- The Second Amendment And The Sovereignty Of A Nation
The Second Amendment And The Sovereignty Of A Nation
Authored by Dania Vizzi via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
As the world watches the Ukrainian people bravely fight for their sovereignty against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of their country, I am reminded of the importance of the Second Amendment enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The right to bear arms has been viciously attacked in the past few decades as an archaic vestige of a bygone era. However, as many Ukrainians take up arms for the first time in their lives, it serves as a stark reminder of why our Second Amendment rights at home are critical for the survival of our nation.
Dania Vizzi from the United States competes in the Women’s Skeet Final of the Shooting competition during the Lima 2019 Pan-American Games, at Las Palmas shooting range in Lima, Peru, on Aug. 2, 2019. (Luka Gonzales/AFP via Getty Images) Many Americans are familiar with the Second Amendment and how its foundation—as described by our nation’s Founding Fathers—was to grant citizens the right to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. Usually, this understanding is only applied in the case of a tyrannical U.S. government; however, Ukraine has proven that the right to bear arms can be fundamental in protecting the sovereignty of a nation against a hostile foreign government. While the value of the Second Amendment is disputed within American society, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has—in a dramatic reversal of his initial stance against the legalization of weapons—reversed his policy in the face of Russian aggression. Zelensky recently not only called on ordinary Ukrainians to take up arms in the defense of their nation, but concurrently stated that the Ukrainian government would issue weapons to any citizen who requested one.
Though a judicious decision by Zelensky, many Ukrainians—in preparation before the conflict—had limited experience with firearms. For example, in viral images weeks before the invasion, Ukrainians were seen wielding wooden rifles in an attempt to gain as much training as possible with firearms. While honorable, this deficit in knowledge across the agrarian nation, has no doubt harmed their readiness against the Russian forces.
While the Russo-Ukrainian conflict provides a fresh example of why Americans’ right to bear arms is so critical, there are other examples here in the United States of Americans taking up arms in order to defend their rights. For example, look no further than the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Founded in 1964, the group of Black World War II veterans armed themselves to defend against the Ku Klux Klan as black Americans marched for civil rights against the Jim Crow South. These American patriots looked tyranny in the face and took up arms in the name of liberty and justice. From the Deacons for Defense and Justice to the Battle of Athens, Tennessee, Americans have used the Second Amendment to protect against those who sought to oppress a population.
This is why the Second Amendment is so important for the security of the American people and the prosperity of the United States. From Ukraine to within our own shores, a legally armed citizenry can serve as a deterrent to a wide array of potential threats. Many Americans recognize this and have taken the time to get proper firearms training as, according to one study, over 60 percent of American gun owners have formal training.
So, while some Americans continue to debate the value of the Second Amendment, let us not forget the people around the world who have no such rights and cannot defend themselves against an oppressive government. Let us not take for granted the gift of our Founding Fathers that has allowed millions of Americans the right to self-defense and a formal education on how to properly use arms.
The United States stands as one of only three nations in the world that has enshrined the right of its citizenry to bear arms, and the significance of this rare clause in the U.S. Constitution has enabled us to become the beacon of the free world. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine should serve as a reminder of the blessings we in the United States take for granted, and buttress American support for our Second Amendment rights for the sake of the sovereignty of our great nation.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 23:40 - Russia Pipeline Gas Flows To China Have Increased Since The Ukraine War
Russia Pipeline Gas Flows To China Have Increased Since The Ukraine War
Russia has increased gas supply to China via its Power of Siberia pipeline after its invasion of Ukraine began, ENN Energy CFO Liu Jianfeng said on the company’s earnings call. ENN is one of China’s largest city gas utlities and purchases gas from oil majors including China National Petroleum Corp, which operates the import pipeline on its side of the border.
The Power of Siberia pipeline ships gas from eastern Russia into northern China, and is ramping up over several years to maximum capacity of 38 bcm/year. The Power of Siberia pipeline began pumping supplies in 2019; Russia is also shipping liquefied natural gas (LNG) to China. It exported 16.5 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas to China in 2021.
The Power of Siberia network is not connected to pipelines that send gas to Europe, which has faced surging gas prices due to tight supplies, one of several points of tension with Moscow. Under plans previously drawn up, Russia aimed to supply China with 38 bcm of gas by pipeline by 2025.
Meanwhile, Gazprom, which has a monopoly on Russian gas exports by pipeline and which operates the Russian side of the pipeline, said Tuesday that exports to China continue to grow under its bilateral long-term agreement with CNPC. Flows had been increasing before the invasion, as well, with Gazprom saying in mid-February it had just set a daily record for exports to China on the pipeline.
One month ago, Russia agreed a 30-year contract to supply gas to China via a new pipeline and will settle the new gas sales in euros, bolstering an energy alliance with Beijing amid Moscow’s strained ties with the West over Ukraine and other issues. Gazprom agreed to supply Chinese state energy major CNPC with 10 billion cubic metres of gas a year, the Russian firm and a Beijing-based industry official said.
First flows through the pipeline, which will connect Russia’s Far East region with northeast China, were due to start in two to three years, the source said in comments that were later followed by an announcement of the deal by Gazprom. The new deal, which coincided with a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to the Beijing Winter Olympics, would add a further 10 bcm, increasing Russian pipeline sales under long-term contracts to China.
Russian gas from its Far East island of Sakhalin will be transported via pipeline across the Japan Sea to northeast China’s Heilongjiang province, reaching up to 10 bcm a year around 2026, said the Beijing source, who asked not to be identified. The deal would be settled in euros, the source added, in line with efforts by the two states to diversify away from U.S. dollars.
Discussions between the two firms began several years ago after the start-up of Power of Siberia, a 4,000-km (2,500-mile)pipeline sending gas to China. Talks accelerated more recently after Beijing set its 2060 carbon neutral goal, the source said.
