a strong likelihood of success in proving government infringement on his free speech rights.

  The injunction prevents the defendants—which include the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the FBI—from taking any actions to coerce social media companies to remove or suppress content containing protected free speech.

  The injunction remains on hold for the time being, however, as the proceeding in Mr. Kennedy Jr.’s lawsuit has been consolidated with the case of Missouri v. Biden, which is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. The freeze will be in place for 10 days after the Supreme Court rules in Missouri v. Biden, which is based on the same evidence.

  The defendants have, in prior public statements, denied illegally leaning on social media companies to stifle protected free speech.

  Rather, they have said they only ever flagged objectionable content, such as that they claimed was “misinformation” and “disinformation” and that it violated the companies’ own terms of use.

  ‘Destructive, Coercive Threats’

  Mr. Kennedy Jr., along with plaintiffs Children’s Health Defense and Connie Sampognaro, a health professional who says she was harmed by the government’s censorship campaign, have alleged in their class action complaint that the Biden administration violated their right to free speech.

  They accuse President Joe Biden and other federal defendants of systematically and repeatedly using “destructive, coercive threats” to force social media platforms to censor protected speech.

  The Biden administration is also accused of entering into “collusive partnerships” with social media companies and working with them to censor constitutionally protected expression.

  Mr. Kennedy has argued that the defendants harmed him by censoring him on social media—in some cases deplatforming him entirely—and so preventing him from gathering vaccine-related news and passing it along to his hundreds of thousands of followers.

  Children’s Health Defense has also made the same argument but, additionally, it claims that its many members were deprived of information and ideas about the safety and efficacy of alternative COVID-19 treatments.

  Ms. Sampognaro has alleged that the Biden administration’s actions have harmed her as a health care policy advocate by depriving her of complete, accurate information about COVID-19 and possible treatments.

  The complaint also asked the court to certify the case a class action to cover all people who consumed news related to COVID-19 or U.S. elections on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, at anytime from January 2020 to the present, and so who would have been harmed by government censorship of related facts.

  ‘Willingness to Coerce’

  The lawsuit singled out several of the “countless examples” of the Biden administration’s alleged censorship campaign.

  One was the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story on social media ahead of the 2020 presidential election, with the complaint calling it “an act of censorship that deprived Americans of information of the highest public interest” and that “may even have swung the outcome of that election.” Polling has indicated that many voters would have picked a different candidate had they been aware of the laptop’s contents, which included information suggesting President Biden was involved in his son’s overseas business dealings, contrary to his repeated denials.

  Another was suppression of reporting or expression of opinion that COVID-19 originated in a Chinese regime lab in Wuhan.

  

  The third example was online suppression of facts and opinions about COVID-19 vaccines “that might lead people to become ‘hesitant’ about COVID vaccine mandates, again depriving Americans of information and opinions on matters of the highest public importance.”

  In his order, Judge Doughty found that Mr. Kennedy and the other plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits that the defendants colluded to influence the actions of private social media companies “by ‘insinuating’ themselves into the social-media companies’ private affairs and blurring the line between public and private action.”

  He also sided with the complaint in determining that the Biden administration’s actions represented a “substantial risk of harm” to Mr. Kennedy and the other plaintiffs.

  “And it is certainly likely that Defendants could use their power over millions of people to suppress alternative views or moderate content that they do not agree with in the upcoming 2024 national election,” Judge Doughty wrote.

  He said that Mr. Kennedy has proven that the Biden administration has shown “willingness to coerce” or at least give significant encouragement to social media companies to suppress free speech with regard to COVID-19 vaccines, national elections, gas prices, climate change, gender, and abortion.

  In July 2023, Judge Doughty also granted an injunction in the Missouri v. Biden case, which is now pending before the Supreme Court.

  More than 50 officials in the Biden administration across a dozen agencies were involved in efforts to pressure big tech companies to censor alleged misinformation, according to documents released in 2022.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 15:10

• US (Re)Designates Houthis A Terrorist Organization
  US (Re)Designates Houthis A Terrorist Organization

  The State Department has formally designated the Houthis as a terrorist organization, which gives Washington new powers to thwart the group’s access to the global financial system.

  The new label of Specially Designated Global Terrorist group against the Yemeni Shia rebel militia backed by Iran was implemented Friday, coming weeks after a mid-January warning was issued by the State Department.

