Mar 18

Today’s News 18th March 2021

  • EU To Sanction China For First Time in 3 Decades Over Uighur 'Genocide'
    EU To Sanction China For First Time in 3 Decades Over Uighur ‘Genocide’

    US pressure and spiraling relations with Beijing, lately focused heavily on human rights-related complaints and the crackdown particularly on China’s ethnic Muslim community which the Trump administration had previously dubbed “genocide”, are now for the first time manifesting in a very definitive way in Europe. 

    “The European Union agreed on Wednesday to blacklist Chinese officials for human rights abuses, two diplomats said, the first sanctions against Beijing since an EU arms embargo in 1989 following the Tiananmen Square crackdown,” Reuters reports.

    These first EU sanctions in over three decades stem from widespread reports of ‘systematic’ human rights abuses in the northwest Xinjiang region, where millions of Muslim Uighurs are said to be confined to Communist ‘reeducation’ and labor camps.

    Via AP

    It’s to include travel bans and asset freezes on at least four Chinese individuals and one entity, Reuters notes; however, the names aren’t expected to be made public until formal approval by EU foreign ministers on March 22.

    EU diplomats have confirmed the sanctions preparations to Reuters, which writes further:

    The 1989 EU arms embargo on China, its second-largest trade partner, is still in place.

    “Restrictive measures against serious human rights violations and abuses adopted,” one EU diplomat said.

    Shortly after the report, the Chinese mission to the EU posted a statement expressing anger over the move, calling it “confrontational”. 

    “Sanctions are confrontational,” the Twitter statement said. “We want dialogue, not confrontation. We ask the EU side to think twice. If some insist on confrontation, we will not back down, as we have no options other than fulfilling our responsibilities to the people.”

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    Canada meanwhile has been most vocal and out front on the Uighur issue, with many MPs attempting to urge EU countries and others to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

    This dramatic proposal to sit out the games as a human rights “message” to China has been met with coolness in Europe. Thus this sanctions measure appears an attempt at ‘doing something’ but without going as far as some Canadian and British lawmakers are pushing for.

    All of this further comes as EU officials are refusing China’s invitations to investigate the Uighur camps first hand: “China denies any human rights abuses in Xinjiang and says its camps provide vocational training and are needed to fight extremism,” Reuters writes. 

    “Beijing has on numerous occasions invited EU ambassadors to Xinjiang but envoys say they cannot visit under the strict conditions and monitoring set by Chinese authorities.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 02:45

  • Israel Is Back With Airstrikes As Turkey Scrambles To Salvage Some Oil In Syria
    Israel Is Back With Airstrikes As Turkey Scrambles To Salvage Some Oil In Syria

    Submitted by SouthFront

    As has become customary in recent weeks, after the relative success of the Axis of Resistance on battlefields across the Middle East, Israel delivered a reminder of its interest in Syria. On March 16th, Damascus’ air defense repelled a missile barrage, which was heading towards targets surrounding the Syrian capital.

    A statement by the Syrian Arab Army said that the missiles had been launched from the direction of the occupied Golan Heights and targeted undisclosed positions around Damascus. Most of the missiles were reportedly intercepted and no casualties were observed. There was minimal damage.

    Strikes such as these are commonplace and happen somewhat regularly, especially now in 2021, when Tel Aviv considers its interests under even more threat than usual due to the Biden Administration’s relative passivity towards Iran.

    The Israeli strike was not the only attack on Damascus in recent days. On March 15th, Syrian security forces foiled a terrorist attack intended to target unspecified areas in Damascus. As a result, three terrorists were killed and three were arrested. All six were wearing explosive belts.

    Separately, in what is likely a positive development for Damascus, Russian forces moved into an oil field and gas field in the northeast Raqqah governorate.

    Russian military reinforcements alongside units from the Russian-backed Fifth Armored Division arrived at al-Thawra oil facility which produces around 2,000 bpd.

    Earlier, on March 12th, Russian forces entered the Toueinane gas field, also in the same area.

    This is a small, but notable shift highlighting a change in the balance of power in northern Syria. Since Russia is allied with Damascus, prior to that most of Syria’s oil went to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces or various Turkish proxies.  Most of the oil still goes out of Syria, but this is a movement in another direction.

    In addition, Russia’s Defense Ministry said that Turkish forces are carry out military movements and acts in Raqqa countryside in violation of a Memorandum of Understanding that Ankara signed with Moscow.

    According to a statement, the Russian side is extremely worried about transporting military equipment affiliated to the Turkish armed forces and establishing fortifications and support points in the suburbs of Ain Issa.

    This is an attempt at a Turkish response to recent shelling by the Syrian Arab Army in the area surrounding Aleppo, and other positions where Turkish proxies operate. Ankara can’t afford to lose access to all of its cheap oil, and as such needs to provide some semblance of resistance before losing access to it.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 03/18/2021 – 02:00

  • Daniel Ellsberg Talks About Whistleblowing, The Pervasiveness Of Official Lies, And The Dangers Of The Espionage Act
    Daniel Ellsberg Talks About Whistleblowing, The Pervasiveness Of Official Lies, And The Dangers Of The Espionage Act

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

    “On Tuesday morning, August 4th, 1964,” writes Daniel Ellsberg in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, “a courier came in my out office with an urgent cable for my boss. He had been running.”

    A former Marine with a PhD from Harvard in Decision Theory, Ellsberg had joined the Pentagon as special assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, who himself was perhaps the closest advisor to Secretary Robert McNamara. Ellsberg, in other words, was the right hand of the right hand, of the man who would become known as the chief architect of the Vietnam War.

    Ellsberg’s first day on August 4th, 1964 proved to be a historic one. His boss McNaughton was down the hall with McNamara, so the panting courier handed Ellsberg the note and left. He opened it and found it was from Captain John J. Herrick, the commodore of a two-destroyer flotilla in the Gulf of Tonkin, off North Vietnam in the South China sea. Officially, the United States was not yet engaged in full-fledged military operations in Indochina.

    Daniel Ellsberg: “We could be East Germany in weeks, in a month. Huge concentration camps and so forth…”

    Herrick said he was under attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats, and had opened fire in return. He was 60 miles from the coast, in international waters. The sonar operators on the Destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy, Maddox said, each heard torpedoes in the water. Ten minutes later, the courier returned with a new note. “Am under continuous torpedo attack,” he wrote, about an encounter that was taking place in total darkness.

    For some time after, cables came in quick succession, as Ellsberg guessed Herrick was dictating from the bridge in between trying to maneuver his ships. “Torpedoes missed. Another fired at us,” read one. “Four torpedoes in water,” read a second. “Five torpedoes in water… Have successfully avoided at least six torpedoes…” According to Herrick, at least one attacking boat had been sunk. The action went on for two long hours, before suddenly the stream of messages cut short.

    “Then, suddenly, an hour later,” Ellberg wrote, “a message arrived that took back, not quite all of it, but enough to put the rest of it in question.” The courier came in running again, handing him a cable with the highest clearance and urgency [emphasis mine]:

    Review of action makes any reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar men may have accounted for many reports. No actual visual sightings by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken…

    It was a little after 2 p.m., Washington time. Ellsberg was dumbfounded by the latest communications. “In my mind, these messages erased the impact of the two-hour-long live drama that we had been following. This new information was a cold bath.”

    Herrick later sent another cable: “Details of action present a confusing picture, although certain original ambush bona fide.” Ellsberg was now unsure of how Herrick was so sure, given that he hadn’t seen anything and was acknowledging, among other things, that one sonar man was hearing his own ship’s propeller. “It seemed almost certain there had been no attack,” Ellsberg wrote, certain the proper course was to wait to see what actually happened before acting.

