May 18

Today’s News 18th May 2021

  • Sweden Records More Than 30K Cases Of Side Effects Tied To COVID Jabs
    Sweden Records More Than 30K Cases Of Side Effects Tied To COVID Jabs

    As Europe pushes ahead with its vaccination program, the Nordic countries are reporting a surge in damaging side effects. In the country, the tally has surpassed 30K with the majority of these reactions reported in patients who received the AstraZeneca jab.

    Sweden’s Medical Products Agency reported that as of last week, the Scandinavian nation had tallied 31,844 reports of adverse reactions linked to its vaccine rollout.

    Sweden presently offers 3 different COVID-19 jabs: Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, with the latter being the most widely available (while other European states like Germany have sought to offer substitutes to younger patients, who are more vulnerable to dangerous cerebral blood clots, which are a rare – but not unheard of – side effect).

    The number of suspected adverse reactions from the two shots seems relatively small when compared to the 19,961 reports linked to AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria, while the AstraZeneca shot only accounts for about 26% of the roughly 2.7MM vaccines that have been administered so far in Sweden, but makes up around 63% of the side effects reports.

    Ebba Hallberg, an official with the Medical Products Agency, told Swedish media that it was unusual to receive so many reports of side effects. She added that the tally was likely higher because of public focus on the new vaccines.To head off complaints that many of the incidences of side effects were minor, she said healthcare providers are likely only reporting the more “serious” side effects.

    One Swedish media outlet said the number of complaints filed in just a few months exceeded the number typically filed over 4 years, which underscores the public anxieties about the COVID vaccines.

    In March, Sweden was one of several nations to temporarily suspend the use of the AstraZeneca jab, following reports of abnormal blood clotting in recipients. AstraZeneca, as well as the European Medicines Agency, have insisted that the vaccine is safe after it came under scrutiny.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 05/18/2021 – 02:45

  • Government Scientific Advisors Admit Using "Totalitarian" Fear Tactics To Control People During Pandemic, Report
    Government Scientific Advisors Admit Using “Totalitarian” Fear Tactics To Control People During Pandemic, Report

    Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

    Scientists in the UK working as advisors for the government have expressed regret for using what they now admit to be “unethical” and “totalitarian” methods of instilling fear in the population in order to control behaviour during the pandemic, according to a report.

    The London Telegraph reports the comments made by Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B), a sub-committee of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) the government’s chief scientific advisory group.

    The report quotes a briefing from March 2020, as the first lockdown was decreed, that stated the government should drastically increase “the perceived level of personal threat” that the virus poses because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”.

    One scientist with the SPI-B admits that “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear.”

    The unnamed scientist adds that “The way we have used fear is dystopian.”

    The scientist further confessed that “The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”

    Another separate scientist on the subcommittee professed “You could call psychology ‘mind control’. That’s what we do… clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past.”

    Another scientist warned that “We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in,” adding “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise.”

    According to the report, another researcher with the group acknowledged that “Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon,” adding that “Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually.”

    Yet another scientist on the subcommittee stated that they have been “stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology” over the past year, and warned that “psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative.”

    “They have too much power and it intoxicates them”, the scientist further warned.

    The comments were collected by author Laura Dodsworth, for her book A State of Fear, out today, that explores the government’s actions during the pandemic.

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    When the Telegraph asked the subcommittee for comment on the findings, SPI-B psychologist Gavin Morgan replied “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government.”

    Morgan added that “By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.”

    Commenting on the revelations, Conservative Steve Baker, a member of a group of anti-lockdown MPs said “If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become.”

    “Do I fear that Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is,” Baker urged.

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    The government state of fear continues minute by minute as government ministers are now suggesting that so called ‘freedom day’ in the UK (a situation where the government permits people to have basic rights is not freedom) on June 21st is under threat because a sizeable portion of the population is refusing to take the vaccine:

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    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 05/18/2021 – 02:00

  • "Blood On Your Hands": Erdogan Issues Worst Rebuke To Biden Since Taking Office
    “Blood On Your Hands”: Erdogan Issues Worst Rebuke To Biden Since Taking Office

    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday blasted the Joe Biden administration for standing idly by while the civilian body count piles up in Gaza after one week of unrelenting Israeli airstrikes. And even more than this Turkey is outraged over new reports that Biden approved a $735 million dollar weapons sale from the United States to Israel.

    “You are writing history with your bloody hands,” Erdogan said in remarks addressed to President Biden. The stinging rebuke came after a meeting with this cabinet over the continuing Gaza crisis. Turkey has long been a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, though Erdogan’s rule has in recent years seen relations with Israel reach a low-point given the hardline Islamist leanings of his Justice and Development Party. The Hill reports of the massive US weapons sale to Israel that “A majority of the possible sale is of Boeing-made Joint Direct Attack Munitions, equipment that can make unguided bombs dropped from aircraft into guided missiles, the aide confirmed.” 

    “The window for Congress to block this sale is for all intents and purposes closed,” The Hill wrote, also noting outrage among a handful of Democrat progressives.

    Following a meeting with his Cabinet, Erdogan issued a rebuke to the U.S. president, saying:

    “Now, unfortunately, you (Biden) are writing history with your bloody hands with this event (in which) Gaza is being attacked with seriously disproportionate force causing the martyrdom of thousands of people. You have forced us to say this.”

    And specifically on the new reports of Biden-approved weapons sales to the Jewish state, Erdogan scolded further:

    “Today we saw Biden’s signature on weapons sales to Israel,” Erdogan said in reference to US media reports of a new arms shipment approved by the Biden administration.

    “Palestinian territories are awash with persecution, suffering and blood, like many other territories that lost the peace with the end of the Ottomans. And you are supporting that,” Erdogan said.

    This apparently marks the end of previously reported attempts of Erdogan to reach out to the administration, following warmer (despite at times tense) personal relations with Trump, given that Monday’s comments mark the harshest words Erdogan has unleashed on Biden since his January arrival in the White House. 

    After all this, Erdogan apparently offered his vision for peace in the region…

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    But Turkey’s leader also went after some European countries, especially Austria – over reports of the Austrians flying an Israeli flag from a government building. He said Austria is trying to make Muslims “pay the price of their own genocide against the Jews” – a reference to the large number of Austrian Nazis that during WWII helped facilitate the Holocaust there.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 05/18/2021 – 01:15

  • US And Its Allies Try To Split The World In Two
    US And Its Allies Try To Split The World In Two

    Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    America is using its post-WWII position of being the world’s hegemon, so as to compel every other nation either to join them (as a banana republic or vassal nation) or else to become their enemy by destroying them.

    America’s response to the increasing economic success of China and other nations that until recent decades were impoverished former colonies is to organize its own allies – especially the English-speaking countries – to become a totally separate global economic trading and military alliance standing against that “third world” – and thereby force all non-aligned nations to have to either choose to be allied with the United States or else become conquered by the U.S. and its allies. It’s “Us,” or “Them,” all the way. The top “enemies” (the “Them”) are the same countries that America and its allies were against during the anti-communist Cold War, Russia and China, even though Russia is no longer communist, and China has become a mixture between communism and capitalism.

    America has on its side Saudi Arabia, Israel, Qatar, UAE, and all four of the fascist nations during World War II: Germany, Japan, Italy, and Spain — as well as many other nations.

    Russia and China were both allies of the United States during the war against Hitler and his allies, but Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to fight against considerable American support for the fascist powers (overwhelmingly coming from Republicans) during the years before Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack on 7 December 1941. (In fact, on 23 November 1937, Hitler’s agents Kurt von Tippleskirch and Manfred von Killinger, two Barons, were secretly negotiating with top Republicans — including the racist Irénée du Pont — what would have been the Duponts’ second coup-attempt against FDR, but neither attempt succeeded.) As soon as Harry S. Truman (whom the Democratic Party’s billionaires chose to be FDR’s VP in 1944) became President on FDR’s death on 12 April 1945, the alliance with the Soviet Union ended, and the Cold War gelled in Truman’s mind on 25 July 1945 because of advice from General Dwight Eisenhower, whom Truman practically worshipped. On 19 June 1945, Truman wrote to his wife, Bess, “He’s done a whale of a job. They are running him for President, which is O.K. with me. I’d turn it over to him now if I could.” And, on 25 July 1945, Ike told Truman that either the Soviet Union would conquer the world or else America would — and this apparently convinced Truman to go for global empire and to conquer the Soviet Union.