  

  It also comes following months of Houthi drone and missile attacks on both commercial vessels and Western warships patrolling the Red Sea. 

  On Thursday in the latest response, the US military struck three Houthi anti-ship cruise missile systems that US Central Command (CENTCOM) said were preparing to launch.

  The new designation is controversial among some humanitarian aid groups working in Yemen, as detailed in The New York Times: 

  Last month, Mr. Blinken announced the State Department’s intent to return the Houthis to its terrorism list, but delayed the action for 30 days. The pause was intended in part to give humanitarian aid groups working in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen time to ensure that their work does not run afoul of new sanctions from the United States that will punish anyone who provides support to the militant group. Some aid groups have warned that their work will inevitably be constrained in a country with dire humanitarian needs.

  The Houthis were removed from the list in 2021 after they were first designated previously under the Trump administration, also given they have long been armed and backed financially by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  A move by Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s February of 2021 had taken the Houthis off the list. “Effective February 16, I am revoking the designations of Ansarallah, sometimes referred to as the Houthis, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO)…,” the US top diplomat said at the time.

  Blinken had said the removal was in “recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen. We have listened to warnings from the United Nations, humanitarian groups, and bipartisan members of Congress, among others, that the designations could have a devastating impact on Yemenis’ access to basic commodities like food and fuel.”

  Yemen’s Houthi rebels fired missiles at the British oil tanker Pollux in the Red Sea amid ongoing attacks on commercial shipping.

  🔴 LIVE updates: https://t.co/LCscISHYXA pic.twitter.com/buD2tEDOJg

  — Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) February 17, 2024

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

  This new reversal presumably means the already dire humanitarian situation in the country is about to get a lot worse once again, though long largely ignored in Western media headlines.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 14:35

• Is Artificial Intelligence Hope? Hype? Or A Market Disaster In The Making?
  Is Artificial Intelligence Hope? Hype? Or A Market Disaster In The Making?

  Authored by J.G. Collins via The Epoch Times,

  When I first moved to New York City in the mid-1970s, cab drivers – or “hacks,” as they were called once – were a skilled profession.

  

  The Checker Taxi Cab, once ubiquitous on NYC Streets, is now a rare sight and hired now mostly for weddings, bar mitzahs, and period movie shoots. (Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

  Many of them were sole proprietors, and owned their cab and taxi medallion—the costly city license that allowed them to pick up fares hailed on the street. They took pride in their taxis, kept them clean, and many festooned them with family photos, religious icons, custom dashboard decorations, and other objects.  These men—and just a handful of women—worked hard and knew the city like you know your Social Security number. They knew the fastest way to get you where you were going by the time of day (“Second Avenue will get you to Wall Street faster than the FDR; it’s morning rush”…) And they knew obscure streets like Freeman Alley, Stone Street, and Hunts Lane.  And if you were conversant, they also dispensed some of the best opinions and advice one could garner, gleaned from years of workaday life and speaking to thousands of people a year.

  But in the 1980s, taxi medallions soared in value to nearly—and past—the half-million dollar mark and were scooped up by investor groups who leased them to a polyglot corps of  independent drivers, mostly recently arrived to New York, who rented the cabs, bought their own gas, and had few other options for work. 

  Soon the medallion-owning taxi owner/operators sold out and retired or found other work.  In the 1980s, you were lucky to find a taxi driver who spoke English, let alone one who knew how to get to Katz’s Deli in the days before the movie “When Harry Met Sally” turned it into an overpriced tourist destination.

  Today, anyone with a hack license issued by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission, a clean driving record, a late-model vehicle, and a mobile phone can drive for Uber or Lyft and start doing what the old hack drivers took years to learn. They can simply start driving using one of the half-dozen navigation apps one can download for free on their telephone or the apps provided by the ride-share company once they sign up. 

  And those old taxi medallions that once sold, in their heyday, for over a million dollars? Well, they now sell, often in bankruptcy, for less than a quarter of that.  And not a few of the independent medallion taxi owner/operators who bought in at the high end and found themselves desperately upside down on their medallion mortgage, ended up killing themselves; there were three in 2018 alone. I relate the story of the medallion taxi drivers to highlight an example of how technology can disrupt long-standing businesses and industries. (NYC taxi medallions have been issued since 1937.)

  As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more prevalent in our economy, it’s important to remember that it could become a massive disrupter of existing businesses.

  In the service space, especially, it has enormous potential to displace millions of skilled workers.  