    Things didn’t go that way. Senior military officials scrambled to put together an immediate retaliatory airstrike. President Lyndon Johnson was so anxious not only to strike back, but to brief the public about doing it, that he asked the Pentagon’s permission to go on TV with details before the planes even reached Vietnam.

    LBJ was on the air by 11:37 p.m. that night, telling the American people that “hostile vessels attacking two U.S. destroyers with torpedoes” constituted “open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.” McNamara gave subsequent pressers in which he described “unprovoked” attacks of U.S. vessels on “routine patrols” in “international waters.” They described the evidence for Vietnamese aggression as “unequivocal.”

    By the end of Ellsberg’s first day, he knew every single one of these claims was a lie. The two destroyers were on a special mission, penetrating deep into North Vietnamese waters and engaging in sabotage raids. In top-secret testimony to congress in the two days after the August 4th incident, McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk told congressional leaders the U.S. had nothing to do with the raids, which were entirely South Vietnamese operations.

    Ellsberg soon learned this was a lie, too, that the personnel on the ships had been chosen by the CIA and that the operations were run jointly by the agency and the Navy. “Each of these assertions,” Ellsberg would later write, “was false.” You can still go back and look to see how these lies were reported with complete credulity and never corrected:

    Ellsberg became famous years later for shepherding to the public a wealth of secret documents about the ugly history of failure, brutality, and ignorance in the Vietnam War, collectively known as the Pentagon Papers. He is America’s most famous whistleblower, a figure who single-handedly triggered a major constitutional crisis when the government of Richard Nixon tried to block publication of his material.

    However, Ellsberg has remained an important figure in American culture and politics precisely because so little has changed since the events of the fifties, sixties, and seventies he described in such vivid detail.

    In the Useful Idiots interview below, Ellsberg points out the similarities between Vietnam and our current policies in various countries around the world. He says our leaders are worried about “regime change in Washington,” which they believe would occur if they left other countries’ oil in the ground, or “stopped killing Afghans.”

    More than anything, however, Ellsberg is an expert on the role of secrecy in American life. Both in his books and in his interview with Useful Idiots, he describes military and executive branch officials who don’t even figure “truth” as a variable in their calculations, since it’s irrelevant to what they tell the world.

    He arrived in Washington believing the commonly held notion that nothing in the capital stays secret for long. Soon he learned that it’s actually quite easy to keep secrets. Ellsberg described a vicious cycle, in which leaders lie pervasively, then learn to have so much contempt for the public that swallows those lies, that they feel justified in lying more.

    “My awareness of how easily Congress, the public, and journalists were fooled and misled contributed to a lack of respect for them,” he wrote. “That, in turn, made it easier to accept practices of deception,” and “their resulting ignorance made it all the more obvious that they must leave these problems to us.”

    Ellsberg is adamant that our military and intelligence services don’t learn from even the bloodiest failures. However, when asked in the Useful Idiots if they’d at least learned something in a negative sense — like how to deal with whistleblowers and shut off pictures of war deaths — he concurred, explaining that he himself had been used as propaganda.

    “It is now accepted that somebody can be a good whistleblower, and that’s Daniel Ellsberg,” he says, “in contrast with Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden. The appreciation that I’ve been getting since 2010, I can date very simply to the need to denigrate Chelsea Manning.”

    He went on to describe a New Yorker piece written by Malcolm Gladwell that ripped Ed Snowden in comparison to him, Ellsberg, among other things quoting an analyst who wondered if Snowden “may have been the dupe of a foreign-intelligence service.” Ellsberg wrote a letter to the New Yorker calling the contrast ridiculous, and, he tells us, “They never published it.”

    Overall, Ellsberg’s takes on nuclear safety, the implications of the use of the Espionage Act in the Julian Assange case, and continued misuse of secrecy and hyper-aggressive foreign policy in places like Afghanistan and Syria, still resonate. The most powerful part of his interview regarded the power of the secret state in modern America.

    “They know where we are, they know our names, they know from our iPhones if we’re on our way to the grocery store or not,” he said. “We could be East Germany in weeks. In a month.”

    The last portion of the Useful Idiots episode:

    Excerpt from the interview:

    Matt Taibbi: What you saw in Vietnam is similar to what people saw in Iraq, and then Afghanistan. What’s the mentality that continues to think that these same kinds of policies will work, and why can’t they get out of that mentality?

    Ellsberg: You have to ask, who is it who actually bears the cost of these and who doesn’t? Any of these wars were not bad for the people making weapons, and it’s not only them. It’s the banks that finance them and it’s the congresspeople who benefit, as I keep saying, from the donations and the jobs and so forth. They did fine…

    Are we actually going to get out of Afghanistan? It’s scheduled, by Trump of all people, for May. Okay, that’s very close. Is that going to happen? Let’s see. Certainly not for sure… If we don’t get out now, there is no reason why it will look different two years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. We’ll still be killing Afghans and losing very few Americans, because it’s all in the air and some special forces going to unarmed villages and whatnot. So very few American casualties, air power, a lot of things. The American public can live with that for a long time. They have lived for 20 years with that. Could be another 20 years.

    Katie Halper: Can you talk about the role of the media in America’s aggressive foreign policy?

    Ellsberg: With the Gulf of Tonkin, the Times did not say, “Here’s what we said at the time.” The Times did not go back and say, “Here’s who lied to us. Here’s how we were lied to. Here’s how gullible we were. Here’s the pattern of deception.” No, that would blame themselves. They didn’t need that, so they didn’t do it…

    In short, I think nations and institutions, we talk about why don’t they learn, learning is not what they do, because learning involves seeing prior errors that you haven’t met. Errors are an occasion for blame, for losing jobs, for being criticized, and they don’t do that.

    Matt Taibbi: Well, sometimes they learn in a negative way though, don’t they? Do you ever think that the way they dealt with Snowden, and to a lesser extent Julian Assange and some other whistleblowers, was about making sure that there was never going to be a Daniel Ellsberg again who would live on and be a hero in the public consciousness?

    Ellsberg: I misspoke when I say they don’t do any learning… Definitely, they do learn.

    Katie Halper: They don’t become more moral, though.

    Ellsberg: It’s not as though they learn how to meet human values or improve human welfare in the world. That’s not what they’re into… But in terms of how can we get away with it better, they do learn….

    They’ve learned to wield the Espionage Act, to criminalize whistleblowing much more than before. You said they didn’t want any more Ellsbergs. Well, obviously, they did get Chelsea Manning, they did get Snowden. Chelsea was 39 years after the Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers did have an effect, as you say, on people’s understanding of the war. It didn’t end the war, but it did affect people’s attitudes. And really, it kept us out of more Vietnams for a couple of decades…

    The NSA did not do surveillance on American citizens without a warrant for about 25 years or so after, so that was a change. But then 9/11 comes along, and it’s Constitution be damned. Since then, this is 20 years ago, we’ve had total surveillance of everybody, totally unconstitutionally.

    It’s created a situation where we’re not a police state, but we could be a police state almost from one day to the next, if they act on all the information they have now about people who give them any trouble or people who protest. They know where we are, they know our names, they know from our iPhones if we’re on our way to the grocery store or not. But they haven’t acted on that to put people in camps yet. They could do it.

    We could be East Germany in weeks, in a month. Huge concentration camps and so forth.

    Matt Taibbi: Why aren’t more journalists worried about the use of the Espionage Act in the Julian Assange case?