“China’s coal shortage last year served as another wake-up call that natural gas has its special value, that’s why CNPC decided to top up with the new pipeline deal,” the source said.
The pricing of the new gas deal will be similar to that of Power of Siberia, the source said, adding that both were “fairly satisfied” with that arrangement.
The deal is expected to weigh on China’s LNG import outlook. “Piped gas from Russia can be supplied to northern China at prices that are competitive when compared with LNG,” said Ken Kiat Lee, analyst at consultancy FGE.
Meanwhile, as Russian gas exports to China increase, those headed for Europe have slowed, and in some cases such as the Yamal-Europe pieline, been largely shut for much of 2022.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 23:20 - Mail Voting And Election Legitimacy
Mail Voting And Election Legitimacy
Authored by Andrew E. Busch via RealClear Politics,
Although it had been a feature of elections in some parts of the United States for years, the phenomenon of mail-ballot voting exploded in the 2020 election. In the midst of the COVID pandemic, jurisdictions around the country expanded use of mail voting, sometimes sending ballots to every registered voter. Steps were taken to facilitate ease of mail voting, such as establishing drop boxes for returned ballots, relaxing rules regarding signature verification, and easing restrictions on “ballot harvesting,” the practice whereby paid political activists collect a large number of completed ballots and return them for counting. As a result, by some estimates, the proportion of ballots cast by mail nearly doubled from 2016 to 2020.
(AP Photo/David Zalubowski) There is, of course, an ongoing debate over whether the turn to mail-ballot voting was necessary, given the pandemic circumstances, or a partisan maneuver to advance the prospects of Democrats, who seemed to reap most of the benefits electorally. Whether or not it was necessary, the development clearly contributed in two important ways to undermining confidence in the results – and is likely to continue doing so unless legislators and election officials take corrective measures.
First, mail-ballot voting is intrinsically less secure than in-person voting. Things might go awry at multiple points. The ballot might never be delivered, or it might be delivered to the wrong address, or to the right address but wrong person. Even if delivered into the right hands, it might ultimately be filled out by someone else or by the intended recipient under pressure; under these conditions, there is no guarantee that the secret ballot is preserved, a problem exacerbated by the activity of ballot harvesters. Once the ballot is completed, it can get lost in the mail, removed from a drop box, or otherwise compromised.
And this is without accounting for the potential for large-scale fraud. In 2020, an unnamed political operative in New Jersey described to the New York Post how he had developed and been using for years a system for replicating ballots and submitting them on behalf of his candidates. Despite the assurances of some that voter fraud is not an issue in the United States, a number of high-profile cases in the last quarter-century prove otherwise. Since 1997, mayoral elections in Miami and Paterson, New Jersey, as well as a congressional election in the Ninth District of North Carolina, have been vacated due to proven fraud. As John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky document in their 2021 book “Our Broken Elections,” these three cases are the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, Fund and von Spakovsky note, most cases of large-scale fraud in recent years have involved mail ballots.
There is a reason France no longer uses mail-in ballots in its elections, and why the 2005 commission led by Republican James Baker and Democrat Jimmy Carter identified mail ballots as the least secure mode of voting (though in 2020 Carter rather weakly tried to walk back that conclusion).
Nearly a year and a half after the 2020 elections, a special counsel has charged that substantial voter fraud took place in more than 90 of Wisconsin’s nursing homes, where it appears that nursing home staff or administrators requested ballots for invalid patients, then filled out and returned those ballots, possibly forging the patients’ signatures. A private study (separate from the controversial Arizona “audit”) alleges that 200,000 mail ballots in Maricopa County were counted despite mismatched signatures.
Overall, one does not need to accept former President Trump’s expansive claims of national voter fraud – indeed, one should not, without a great deal more evidence than he has yet offered – in order to recognize that mail-ballot voting is vulnerable to a number of problems that make it chronically less reliable than in-person voting. Moreover, perhaps as importantly, many voters recognize this fact, and as a result will consistently question the validity of close results in elections using large-scale mail balloting, at least if their candidate loses.
Second, because of significant disparities in the political makeup of the mail-ballot electorate and the Election Day in-person electorate (in states that are not 100% mail ballot), the reporting of election results can become distorted. In the 2020 general election, we witnessed both a much-expected “red mirage” and a lesser-noted “blue mirage.” In a few states such as Texas and Ohio, mail-ballot votes were counted and reported first, leading to initial Democratic leads that were gradually wiped out through the night as Election Day votes were added to the tallies. In most major states, the reverse happened. Election Day votes were counted first, followed by mail-ballot votes. The predicted “red mirage” came to pass as President Trump took early leads in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin before surrendering them over the next few days as the mail ballots rolled in.
No one paid much attention to Texas and Ohio, which had their totals in relatively early, and in any case went the way they were expected to go. On the other hand, the “red mirage” states drew enormous scrutiny. They were already understood to be swing states that could go either way and would determine the election. Moreover, all had voted for Trump in 2016. Many Trump supporters went to bed on November 3 with their man seemingly headed to another surprise win, and found out on November 4 that it was slipping away in a process that was not completed for several days. That sensation, of having an election victory subsequently overridden, undoubtedly contributed to the willingness of many to embrace Trump’s “stolen election” narrative. That is an outcome we should hope to avoid in the future.
It is possible that the partisan makeup of mail-ballot versus Election Day voters depends on circumstances. In 2020, Democratic voters may have been more afraid of COVID and hence more likely to avoid voting lines, while Republican voters were urged by their president not to trust mail voting. Perhaps other circumstances will produce different tendencies. Unless both modes of voting are utilized equally by supporters of both candidates, the potential will exist that those who lose based on late-reporting mail results will wonder whether something nefarious happened.