    America’s increasingly used method for conquest is the method that was first done against Iraq starting in 1991: international sanctions, followed by coup-attempts that, if unsuccessful, are then followed by an outright military invasion — with or without U.N. approval. More recently, this stepwise method (sanctions, failed coup, then invasion) is being used against Syria, but America no longer applies its own troops for its invasions, and instead uses hired proxy-forces (mercenaries), such as, in Syria, jihadists who are hired from around the world and paid for by the Sauds, and also uses separatist Kurds are hired who have long wanted to break away from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey in order to establish their own Kurdistan nation, and who are controlled more directly from Washington (since the Sauds don’t control Kurdish forces). America’s troops in Syria train and arm (usually with money being supplied by the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar) the jihadists (who are Al Qaeda-affiliated) and the Kurds.

    Right now, America is using its post-WWII position of being the world’s hegemon or globally dominant nation, so as to, basically, compel every other nation either to join them (as a banana republic or vassal nation) or else to become their enemy by destroying them, as Washington and its allies have done to Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Bolivians, Ecuadorans, and, before that, Hondurans, Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, Argentinians, Chileans, Iranians, and many others in what Washington calls “The Free World.” Ideology is no longer the excuse. Now the excuses are “democracy,” “human rights,” “fighting against corruption,” and, of course “national defense” (which likewise was Hitler’s main excuse).

    In other words: America is trying to do everything it can to avoid becoming downgraded to become the world’s #2 nation, in terms of power. America’s billionaires are behind this; America’s Government is controlled by them.

    The best single statement of America’s position is the speech that Barack Obama gave to the graduating cadets at West Point Military Academy on 28 May 2014, saying:

    The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

    America “responds” to the rising power of nations that formerly had been colonies, by means of offering them this choice: Join with us, or else be destroyed.

    As the U.S. Establishment presents and promotes this, it is ‘justified’ because only America is “indispensable”: all other nations are “dispensable.” (Hitler, too, felt that way about all other nations — and most Germans endorsed that supremacism then, just like most Americans support it today.) FDR had planned a non-fascist future for the world, but then he died and (because of whom FDR’s successor was) we got a fascist future, instead, and that’s what we have. Mussolini called fascism “corporationism.” And America is more and more corporationist every decade that passes.

    Under the bigoted Hindu-nationalist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is now clearly part of the U.S.-UK-led alliance. On 4 March 2021, Munira Lokhandwala headlined “Google Invests Billions in India as Modi and Allies Stage Corporate Takeover of Agriculture” and reported that

    In particular, Google’s multi-billion dollar investment in the telecommunications company owned by oil and gas billionaire Mukesh Ambani shows how US Big Tech will stop at nothing to make a bigger profit, even if this includes legitimizing a key supporter of the authoritarian-leaning government that is now a target of mass revolt. Ambani is India’s richest man and a strong corporate ally to BJP leadership, perceived by many as a major beneficiary of the hated agricultural reforms.

    In September 2020, the Indian Parliament approved the Indian Agriculture Acts of 2020, also known as the “Farm Bills.” In response, Indian farmers who opposed these bills launched one of the largest protests and series of cross-sectoral strikes that the world has ever seen.

    It’s estimated that over 250 million people have participated in protests against the passage of these bills that Indian farmers see as another phase in the continued attack on their livelihoods and an attempt to deregulate the farming industry to allow for greater private-sector control of food distribution. These changes would favor large corporations like Ambani’s Reliance Industries, who would thrive under the free market conditions that these Farm Bills would create.

    India, in the Rhodesist plan, would be a major counter-weight to China.

    Japan is another. On 23 April 2021, Craig Mark bannered “From Five Eyes To Six? Japan’s Push To Join The West’s Intelligence Alliance”, and he reported that

    As tensions with China continue to grow, Japan is making moves to join the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing alliance. This week, Japan’s ambassador to Australia, Shingo Yamagami, told The Sydney Morning Herald he was “optimistic” about his country coming on board. “[I] would like to see this idea become reality in the near future.”

    This comes as New Zealand voices its concerns over using the Five Eyes process to pressure China.

    What is this spy alliance? And what are the benefits and risks to bringing Japan on board?

    What is the Five Eyes?

    Beginning as an intelligence exchange agreement between the United States and United Kingdom in 1943, it formally became the UKUSA Agreement in 1946. The agreement then extended to Canada in 1948, and Australia and New Zealand in 1956.

    UK has gotten Japan’s Ambassador to Australia to assist Australia to pressure progressive New Zealand to remain in the Rhodesist alliance and thereby help to bring Japan into the Rhodesist core as being the first-ever non-English-speaking country to be admitted into the Rhodes-core (and thereby turn the “Five Eyes” into six). That would achieve what David Rockefeller and his sidekick Zbig Brzezinski (who was a member of Poland’s nobility) had been attempting to do by means of their Trilateral Commission, which was intended to expand beyond the Bilderberg group of NATO countries so as to include also Japan.

    On 30 April 2021, the geostrategic analyst Alexander Mercouris headlined a video “Blinken Goes To Ukraine With A Tough Message For Zelensky” and explained that because Putin recently established “red lines” that would provoke a direct military conflict between Russia and the United States if violated by the U.S., Biden has refocused America’s top target to be conquered as being no longer Russia but instead now China. Mercouris says that Ukraine’s U.S.-stooge President Volodmyr Zelensky will probably now be forced to stop threatening to invade the breakaway formerly Ukrainian Donbas region.

    However, whereas the U.S. aristocracy’s main medium-term objective is to retain control over Ukraine so as to become enabled to blitz-launch missiles from there to eliminate Moscow’s ability to retaliate against America’s first-strike hit (the U.S. alliance’s updated version of the Nazis’ Operation Barbarossa), the UK’s main medium-term objective is for the U.S.-UK-Saud-Qatar alliance to arm and train jihadists and separatist Kurds to conquer Syria so that the Sauds will control that country. The long-term objective, both of America’s and UK’s aristocrats, is their shared dictatorship over all nations.

    On 30 April 2021, the international investigative journalist Finian Cunningham interviewed at Strategic Culture the former UK Ambassador to Syria, the astoundingly courageous Peter Ford, and headlined “Syria Regime Change Still on Western Agenda – Ex-Ambassador Peter Ford”. This whistleblowing former UK Ambassador opened his comments by saying:

    The Western powers are like dogs with an old bone on the subject of alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria. There is no meat on it but they continue to gnaw away. Why? Because the trope that “Assad gasses his own people” has become a cornerstone of the whole Western propaganda narrative on Syria. Without it, justifying the cruel economic war on Syria, largely through sanctions, would be harder to justify. And with military efforts at regime change having failed, economic warfare is now the last hope for the Western powers of destabilizing Syria enough to topple the government. For this strategy to work the Western powers are more than ready to undermine the credibility of the OPCW by abusing their ability to manipulate it in the Syrian context.

    The interview closed with:

    Question: Finally, Syria is holding presidential elections on May 26 in which incumbent Bashar al-Assad is running for re-election. The Western powers disparage Syria as an “undemocratic regime”. How do you view Syria’s polity? Is Assad likely to win re-election?

    Peter Ford: Of course Assad will win and of course the Western powers will try to disparage his victory. But I can state with certainty that if you could offer the Conservative party in Britain a guarantee of achieving in the next general election anything anywhere near Assad’s genuine level of support, albeit some of it reluctant from a war-weary people, the Tories would bite your hand off for such an electoral gain. Much of the current Western propaganda effort against Syria is geared at trying to spoil Assad’s victory and deny it legitimacy. But inside Syria itself, the people will see the election as setting the seal on 10 years of struggle, and Assad will emerge strengthened as he faces the next phase in the Western war on Syria.

    Furthermore, just the same as the U.S. and their allies were funding, training, and arming jihadists (technically called “Salafist Muslims”) in order to bring about regime-change in Syria, they’re doing the very same thing in order to bring about regime-change in China — in that instance by propagandizing ‘human rights’ for Uyghur Chinese who have been indoctrinated with the Sauds’ extremist-Sunni variant of the Islamic faith (Salafism). (Many of those Salafists, because of their Turkic culture, have recently become more favorable to Turkey than to Saudi Arabia, and therefore on 18 July 2019, Reuters headlined “Saudi Arabia defends letter backing China’s Xinjiang policy”, and reported that the Sauds “defended signing a letter along with 36 other countries in support of China’s policies in its western region of Xinjiang, where the United Nations says at least 1 million ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims have been detained.” The U.S. and UK were now backing pro-Turkish jihadists, instead of pro-Saudi ones. Turkey is a NATO nation; and, so, the Rhodesists don’t care which brand of jihad they are backing in order to break up, or bring regime-change to, China.)