  Or not…

  “New” technology is always hyped by its proponents. The Segway, when it was introduced in 2001, was reported by one outlet to be “a more significant invention than the personal computer.” Twenty years later, its leading customers were  tour companies whose clients couldn’t walk the mile or more to highlighted destinations and mall cops who were similarly limited. (The Segway even became a feature in the “Paul Bart: Mall Cop” movie comedies.) The original model is no longer produced, and most of the market has been replaced with an array of battery powered scooters. 

  

  Tourists on Segway Scooters visiting Washington, D.C., on Aug. 21, 2008. (Xesús Cociña Souto, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

  So, how do we separate the hype from the facts?

  I’ll have to leave that to people far smarter than I am. If you had told me 20 years ago that Elon Musk would return a rocket booster from space to land, upright, on a platform at sea, like a rocket landing on Mars in some 1950s’ sci-fi movie, I would have called you a liar. But here we are; Musk has done it. (For a deeper dive into the “hows,” “whats,” “whos,” and “whys,” particularly on the hardware elements of AI, I suggest the article “What Is AI Hardwire?” on VentureBeat.)

  If AI lives up to its billing, then millions of clerical, repetitive, and routine jobs will go the way of telephone booths and AAA road maps. It could be a massive disruption, for some, or a massive opportunity for others.  We’ll have to wait and see. 

  But adaptation will be necessary to some greater or lesser degree. Luddites seldom (never?) win. The good news is that AI will likely take several years to “learn” the routine, clerical, and repetitive jobs it will likely replace, although higher-paying skills are most likely to be “learned” first.

  The Market Effect

  I am more concerned about the likelihood markets will see an AI bubble and bust, much as we saw in the  “dot-com” boom and bust at the flip of this century. Those of us old enough to remember the late 1990s can recall when pretty much any business having a “.com” after its name practically guaranteed an avalanche of investor money being dumped on it. By the time the markets had sorted the likes of Amazon.com and Booking.com from their less viable brethren, billions of investor money had been lost with an enormous effect on the larger macro-economy and the securities markets.   

  I fear there may be a similar boom and bust in AI.

  An exchange-traded fund, for example, that invests only in the so-called Magnificent 7 stocks—Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—is up by nearly 50 percent in less than a year. In addition to the Magnificent 7,  AI stocks, who are all involved in AI to a greater or lesser degree, there are a number of “pure play” stocks and start-ups. A number of “silly season,” purely speculative “meme” stocks (i.e., a stock which has gained viral popularity) have been bid up by Wall Street, as well as blockchain digital assets like crypto coins and non-fungible tokens (NFTs)—unique digital assets like artworks. 

  It’s important to remember that much of this value appreciation has occurred because Federal Reserve policy and Biden administration deficit spending has caused a lot of money to be sloshing around the financial markets.

  Much of that money—or “excess liquidity”—is looking for a place to nest.

  If too much of it nests in the aspirational AI, and those dreams come to be dashed, or simply take too long to be realized,  it will have an enormous effect on the markets. For that reason, fund managers and market regulators – as well as the “plunge protection team” (formally, the Working Group on Financial Markets) at the White House – should all be on heightened alert and run robust risk-management strategies to ameliorate market risks. It will be a massive and crucial undertaking.

  They may even want to create an AI algorithm to do it.  

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 14:00

• Bidenomics Fail: White House Plans Downshift In Electric Vehicle Transition As Demand Slides
  Bidenomics Fail: White House Plans Downshift In Electric Vehicle Transition As Demand Slides

  The Biden administration is reportedly considering easing tailpipe emissions regulations, a move that was designed to force Americans from gas and diesel-powered vehicles to electric vehicles, according to The New York Times, citing three people familiar with the plan. This potential policy adjustment is in response to concerns from major automakers and labor unions and comes amid sliding EV demand, recently prompting companies such as Ford Motor Company to reduce EV production and lay off workers. 

  “Instead of essentially requiring automakers to rapidly ramp up sales of electric vehicles over the next few years, the administration would give car manufacturers more time, with a sharp increase in sales not required until after 2030,” the people said.

  

  This policy change comes after 3,900 auto dealers penned a letter to President Biden at the end of 2023, warning the president to reconsider the pace of EV mandates, citing a severe decline in demand for these vehicles. 