The optimal solution would be to increase in-person early voting opportunities and the number of Election Day polling places, while strictly limiting mail voting to traditional absentee voting for reasons of illness, disability, or absence. However, many jurisdictions continue to be committed to widespread mail voting. It is a practice that is not going away anytime soon, so a key question is what can be done to reduce the damage that mail-ballot voting can do to confidence in electoral legitimacy.
The two problems outlined above – inadequate ballot security and delayed vote totals – require distinct measures.
The chief way to mitigate concerns around delayed vote totals is to enforce a strict Election Day deadline for the return of mail ballots and to require election officials to begin counting received mail ballots prior to Election Day. The other confidence-building measure would be to adopt Georgia’s new requirement that election officials must announce on Election Night the total number of votes received. This will prevent the perception that large batches of incoming votes are materializing out of thin air.
As for ballot security, some states have already taken steps that should be adopted more broadly. These include banning ballot harvesting and improving verification techniques (possibly using the last four digits of Social Security numbers instead of signatures). Not least, state and county election offices should take more seriously their obligation to keep their voter-registration rolls updated. If election officials want voters to be confident in the legitimacy of mail-ballot elections, they need to make sure that no household is getting five extra ballots for residents who haven’t lived there in years. Unfortunately, Democrats have widely condemned such measures as “voter suppression.”
None of these steps would prevent a nominally responsible eligible voter from casting a vote by mail, but they can help bolster confidence in our elections. If we have to learn to live with mail-ballot voting, we should be able – no, eager – to answer legitimate concerns rather than pretend that they don’t exist.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 23:00 - Mapped: All The World's Military Personnel
Mapped: All The World’s Military Personnel
While much of the world is living in one of the most peaceful periods in history, Visual Capitalist’s Avery Koop notes that the spark of new conflicts like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminds us of the importance of military personnel.
Between ongoing armed conflicts to building of defenses preemptively, many countries have amassed significant militaries to date.
This map, using data from World Population Review, displays all the world’s military personnel.
Who Has the Largest Military?
So who has the largest military? Well, the answer isn’t so simple.
There are three commonly measured categories of military personnel:
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Active military: Soldiers who work full-time for the army
Country with the largest active military: China (over 2 million) -
Military reserves: People who do not work for the army full-time, but have military training and can be called up and deployed at any moment
Country with the largest military reserves: Vietnam (5 million) -
Paramilitary: Groups that aren’t officially military but operate in a similar fashion, such as the CIA or SWAT teams in the U.S.
Country with the largest paramilitary: North Korea (an estimated 5 million)
NOTE: Of these categories of military personnel, paramilitary is the least well-defined across the world’s countries and thus not included in the infographic above.
Which country has the biggest military? It depends who’s doing the counting.
If we include paramilitary forces, here’s how the top countries stack up in terms of military personnel:
Source: World Population Review
When combining all three types of military, Vietnam comes out on top with over 10 million personnel.
And here are the world’s top 10 biggest militaries, excluding paramilitary forces:
Even in this case, North Korea remains near the top of the list with these much larger nations. Excluding estimates of paramilitary forces, the Hermit Kingdom has nearly 1.9 million active and reserve troops.
Building up Military Personnel
The reasons for these immense military sizes are obvious in some cases. For example, in Vietnam, North Korea, and Russia, citizens are required to serve a mandatory period of time for the military.
The Koreas, two countries still technically at war, both conscript citizens for their armies. In North Korea, boys are conscripted at age 14. They begin active service at age 17 and remain in the army for another 13 years. In select cases, women are conscripted as well.
In South Korea, a man must enlist at some point between the ages of 18 and 28. Most service terms are just over one year at minimum. There are however, certain exceptions: the K-Pop group BTS was recently granted legal rights to delay their military service, thanks to the country’s culture minister.
Here’s a look at just a few of the other countries that require their citizens to serve some form of military service:
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Austria
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Brazil
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Myanmar
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Egypt
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Israel
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Ukraine
In many of these countries, geopolitical and historical factors play into why they have mandatory service in place.
In the U.S., many different factors play into why the country has such a large military force. For one, the military industrial complex feeds into the U.S. army. A longstanding tradition of the American government and the defense and weapons industry working closely together creates economic incentives to build up arms and defenses, translating into a need for more personnel.
Additionally, the U.S. army offers job security and safety nets, and can be an attractive career choice. Culturally, the military is also held in high esteem in the country.
Nations with No Armies
For many countries, building up military personnel is a priority, however, there are other nations who have no armies at all (excluding the paramilitary branch).
Here’s a glance at some countries that have no armies:
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Costa Rica
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Iceland
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Liechtenstein
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Panama
Costa Rica has no army as it was dissolved after the country’s civil war in the 1940s. The funds for the military were redirected towards other public services, such as education.
This is not to say that these nations live in a state of constant peace—most have found alternative means to garner security forces. Under the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, other countries like the U.S. are technically obligated to provide military services to Costa Rica, for example, should they be in need.
The Future of Warfare
International conflicts persist in the 21st century, but now go far beyond just the number of troops on the ground.
New and emerging forms of warfare pose unforeseen threats. For example, cyber warfare and utilization of data to attack populations could dismantle countries and cause conflict almost instantaneously. Cybersecurity failure has been ranked among the top 10 most likely risks to the world today.
If current trends continue, soldiers of the future will face off on very different fields of battle.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 22:40 -
- China Wins A Little, Loses A Lot From Russia’s War On Ukraine
China Wins A Little, Loses A Lot From Russia’s War On Ukraine
Authored by Charles Lipson via RealClear Politics (emphasis ours),
The unfolding mayhem unleashed on Ukraine by Vladmir Putin carries one major benefit for China and two much larger losses, plus a boatload of secondary effects. The main benefit is geostrategic: The United States must now keep more scarce military resources in Europe, instead diverting them to the Pacific, as it had been hoping.