    So, even if the U.S. regime might be placing Ukraine onto the back burner, the UK regime, apparently, is unwilling to place the conquest of Syria onto its back burner. And, for both American billionaires and UK billionaires, China is unrelentingly in the gunsights of both aristocracies, to conquer. In fact, on 10 April 2021, Strategic Culture issued an editorial, “Ukraine, Taiwan… Two-Prong U.S. Aggression Toward Russia, China”, which noted:

    Biden is advancing the same policy under the previous Trump and Obama administrations of military buildup near China’s territory. This week saw the fourth U.S. guided-missile destroyer passing through the Taiwan Strait since Biden took office. That narrow sea separates the breakaway island from China’s mainland. Beijing has sovereign territorial claim to Taiwan which is recognized by the vast majority of nations, including up until recently the United States under its so-called “One China” policy. Biden, like his predecessor Donald Trump, is deliberately eroding the One China policy by sending delegates to the island on official visits, increasing weapons sales and most provocatively making public declarations that the U.S. will “defend” Taiwan in the event of “an invasion” by Chinese forces.

    Similar to the Ukraine, the Biden administration’s rhetoric and conduct is serving to fuel an ever-more provocative stance by the Taiwanese leaders. This week, a senior official warned that the island’s forces would shoot down Chinese aircraft that approach the territory. This is nothing but a flagrant challenge to China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. As in the case of the Ukraine and Russia, it is Washington’s words and actions that are inflaming the tensions between Taiwan and China. Yet the Americans accuse others of “aggression” and claim to be providing “defense”.

    The only entity that could possibly stop all this would be the U.S.-created European Union. Either they will turn against their creator, and join with Russia and China against U.S. and UK (which would put an end to the Rhodesist team’s insanity), or there will be World War III (though probably not in the near-term future), in which the U.S. regime will blitz-nuclear attack Russia, though that would destroy the planet.

    If the EU does break away from the U.S., then it will also be able to relocate the U.N. out of NYC to Europe and reform the U.N. in what had been its inventor’s, FDR’s, intention, that the U.N. become the democratic global federation of nations controlling all nuclear and other geostrategic weapons and forces, and that serves as the sole and authoritative executive, legislative, and judicial, authority for all international-relations issues throughout the world, the democratic federal world government. That’s what Truman and Churchill prevented, and what would produce a world that will have no future world wars, no future wars between empires, because there would no longer be any empires, nor any imperialism.

    Either there will be FDR’s intention, or there will be nuclear annihilation. The EU will decide. For the EU to impose FDR’s intention would be for the EU to turn against its creator, which was Truman and all subsequent U.S. Presidents (and their Congresses, which likewise have been controlled by America’s billionaires). However, a likelier alternative would be for some nations to do as UK did and break away from the EU, but for them to do it as UK did not, to realign themselves with Russia, China, and Iran, and away from the U.S. That, too, might prevent WWIII and enable the U.N. to be reformed as FDR had been intending it to be: as the global democratic federal republic and sole source and judge and enforcer of international laws — the post-imperialist world, which FDR had planned for. If FDR’s plan doesn’t happen, then WWIII will happen, and this was the reason why he had been planning the U.N. as he did. But as soon as he died, on 12 April 1945, the billionaires’ agents worked on Truman, who finally, on 25 July 1945 (based on General Eisenhower’s advice), decided to go for America’s global conquest; and, so, the ceaseless string of subversions, coups, and invasions, by the U.S. (the permanent-warfare state), started. The first coup was 1948 in Thailand, in order to install rulers who would let the OSS-CIA skim from the international narcotics traffic so as to supply the needed off-the-books funding for the CIA’s Special Operations.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 05/18/2021 – 00:30

  • Visualizing The History Of Psychedelics, Part 1
    Visualizing The History Of Psychedelics, Part 1

    Due to their counterculture connotations and rigid legal status, psychedelics were once considered a highly stigmatized topic.

    Over the last decade however, a steady stream of groundbreaking research has proven that these powerful substances have the potential to safely treat a wide range of diseases.

    Today, attitudes toward the industry have changed, and capital is flowing- resulting in a market that analysts predict could eventually be worth $100 billion.

    The graphic above from Tryp Therapeutics is the first in a two-part series that explores how psychedelics have evolved over the last 6,000 years.

    From Ancient Antidote to Breakthrough Medicine

    Before we dive into the history of psychedelics, it’s important to understand what they are and how they work.

    Psychedelics are drugs that alter cognitive processes and produce hallucinogenic effects. Broadly speaking, there are two categories that psychedelic substances fall into: entheogens, and synthetic drugs. Entheogenic psychedelics are derived from plants, while synthetic psychedelics are created in a laboratory.

    Here are some of the most well known psychedelic substances explained:

    Certain psychedelics work by binding to serotonin receptors in the brain which produces psychoactive effects. Research suggests that when this happens, the structure of the brain changes—such as the number of connections between neutrons. This means that psychedelics could have the potential to rewire or repair circuits in the brain, hence their reputation for having healing powers.

    Ancient Times

    While the science behind these mind-altering plants is only now beginning to become clear, they have in fact been used in rituals and ceremonies for thousands of years.

    As a result, psychedelic substances have been hugely influential in shaping certain cultures and religions dating back to 4,000 BC. These cultures, particularly in the Americas, learned how to utilize psychoactive plants and mushrooms for medicinal purposes or to reach an altered state of consciousness.

    With that being said, evidence of how psychedelics were used in ancient times is often anecdotal, and therefore widely debated.

    The Prohibition Era

    In the 1800s, scientists and psychiatrists began discovering new kinds of drugs such as psilocybin and subsequently became advocates of psychedelic medicine. Unfortunately, uncontrolled drug use for recreational purposes led to governments across the world debating their legal status, and clamping down on restrictions.

    Within decades, the recreational use of psychedelics undermined promising medical discoveries, and put the future of the industry into question, eventually triggering the War on Drugs.

    An Industry, Reborn

    With these strict legal changes around the world, the psychedelics industry became largely inactive. But today, an explosion of unprecedented research findings surrounding the therapeutic potential of psychedelics has triggered many countries to reassess their decision to criminalize.

    Now, the industry is back, and bigger than ever before. In Part 2 of The History of Psychedelics, we’ll dive into The Psychedelics Renaissance the industry is currently experiencing and discuss the exciting future of this promising sector.

    Tyler Durden
    Tue, 05/18/2021 – 00:10

  • Liz Cheney: Biden Military Budget 'Too Low' Despite Being Highest Of All Time
    Liz Cheney: Biden Military Budget ‘Too Low’ Despite Being Highest Of All Time

    Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

    President Biden requested a $753 billion military budget for the 2022 fiscal year, which would be the highest of all time. But this number is not enough for Republican hawks in Congress. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WI) said not increasing the budget by three to five percent would be a “red line” for Republicans. Biden’s budget request would be about a 1.6 percent increase from 2021.

    “In my view, that is a red line, and if the administration is not going to be proposing a budget that meets that requirement, then I think they will need to explain to the American people why they’re unwilling to fund defense at the levels the nation needs,” Cheney said at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference, which was held virtually last week.

    Via AP

    “I would clearly oppose budgets that were below that number, and I think we’re going to have a very healthy debate and discussion about the administration’s proposal because it is coming in significantly below that number,” she said.

    While Cheney might have fallen out of favor with the GOP over her criticisms of Trump and has been removed from her position as party leadership, her opinion on the military budget is still the prevalent view of Republicans in Congress. Leading Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have been urging Biden to increase the budget by three to five percent.

    The Pentagon has recently identified China as the top “pacing threat” to the US military, and Beijing is serving as the hawks’ justification to spend more.

    After Biden requested his $753 billion budget, Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Richard Shelby (R-AL) released a joint statement calling for more spending.

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    The statement reads: “President Biden recently said, ‘If we don’t get moving, [China] is going to eat our lunch.’ Today’s budget proposal signals to China that they should set the table.” The senators claimed China “aspires to overtake America as the world’s dominant superpower.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 23:50

  • Illinois Jeep Factory Set To Lay Off 1,600 Workers Amid Global Semiconductor Shortage
    Illinois Jeep Factory Set To Lay Off 1,600 Workers Amid Global Semiconductor Shortage

    A Jeep Cherokee factory is cutting 1,600 jobs in Northern Illinois as the auto industry continues to struggle with the global shortage of semiconductors.

    The U.S. arm of Stellantis announced this week is was going to cut one of its two work shifts at the Belvidere Assembly Plant as of July 26. 1,641 workers could be affected, a local NBC affiliate reported over the weekend. 

    Company spokeswoman Jodi Tinson claimed that the company was trying to “balance sales with production,” and that the factory’s situation “has been further exacerbated by the unprecedented global microchip shortage.”

    This stands at odds with comments made by the company’s CFO earlier this month, when we reported that Chief Financial Officer Richard Palmer said the semi shortage impact would be higher in Q2, but also said it “is still very controlled”.

    The plant has been idled since late March, the report notes. Its re-opening has been delayed and isn’t expected until “at least” later this month. 

    Recall, we last wrote about Stellantis at the beginning of May, after the auto maker said there was “no end in sight” to the ongoing semi chip shortage. 