    Ellsberg: Because they have never been tried before. This is a first, so they thought they were immune… I’ve been saying for 40 years now, 50 years, I’ve been saying to journalists and judges, the wording of that law applies to you as well as your sources…

    It is now accepted that somebody can be a good whistleblower, and that’s Daniel Ellsberg, in contrast to Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden. The appreciation I’ve been getting since 2010, I can date very simply to the need to denigrate Chelsea Manning… This contrast is used all the time. So I’m appreciated in order to say, “Ah, but there were bad whistleblowers like Snowden or Assange.” And a lot of people do that.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 23:40

  • Tinder Will Soon Allow Users To Run Background Checks On Would-Be Dates
    Tinder Will Soon Allow Users To Run Background Checks On Would-Be Dates

    Online dating is on the verge of becoming a whole lot safer. Tinder, along with its parent company Match Group, partnered with a non-profit background check platform, called Garbo, to help customers determine if their blind date is hiding a criminal record. 

    “Match Group will begin testing and building out capabilities for Garbo on Tinder in the coming months,” according to a news release. Once Garbo is integrated on Tinder, other Match Group brands (Match, OkCupid, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, OurTime, among others) will follow. 

    When it comes to Tinder and Hinge, and other online dating apps, very little is known about the other person before the blind date. Garbo transforms online dating experience to become a safer environment. 

    “For far too long, women and marginalized groups in all corners of the world have faced many barriers to resources and safety,” said Tracey Breeden, Head of Safety and Social Advocacy for Match Group.

    “We recognize corporations can play a key role in helping remove those barriers with technology and true collaboration rooted in action. In partnership with Match Group, Garbo’s thoughtful and groundbreaking consumer background check will enable and empower users with information, helping create equitable pathways to safer connections and online communities across tech.”

    Once Tinder fully integrates Garbo, users can check public records and reports of violence or abuse before the first date. 

    “Before Garbo, abusers were able to hide behind expensive, hard-to-find public records and reports of their violence; now that’s much harder,” Garbo CEO Kathryn Kosmides said. “Being able to reach historically underserved populations is fundamental to Garbo’s mission and the partnership with Match will help us connect with these communities.”

    The move by Match comes as Tinder murders have been reported over the years. Here are some recent news stories: 

    Rethinking safety appears to be Match’s biggest push this year across all dating platforms. It would not surprise us if COVID health passports were also an additional option for Tinder dates. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 23:20

  • Iran's Defense Ministry Warns Citizens To Prepare For Nuclear & Chemical Attacks
    Iran’s Defense Ministry Warns Citizens To Prepare For Nuclear & Chemical Attacks

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    On Tuesday, Iran’s defense minister said the country must be prepared to face nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks.

    “We should be prepared to defend our nation against all threats and whatever the enemy may one day use as an offensive tool, including chemical, nuclear and biological weapons,” said Gen. Amir Hatami, according to Iran’s Fars News Agency.

    Hatami made his comments on the 33rd anniversary of a chemical weapons attack by Saddam Hussein on Iraqi Kurds in Halabja, Iraq. During the Iran-Iraq war that raged from 1980 to 1988, Hussein frequently used chemical weapons against Iran, sometimes with US support.

    Declassified CIA documents revealed that in 1988, the US shared intelligence with Hussein to show the location of Iranian troops, knowing he would use lethal gas against them.

    The documents revealed the US had firm evidence Hussein was using chemical weapons as early as 1983. 

    The US and other Western countries provided Hussein with materials to make chemical weapons at the time. A 1994 congressional inquiry found that US companies shipped anthrax and dozens of other biological agents that could be used to make chemical weapons to Iraq during the war. 

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    Besides Iran’s history of being targeted by chemical weapons, Iran is also constantly threatened by Israel, the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East.

    While Israel frequently takes covert action against Iran, Israeli officials have been hinting at a larger attack on Tehran’s civilian nuclear program if the US returns to the Iran nuclear deal.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 23:00

  • America's Small Businesses On Gov't Life Support As Debt Apocalypse Can Kicked
    America’s Small Businesses On Gov’t Life Support As Debt Apocalypse Can Kicked

    No matter if it’s Republicans under former President Trump or Democrats under President Biden, the one commonality between these two political parties is that they are in massive support of government relief programs and lender forbearance programs to keep small and medium-sized enterprises from defaulting on their debt as revenue collapsed during the virus pandemic. 

    Washington, DC-based think tank Urban Institute analyzed data from commercial data and analytics firm Dun & Bradstreet of one million businesses between September 2019 and January 2021 to examine trends before and after the federal government closed the economy to mitigate the virus spread. What they found was despite small businesses sustaining massive revenue declines, many of them remained in solid credit standings. 

    Among small firms nationwide, past-due payments or debts owed by them as a share of each firm’s total trade activity increased nationwide, from 17.7% in February 2020 to 18.3% in January 2021. The most significant jump in past-due payments was in San Francisco, where they increased from 13.5% in February 2020 to 17.8% in January 2021. New York City had delinquencies rise quicker than the national average, from 25.1% in February 2020 to 27.6% in January 2021.

    San Francisco

    New York 

    Many small businesses were transformed into zombie companies, kept alive by the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and other stimulus programs. These businesses have slashed costs and payrolls; landlords and creditors have allowed them flexibility in rent payments or servicing debts. 

    “It’s a good sign that small businesses are maintaining strong credit and increasing their cash on hand, but their ultimate standing will depend on future supports and the pace of the economic recovery,” said Urban Institute. At the moment, some ten million jobs are missing from the economy since the virus pandemic began. Small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy, accounting for more than 50% of all jobs. 

    The combined result of PPP support, cost reductions, and forbearances has favored some small businesses whose cash holdings are significantly higher. 

    “Shrinking payroll, reducing physical space, and other accommodations are painful for small businesses and may constrain their ability to grow,” said Urban Institute. “It’s also unclear what will happen when creditors cease to offer flexibility for businesses on repayment of their built-up amounts owed.”

    When government relief programs and forbearances expire (maybe not until later this year considering Biden’s new stimulus program) – there comes a time when small businesses are taken off life support and will face the consequences of servicing debt and paying rent in an economy that is entirely dependent on massive fiscal packages. 

    Despite the relatively strong credit metrics, small businesses are on government life support – any removal of the support will create a fiscal cliff. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 22:40

  • Would You Buy An Automobile Designed By A Woke Engineer?
    Would You Buy An Automobile Designed By A Woke Engineer?

    Authored by Robert Bridge via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the leftwing cancel cult now running amok through the unguarded halls of academia is that highly intelligent people, with absolutely no racial or political ax to grind, are being forced to defend themselves and their respective fields from the most outrageous accusations, time that would be much better spent on valuable research.

    While mathematicians over the millennia have successfully solved some of the most perplexing problems, like the Poincaré Conjecture and Fermat’s Last Theorom, they will probably have more difficulty arriving at a solution for appeasing the woke mob now banging on their door.

    Difficult as it may be to fathom, the radical progressive inquisition has a beef with the cloistered community of number crunchers, made up as it is, according to the woke crowd, of closet racists and white supremacists. Needless to say, this latest accusation has sent shockwaves through the academic community.

    This month, Sergiu Klainerman, professor of mathematics at Princeton University, explained to the journalist Bari Weiss how he has personally witnessed “the decline of universities and cultural institutions as they have embraced political ideology at the expense of rigorous scholarship.” Klainerman admitted that he had “naively thought” that the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) would be not be touched by this “ideological takeover.” Much to his chagrin, he was mistaken.