(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) That diversion would be costly for any president, but it is particularly costly for a Democrat, whose party habitually scales back military budgets to spend more on social programs. Biden’s budget, submitted before the war in Eastern Europe, certainly did. He proposed a 16% rise in social spending but only a 2% increase for defense, far less than the inflation rate. Those priorities are now imperiled.
Also endangered is any reorientation of America’s defense posture, to focus almost exclusively on China. That focus, shared by Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joe Biden, remains the country’s principal long-term challenge. But Putin’s aggression makes clear that the United States does not have the luxury of focusing on only one hostile (and nuclear-armed) power at a time. Russia’s war on Ukraine significantly raises the threat level in Europe and forces the Pentagon to avoid any drawdown there to fund increases in Asia. That’s true even though many of our NATO partners have finally agreed to spend 2% of their GDP on defense – a long-standing American demand. This renewed concern for Europe’s security is a potential gain for China.
Yet, any advantage to Beijing is offset by two costs that may be as just as important. The first is that China’s only major ally is now badly damaged, economically and militarily – and a pariah in the eyes of much of the world. Putin’s position may be more vulnerable, as well. And while Beijing can drive harder bargains for Russian oil, raw materials, and capital credit, Russia’s self-inflicted damage makes Moscow a much less valuable partner as long as the crushing sanctions remain in place and Putin remains in charge.
The second, far larger cost to China may be the deterrent effect of crippling economic sanctions. Communist party leaders, determined to seize Taiwan, must have been shocked by the scale, comprehensiveness, and devastating impact of sanctions imposed on Russia. They must have been shocked, too, by the West’s surprising unanimity in imposing them and by Germany’s swift about-face despite its dependence on Russian energy and decades of concessionary policies.
As the CCP watches the Russian economy implode, Chinese leaders must shudder at the thought of what could happen to their own economy if it faced a similar onslaught. Although the communist regime would likely survive, given its tight control over the army and internal security services and its more robust and diverse economy, it would have to withstand a sustained, destabilizing shock with uncertain consequences. Moreover, it would face some erosion of its legitimacy, the public’s acceptance of its right to rule. The CCP’s two main sources of legitimacy are its reassertion of China’s central role in the world and, since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the party’s ability to grow the economy and significantly increase the living standard of most Chinese families. Any fundamental threats to that economy, now deeply embedded in world markets, would pose a significant political challenge.
Until Russia’s economy withered under sanctions, Beijing had little reason to fear similar punishment for invading Taiwan. After all, the world’s major economies did nothing when Beijing seized Hong Kong, in clear violation of its treaty commitments. They did nothing when they learned of the Uighurs’ mass imprisonment, “reeducation,” and deaths. They did nothing to sanction China for its role in spreading the COVID pandemic, and lying endlessly about it afterward. Based on that track record, Beijing must have figured the world would do little if it seized Taiwan. No more. Xi and his aides will need to recalibrate after seeing Russia hit with swift, draconian sanctions and largely excluded from world financial markets, despite the costs to countries imposing those sanctions.
Foreign business entities operating in China are also recalibrating. Their assessment of political risks is bound to be higher, their search for alternative sources of supply more urgent. These companies saw how quickly their Russian investments became worthless after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. While they would lobby hard against sanctions from Washington, Brussels, Berlin, and Tokyo, regardless of China’s actions, they can’t be sure they will succeed. The most vulnerable are foreign companies that rely on the Chinese market. They will adapt to the riskier environment by trying to diversify their final markets and minimizing any fixed assets within China.
The prospect of economic sanctions will not, in itself, block Beijing invading Taiwan. Only a military deterrent can do that. But the net effect of Russia’s troubles is to show China, with terrible clarity, that it would face grim economic costs on top of the military calculations.
Russia’s catastrophic experience in Ukraine also underscores the oldest lesson in strategy. The best-laid plans and most optimistic projections can go horribly wrong. Taiwan and its allies will drive home that enduring lesson. Taiwan will continue buying and building defensive weapons, as many as it can afford. The U.S. will continue sending its navy through the Taiwan Straits, and the Quad (the U.S., Japan, India, and Australia) will continue strengthening their security partnership. That’s the emerging shape of a new Cold War, with dangerous, nuclear-armed fronts in both Eastern Europe and the western Pacific.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 22:20 - Alleged Russian Intelligence Leak Says Xi Planned Taiwan Invasion For Fall
Alleged Russian Intelligence Leak Says Xi Planned Taiwan Invasion For Fall
A Ukraine scenario repeat, but this time in China’s backyard concerning Taiwan independence? “China has plans to invade Taiwan as soon as next fall, reported Al Jazeera in a tweet citing Newsweek on a Russian intelligence document. Traders are treating the report with skepticism,” FXStreet is noting of the latest reporting on a purported Russian intelligence whistleblower document.
“Many geopolitical analysts had viewed recent geopolitical events regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as likely to dissuade China from mounting an assault on Taiwan in the near term (i.e. the strong Western response, Russia’s difficulties in achieving its military goals amid unexpectedly spirited resistance),” it comments.
Within the past days Newsweek reported the alleged Russian intel document which indicated China’s Xi Jinping had set in motion planning that would result in a PLA army move to annex the island this next fall. The document is attributed to an “anonymous analyst with Russia’s Federal Security Service” (FSB), according to Newsweek, and says the plan is likely delayed due to Ukraine developments and collective Western mobilization against it, including far-reaching US and EU-led sanctions. The document suggested Xi believes the “window of opportunity” has passed for the time being.