    The company said in its report earlier this month that it lost production of 190,000 vehicles due to the shortage. The world’s fourth largest carmaker said that 8 of its 44 plants were affected by the shortage, ultimately resulting in reductions in shifts and slowing, or shuttering, of vehicle lines. 

    The company had been making changes to its lineup, including changing the dashboard of the Peugeot 308, to try and adapt to the crisis. 

    “We don’t have great visibility. As such it would be imprudent to assume the issue is going to go away,” Palmer continued, sounding less like the issue is “still very controlled”. 

    Recall, Intel’s CEO, speaking on 60 Minutes earlier this month, said: “We have a couple of years until we catch up to this surging demand across every aspect of the business.” Days prior, we wrote that Morgan Stanley had also suggested the shortage could continue “well into 2022”. 

    Stellantis was created out of the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA Peugeot.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 23:30

  • Common Sense Wins As Supreme Court Backs Energy Companies Over Baltimore In Climate Case
    Common Sense Wins As Supreme Court Backs Energy Companies Over Baltimore In Climate Case

    Via The Federalist Papers,

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of BP PLC, Chevron Corp, Exxon Mobil Corp, Royal Dutch Shell PLC and other energy companies contesting a lawsuit filed by the city of Baltimore seeking monetary damages from them due to costs caused by global climate change.

    The 7-1 ruling, authored by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, came on a technical legal issue that could help the companies in their effort to have the case heard in federal court, as they would prefer, instead of state court, which the city favors as it is seen as a more amenable venue.

    The high court decided that the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not correctly analyze whether the case could be heard in federal court.

    The Democratic-governed Maryland city’s lawsuit targeted 21 U.S. and foreign energy companies that extract, produce, distribute or sell fossil fuels, arguing that their activities contribute to emissions of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases linked to climate change. An important port city, Baltimore noted that it is vulnerable to sea-level rise and flooding driven by climate change.

    The Supreme Court’s ruling could affect around a dozen similar lawsuits brought by various U.S. states, cities and counties.

    Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented in the ruling. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, did not participate in the case, likely because he owns stocks in two oil companies involved in the litigation.

    The legal question concerned a provision of U.S. law that puts limits on appeals courts reviewing decisions by federal district court judges to remand a case to state court. The companies have said that in this instance the 4th Circuit had broad scope to review a district court’s decision because of a provision that permits appeals of such rulings when a case directly concerns federal officials or government entities.

    The energy companies have argued that energy production is an inherently federal issue, meaning the case should be heard in federal court. Greenhouse gas emissions that cross state and international lines are likewise an issue that cannot be addressed under state laws, the companies added.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 23:10

  • India Sees Cases Slow As Outbreak Spills Into Nepal; Regional Mutant Arrives In US
    India Sees Cases Slow As Outbreak Spills Into Nepal; Regional Mutant Arrives In US

    It finally looks like India’s brutal second wave of COVID-19 is easing, as cases again slowed on Monday, while daily deaths remained near record highs. New cases dropped below 300K on Monday, to 281,386, while deaths remained stubbornly above 4K at 4,106. In total, India has counted 24,965,463 cases (with many more likely uncounted) and 274, 390 deaths.

    Vaccinations, meanwhile, have lagged with just 182M doses administered across the country of 1.4 billion.

    Source: Johns Hopkins

    However, there’s a new threat on the horizon that could cripple India’s health-care system at what is probably its most vulnerable moment: a cyclone called Cyclone Tauktae, which is hammering the western part of the country, including drenching the financial capital of Mumbai.

    In Gujarat, where on Sunday and overnight nearly 150,000 people from 17 districts were evacuated, all Covid-19 patients in hospitals with five kilometres of the coast were also moved. In some places, to ensure that hospitals are not faced with power outages, 1,383 back-up generators have been installed, according to local officials.

    Virus safety protocols such as wearing masks, social distancing and the use of sanitisers would be observed in the shelters for evacuees, officials added.

    Data released Monday showed new cases in Mumbai have declined 70% in the past week, from 11,000 daily cases to fewer than 2,000 in Mumbai.

    Across India, active cases number more than 3.6 million, meaning hospitals are still swamped by patients.

    Izhaar Hussain Shaikh, an ambulance driver in Mumbai, drove about 70 patients to the hospital last month. Two weeks into May, he’d carried only 10 patients, according to Newsweek. “We used to be so busy before, we didn’t even have time to eat.”

    Meanwhile, more signs that India’s outbreak is spreading beyond its borders emerged as the worsening outbreak in neighboring Nepal made headlines in the West. NBC News reported that cases have exploded in Nepal in recent weeks, which is one reason why China installed a border “line” at the summit of Mt Everest to warn mountaineers to stay out of China.

    Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, expressed worry about the unfolding crisis.

    “India remains hugely concerning,” he said at a news briefing. “But it’s not only India that has emergency needs. Nepal, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Egypt are just some of the countries that are dealing with spikes in cases and hospitalizations.”

    Others warned that the situation in Nepal might worsen in the coming days as some 9K cases are reported daily, while many more likely go undiagnosed.

    “We are in the initial phase,” said Sushila Pandit, a Nepalese aid worker with Mercy Corps, an international nongovernmental aid group. “I think the condition will be more critical in the the coming days.”

    Experts in Europe warned last week that mutant strain known as B.1.617 and some of its variants had been traced to parts of Europe and the UK. Well on Monday, scientists warned that B.1.617 had officially been tracked to the US, according to USA Today.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 22:50

  • The Corrupted January 6 Commission
    The Corrupted January 6 Commission

    Authored by Technofog via The Reactionary,

    Late last week, House Democrats unveiled their Bill to “establish the National Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol Complex.”

    We previously warned about the Democrats’ roadmap to use their investigative authority to further their political goals. We advised that Democrats make the investigation broad enough to subpoena records from conservative groups and websites – and their investors. We warned that they would seek donor lists and personal communications from those having little to do with the events on January 6.

    The Democrats’ Bill – which elevates the January 6 “riot” to a “domestic terrorist attack on the Capitol” – proves us right.

    The Bill establishes a Commission of 10 members, five appointed by Democrats and five appointed by Republicans. It will be chaired by a Democrat nominee.

    The Commission will have powers to:

    “Issue subpoenas requiring the attendance and testimony of witnesses and the production of evidence relating to any matter which the Commission is empowered to investigate.”

    From that language we look to what the Commission is “empowered to investigate.” This power is extremely broad. And this is where the trouble lies. It includes:

    “The facts and causes relating to the January 6, 2021 domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex.”

    “The influencing factors that fomented such attack on American representative democracy while engaging in a constitutional process.”

    The Danger

    The dangerous part about all this is that the subpoena power is limited to the imagination of the Democrat appointees. (We assume the likelihood that at least one Republican member of the Committee will go along with anything the Democrats want, thus giving them majority vote for a subpoena.)

    We also note that the Commission is given the power to obtain information from “the intelligence community” to further its investigation.

    We cannot stress strongly enough the danger of such powers. The House Democrats – those who have leaked false intelligence to the press and lied to the public about the Carter Page FISA applications – will have access, via their appointees, to raw intelligence data. Their history shows they will not use this information responsibly.

    All this just proves that the Commission will be their instrument to inflict massive political harm on the Right. Remember Pelosi’s occupation of the Capitol?

    As I said on March 5, 2021:

    “If you question the seriousness of the game they’re playing, just look at the security around the Capitol. Currently, over 5,000 National Guard troops, along with fencing and razor wire, protect against a non-existent threat. The occupation is theater to make January 6 more than what it was to justify what is to come.”

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 22:30

  • World Economic Forum Cancels Annual Meeting After Moving It To Singapore
    World Economic Forum Cancels Annual Meeting After Moving It To Singapore

    After initially rescheduling the forum from May to the late-summer months, the World Economic Forum has decided to cancel its annual gathering of powerhouses in the worlds of markets, business and politics, which is usually held in Davos, Switzerland, but had been moved to Singapore in the face of the coronavirus, according to Bloomberg. 

    Back in February, the WEF announced that it would delay the week-long event until August, hoping that would give it enough time. But as India’s COVID-19 outbreak continues to spill across Asia, while a mutant strain first identified in India has finally been traced to the US.

    As Brits travel on their first international flights in more than a year, the WEF announced Monday that it would cancel its annual meeting in Singapore as the city-state sees a jump in COVID-19 cases.

    Singapore’s new restrictions announced over the weekend include requiring all primary, secondary and junior colleges to shift to full home-based learning from Wednesday until the end of the school year later this month.

    This comes after health authorities in the city-state confirmed 38 locally transmitted cases, the highest daily number since mid-September, with 17 currently unlinked. The cases included four children linked to a cluster at a tuition center.