    “I was wrong,” he admitted. “Attempts to ‘deconstruct’ mathematics, deny its objectivity, accuse it of racial bias, and infuse it with political ideology have become more and more common — perhaps, even, at your child’s elementary school.”

    The story gets better. As an émigré of the formerly communist regime of Romania, Klainerman makes an observation that should give any freedom-loving American tremendous pause. The former denizens of the totalitarian Soviet state, he explained, viewed the field of mathematics as “a great equalizer: those from socioeconomically disadvantaged families had a chance to compete on equal footing with those from privileged ones.”

    “Mathematics also granted me an escape from the intoxicating daily drum of party propaganda — a refuge from the crushing atmosphere of political and ideological conformity [italics added].”

    Today, Klainerman’s dramatic life has come full circle as he finds himself struggling against a different sort of oppression, that is, the cancel cult – what some have called ‘Cultural Marxism’ – that has descended on college campuses around the country like a brain fog. It’s not communist theory, however, which is promulgating the lie of racism inside of the mathematic disciplines, but rather one of the wealthiest capitalists of our time, Bill Gates.

    Klainerman takes issue with a shocking document financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and endorsed by various State of California educational entities, entitled, ‘A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction.’ The very first paragraph gives away the entire scheming plot:

    “This tool provides teachers an opportunity to examine their actions, beliefs, and values around teaching mathematics. The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by visibilizing the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture.”

    [This opening paragraph provides a citation to a 2001 paper entitled, ‘White Supremacy Culture,’ yet that document fails to mention either the study of mathematics, or the university setting where such implied racism is said to occur. In other words, “racism in mathematics” is a priori accepted as fact].

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    How do you know if your classroom is – wittingly or unwittingly – promoting a white supremacy culture? According to the document that happens when “[T]he focus is on getting the “right” answer,” apparently an anal retentive trait of the fastidious Caucasian tribe. The quotation marks around “right,” incidentally, appear in the original, suggesting that there really is no “right” answer in the field of mathematics.

    That sort of thinking was tossed around back in August when James Lindsay, of New Discourses, posted a memorable meme that quipped: “2+2=4: A perspective in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values.” This blew up the Internet when enraged wokesters, who have made it their life mission to rage against every sort of scientific, biological and mathematical fact, responded that sometimes 2+2 could equal 5. You know, just like a born male can sometimes suffer menstrual cramps. It is worth considering how these same people would respond at their local grocer if the cashier tried to charge them for five apples instead of four. But I digress.

    To take the observation a bit further, Klainerman was not really going out on a limb when he said that without the precision of mathematical certainty, “bridges would collapse, planes would fall from the sky, and bank transactions would be impossible.”

    Other clues that your math class is a hotbed of white supremacist ideology is when your teacher requires students to “show their work in only one way;” math is taught in a “linear fashion” and skills are taught sequentially; expectations are “not met.” The reader is not informed as to what those expectations are.

    The irony is that in this effort to root out “racism” in the classroom, the authors of this document are themselves guilty of the very same sin as they attempt to assign attributes and stereotypes to an entire race of people. It requires little imagination to guess what the response would be if such “racial profiling” were turned around and applied to other races of people. Meanwhile, the notion that mathematics could be rooted in racism is simply absurd. The beauty of mathematics is that there can only be one correct answer to every problem, and talented students – regardless of skin color – all have the freedom to pursue this discipline.

    Indeed, mathematics is the most straightforward of all disciplines, which means that the final result is not determined by any subjective feelings of the teacher. Although there may be isolated cases where a particular educator may give preferential treatment to some students at the expense of others, that cannot be a logical reason to forward the preposterous charge that the world of mathematics is brimming with white supremacists.

    In fact, the field of mathematics, which has been built on the work of the ancients, like the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Egyptians, is in reality the very least segregated, the least racist, of disciplines. It is open to anyone who is willing and able to excel at number crunching, which may make it an easy target to be tarred as an exclusive white man’s club.

    Academics must begin confronting this unfounded criticism head on, lest the radical progressives succeed in convincing the world through aggressive bully tactics that 2+2 really does equal 5, and that math teachers are imbued with innate racism. Otherwise, the very foundation of Western civilization, dependent as it is on mathematical precision, will simply collapse from within.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 22:20

  • SUV-Sized Battery Was Just Jettisoned From The ISS
    SUV-Sized Battery Was Just Jettisoned From The ISS

    With space junk becoming a significant problem that could wreak havoc on working satellites, the International Space Station (ISS) decided to dump an SUV-sized pallet of batteries into low Earth orbit.  

    The ISS discharged a 2.9-ton pallet of used batteries last Thursday, the most massive object it has ever ejected, NASA spokesperson Leah Cheshier told Gizmodo.

    “The External Pallet was the largest object—mass-wise—ever jettisoned from the International Space Station at 2.9 tons, more than twice the mass of the Early Ammonia Servicing System tank jettisoned by spacewalker Clay Anderson during the STS-118 mission in 2007,” Cheshier said. 

    The pallet is made of nickel-hydrogen batteries and will orbit the Earth for the next two to four years “before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere,” according to NASA.

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    She said the object is “no threat” to working satellites and will be closely monitored by U.S. Space Command.

    However, Phil Plait, whose “Bad Astronomy” blog runs on Syfy Wire, tweeted: “This strikes me (haha, a pun given the circumstances) as dangerous. It seems big and dense so unlikely to burn up completely.” 

    The ejection of the 2.9-ton object comes as the European Space Agency (ESA) recently warned that millions of objects are orbiting Earth, and there’s bound to be a collision between space junk and working satellites. 

    If readers are curious about just how much space junk is orbiting above, ESA’s animation shows an incredible view of all the debris:  

    The volume of both function and non-function objects in orbit has been steadily increasing since the start of the space age in 1957. Now there’s so much junk orbiting around the planet that collision risks are rising. 

    To solve this problem, ESA recently awarded the Swiss startup company Clearpace, a $117 million contract to remove space debris from orbit.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 22:00

  • Bitcoin Bros Rediscovering Our Monetary Past
    Bitcoin Bros Rediscovering Our Monetary Past

    Authored by Joakim Book via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    All eyes on bitcoin, it seems, as the price hits new all-time-highs, its proponents celebrate, and the economists who have long pronounced it dead and useless scratch their head in confusion (any “bubble” pronouncements as of late?)

    “The discomforting reality for the early idealists,” wrote Izabella Kaminska, a long-time critic of cryptocurrencies, before the price explosion in recent months, “is that 12 years on, the bitcoin ecosystem has more in common with the incumbent one it was hoping to displace than that original utopian vision.” 

    She’s more right than she knows. In one sense, we should probably celebrate this as it means that bitcoin is approaching the monetary commodity dream it always harbored: it is running into some eternal troubles common to all monetary systems. Even better, we should take the opportunity to teach some monetary history, as those in the crypto world have never been particularly well-versed in our monetary past. The audience they cater to is even less informed and so the “bitcoin heroes” – Saifedean Ammous, Robert Breedlove etc – are celebrated for their wisdom, no matter how rudimentary or inaccurate. 

    It’s easy to discard an entire field of centuries-long academic inquiries, especially if you’ve never been exposed to it, or only investigated a caricature. Some humility is recommended since, as Denis Patrick O’Brien writes in his collection of scholarly articles The Development of Monetary Economics, “Monetary economics has attracted some of the very best people to have written about economic problems.” 