  “Currently, there are many excellent battery electric vehicles available for consumers to purchase. These vehicles are ideal for many people, and we believe their appeal will grow over time. The reality, however, is that electric vehicle demand today is not keeping up with the large influx of BEVs arriving at our dealerships prompted by the current regulations. BEVs are stacking up on our lots,” the dealers said. 

  They warned: “Already, electric vehicles are stacking up on our lots which is our best indicator of customer demand in the marketplace.” 

  Last month, Ford Motor’s electric vehicle sales ran out of juice as the automaker was forced to slash production of its all-electric F-150 Lightning to April “to achieve the optimal balance of production, sales growth and profitability.” 

  A recent note by RBC analyst Tom Narayan said the EV slowdown is far from over:

  “Key takeaways thus far from earnings season are that the EV slowdown is not showing any evidence of an inflection, Level 4 autonomy headwinds continue to persist, and fears over supplier inventory overbuild are likely overblown.”

  

  Analyst Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley suggested consolidation is coming to the industry:

  

  The EV bubble is no match for elevated interest rates, and no fiscally conservative American is trying to survive the era of failed Bidenomics with a +$1,000 EV car payment. 

  Plus, Toyota’s chairman and former CEO, Akio Toyoda, will likely be proven right: EV cars will never dominate the global market, adding hybrids are the future. 

  If the alleged climate crisis is as urgent as portrayed by radicals in the White House and woke corporate media, then why does the Biden administration feel the need to move the transition goalposts if banning gas cars saves the planet? 

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 13:25

• Chicago Mayor Extends Contract On Anti-Crime Program That He Campaigned Against As Racist
  Chicago Mayor Extends Contract On Anti-Crime Program That He Campaigned Against As Racist

  Authored by Jonathan Turley,

  I have written about the disastrous policies of Mayor Brandon Johnson for Chicago. 

  As a native son, it is hard to watch this wonderful city undermined by Johnson and radical allies in the city council. Some initiatives like reparations and state-funded grocery stores will cost money but will not impose nearly the costs of Johnson’s dismal record on crime and taxes.

  However, this week saw a particularly confusing moment when, after calling the anti-crime program ShotSpotter “racist,” Johnson asked the company to extend its contract beyond the upcoming Democratic National Convention. So Johnson will put an end to this supposedly racist program but only after the Democratic luminaries (and the most violent summer months) have passed.

  

  Johnson was elected in a close race against an anti-crime candidate. The teacher-union backed politician has never enjoyed widespread support in the city, but he is now polling at just 28 percent popularity.

  In his latest baffling position, Johnson first declared that ShotStopper was racist because it spots more shots in minority neighborhoods and is used by police to justify unsupported investigations or charges.

  The program has been widely credited for reducing violence and crimes.

  The Democratic National Convention presented a problem for Johnson.

  He is already under fire for continuing Chicago’s status as a sanctuary city despite the struggle to support the current number of undocumented migrants and the opposition of most Chicagoans. Only 39 percent favor Johnson continuing the status.

  So ShotSpotter is now being extended for seven months. Johnson says that the police will then be transitioned away from the technology. Critics say that the city will then return to operating without the system of alerts at a time when people are demanding more action on gun violence.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 12:50

• From Censorship To Criminalizing Dissent
  From Censorship To Criminalizing Dissent

  Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

  History does seem to be on fast forward, doesn’t it?

  A major battle is brewing throughout the Western world over the basic principle of free speech. Is it going to be protected by law? It’s not entirely clear what the outcome will be. We seem to be on the precipice of a potential calamity if the courts don’t decide the right way. Even if we squeak out a victory, the question is already in play. Our free speech rights have never been more fragile.

  Turn your attention to France right now. In the dead of night, a new law slipped through the General Assembly that would make it a crime to criticize mRNA shots. Critics call it the Pfizer law. It calls for fines up to 45,000 euros and possibly three years in prison for debunking an approved medical treatment.

  

  A general view of the French National Assembly (Assemblee Nationale) is seen in Paris on July 17, 2023. (Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images)

  Like all Western nations, criticism of the mRNA platform has already been subjected to vast social-media censorship. Even given this, there has been a major and global consumer turn against these shots. People are not convinced that they are necessary, safe, or effective. Still, government imposed mandates for everyone, billions of people worldwide. This was a form of conscription that has driven a deep divide between the rulers and the ruled.