    In recent years, the WEF and its attendees have taken up the twin causes of climate change and economic inequality (which are linked, scholars say, because the ‘global south’ will bear the brunt of the negative impact of climate, or at least that’s what they say). Which is ironic, since the best thing the WEF could possibly do to lower carbon emissions would be to cancel the annual event, which draws legions of private jets ferrying the global elite.

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    In other bad news for Singapore, a travel bubble between Hong Kong and Singapore that was due to start on May 26 has been postponed for a second time, according to officials on Monday, as new COVID cases spiked, derailing hopes for quarantine-free travel.

    Singapore, one of Asia’s trade and financial hubs with a tiny population of 5.7 million people, had until recently been reporting almost zero or single-digit new COVID cases until just last week.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 22:10

  • Newsom Turns To Bribery, Opens Up Big Bag Of Goodies To Californians In Bid To Head-Off Recall
    Newsom Turns To Bribery, Opens Up Big Bag Of Goodies To Californians In Bid To Head-Off Recall

    Authored by Monica Showalter via AmericanThinker.com,

    Politicians in trouble frequently wheel out the freebies ahead of a tough election.

    California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom, however, is taking it to 11.

    Seems, he’s not all that confident that Democrats will be able to rig him into victory to keep him in office in this year’s coming recall referendum on him. Internals must be horrible.

    Which is why he’s now holding out monster goodie bag to angry voters as a last-ditch bribe to secure their votes.

    According to National Review:

    This week, Newsom began a statewide tour to brag about a $75.7 billion state “surplus” that is burning a hole in his recall jeans. That “surplus” alone is larger than the total expenditures of 44 other states in 2020. Combining substantial capital-gains revenues from the bank accounts of Big Tech billionaires and an embarrassing amount of federal stimulus funds, to the tune of $371 billion in total payments, the governor is taking credit for the windfall. Promising to hand out wads of cash and pay off overdue rent and utility bills while hoping middle-class voters will forget Newsom’s cavalier statewide lockdowns over the past year reeks of bribery.

    It comes from a one-time slush fund surplus coming from the federal government, courtesy of Joe Biden and his congressional Democrats, and ironically, as Sacramento legislators are proposing tax hikes on normal taxpayers. Nice.

    But he’s got a recall referendum coming in November, so like Hugo Chavez, he’s wheeling out the free washing machines and bags of beans, as Hugo and other corrupt Latin autocrats used to do to “win” elections.

    Here’s Newsom’s own tweet advertising the crowd-pleasers he’s holding out to voters; the electoral junk food:

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    High as this spending is, and universal as these solutions are, they are nothing but Band-Aids onto the festering economic wounds he’s inflicted on the state last year, through high taxes, lockdowns, and police defundings, all problems which now require tourniquets.

    Anybody think the billions for the homeless he’s proposing are actually going to fix homelessness in this state? It should employ a lot of bureaucrats and probably backfill some bloated public pensions, as has been the story in the past.

    And where the heck is he going to get the permits to build all these free houses for the homeless in any case, given the state’s other NIMBY-inspired laws. Malibu?

    That’s just one problem, and there are a ton of others:

    Number one, it’s unsustainable. According to the Associated Press:

    But it is a budget on the edge. Nearly all of the $100 billion in extra money is a one-time surplus, meaning it won’t be available next year. Newsom and the Legislature have already approved a massive tax cut for small businesses that will reduce revenues by more than $6 billion over the next five years.

    In the years to come, budget officials predict the state’s revenue will grow slightly while its expenses keep increasing. For now, they say the two sides of the budget will balance and not cause a deficit. But that leaves no room for error in a time when the pandemic has made it impossible to predict the future.

    It’s enough for Keely Martin Bosler, Newsom’s budget director, to remark on “how incredibly uncertain things continue to be.”

    He’s basically proposing to spend now, get people addicted to freebie programs, and then either cut them off cold when the cash runs out, or drive the state into bankruptcy. Taxes, of course, already the nation’s highest, will go into the stratosphere.

    Number two, it sends terrible messages. The guy who practically killed himself in the pandemic to pay his rent after losing his job, maybe defaulting on his other bills in the process and paying that price through his credit rating, gets nothing. The deadbeat who didn’t pay even though he could pay, or who didn’t apply for otherwise free federal aid, taking advantage of the eviction moratorium instead, gets his back rent paid. And who knows if the landlords get paid. Based on Newsom’s tweet, he might just pass a law or issue an executive action declaring that nobody needs to pay and let the landlords eat the losses. The unpaid traffic fines, meanwhile, giving the nominally poor a pass for speeding, bad driving, endangering others, expired registrations, parking in the middle of the road, taking up handicapped spaces, parking in red fire zones, any number of nightmare violations, get wiped out, while once again, the guy who moved heaven and earth to pay his parking fines at the expense of food or something, gets the news from Newsom that he’s a sucker. The whole thing smacks of a program to increase contempt for rule of law. After all, if all you have to do is wait for relief from Newsom, same as if you’re waiting for the next subway to stop, why pay anything at all?

    Number three, there’s a heckuva lot that he didn’t mention. California is flooded with drug-addicted homeless, now seeping into ordinarily placid middle-class areas now. Yesterday I tried to cross a highway pedestrian bridge in San Diego into a poorer neighborhood to buy some fresh vegetables and was blocked at the entrance by three homeless people doing drugs together right in that pedestrian walkway, blocking it. Passing them by was so close that any of them could have pulled a knife on me and I went home by a longer way that involved a chancy highway underpass, which also could have been a home to bums, given that it was trash-strewn, meaning, it probably was at some point. I didn’t even call the cops, given the knowledge that they aren’t enforcing anything anymore. My conclusion from that is that it’s going to get worse, way worse, spilling into the placid, previously crime-free areas and Newsom has no intention of backing up the police to enforce this very necessary quality of life measure for the law-abiding taxpayers who pay his big-budget bills.

    Newsom also didn’t mention his big plan for free health care for elderly illegal aliens over the age of 60. Elderly people have the biggest of all medical bills, and rest assured, now with Joe Biden’s border surge on, the dinner triangle has just been rung for the nation’s illegals to bring in their ailing elderly relatives because the ride is now free. If you were a citizen of someplace like Honduras and heard this, and you will, you’d be a fool not to. California’s Gov. Gray Davis was fired by voters in a recall referendum back in 2003 over the issuing of drivers’ licenses to illegals. You can see why Newsom didn’t quite put that as a selling point to voters in his tweet. But rest assured, he’s got special interests who harvest ballots who are very, very happy with him.

    Number four, there’s a heckuva lot that he ought to be spending money on, yet he refuses to do. Where is the cash for more police to remove the riff-raff and criminal element that is plaguing both rich and poor areas now throughout California’s cities and making life unlivable? Where are the tax cuts in this highest-of-all high tax states? He considers that “his” money, so no tax cuts of any significance for the tax-battered. What’s he doing about monster health care costs for those who actually pay? Nothing, of course. Where is the housing and land-policy reform, which is keeping new housing from being built, and contributing to this state’s monster real estate bubble, which is pricing ordinary families out of homes? Price controls create shortages, Gav. And of course, this fool is clueless.

    It’s such a bad picture, so cynical, so Peronist, (or just see that 1999 Mexican masterpiece movie “Herod’s Law” about the “crumbling, rotting, 70-year old regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)” as one reviewer put it, to get a whiff) that one hopes that California’s voters might just see through it. The fact that Newsom’s doing this is proof, all by itself, that he’s unfit to be governor.

    Governors in this state, as National Review notes, are historically balancing elements who can say ‘no’ to spendthrift legislators, Jerry Brown before him being one example. The fact that Newsom also wrecked the state’s economy through his fanatic lockdowns while red-state governors showed real judgment and leadership in doing all they could to keep their state’s economies open is another strike against this clown. Now we have this budget-bankrupting spendfest to put the cherry on top of his rotten cake. He’s so bad even Caitlyn Jenner looks like a better potential governor than Newsom is.

    Throw him out.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 21:50

  • One Bank Spots "A Huge Worry On The Horizon"
    One Bank Spots “A Huge Worry On The Horizon”

    The big banks may be dismissing the current wave of soaring prices, which as we noted previously has been driven mostly economic reopening categories such as soaring used car prices where a pandemic-induced demand surge has run headfirst into temporary shortages, production bottlenecks, and supply chain disruptions…

    … but they are increasingly zeroing in on what may well be the source of non-transitory inflation over the coming years. Just last night, Goldman highlighted three such risks for longer-term inflation pressures including:

    • A sharper rise in wage growth: The first risk is that wage growth could rise to a much faster pace than reached last cycle if current signs of worker shortages and labor market tightness prove more persistent than many expect. The starting point for wage growth is unusually high for an economy emerging from a recession.
    • A multi-year boom in home prices boosts rent inflation: The second risk is that a multiyear boom in US home prices could drive shelter inflation much higher.
    • Temporary price spikes raise inflation expectations substantially: The third risk is that the current price spikes caused by temporary pandemic effects could have a more lasting impact if they raise long-term inflation expectations substantially (i.e. transitory proves to be non-transitory). Last week brought hints in this direction, including a 0.4% jump in the University of Michigan’s measure of long-term household inflation expectations, a modest increase in long-term inflation expectations in the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and further increases in market-implied inflation compensation.