PLA amphibious assault drills, via Xinhua “The letter in question is part of a series published by France-based Russian dissident Vladimir Osechkin, a human rights lawyer who runs gulagu-net.ru, a website documenting abuses in Russian jails,” the report said of the document.
“Osechkin claims to have received seven letters since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The FSB whistleblower has painted a detailed picture of fear and chaos inside Russia’s principal intelligence service, where apparently none but a select few were aware of Putin’s plans.”
It allegedly emerged as part of a whistleblower’s internal leak, and key parts were translated as follows, and presented in the Newsweek report:
“Because of the war, Russia has such a negative image for a number of countries that the United States can easily push sanctions against China, at least with the Europeans, if it risks circumventing the sanctions on Russia,” the letter read. “China depends on exports so much that, coupled with its dependence on commodity prices…this would be almost a fatal blow.”
The whistleblower continued: “Not only that: Xi Jinping was at least tentatively considering the capture of Taiwan in the autumn—he needs his own small victory in order to be re-elected for a third term—there is a colossal power struggle among the [party] elite. Now, after the events in Ukraine, this window of opportunity has shut, which gives the United States the opportunity to both blackmail Xi and negotiate with his [political] rivals on favorable terms.”
“China Planned Taiwan Invasion in Fall, Alleged Russian Intel Leak Claims:
Taiwan’s top diplomat said he couldn’t speak on the authenticity of a purported Russian intelligence document…”https://t.co/20kJHM4R47 pic.twitter.com/Bi4lCMmUDB
— Prodigal Son (@ThePr0diga1S0n) March 17, 2022
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The ‘intelligence letter’ was dated March 9, and Newsweek in the report says it can’t verify the authenticity of the document, which is being widely pushed by well-known anti-Moscow “open source” investigators like Bellingcat.
The fact that the document emerged from within what can be described as Russian opposition activist groups is alone enough to case severe doubt on its authenticity. Taiwan’s foreign minister also appeared to downplay the document when asked about its authenticity in a press briefing this week.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 22:00 - State Governments Shedding Millions Of Square Feet Of Office Space Amid Hybrid Work Revolution
State Governments Shedding Millions Of Square Feet Of Office Space Amid Hybrid Work Revolution
By Jarred Schenke and Matthew Rothstein of BisNow,
State and local governments lease tens of millions of square feet of office space across the country, but that number is falling fast as the push for remote and hybrid work has made civil servants rethink their real estate.
From California to Georgia and Maine to Utah, the pandemic thrust government agencies into an entirely new way of working. Two years later, many have found that offering flexible working arrangements can solve two ever-present challenges they face: attracting and retaining their workers and maximizing taxpayer dollars.
“The savings are real,” Nebraska Department of Administrative Services Director Jason Jackson said.
“I think future administrations are going to be hard-pressed to say, ‘We should be spending more on office space.’”
Philadelphia City Hall sits across the street from the Municipal Services Building, a more conventional office home to many of its departments. At the end of 2019, state and local governments leased 22.6M SF of privately owned, corporate-grade office space across the U.S., comprising 21.6% of all government tenants, according to data compiled by JLL U.S. Office Research. By the end of last year, that total had dropped by 2M SF.
That nearly 10% reduction may be the tip of the iceberg, said Bob Hunt, the national leader of JLL’s public institution and higher education department. Over time, state and local office footprints could shrink by as much as 25% or 30%, Hunt told Bisnow.
The pandemic and its effects on remote work policies have prompted 87% of state governments to rethink their real estate strategies, according to a JLL survey conducted between February and April 2021. Forty percent of respondents said the rethinking would likely result in a reduction in office space, Hunt said during a November webinar with the National Association of State Facilities Administrators, while the other 60% were unsure what level of impact these considerations would have.
“That’s a profound amount, for the vast majority [of states] to say, ‘Hey we’re thinking about doing something differently as a result of this,’” Hunt said during the webinar.
For private companies, expenses on office space can be as much as 50% of their net income, according to a 2017 paper from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The equation is less straightforward for the revenues and financial outlays of state and local governments, and functions like emergency services or community-based programs have non-negotiable space requirements.
But plenty of administrative functions have been carried out remotely since the pandemic began, and the offices they left behind represent real financial commitments.
“My impression is that last year and two years ago, when everyone was looking at empty buildings, they saw dollar signs,” said James Burroughs, an associate professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Public Policy. “They were paying for things they couldn’t use when they emptied out a lot of departments and agencies. Now, I think discussions have evolved to be about the broad future of work.”
The city of Fort Worth, Texas, purchased the former Pier 1 Imports headquarters in 2021 to redevelop it as the new City Hall State officials across the country told Bisnow in recent weeks that their workers have embraced the ability to go remote, and they see a chance to redefine their real estate portfolios to tilt more toward employee attraction and retention.
How much less space they take remains to be seen, as does how future budget impacts could play out. But the opportunity to spend more on services rather than office space isn’t lost on the civil servants making these decisions.
“I think whenever you’re talking about several hundreds of thousands of dollars, you’re talking about money that is meaningful to Nebraskans,” Jackson said. “For us, when we’re talking about managing our real estate strategically, the total size of the opportunity there is pretty substantial.”
California has already cut 767K SF of its 14.4M SF office footprint, providing an annual savings of $22.5M. Over the next three years, California is looking to reduce 20% of its overall leased office portfolio, which will save the state $84.7M annually, California Department of General Services Deputy Director Monica Hassan said in an email to Bisnow. By comparison, the state already expects to have a surplus of $20B in its discretionary fund for fiscal year 2022-2023.
The Georgia State Properties Commission works with nearly 50 state agencies that occupy 12M SF of office, half of which is leased from private landlords, said Lee Nelson, GSPC’s leasing manager and assistant director of space management.