    In contrast to Bitcoin’s money supply mechanism, set in stone since its origin, many of bitcoin’s rivals – “alt-coins” or “sh**coins” – want to set their own monetary policy, laid down arcane rules in fancy white papers that only the insiders have the discretion to change. This dispute over rules and discretion about who runs the printing press is about three centuries old if not more, and was thoroughly investigated by the likes of Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Tooke, Horsley Palmer, Walter Bagehot, John Clapham and others. 

    Some of the seemingly novel features of many cryptocurrency innovations are not so novel, and quickly run into precisely the problems that plagued past economies; these were promptly examined and argued over by monetary economists long since dead and forgotten. 

    When Bitcoin was small and insignificant, the dollar-cost of sending value across the network was minuscule. For the first few years of the cryptocurrency’s existence, this was among the best reasons to use it: you could send any amount, to anyone in the world, much cheaper and much faster than the legacy banking system of the 2000s. That was roughly correct. Legacy systems were slow and expensive, and doing international banking only 15-20 years ago caused headaches to plenty more people than money launderers.

    The Internet, effective competition, and the rise of fintechs changed all that – but the most vocal bitcoiners remained in the past that the legacy system had long left behind, thinking that their magnificent invention still trumped the system against which bitcoin was created. For most uses it doesn’t: unless you’re living under authoritarian regimes or are trying to do business in the legal grey (two very important, yet comparatively small, market segments), using bitcoin for its initial transactional purposes isn’t that great. 

    How our monetary past informs Bitcoin’s current troubles

    Exhibit A: Second Layers. After 2017 – the bull-run, the congestion, the forks and battle over block sizes – the winning faction found an enticing solution to their crowded-mempool problems: second layers like the “Lightning network” or similar services like Liquid (with plenty of others in the works). Instead of settling on Bitcoin’s main blockchain, most minor transactions would take place on a second layer that only occasionally settled on the main network. That way, every on-chain transaction could include many more underlying transactions, netted against each other. Second layers make perfect sense against bitcoin’s inherent supply-schedule problem. 

    Except that for anyone who looked, this was just old commercial banking systems reinvented, trust sneaking in through the back door. A commercial banking system (with or without a central bank) that freely issues notes and deposits redeemable in some outside currency was also a second layer on top of the main currency layer of the realm (which in our monetary past was often gold or silver). The second-layer solutions sketched right now are supposedly full-reserve and don’t have maturity mismatch, but so started early banking before they developed into the (safe!) fractional reserve banks that bitcoiners detest so much. 

    Just like you must put trust in your commercial bank not to risk your deposits or excessively inflate the notes they issued, with bitcoin you must place faith in second-layer networks you join not to run off with your bitcoin or revert your transactions. Not your keys, not your… em, transactions.

    Why would anybody in the past take paper money, the value of which could be inflated away and had counterparty risk on the bank that issued it, over “hard currency” like gold? Easy, noted Ray Perman in his superb financial history of Edinburgh: “The first paper notes were seen as holding their value better than coin because they could not be debased and clipping them did not affect their worth.” There’s no risk-free baseline; you pick your poison. And sometimes, to the fury of bitcoin maximalists, that poison isn’t the technical hurdles of bitcoin but the sweet insecurity of political governments and central banks and our well-established systems of international commercial banking. 

    Exhibit B: Speed and Cost of Payment. Making a high-priority transfer on the Bitcoin network, i.e. having a great chance for your transaction to be included in the next few blocks, requires you to pay something like 30 cents during low-traffic times, and closer to $20 or $30 in high-traffic times. Many bitcoin wallets allow you to send transactions with “Low Priority” settings meaning that they will clear on the network perhaps a day or two later. This usually inches the price closer to that 30 cents than the 30 dollars I mentioned. 

    But hang on, wasn’t the beauty of Bitcoin that transactions were cheap and fast compared to the banking system it supplants? It seems this brilliant piece of tech ran into precisely the trade-off between speed, cost, and finality with which our legacy systems have struggled for centuries. Surprise, surprise, the revolutionary bitcoin network went full circle. You can have efficient and thus cheap payments, fast payments, or secure payments – but not all three. When Satoshi Nakamoto programmed finality into the bitcoin protocol, users could not compromise on that dimension; instead, they were left with choosing between fast or cheap payments. Just like the regular banking system. 

    Exhibit C: Black Boxes Moving Around. Another version of this is bitcoin on side-chains, like the tBTC project or Wrapped BTC, where trusted custodians hold your bitcoins in exchange for a token claim to that bitcoin, a token that itself lives on a different cryptocurrency chain (say Ethereum). Ideally, users could then move bitcoin around at much lower cost than on the Bitcoin main chain; instead of moving actual bitcoin, the user moves a digital box that contains said bitcoin. 

    In many places of our financial past, we used the shiny metal gold as base money. Moving it, especially in large shipments, was clunky and expensive. In the high seas, ships carrying it could founder and sink; in the woods of Europe lurked thieves. So far, that gold-bitcoin analogy should be clear and obvious. 

    Financial systems in Britain or the Dutch republic solved this expensive transportation problem by using paper claims to deposited gold. For centuries of international trade Bills of Exchange moved across the world, and only rarely did the underlying base money move. These “Wrapped BTCs” of the past let the expensive underlying asset lay still while paper claims to it moved instead. The financial system in different locations of international trade used bills of exchange – papers of credit – to net out transactions between them, supporting the real economy with a sophisticated and efficient banking system running in the background. In past times that made gold easier to use as money; in crypto times that makes bitcoin, with its highly variable transaction fees, easier to move around. 

    For all the revolutionary creed that surrounds the emerging monetary commodity that is bitcoin, it seems that its future more and more resembles the past it tried to escape. Happy times for us monetary nerds.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 21:40

  • Netflix Purges Password Moochers In Bid To Boost Paying Subscribers
    Netflix Purges Password Moochers In Bid To Boost Paying Subscribers

    After years of burning cash with heedless abandon, and with an ever-growing field of new low-priced competitors nipping at its heels, Netflix is understandably facing pressure to squeeze more profits out of its users. And user growth is still a critical metric for Wall Street.

    Readers may remember Netflix shares’ reaction to the company’s Q4 global paying subs number released back in January with the rest of the streaming giant’s Q4 earnings, when the company projected that it might become free cash flow positive for the year 2021.

    Well, as it turns out, that promise was accompanied by a gamble that could risk Netflix finally losing its dominant position in the streaming race, especially as new platforms are seemingly launched every few months, while more established competitors like HBO Max and Disney+ add millions of subscribers a month. Netflix is testing a new feature to try and force some of its non-paying users off the platform, according to Bloomberg.

    Sharing of Netflix passwords and account access has been rampant since the early days, back when a monthly subscription was roughly half the price it is now.

    And as Netflix shares lag the broader Nasdaq index (during a period that has seen high-flying tech shares underperform vs. “real economy” stocks like the members of the DJIA), the company is apparently betting that finally confronting its deadbeat users might convert more of them into subscribers (notably, it’s timing this initiative with the latest round of stimulus checks and renewed unemployment benefits).

    The big fear, according to Benchmark Co’s Matthew Harrigan, is that the crackdown could hurt NFLX’s pricing power. Last week, Needham called user churn the top risk for Netflix.

    But Wired has a different take: NFLX’s purge could have a silver lining, since it could help push users toward 2-factor authentication, which makes their accounts more secure.

    The limited test that Netflix introduced this week is basically a form of two-factor authentication, the kind you hopefully already have on most of your online accounts. Some users have begun to see the following prompt when settling in for a binge: “If you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.”