    Of these three, Goldman is most concerned about the second one, and dedicated a separate research report (discussed here) precisely about the risk of sharply higher home prices.

    In a report from Goldman’s economists, the bank warned that “a national housing shortage will fuel substantial home price appreciation for at least a couple more years.” Goldman now expects that shelter inflation is likely to surge to 3.8% YoY by end-2022 — boosting core PCE by about 0.3% relative to today — and to exceed 4% in 2023 (!), a higher rate than at any point in the prior economic cycle. At that point anyone countering that (hyper)inflation is transitory will be laughed right out of the room.

    In other words, Goldman just predicted that by 2024 home prices will be rising at a pace far faster than the widely recognized 2006-2007 housing bubble, and that the spillover from this surge in prices will make the coming hyperinflation anything but transitory.

    We bring this up again because this morning another prominent bank analyst – Deutsche Bank’s chief credit strategist Jim Reid – published a similar note of caution regarding soaring home prices.

    Reid begins with the familiar background: “around many parts of the world housing markets have surged during the pandemic. Huge stimulus, low and suppressed interest rates, government tax incentives, demand for more space in the new world, and limited supply have created a boom that surely few could have predicted when the pandemic started.“

    Next, the credit strategist shows the US housing boom in perspective with his Monday Chart of the Day…

    … and writes that real home prices were the same in 1999 as they were in 1894. So, remarkably, besides being a good inflation hedge, home prices are little besides having been range bound around inflation for over 100 years. However, over the next 7 years they rose over 60% inflation adjusted before slumping 35% in the next 6 years when the housing bubble burst.

    Well, second time may be the charm because from these lows, they are now back up nearly 55% and less than 1% off their all-time real adjusted highs and over 10% above pre-pandemic levels. Indeed, as Reid predicts, they will probably hit record real adjusted highs when the latest data is released next week (they already have according to Black Knight and other pricing services).

    Reid’s ominous conclusion is that the recent surge in home prices “is nearly on the same national scale as it was in the lead-up to the US housing bust that precipitated the GFC”, and he concludes rhetorically: “a new paradigm or a huge worry on the horizon?”

    Spoiler alert: it’s the latter.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 21:30

  • Iran Preps Return To Oil Market As Vienna Talks "Within Reach" Of Agreement
    Iran Preps Return To Oil Market As Vienna Talks “Within Reach” Of Agreement

    US and Iranian diplomats which are still engaged in ongoing ‘indirect’ negotiations via intermediaries in Vienna (now over a month in) have signaled that a major nuclear agreement is now “within reach” – and now as Bloomberg reports, “Iran is preparing to ramp up global oil sales as talks to lift U.S. sanctions show signs of progress.”

    Following years of Trump-imposed biting sanctions which particularly targeted Iran’s oil exports, and with in some cases Iranian tankers even being seized, the Islamic Republic is actively prepping to get its global exports flowing once again. “State-controlled National Iranian Oil Co. has been priming oil fields — and customer relationships — so it can increase exports if an accord is clinched, officials said,” Bloomberg continues. “Under the most optimistic estimates, the country could return to pre-sanctions production of almost 4 million barrels a day in as little as three months. It could also tap a flotilla’s worth of oil that’s hoarded away in storage.”

    However, even with such positive momentum and optimism on both sides, it remains that the Trump administration “boxed-in” Biden in terms of what can and can’t be done rapidly. At issue is the “mine field” of sanctions and punitive actions slapped on over 700 entities and officials. Most notably this includes two dozen financial institutions at the heart of which is Iran’s central bank.

    This had also been designed to scare off even willing buyers, given the complex labyrinth of legal hurdles related to shipping insurance and other red tape. The Iranians are said to be expectant of an extended gradual process of undoing sanctions, yet hardliners and the Ayatollah himself have warned their patience will soon run out, and that talks cannot “drag on”. 

    Over the weekend Vienna talks continued without pause despite a fierce bombing campaign by Israel on Gaza reaching the end of a week, leaving about 200 Palestinians in the strip dead, and thousands wounded.

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    There have been growing fears that the outbreak of fighting in Gaza, which saw Hamas and Islamic Jihad launch some 2,000 total rockets into Israel, killing ten Israel civilians, could derail the attempts to restore the JCPOA nuclear deal. Tel Aviv has consistently blamed Iran for supporting and supplying Hamas with its sizable missile stockpile. 

    Netanyahu as well as Mossad chief Yossi Cohen have lately personally attempted to intervene with the Biden White House, arguing that restoration of a “bad deal” will all but assure that Iran acquires nukes. Israel has also gone so far as to allegedly bomb and sabotage Iranian tankers delivering oil and fuel to its ally Syria. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 21:10

  • Welcome To The DarkSide: Why The Biden Administration Will Not Define The Pipeline Attack As Terrorism
    Welcome To The DarkSide: Why The Biden Administration Will Not Define The Pipeline Attack As Terrorism

    Authored by Jonathan Turley,

    Below is my column on the recent Colonial Pipeline attack. President Joe Biden and his Administration (as well as the media) has referred to the actors as “criminals” and “hacker” but notably not “terrorists.” Many cyberattacks are forms of extortion. They seek money from businesses to release data.  This is different. This was an effort to coerce a population; to cause economic chaos.

    Notably, DarkSide announced that it would shutdown its operations after receiving the ransom, an announcement heralded by many. It is a dubious claim. First, the declaration serves assure the public and to tamp down calls for a global hunt for the culprits. Second, it is meaningless. Whether DarkSide continues as a moniker or as a functioning organization, we just paid off terrorists. We long maintained a policy not to yield to terrorism because it fuels more attacks. DarkSide and other such attacks have proven how ineffective we are in preventing such attacks or defying such demands. These are despicable people willing to cause deaths and social disarray, but they are also rationale actors. 

    For the moment, cyber terrorism works and the success of this attack is not going to lead to a unilateral ceasefire from cyber gangs.

    Here is the column:

    We’ve heard calls in recent years for an ever-widening category of “terrorists” to encompass groups from the Jan. 6 rioters to antifa to the the Ku Klux Klan. So it is surprising that the White House and the media have referred to the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attackers simply as “hackers.” “DarkSide” is not just a collection of hackers — it’s a group of terrorists. And the only thing more concerning than the failure to label them correctly is the possible reason for not doing so.

    From the White House to The Washington Post, the mantra has been uniform: Gas to the East Coast was cut off by hackers who demanded — and reportedly received — $5 million in ransom to give us back control of a critical pipeline. The White House not only called these individuals hackers but — when pressed about its position on paying the ransom — insisted it was just a decision for a private company. Deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger said, “Colonial is a private company, and we’ll defer information regarding their decision on paying a ransom to them.” She and others in the Biden administration insisted the ransom payment was a “private sector decision” and said that “the administration has not offered further advice at this time.”

    After the ransom was widely reported as having been paid and gas began to flow again, President Biden gave a “no comment” when asked if he was aware of the payment. It was a curious response since the media apparently knew. The company certainly knew, and, most importantly, DarkSide knew. Yet, the White House wanted to portray itself as a pure observer to a private decision on how to handle “hackers.”

    The reason is obvious: Colonial just paid a ransom to terrorists. Moreover, gas pipelines are not just “a private company” but a highly regulated industry that closely follows the government’s directions.

    The fact is that most of Washington wanted the company to pay off the terrorists because our East Coast was rapidly melting down over shortages. While The New York Times bizarrely issued (and later quietly deleted) a statement that the attack had not led to any gas station lines or higher prices, other news stories were filled with images of long lines, fights at pumps and cascading shortages.

    The White House narrative has been to treat this as a type of cost of doing business for Colonial. The problem is that this is not some nuisance cost but a terrorist demand for payment.

    While definitions vary, DarkSide meets key elements of terrorism crimes. Key provisions such as 18 U.S.C. 2331 focus less on the motivation of terroristic acts as opposed to the intent: “(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.” Congress has extended domestic terrorism classifications to include drug gangs, but laws such as the Controlled Substances Act still refer to “premeditated, politically motivated violence.” The State Department uses the same definition to designate Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Those definitions may have to be changed as groups seek to terrorize populations in economically motivated attacks. Cyber terrorism can have either economic or political motivations or both. Indeed, DarkSide has claimed to use the money for charity and suggested it has policy goals. Moreover, such gangs can be enlisted or enabled by foreign powers such as Russia or Iran to carry out such attacks.