“It seems like just about all of [the agencies] are in some stage of figuring out the proper way for us to be organizing our in-office experience going forward,” Nelson said, adding that many agencies have budgetary motivations to reduce leased space.
The Georgia Department of Education has already decided to shrink its footprint at its 150K SF, state-owned headquarters in Downtown Atlanta down to 70K SF, with part of the staff working from home or in remote counties, Nelson said.
“We’ll find a state entity to backfill it,” Nelson said. “And whether that [entity] gets pulled from space that is leased from a private sector landlord hasn’t been determined yet.”
The Maine state government recently consolidated a 180-employee department, which was spread across three office buildings, into a single space, Maine Bureau of General Services Director Bill Longfellow said during the NASFA webinar. About 75% of those 180 workers expect to work remotely three days a week as part of the arrangement, he said, which took away assigned desks.
Nelson and Longfellow also cited cost savings as a motivation behind their respective consolidation drives.
The state of Tennessee introduced a remote work option for employees of 16 departments starting in 2016, initially as a cost-saving measure. Tennessee Department of General Services’ former deputy commissioner, Reen Baskin, told Governing.com that the state only realized the benefits for worker retention after the fact, but well before the pandemic forced the consideration onto other jurisdictions and the private sector.
In Nebraska before the pandemic, the concept of remote work “wasn’t even on our radar,” said Jackson, the state’s director of general services. Now 18 of 80 state agencies, accounting for 13,000 employees, continue to employ remote or hybrid work arrangements.
“We surprised ourselves with our own capability to leverage this [situation],” Jackson said.
The potential for budget savings is just one motivation for states to look at reducing their office usage; work flexibility has been a major factor in employee recruitment and retention, particularly in a job market increasingly defined by labor shortages.
State and local governments are used to doing more with less, but allowing remote and hybrid work is already necessary to stop a major brain drain, Hunt and Burroughs said.
“At the end of the day, state and local governments are employing knowledge workers, just in a different regulatory environment [from the private sector],” Hunt said. “And they had an issue with attraction and retention to begin with.”
Figuring out how to formulate long-term work strategies is what JLL’s public sector and higher education division, led nationally by Hunt, has been focusing on since before the pandemic. His team consulted on a 2019 pilot program in the state of Utah with the goal of getting 8,000 employees to work from home part time over three years, but around 10,000 Utah employees signed up for the program in just three months, Hunt said.
His team is now under contract to consult with Oregon’s state government, with the assumption that hybrid work will be a permanent part of its real estate equation.
Allowing workers to stay remote, in full or in part, is as easy as sending an email in many cases, but amounts to a triage effort for keeping workers happy, Burroughs said. For the model to be sustainable long-term, it requires a right-sizing of real estate usage and a redesign of often outmoded office spaces to the shared desks, conference and breakout rooms heavily utilized by coworking operators and private companies with permanent remote work plans, and such overhauls come with price tags.
“No one’s going up to a legislator and suggesting a $1B plan to redesign an office so that it will eventually save money,” Hunt said.
The easiest and cheapest option for transitioning to a new work model is to simply let leases in private office buildings expire and move those functions either to another space with more time on its lease or one that a jurisdiction owns.
“They’ve got to address the human problem immediately, but if you do it without addressing the design problem, ultimately you’ve got a lot of idle space,” Hunt said.
There are very real limitations of remote work in the public sector, which go beyond the need for police stations and schools. Departments having staff available for local residents who struggle either with internet access or phone usage is key to ensuring equitable access to government services regardless of means.
Smaller local governments have less need to radically rethink their real estate, especially since so many already own their own city halls and county complexes, said Chrelle Booker, the mayor pro tem for the town of Tryon in western North Carolina.
For much of the pandemic, city employees came to work in person when they were allowed at Tryon Town Hall, Booker said, and public meetings were still held in person in the town of fewer than 2,000 people.
“The pandemic didn’t change anything for us,” Booker said. “It’s almost as if we were in another part of the world I guess. Our own little private island.”
Booker, who is on the board of directors for the National League of Cities and is running for a seat in the U.S. Senate, said her peers in larger cities could benefit from building a one-stop shop for multiple city services. In Tryon’s case, no consolidation was necessary.
“Our police station is part of the same building, and of course, they can’t just sit at home,” she said.
Office footprints of bigger cities could increasingly look more like Tryon’s as they consolidate departments and lean on hybrid work.
Last year, Fort Worth, Texas, purchased a 20-story, 425K SF tower that had been the headquarters of Pier 1 Imports to convert into its new seat of government. The new Fort Worth City Hall will be home to 16 different departments that had occupied nine other city-owned buildings between them, Fort Worth Director of Property Management Steve Cooke told Bisnow.
The consolidation helps especially in the case of individuals or businesses who need permits or forms from multiple departments. Whereas previously, someone might be running all over town to get the correct materials, the new City Hall can function as a one-stop shop, Cooke said.
“We’re going to be putting that big, pretty building on the front of everything so that it becomes the face of the city,” he said.
The city of Fort Worth paid $69.5M for the building and initially estimated that renovations would cost around $30M, compared to the $200M it estimated new construction would cost. Unlike many other jurisdictions, Fort Worth is amenable to selling the properties it is vacating, further defraying the cost of the move.
“We’re going to empty them and sell them for the most part. To sit here and say that it’s going to save us 30 million bucks, I can’t do that sitting here right now,” Cooke said. “But it certainly helps.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 21:40 - Food Supply Chains "Falling Apart" In Ukraine As "Imminent Famine" Risks Plague The World
Food Supply Chains “Falling Apart” In Ukraine As “Imminent Famine” Risks Plague The World
On Friday, Jakob Kern, an emergency coordinator at the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP), warned Ukraine’s food supply chains were collapsing as Russia bombed key infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and trains.