    Below that, there’s an option to get a code emailed or texted to the account owner, which you can enter to continue watching.

    A source familiar with Netflix’s trial says that the company is still in the very early stages, and sees the effort as a way both to verify who’s using what accounts and to minimize the security issues inherent in unauthorized sharing.

    Netflix’s terms of service specify that accounts must not be shared with people living outside the user’s household. But one Wired editor reportedly found 90 authorized devices linked to the Hulu account she herself was mooching off of.

    Estimates from Bloomberg and others seem to put the percentage of Netflix users who are mooches at roughly 30%. While excising the mooches will help improve the quality of auto-generated recommendation lists for its paying users, Netflix could see a drop in hours consumed exacerbated by the fact that customers around the world are about to finally get up off the couch.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 21:20

  • The Gradual Return Of Good Sense
    The Gradual Return Of Good Sense

    Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The American Institute for Economic Research,

    President Biden made a statement last week that Americans might be able to gather in small groups by July 4, to celebrate Independence Day. One wonders who is protecting him from the reality: most of the country is almost entirely back to normal.

    Outside of California and some Northeast states, the lockdowns have largely ended, with ever more states repealing restrictions and mandates. Reimposing them for any reason seems almost unthinkable at this point. Anthony Fauci’s constant prattle about the dangers of opening up are falling on deaf ears. 

    The few states that are still locked down are rapidly losing residents and businesses. States that are entirely open are gaining them. As for the travel against which the CDC warns, the nation’s airports and highways are back to pre-lockdown levels of normal. The slogan “land of the free” is starting to mean something again. 

    Even the New York Times, which has led the lockdown effort for longer than a year, is starting to back peddle, finally. An article called “I Would Much Rather Be in Florida” points out:

    [M]uch of the state has a boomtown feel, a sense of making up for months of lost time.

    Realtors cold-knock on doors looking to recruit sellers to the sizzling housing market, in part because New Yorkers and Californians keep moving in. The unemployment rate is 5.1 percent, compared to 9.3 percent in California, 8.7 percent in New York and 6.9 percent in Texas. That debate about opening schools? It came and went months ago. Children have been in classrooms since the fall….

    Florida’s death rate is no worse than the national average, and better than that of some other states that imposed more restrictions, despite its large numbers of retirees, young partyers and tourists. Caseloads and hospitalizations across most of the state are down….

    Try to buy a home and the experience is frustrating for a different reason: an open house will have 30 cars parked outside. Though Florida’s population growth has slowed during the pandemic, documentary stamps, an excise tax on real estate sales, were 15 percent higher in January than they were a year ago. Filing fees for new corporations were 14 percent higher.

    Also notable is that the heavily curated comment section of the article is packed with people saying that we never should have locked down – a point of view practically banned for the better part of a year. 

    Meanwhile, the “science” behind accepted postulates such as the 6-feet-of-distance rule are unraveling by the day. A study from Massachusetts found essentially no differences in rates of infection in students whether they are standing 6 feet or 3 feet apart. This prompted even Fauci to walk back his long-standing demand that students be 6 feet apart – just the latest of many flip flops. The study didn’t examine what would happen if everyone just behaved normally, as they do in Florida. In fact, one of the missing pieces of research for a whole year would have compared a normal-behaving maskless community with one that complied with all the extreme lockdown strictures. The closest we have to this are all the very many studies showing no correlation at all between lockdowns and disease control. 

    Remember that the whole notion of managing people’s lives to control a virus stemmed from untested models. That people should be compelled to stand apart is related to what Edward Stringham calls “Sim City Thinking” – the belief that society can be operated the way people play with computer games. It might have been wiser to have looked more critically at those models before adopting them the whole world over in the midst of a disease panic. 

    It’s a huge relief, to be sure, but it comes far too late, not only in the US but all around the world. The terrible damage of the lockdowns has become palpably obvious. UNICEF reports:

    • As of March 2021, 13 percent of 71 million COVID-19 infections in 107 countries (62 per cent of the total global infections) with data by age are among children and adolescents under 20 years of age.

    • In developing countries, child poverty is expected to increase by around 15 per cent. An additional 140 million children in these countries are also already projected to be in households living below the poverty line.

    • Schools for more than 168 million schoolchildren globally have been closed for almost a year. Two-thirds of countries with full or partial closures are in Latin America and the Caribbean.

    • At least 1 in 3 schoolchildren has been unable to access remote learning while their schools were closed.

    • Around 10 million additional child marriages may occur before the end of the decade, threatening years of progress in reducing the practice.

    • At least 1 in 7 children and young people has lived under stay-at-home policies for most of the last year, leading to feelings of anxiety, depression and isolation.

    • As of November 2020, an additional 6 to 7 million children under age 5 may have suffered from wasting or acute malnutrition in 2020, resulting in almost 54 million wasted children, a 14 per cent rise that could translate into more than 10,000 additional child deaths per month – mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. With a 40 per cent decline in nutrition services for children and women, many other nutrition outcomes can worsen.

    • As of November 2020, more than 94 million people were at risk of missing vaccines due to paused measles campaigns in 26 countries.

    The toll on civil liberties at home and around the world is extremely grim, and especially disturbing when you consider that all of this was preventable. As Florida governor Ron DeSantis says now with some frequency, lockdowns do not work and they cause immense harm. More opinion pages are admitting, as the Las Vegas Review Journal has said: “Virus lockdowns don’t appear to have worked as advertised.”

    Don’t hold your breath waiting for the New York Times editorial page to admit that. Perhaps someday but it won’t come soon.

    The lockdowners committed themselves to something previously unthinkable. To admit error at this point is too intellectually and psychologically upsetting. Regardless, we can be confident that as the years roll on, there will be a growing consensus that, as Jay Bhattacharya has said, lockdowns are the worst policy error of our lifetimes and many generations. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 21:00

  • "The FOMC Packed A Huge Surprise" – Fed Now Comfortable With "Slightly" Negative Rates
    “The FOMC Packed A Huge Surprise” – Fed Now Comfortable With “Slightly” Negative Rates

    While markets were focused on headline hot takes from today’s FOMC statement, those reading between the lines and focusing on the market plumbing – such as Curvature Securities’ Scott Skyrm – found “a huge surprise”: an increase in the RRP counterparty limit from $30 billion to $80 billion per counterparty.

    While at first look, it seems quite benign, Skyrm notes that “this implies the Fed is very comfortable with zero percent rates and maybe even negative rates.”

    Let’s rewind a little:

    This week, Repo GC averaged at .01% and few RRP counterparties showed up at the RRP window. Remember, RRP counterparties invest cash at the Fed in exchange for Treasury securities at a rate of 0.0%. If the cash investors can’t get collateral from the Repo market, they go to the Fed. Surprisingly, there was no RRP activity on Monday and today, and only $702 million on Tuesday. Rates are close to zero and the market isn’t even using the RRP window.

    Here’s the implication. As Skyrm explains, “if the Fed wanted overnight rates higher, they would have raised the IOER and/or RRP. Instead, they raised the RRP counterparty limit meaning they are very comfortable with rates here at zero, but don’t want them to drop into the negatives“… although they now seem to be ok with rates dipping occasionally into the red as they have done recently in GC repo…

    … and 1 month bills.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 20:52

  • Detroit's Westin Book Cadillac Hotel Heading For Foreclosure
    Detroit’s Westin Book Cadillac Hotel Heading For Foreclosure

    Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse for Detroit, the city’s iconic Westin Book Cadillac hotel looks like it’s heading for foreclosure.