    For those of us who have long opposed expansive definitions of terrorism, there remains a danger of converting everything from extortion to identity theft into terrorism. However, DarkSide clearly attempted to “intimidate or coerce” the entire population of the United States, and it succeeded. It used hacking as its means, but that does not change its status as a terrorist group — any more than the use of food poison would make al Qaeda a “food tamperer” rather than a terrorist organization. When you threaten an individual if they don’t pay you, you are an extortionist. When you seek to coerce an entire population, you are a terrorist — whether you claim to do so for Allah or for moolah.

    Once you acknowledge that DarkSide is a terrorist organization, however, it is harder for the White House to shrug and dismiss this as merely a “private sector decision.”

    We have long maintained a policy of not yielding to terrorists, and outsourcing ransom payments does not change the implications of this decision. DarkSide and other cyber terrorists now know they not only can succeed but can do so surprisingly quickly. Indeed, ransomware has been profitably used around the world for years with businesses. Indeed, my suspicion is that the vast majority of ransoms paid have not been made public by businesses but are known to the FBI. This incident, though, was different. It was designed to cause widespread social and political havoc among our population.

    If the Biden administration did not want to pay terrorists, it could have used a wide array of powers to pressure Colonial not to pay. Colonial is tied into our infrastructure and largely exists by the grace of federal and state agencies. If Biden declared publicly that the company should not yield to terrorists, he would have presented no less of an existential threat to the company than DarkSide did.

    It may be true that the Biden administration concluded we are defenseless to cyber terrorism despite years of ransomware attacks and hundreds of billions of dollars in cybersecurity programs. If that is the case, the public should be informed. The failure of Congress and our government to defend against such terror attacks is a national security failure of breathtaking proportions. The Colonial Pipeline attack was the cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor. In both cases, we were caught unprepared and unable to deal with a threat we knew was coming. Yet President Roosevelt did not issue a “no comment” on the critical facts after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.

    Back then, we believed FDR when he stated in his first inauguration that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  If we are going to defeat this new form of terrorism, we must first call it for what it is. Not fear it, face it.

    What the Biden administration seems to fear most is public recognition that it is afraid — afraid of the vulnerability of our infrastructure, afraid that the public will learn what cyber terrorists already know.

    This should not be treated as just another political dodge, however. During the 2020 election, Biden simply refused to share his views on key issues such as packing the Supreme Court. Yet this is a far more serious matter, and we do not have time for another study commission to give the president cover. We need to call DarkSide what it is — a terrorist organization — and to acknowledge what we did: We paid off terrorists. Then, perhaps, we can get some answers as to whether our country remains only days away from another meltdown due to a failure to defend against ransomware.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 20:50

  • EV Anxiety? World's Largest Lithium Producer Crashes On Chilean Political Storm
    EV Anxiety? World’s Largest Lithium Producer Crashes On Chilean Political Storm

    As we detailed earlier, as Chileans overwhelmingly chose leftist and independent candidates for the country’s constitutional convention, the new non-free-market-friendly political regime is generating a lot of uncertainly in Chilean markets.

    One of the biggest equity losers on the session is Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile SA (SQM), the world’s largest producer of lithium, down more than 10% in the US cash session. 

    A new left-leaning constitution could include even tighter lithium mining operations in the country. 

    “Even, possibly, to the point that those old, grandfathered, licenses are revoked. Or the lithium operations (intimately tied in with the potassium and iodine ones, they’re not separable) might be taken back under direct state control. There are those, as above, who still would relitigate that initial privatization,” former Forbes writer Tim Worstall wrote in a Seeking Alpha piece in late 2020. Back then, he was writing about SQM’s path in light of a new constitution in 2021. 

    Worstall added:

    “The process here is a constitutional convention and it’s really difficult to predict what the end result of one of those is going to be. After all, they are, by there mere declaration of what they’re doing, insisting that they’re going to change the basic rules of the country. And SQM does have that slightly anomalous position – as does more strongly lithium mining in Chile – which means we might want to worry here.”

    A new constitution could change SQM’s position in the country and even affect their legal right to mine. No wonder the stock crashed. 

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 20:30

  • Taibbi: Is Slack Destroying American Companies? Q&A With Antonio Garcia-Martinez
    Taibbi: Is Slack Destroying American Companies? Q&A With Antonio Garcia-Martinez

    Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News

    ​

     

    Late last week, amid a Slack-driven furor over his confessional memoir Chaos Monkeys, Apple fired ads engineer Antonio Garcia-Martinez. I wrote Friday about the specific hypocrisy of Apple’s move — the company has the author of Bitches Ain’t Shit on its board but claimed it fired Garcia-Martinez as a statement of its devotion to “inclusivity” — but over the weekend spoke to Antonio about the larger issue of his case, which extends past his own predicament.

    “This business of Slack at work,” he said.

    After George Floyd’s death last summer, corporate leaders found themselves in an unusual position. With water-cooler conversations turbo-charged by chat programs like Slack, many firms saw outpourings of anger. Employees demanded their employers do something, or at least be seen doing something, to “confront racism.”

    In some shops, employers were asked to recognize Juneteenth as a paid holiday. In others, there was a demand for more diverse hiring procedures. Significant donations to political organizations, scholarship funds, or product lines targeted to African-Americans were expected.

    Responses became more idiosyncratic. Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens pledged to stop putting “multicultural cosmetic products” behind locked cases in retail outlets. YouTube deleted 100,000 videos and 100 million comments as part of an expanded hate speech policy. HBO Max took down Gone With the Wind, then restored it with a disclaimer that it showed “ethnic and racial prejudices” that “were wrong then and are wrong today.” Disney later did something similar with The Muppet Show, Lady and the Tramp, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Dumbo, Peter Pan, and Swiss Family Robinson.

    In some places, the connections between the companies’ core businesses and structural racism were apparent. For instance, many of the banks that made the most ostentatious pledges of support for Black Lives Matter were the same firms that targeted black communities with exotic subprime mortgage products, Wells Fargo’s “ghetto loans” episode being among the more infamous.

    In other places, the connection was less clear. What should FitBit be doing to fix police brutality? How could Pinterest contribute? (They ended up removing ads on Black Lives Matter search results, so readers could “focus on learning about the movement”). Was it axiomatic that every company had a political role to play?

    Soon, a new type of controversy arose, ironically at some of the companies with the reputations for most progressive management. The questions were less about race than workflow. At cryptocurrency firm Coinbase, employees demanded that CEO Brian Armstrong make a statement in support of Black Lives Matter. Armstrong, for a while, demurred. Then some employees and executives began what Wired called a “virtual walkout,” in which “senior engineers encouraged junior staff to close their laptops in solidarity.”

    Armstrong quickly got religion, or so it seemed. He went on Twitter to announce, “I want to unequivocally say that Black Lives Matter.” Then, within weeks, Armstrong and Coinbase leadership flipped completely, announcing that the firm would no longer engage in “social activism,” and any employee who didn’t like the new policy could get the fuck out.

    Coinbase offered 4-6 months of severance (depending on service time) and six months of COBRA, in a statement saying — in the thickest corporate sarcasm — that the arrangement could be a “win-win” for the politically minded, as “life is too short to work at a company you’re not excited about.” Only about 60 of the company’s 1,200 employees took the buyout.

    At another tech firm, Basecamp, CEO Jason Fried — long the owner of a rep as a progressive corporate leader, as his company has published five books on workplace culture — put the kibosh on controversial talk at work, banning “societal and political discussions.” Shopify, an e-commerce firm that broke ground after the January 6th riots by closing online stores tied to Trump or MAGA merchandise, has now become a symbol of corporate pushback. CEO Tobi Lütke just sent an email to employees explaining that work is not life and life is not work, and employee demands should be adjusted accordingly:

    Shopify, like any other for-profit company, is not a family. The very idea is preposterous. You are born into a family. You never choose it, and they can’t un-family you. It should be massively obvious that Shopify is not a family but I see people, even leaders, casually use terms like “Shopifam” which will cause the members of our teams (especially junior ones that have never worked anywhere else) to get the wrong impression. The dangers of “family thinking” are that it becomes incredibly hard to let poor performers go. Shopify is a team, not a family…

    Shopify is also not the government. We cannot solve every societal problem here.

    There’s a Frankensteinian irony to all this. Our biggest corporations spent decades steeping the public in weird Me Generation propaganda stressing the primacy of personal fulfillment, which fast became our real national faith as traditional religion lost influence. The result was a work-centric culture most of the rest of the world looked on as a kind of insanity. Alone among peoples who have a choice in such matters, Americans have long bragged about working themselves to death, feeling real pride in putting off distractions like marriage, kids, or “meaning” as they ran hamster wheels in pursuit of status and rock-hard abs, alone and at full speed toward the great beyond.