“The country’s food supply chain is falling apart. Movements of goods have slowed down due to insecurity and the reluctance of drivers,” Kern told a Geneva during a video conference from Krakow, Poland.
“Inside Ukraine our job is in effect, to replace the broken commercial food supply chains,” he added, describing the rebuilding task as a “mammoth” one.
Ukraine’s top agricultural export products are corn and wheat. Before the invasion, Ukraine was the second-largest supplier of grains for the European Union and one of the largest suppliers for emerging markets in Asia and Africa. Breaking down the numbers, Ukraine produced 49.6% of global sunflower oil, 10% of global wheat, 12.6% of global barley, and 15.3% of global maize.
Estimates via Black Sea research firm SovEcon show Ukraine’s 2022 corn harvest could plunge as much as 35% from 41.9 million tons last year to 27.7 million tons this year because of all the disruptions. Farmers are already reporting diesel and fertilizer shortages. Wheat harvests are also expected to decline. Some have even pointed total crop output in the country could be halved.
“With global food prices at an all-time high, WFP is also concerned about the impact of the Ukraine crisis on food security globally, especially hunger hot spots,” he said, warning of “collateral hunger” in other places like Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Turkey that rely heavily on Ukraine imports.
All of this has fueled the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization to warn global food prices could rise another 8-20% from current levels due to the deteriorating situation in Ukraine.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, also warned today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may cause a global surge in malnutrition and famine.
“For the last three years, global rates of hunger and famine have been on the rise. With the Russian invasion, we are now facing the risk of imminent famine and starvation in more places around the world,” Fakhri said in a statement.
There’s even a spillover risk for the US (read: “Media Isn’t Warning You” That US Careening Towards Food Crisis).
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 21:20 - 6 Years Of Being Manipulated By Manufactured Waves Of Outrage… And No End In Sight
6 Years Of Being Manipulated By Manufactured Waves Of Outrage… And No End In Sight
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Are you starting to notice a pattern by now? For the past six years, the American people have been emotionally manipulated by what I call “manufactured waves of outrage”. Once the corporate media identifies a trigger, it will obsessively focus on it for weeks or months on end, and the narrative that develops will be echoed and magnified by millions upon millions of social media denizens. Before too long, much of the population is whipped up into an irrational emotional frenzy, and that frenzy is used to move certain agendas forward.
To me, this new era began in 2016.
Donald Trump was a political candidate like no other, and the elite absolutely hated the fact that he did not follow their rules and that they could not control him.
So when he actually won, it truly was a catastrophic event for them.
From that moment forward, most corporate media outlets relentlessly demonized Trump. Never before in U.S. history had a sitting U.S. president been treated in such a fashion, and we may never see anything like it ever again.
The anti-Trump narratives which were being pumped out by the corporate media were constantly fed to social media influencers on both sides of the political spectrum, and that ultimately created extremely deep political divisions in this country which still exist to this day.
Many on the left are entirely convinced that Trump is the devil, while many on the right believe that he is the greatest American that ever lived.
Of course the truth is that Trump is not actually on the far end of the political spectrum that currently exists in this country. There is a lot about Trump that liberals should actually like, and there is a lot about Trump that conservatives should actually be criticizing.
But that is not how the debate has been framed. If you hate Trump you are on the left, and if you love Trump you are on the right, and that is the end of the story.
In 2020, a couple things happened that caused new manufactured waves of outrage.
One was the tragic death of George Floyd. His death sparked the BLM movement, and our country was whipped up into an emotional frenzy. Protests, civil unrest and riots erupted all over the nation, and the level of violence that we witnessed shocked the entire planet.
But if you did not support the protesters, you were suddenly a bad person.
Instead, it was the police that were relentlessly demonized by the media, and this greatly upset a lot of us that are very supportive of the police.
Without a doubt, the U.S. has had problems with police brutality. And without a doubt, there is a lot of racism out there. I have been boldly speaking out against racism for many years, and I will continue to speak out against it. I believe that every man, woman and child on the entire planet was created equal, and I believe that every single one of us possesses immense value.
But there were millions upon millions of us that did not agree with the political agenda of the BLM movement, and many of the specific political positions that the organization adopted were deeply alarming.
Does that make us bad just because we don’t agree with their far left agenda?
2020 also brought us the COVID pandemic.
Our societal divisions became deeper than ever before as we endlessly debated about masks, vaccines, mandates and other restrictions.
Manufactured waves of outrage about COVID dominated our national discourse for nearly two full years, but we were finally getting to a point where we were almost ready to put it all behind us.
And then the Ukraine war came along, and now everyone has a reason to be outraged again.
I think that Elon Musk summed things up very well in one of his latest tweets.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 14, 2022
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You may have noticed that hordes of social media lemmings are plastering their profiles with Ukrainian flags these days.
Next month, they may have to switch back to COVID again.
Then in May, the hot topic may be racial injustice.
Of course every June is reserved for the alphabet people.
Social media has become a very clear reflection of society as a whole, and so much of what goes on in our world today is being driven by social media.
Last week, I was stunned to learn that the Biden administration had actually conducted a briefing on the war in Ukraine for 30 key TikTok influencers…
To get ahead of misinformation and spread its messaging, the Biden administration on Thursday briefed 30 top TikTok stars on key information regarding the war in Ukraine, The Washington Post reports.
The online influencers received updates about the U.S.’ “strategic goals in the region” while National Security Council staffers and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki “answered questions on distributing aid to Ukrainians, working with NATO, and how the United States would react to a Russian use of nuclear weapons.”
Can you imagine the Reagan administration doing such a thing?
Of course not.
But the world has changed.
Today, the elite need the support of influencers on social media, because those social media influencers can whip up tremendous waves of manufactured outrage.