    The 33 story hotel had undergone a $180 million renovation in 2008, but has suffered mightily as a result of the pandemic. The hotel’s owner owes $77 million in commercial mortgage backed securities debt which has been delinquent since last May, Deadline Detroit writes. 

    Owner John Ferchill said he hasn’t been able to come to an agreement with his lender: “We are not unique. We have tried everything to work with a lender who won’t work with us, which quite frankly is a testament to how good of a property we created. They would rather take it for themselves than work it out with the borrower. We have not received one concession.”

    Ferchill said “the state’s ‘draconian COVID rules'” also contributed to the decline in revenue. 

    The loan’s special servicer, CWC Capital Asset Management LLC, didn’t comment. 

    Justin Winslow, president of the Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association, told Yahoo News: “This is a flagship hotel in the city of Detroit, and I think the frustrating reality is we’re only a couple months away it feels like at this point from demand coming back in very large numbers. To get this close to what feels like a finish line and to not be able to see it through is unfortunately, and to me, an avoidable outcome for the Book Cadillac.”

    Detroit was experiencing a boom in downtown hotels prior to the pandemic. Names like the Shinola Hotel on Woodward, the Element Detroit in the old Metropolitan Building on John R and the Detroit Foundation Hotel on Larned St. were all experiencing success prior to Covid provisions kicking in. 

    The Westin Book Cadillac was valued at $136 million in late 2019, but as of December 2021 is being valued at $74.6 million, slightly below the loan balance owed on the property. 

    Winslow blames the “inflexible nature” of commercial mortgage-backed securities loans: “This was a hotel that was very profitable many years in a row and can be again once the general public feels the immediate threat is gone. I think that with (the) vaccine that is a short-term horizon before that willingness comes.”

    Meanwhile, despite petitioning local government to help, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed recent legislation that Winslow said would have helped the industry in Michigan. 

    Winslow concluded: “That is not something I put exclusively or only at the governor’s feet because I think this is a process that requires the legislature to engage in honest negotiation to get something to the finish line that can actual help the industry. But vetoing legislation that would have had $300 million in property tax relief would have been direct relief to hotels and restaurants.”

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 20:40

  • "The Endpoint Of Critical Race Theory": Columbia University Faces Backlash For Segregated Graduations
    “The Endpoint Of Critical Race Theory”: Columbia University Faces Backlash For Segregated Graduations

    Authored by Benjamin Zeisloft via Campus Reform,

    Columbia University in New York City will host virtual graduation ceremonies segregated by race, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status, in addition to its main commencement ceremonies for all students.

    In order to “provide a more intimate setting for students who self-identify in a variety of ways,” the Ivy League school said these programs are a way to “complement” the main ceremonies.

    The additional virtual ceremonies include the “Native Graduation Celebration,” “Lavender Graduation Celebration” for LGBTQ students, “Asian Graduation Celebration,” “First-generation and Low-Income student Graduation Celebration,” “Latinx Graduation Celebration,” and “Black Graduation Celebration.”

    The university faced swift backlash for promoting segregated graduation programming.

    “Congratulations are in order for liberals and @Columbia University for successfully bringing segregation back by packaging it as ‘diversity inclusion,’” wrote conservative commentator Candace Owens.

    “Just one question: which ceremony do bi-racial children attend?”

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    “The endpoint of critical race theory: segregation,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) reacted.

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    As previously reported by Campus Reform, Cotton sent a letter to then-Attorney General Bill Barr in 2020 asking that the Department of Justice investigate the rising trend of segregation on the nation’s college campuses.

    Columbia issued a statement in response to the backlash.

    “Reports today and previous tweets misrepresent our multicultural graduation celebrations, which exist in addition to, not instead of, University-wide commencement and individual school Class Days,” wrote the school on Twitter.

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    “These events are important, intimate and welcoming spaces for students aligned with these groups to come together to celebrate their achievements if they wish,” said the university. “They are organized in tandem with students and student groups. In most instances, these celebrations evolved from ceremonies originally created by students and alumni.”

    “They are open to every student. They are voluntary. And they have become a highly anticipated and valuable part of the Columbia graduation experience,” added the university.

    Campus Reform reached out to Columbia University on Tuesday for additional comment. A university spokesperson provided the same statement as was issued on Twitter.  

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 20:20

  • Washington, Beijing Reportedly Far Apart On Key Issues Ahead Of Alaska Summit
    Washington, Beijing Reportedly Far Apart On Key Issues Ahead Of Alaska Summit

    In the span of just a few days, a high-level summit between Washington and Beijing in far-flung Anchorage, Alaska is about to kick off Thursday and continue through Friday. And as the world waits to see whether the fate of Taiwan will factor into the discussions, the Wall Street Journal has returned with some more details about Beijing’s agenda.

    Per the report, the two lead Chinese delegates (Yang Jiechi, a member of the Communist Party ruling body, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, China’s top-ranking diplomat) plan to urge Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan to drop sanctions and restrictions on Chinese entities and individuals put in place by the Trump administration. Ransquawk described the meeting as “the first significant engagement” between the world’s two largest economies, and arguably, the world’s only two contemporary superpowers since President Trump left office. Depending on the outcome, the meeting could set the tone for bilateral relations for years to come.

    So far, Biden and his team have tried to maintain a tough-on-China stance, pledging to leave Trump’s tariffs and other punitive measures, like keeping Huawei on the Entities List, in place.

    US officials reportedly told WSJ that hot-potato topics like Beijing’s move to crush democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, and its aggressive policing of the South China Seat will factor in to the discussion. However, every time the US has expressed concerns about China’s increasingly aggressive military posture toward Taiwan, Beijing has replied by sharply insisting that Washington not meddle in China’s domestic affairs.

    Blinken used a trip to Japan and South Korea this past week to blast Beijing’s aggressive stance toward Taiwan. Politico mused in a headline that the two sides appeared headed for a “frosty” summit.

    Beijing has gone so far as to obliquely threaten the US with military retaliation if it continues to back Taiwan’s domestic pro-independence politics.

    WSJ noted that China is coming to the meeting with a different agenda that bears little overlap with the Biden Administration’s preferred talking points. Though the Chinese officials are reportedly planning to propose that high-level meetings between the two governments be re-established.

    Chinese officials reportedly started laying the groundwork for the summit late last year. Chinese sources reportedly told WSJ that “the US side proposed to hold this high-level strategic dialogue, which we think is meaningful…and…”we hope that the two sides can have a candid dialogue on issues of mutual concern.”

    Beijing is expected to propose a virtual climate summit set for April 22 to schedule a meeting between President Biden and President Xi. The two leaders, who have known each other for years, have spoken only once by phone since Biden took office.

    In summary, few expect the two sides to accomplish much more than an initial sizing up of the competition. Biden is preparing to convene a “quad” summit with several of China’s other recent adversaries like Japan and Australia. With all this in mind, Ransquawk speculated the focus will be on the tone of the meeting and how diverged /converged each other’s views are, as the focus shifts toward what might be accomplished during future rounds of talks.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 20:00

  • American Airlines "Looking Into It" After John Kerry Busted Flying Without Mask
    American Airlines “Looking Into It” After John Kerry Busted Flying Without Mask

    As ‘elites’ such as Gavin Newsom, Anthony Fauci and President Biden continue to make a mockery of their own pandemic guidelines, Americans are getting arrested at banks, tossed from restaurants and ejected from Costco for not wearing masks. Most recently, ‘Climate Envoy’ and former Secretary of State John Kerry was busted maskless on an American Airlines flight in violation of airline policy and a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) mandate requiring them on flights.