    Americans in my age group, Gen-Xers, were poorly prepared for corporate jobs in that a lot of us were somehow surprised to learn our ethnomusicology or (in my case) creative writing degrees were fairly useless for finding paying work. In conjunction with the huge sums many people borrowed to get those educations, the whole thing was a bit of a scam, though of course we should have known better.

    Millennials had it worse. They attended the same academic resort spas, and were handed the same oft-preposterous degrees, but were additionally indoctrinated in affirming ideological oat-baths stressing the righteousness of their lived experiences. If the big surprise my generation faced was that our educations were worth bupkes to employers, the next generation had to deal with the shock of corporate bosses being indifferent to their emotional needs.

    Meaning, we’ve come full circle. After training generations of Americans to forego personal lives and work their brains to mush in service of bigger profits, corporate leaders are waking up to find their companies staffed by people so psychologically dependent upon validation from work that they’re a net minus from a production standpoint, forcing bosses to beg them to shut up, go home, and get lives. Not many modern Americans know how to do any of those things, however, as can be seen in cases like that of Garcia-Martinez, where 2,000 employees claimed to be literally incapable of sharing a vast corporate structure with someone who once wrote a book containing passages they might have disagreed with, if they’d actually read it.

    “The thought of conflating your entire political, moral, social, family, and religious being with your professional persona,” Garcia-Martinez says, “I think is extraordinarily fraught and difficult.”

    Another irony: despite the progressive sheen of these campaigns, Slack agitation doesn’t represent a resurgence of labor. Unions used the strength of the whole workforce to protect the rights of the individual employee, among other things insisting that management not act without due process, evidence, etc. Slack, as has been seen in cases like Antonio’s, or the oustings at the New York Times of editor James Bennet and reporter Donald McNeil, often urges companies to bypass process and act in the heat of the moment. In any case, it’s a weird kind of liberalism that tries to override management to get employees fired, but that’s where we are in the modern American workplace.

    I asked Antonio about these and other issues, from his perspective:

    TK: You’ve had multiple careers, and clearly took writing seriously. How will episodes like this affect people who might try to write or take creative detours in their careers?

    Antonio Garcia-Martinez: Kat Rosenfield was tweeting about this and I love her and it’s great that she’s defending me. Do you want art? People are saying, “Well, you should have realized the consequences… I feel like saying: “Do you realize if an artist went into producing their art, whatever it is, literary or nonfiction or whatever, and thought about the consequences, the art would be total shit?”

    Looking at it bigger, there’s a lot of political ideologies like Nazism and communism that thought that art should be subservient to politics, and that art can only serve a political end. Those movements did not end well. I don’t think we want that in our liberal democratic society. I think that’s a bizarre ideological way of looking at the world, from the wokesters who treat this as a quasi-religion.

    This is an excerpt from today’s subscriber-only post. To read the entire article and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.

    Subscribe Now

     

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 20:10

  • Lumber Industry Has No Interest In New Mills As They Reap Rewards Of Record Prices 
    Lumber Industry Has No Interest In New Mills As They Reap Rewards Of Record Prices 

    The problem with the North American lumber industry is that supply is controlled by just a few firms that can easily manipulate prices. For instance, WSJ reports lumber mills are in no rush to bring on additional capacity as they reap the rewards of consumers paying four times the average price. 

    North America’s sawmills, such as Weyerhaeuser Co., West Fraser Timber Co., Canfor Corporation, Interfor Corporation, and PotlatchDeltic, are in no hurry to boost new capacity as they rake in the cash as lumber prices soar. Consumers have been on the opposite side of the stick, and soaring lumber prices added nearly $36k to the cost of building a new home in less than one year. 

    Lumber executives told WSJ they “aren’t racing out to build new mills” as they are contempt with elevated prices boosting their quarterly net incomes. Usually, when commodity prices soar, new supplies flood the market, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. 

    By now, readers know soaring lumber prices have been due to a combination of factors, including record-low mortgage rates sparking a housing frenzy, home renovations, and, of course, sawmills reduced capacity at the beginning of the pandemic anticipating lower demand. 

    Executives at Weyerhaeuser Co. and West Fraser Timber Co. said they would increase budgets to boost efficiency and output at their existing mills in the South, where a glut of cheap timber resides. Some executives don’t mind accumulating a surplus amount of cash as the times are good but aren’t using the money to construct new mills. 

    “We are going to be ultra-cautious on what we do in those regards,” Canfor Corp. Chief Executive Don Kayne told investors last month when he announced record quarterly profits.

    “We don’t mind at all having a little extra cash around for sure, considering what this industry goes through.”

    Chad Hesters, who advises lumber executives and investors as managing partner in the Houston office of consulting firm Korn Ferry, told his clients not to build any mills during this cycle because “they are too late.” He said that by the time a new mill comes online, the industry’s cyclical nature could quickly turn, and new investments shift into “a good way to lose money.” 

    So in the meantime, the North American lumber industry has no incentive to bring on additional capacity as they remain cautious and enjoy the fact their quarterly net income is some of the highest in years – all at the expense of the consumer. 

    Source: WSJ

    Why would lumber companies ruin the profit-making party with added supply? 

    What’s concerning is that lawmakers on Capitol Hill are more concerned about GameStop retail daytraders in their parents’ basements than consumers paying four times the amount for lumber than a year ago. 

    Will there be an inquiry when this bubble bursts too?

    A Lumbear market.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 19:50

  • Biggest Shorting Of Tech Stocks By Hedge Funds In 5 Years: Goldman Prime
    Biggest Shorting Of Tech Stocks By Hedge Funds In 5 Years: Goldman Prime

    Last week we noted that one of the clear trends to emerge as a result of the recent horrific price action in tech stocks, was the continued aggressive selling – and shorting – of tech stocks by hedge funds. The latest weekly report from Goldman’s Prime Brokerage confirms this.

    Starting at the macro level, Goldman Prime writes that the GS Prime book “was net sold for the first time in three weeks (-1.3 SDs), driven by short sales outpacing long buys 2.4 to 1. Single Names saw the largest net selling in two months, while Macro Products (Index and ETF combined) saw the largest net buying in seven weeks. Nearly all regions were net sold led by North America and EM Asia, while Europe was net bought for a 7th straight week and saw the largest $ net buying since Feb ‘18. 7 of 11 global sectors were net sold led by Info Tech, Consumer Disc, Financials, and Comm Svcs, while Health Care, Industrials, and Utilities were the most net bought.”

    As noted previously, however, the real action was in the tech sector, with GS Prime noting that “Info Tech was net sold for a 4th straight week and saw the largest $ net selling in more than 5 years, driven entirely by short sales.”

    Far from a one-off event, the report then notes that “the sector has seen increased shorting in 4 of the past 5 weeks (8 of the past 10), which is in contrast to long flows which have seen buying in 7 of the past 10 weeks.“

    Drilling down, the Goldman Prime desk reveals that 4 of the 6 Info Tech subsectors were net sold on the week, led in $ terms by Semis & Semi Equip, Tech Hardware, and IT Services, while Software and to a lesser extent Comm Equip were net bought.

    As a result, and as the latest batch of 13F filings reveals, “hedge funds are now U/W Info Tech stocks by 1.5% vs. the MSCI World, the lowest level since last November and in the 2nd percentile vs. the past five years. By industry group, hedge funds are still O/W Software & Svcs by 4.7% (28th percentile) and U/W Semis & Semi Equip and Tech Hardware by 1.7% (8th percentile) and 4.4% (18th percentile), respectively.”

    What is remarkable is that even as the HF sector is now positioned uniformly bearish in the tech sector, the GS Equity Fundamental L/S Performance Estimate fell for a second straight week by -1.83% between 5/7 and 5/13 (vs MSCI World TR -1.96%),
    driven by beta of -1.44% (from market exposure and the market sensitivity factor combined) and to a lesser extent alpha of -0.39%. In fact, as shown in the chart below, hedge funds are now once again underperforming not only broader market indexes but are down on the year…

    … while being levered to the hilt: according to GS Prime, overall book Gross leverage rose another 1.3% to 248.4% – the highest on record – while Net leverage fell -1.7 pts to 86.6% (73rd percentile one year) as a result of continued pressing of tech shorts.

    In short, we are now at max pain levels for the hedge fund sector.

    And in light of the recent rebound in the FAAMG sector which has moved higher in the past 3 days amid a reassessment of reflation concerns with the “transitory” camp now winning, the question – as we asked a week ago – is when will this massive one-sided short position push max levered funds over the edge, and lead to a powerful squeeze higher in the tech sector.

    Tyler Durden
    Mon, 05/17/2021 – 19:35

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