  Rather than back down, however, governments, which have been captured by pharmaceutical interests, are going to bat for the companies and the technology to threaten imprisonment of anyone who speaks out openly against them.

  Here is where censorship becomes severely weaponized. It’s the next logical step. First you deploy every power to keep the distribution channels of information free of dissent. When that doesn’t entirely work, simply because people find alternative means of getting the word out, you have to intensify matters and institute outright controls.

  It stands to reason that this would happen. After all, the whole point of censorship is to curate the public mind to put down opposition to regime priorities. When mainstream corporate media is falling apart and new media is rising, the next stage is to go the full way to flat-out criminalize opinion, like any totalitarian government.

  We are very close to that stage. If it can happen in France, it can happen throughout Europe, then the Commonwealth, and then the United States. We know this much about politics today. It is global. The elites that have seized control of our governments coordinate across borders. This is why it is hugely important to pay attention to what’s going on across the pond.

  As a second item, I’m alarmed to read the lead piece in the New York Times opinion section that celebrates a defamation case about which I had not previously heard. It is by Michael Mann, professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He had sued a writer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute for taking issue with Mann’s climate change model, and the so-called hockey stick in particular.

  This is not my area of specialization at all but I have no doubt that mainstream climate science should be subject to vigorous criticism. If the COVID era has taught us anything, it is that the “scientific consensus” can be outrageously wrong and needs a check that comes in the form of writing, some of it zippy and cutting.

  

  Scientist Michael Mann attends the New York screening of the HBO Documentary “How to Let Go of the World and All The Things Climate Can’t Change” in New York on June 21, 2016. (Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for HBO)

  Dr. Mann filed a defamation lawsuit. Defamation is a very high bar: it means to deliberately lie about something with the intention to harm. One might not suppose that many things could qualify as that, certainly not criticism of a climate model. Indeed, most defamation lawsuits are dismissed outright simply because this country generally values free speech.

  This one, however, was accepted by the judge in Washington, D.C. court. After a full decade in litigation, and a full hearing, the jury ended up deciding in favor of the plaintiffs. One defendant, Rand Simberg, has been told to pay $1K and the other, Mark Steyn, $1M. Simberg says he will appeal and stands by every word that he wrote. Steyn agrees and is ready to appeal.

  Essentially this verdict is criminalizing hyperbole, said the defense attorney.

  The op-ed writer, however, says this is justice. “Our recent trial victory may have wider implications,” he says. “It has drawn a line in the sand. Scientists now know that they can respond to attacks by suing for defamation.” He mentions in particular people who have disagreed with the COVID consensus—disagreeing with Anthony Fauci—or otherwise make “false claims about adverse health effects from wind turbines.”

  Can you imagine? Criticize a wind turbine or pandemic lockdowns and find yourself hauled in front of a judge!

  Will this case have a chilling effect on criticism of government? Absolutely! Indeed, it is terrifying to think what it implies. And the writer leaves nothing to the imagination. He sees this case as a wedge to make scientific criticism of any area of life—from vaccines to climate change to the conversion to EVs—essentially illegal. In any case, if not that, it comes close by erecting so many landmines that critics essentially shut up for fear of having their whole lives ruined.

  This case went on for ten years. The article in question was published 12 years ago. How is it possible that litigants pushed a case for that long? It was to establish a serious precedent. That precedent is now clearly established. The definition of defamation is so malleable that juries can decide anything. Just the prospect of being hauled before a judge over ten years is enough to deter speaking out.

  We can hope that this appeal reverses the decision. But let’s face it: free speech should not rest on such a thin foundation of jury-created law and arbitrary judicial edict. This is all extremely dangerous and flies in the face of the First Amendment.

  Essentially, every critic of the “scientific consensus” in every area has been put on notice. They are already fair game. That’s the world toward which we are moving.

  Here’s the issue. Censorship works when government can control all the distribution channels of information. What happens when that no longer works? The powers that be have to use more direct methods, even when they fly in the face of the First Amendment. Those who say that this cannot happen here need to pay closer attention to the reality of what’s happening.

  Many people are excited to see the breakup of old media. Certainly I am but consider how the censors will respond. They are getting hardcore, relying more on law rather than capture, and hoping the courts can act to shut up the critics permanently. That’s the future we are looking at. It is extremely dangerous. Under this trajectory, free speech will be no more. The First Amendment will be a dead letter.

  Tyler Durden
  Sat, 02/17/2024 – 11:40

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