    First reported by the Tennessee Star, Kerry can be seen reading a book in first class while letting his mask hang down from his ear.

    In a statement to Fox News, the passenger that took the photo – who wished to remain anonymous –  said that the president’s climate convoy was wearing his mask at the boarding gate, only to ditch it after getting on the plane before other passengers.

    “I salute our Very Special Presidential Envoy for Climate for not flying private, but instead flying first class commercial with the rest of us common folk,” said the passenger, adding “And while he can’t bring himself to follow his own party’s mask restrictions, we should cut him some slack.”

    “Being an elite hypocrite is hard work!” the passenger then quipped.

    When asked to clarify their mask policy, American Airlines tweeted that “Masks are required on board our aircraft, and we are looking into this.”

    In January, the CDC issued a mandate which kicked in last month requiring individuals to “wear masks that cover both the mouth and nose” while taking public transportation or at a “transportation hub.”

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    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 19:40

  • Russia Recalls Its Ambassador After Biden Vows Putin Will "Pay A Price" For Meddling
    Russia Recalls Its Ambassador After Biden Vows Putin Will “Pay A Price” For Meddling

    Just a day after the public release of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s report alleging that Vladimir Putin ordered Russian agencies to conduct ‘influence operations’ during the 2020 election in order to ‘boost’ Trump at the expense of Joe Biden, an angry Kremlin has summoned its ambassador to the US back to Moscow for “consultations”.

    “The Russian ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Antonov, has been invited to come to Moscow for consultations conducted with the aim of analyzing what should be done and where to go in the context of ties with the United States,” Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement Wednesday.

    Ambassador Anatoly Antonov, via Sputnik

    Of note is that the statement emphasized Moscow hoped to prevent an “irreversible deterioration” in relations – something that appears to be increasingly difficult given President Biden’s interview also published Wednesday morning wherein the president vowed Russia will “pay a price” for “meddling” in US elections. Biden further agreed with ABC interview host George Stephanopoulos that Putin is a “killer”.

    Here’s the most controversial part of the interview which aired early Wednesday:

    Asked whether he believes Mr Putin is a “killer” in a pre-taped interview that aired on Wednesday, the president responded: “I do.”

    “The price he’s going to pay, you’ll see shortly,” he said.

    Mr Biden recalled meeting Mr Putin, during which he reportedly told him that he “doesn’t have a soul”: “I wasn’t being a wise guy.”

    “He looked back at me and said, ‘We understand each other’,” Mr Biden said.

    CNN is also reporting sanctions are likely coming as soon as next week, which will specifically target “people close to Russia President Vladimir Putin.”

    Biden during this latest bombshell interview had claimed he know’s Putin “relatively well”.

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    Biden recounted to Stephanopoulos that during a “long talk” with the Russian leader, he informed his Russian counterpart, “I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared” — speaking of the election meddling allegations and the potential for sanctions.

    As for how Russia might reciprocate, it has very limited options – given especially the Kremlin no doubt senses that the Democratic administration is in large part playing to its base – the same which hyped and bought into the now long deflated ‘Russiagate’ narrative which persisted through the Trump years. This means Washington seems ready and willing with finger on the sanctions trigger to escalate things in a tit-for-tat fashion. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 19:20

  • Markets Relieved By Fed's Dovish Message… But For How Long?
    Markets Relieved By Fed’s Dovish Message… But For How Long?

    Authored by Steve Englander via Standard Chartered,

    The FOMC made few changes in the statement, but increased the ceiling for per counter-party overnight reverse repos from USD 30bn to USD 80bn.

    The Fed’s economic projections did not include an increase in the fed funds target rate through 2023, although 7 of 18 participants did project a fed funds increase.    

    Dovish message a relief to asset markets, but for how long?

    Investors were very focused on this FOMC meeting to see how projections and the policy stance would be affected by the March (and to some degree the December) fiscal stimulus. We had expected the Fed projections to show two 25bps hikes in 2023; we reckoned markets were anticipating one or somewhat less than one 2023 hike and the FOMC delivered none. This was a dovish surprise – the AUD, NZD, MXN, ZAR, NOK and BRL rallied more than 1% in the first hour after the announcement. Most major currencies appreciated within a range of 0.5% to 1.0%; 10Y UST yields, which had jumped 6bps in the run-up to the meeting, came back to their opening level of c.1.62%. Inflation breakevens moved somewhat higher, while real yields fell. The combined real and breakeven moves were supportive particularly for EM FX, but also G10 FX.

    Fed Chair Powell repeated that there was no discomfort with the current level of yields.

    Powell also made an effort to downplay the projections embedded in the dots, while emphasizing the importance of achieving (rather than forecasting) their inflation and unemployment targets under the Average Inflation Targeting framework.

    For now, investors are absorbing a message that the Fed intends to be dovish until data indicates otherwise. This might change if we get a run of strong data in the coming weeks as the US economy reopens and fiscal stimulus hits.

    In the short term, the fears that the market (as well as we) had of a Fed acknowledgment of a more optimistic landscape have dissipated. But we think these could be renewed if the pace of recovery suggests that full employment may be reached faster than shown in the dots.

    We expect US yields to keep grinding higher, but we also think that any USD-positive effect will be temporary, with the yield increases not enough to offset long-term USD negatives from a wider current account deficit and increased debt.

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 19:00

  • Watch: California Neighborhood Leveled In Powerful Commercial-Grade Fireworks Explosion
    Watch: California Neighborhood Leveled In Powerful Commercial-Grade Fireworks Explosion

    “They are commercial grade,” Ontario Fire Department Chief Ray Gayk said in a news conference after a massive blast rocked a suburb of San Bernadino, California on Tuesday. He described further they were “like you would normally see in the fireworks show,” according to the the Los Angeles Times.

    Two people died when what appears to have been a private stockpile of commercial-grade fireworks ignited inside a suburban residence, erupting into a fireball and huge plume of smoke which prompted an immediate evacuation of the whole area, further causing several structures to catch fire. 

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    According to local KABC-TV, “Officials later put crime scene tape around the house and covered two bodies at the scene, confirming there were two fatalities in addition to some injuries.”

    And further, police say they are investigating the matter as a potential felony due to the large ‘illegal’ fireworks cache that possibly included other explosives.

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    “Residents across a vast area reported hearing the blast and feeling the ground shake shortly before 1 p.m.,” LA Times noted further. 

    Local reports additionally cited area residents and neighbors who said the house which allegedly contained the fireworks stockpile had been source of many prior complaints related to explosive detonations and frequent fireworks-related noise. 

    “Someone’s in trouble…” one eyewitness exclaimed.

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    Likely an investigation will also focus on whether local authorities ignored or failed to respond to the prior complaints of neighbors. Area residents said police were somewhat routinely called about blasts and noise at the property, but that the homeowners were “never caught in the act”.

    Surreal footage of the initial blast from multiple angles showed a small mushroom cloud plume of smoke extending far into the sky over the southern California residential area. 

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    “The boom pushed me back, and the window shattered,” one nearby eyewitness and area resident was cited as saying. “I got hit with the after-blast when I opened the door.”

    “Fireworks always go off over here. It shook the whole apartment from left to right,” she added.

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    Police and firefighters later said they had to cordon off a larger area than expected, preventing people from returning to their homes in the neighborhood, due to the vastness of the debris field.

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    Fires had continued to smolder into the evening, with reports of smaller, random follow-up blasts involving fireworks still going off. 

    Tyler Durden
    Wed, 03/17/2021 – 18:40

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