If you asked random U.S. social media users to tell you what caused the war in Ukraine, the vast majority of them could not give you any sort of a coherent answer.
And the vast majority of them would not be able to point out Ukraine on a blank map of the world.
But they do know that Russia is really bad and Ukraine is really good, and that is all that the elite really need for them to know.
For years, I have been encouraging my readers to think for themselves.
Because if you don’t learn to think for yourself, there are others that will be more than happy to do your thinking for you.
That can be a tempting path to follow, but when you let others do your thinking for you it is way too easy for them to manipulate your emotions with the latest wave of manufactured outrage.
* * *
It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 21:00 - A Recent History Of US Sanctions On Russia
A Recent History Of US Sanctions On Russia
When a direct military confrontation is off the table, how should countries respond to acts of foreign aggression?
One tactic is sanctioning, which applies economic restrictions on a country’s government, businesses, and even individual citizens. In theory, these penalties create enough impact to dissuade further hostility.
Today, the U.S. maintains more sanctions than any other country, and one of its most comprehensive programs is aimed at Russia. To learn more, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu compiled an overview of these sanctions using data from the Congressional Research Service and U.S. Treasury.
Sanctions by Catalyst Event
Sanctions are often introduced after a President issues an executive order (EO) that declares a national emergency. This provides special powers to regulate commerce with an aggressor nation.
Our starting point will be Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, as this is where a majority of ongoing sanctions have originated.
Catalyst: 2014 Ukraine Invasion
On March 18, 2014, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine. This was denounced by the U.S. and its allies, leading them to impose wide-reaching sanctions. President Obama’s EOs are listed below.
Altogether, these sanctions affect 480 entities (includes businesses and government agencies), 253 individuals, 7 vessels, and 3 aircraft.
Sanctions against ships and planes may seem odd, but these assets are often owned by sanctioned entities. For example, in February 2022, France seized a cargo ship belonging to a sanctioned Russian bank.
Catalyst: U.S. Election Interference
The Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have all imposed sanctions against Russia for its malicious cyber activities.
Altogether, these sanctions affect 106 entites, 136 individuals, 6 aircraft, and 2 vessels. A critical target is the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian company notorious for its online influence operations.
Prior to the 2016 election, 3,000 IRA-sponsored ads reached up to 10 million Americans on Facebook. This problem escalated in the run-up to the 2020 election, with 140 million Americans being exposed to propaganda on a monthly basis.
Catalyst: Various Geopolitical Dealings
The U.S. maintains various sanctions designed to counteract Russian influence in Syria, Venezuela, and North Korea.
*These are recent sanctions pursuant to EOs that were issued many years prior. For example, EO 13582 was introduced in August 2011.
These sanctions impact 23 entities, 17 individuals, and 7 vessels. Specific entities include Rosoboronexport, a state-owned arms exporter which was sanctioned for supplying the Syrian government.
As of December 2020, Syria’s government was responsible for the deaths of 156,329 people (civilians and combatants) in the civil war.
Catalyst: Chemical Poisonings of Individuals
The Russian government has been accused of poisoning two individuals in recent years.
The first incident involved Sergei Skripal, a former Russian intelligence officer who was allegedly poisoned in March 2018 on UK soil. The second, Alexei Navalny, a Russian opposition leader, was allegedly poisoned in August 2020.
The Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act) allows sanctions against foreign governments that use chemical weapons. Nine individuals and five entities were sanctioned as a result of the two cases.
Catalyst: 2022 Ukraine Invasion
The U.S. has introduced many more sanctions in response to Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine.
EO 14024, which was issued in February 2022, targets Russia’s major financial institutions and their subsidiaries (83 entities in total). Included in this list are the country’s two largest banks, Sberbank and VTB Bank. Together, they hold more than half of all Russian banking assets.
Also targeted are 13 private and state-owned companies deemed to be critical to the Russian economy. Included in this 13 are Rostelecom, Russia’s largest digital services provider, and Alrosa, the world’s largest diamond mining company.
Do Sanctions Work?
Proving that a sanction was solely responsible for an outcome is impossible, though there have been successes in the past. For example, many agree that sanctions played an important role in ending Libya’s weapons of mass destruction programs.
Critics of sanctions argue that imposing economic distress on a country can lead to unintended consequences. One of these is a shift away from the U.S. financial system.
There is no alternative to the dollar and no export market as attractive as the United States. But if Washington continues to force other nations to go along with policies that they consider both illegal and unwise … they are likely to shift away from the United States’ economy and financial system.
JACOB J. LEW, FORMER SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY
In other words, sanctions can create an impact as long as the U.S. dollar continues to reign supreme.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 20:40 - Hyper-Bitcoinization Is Now Baked-In
Hyper-Bitcoinization Is Now Baked-In
Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,
The game theory dictates that Bitcoin will become a global reserve asset
Some time around 2010 I took a course at the Ben Graham Center for Value Investing at UWO (University of Western Ontario, in London, Canada), taught by the eminent Dr. George Athanassakos. He was the guy who unleashed a shitstorm across corporate Canada and within the corridors the CRA ( Canada’s version of the IRS), when in 2005 he wrote in op-ed in the Globe and Mail on why Bell Canada should convert itself into an income trust. When a company does this, they no longer pay corporate income taxes, and pass income through directly to their unit holders. Doing so would save the mega-conglomerate close to $1B CAD in taxes annually. They decided it was such a good idea they went ahead and announced they would do it. Their rival Telus concurred, actually announcing their conversion even before Bell did. In fact this became somewhat of a trend across boardrooms nationwide.
The political class went ballistic, and it culminated in a tax crackdown on income trusts by the Harper government.
Burning the throne of “King Dollar”
In that course, which was attended by investors as far away as Germany and Japan, I learned two things about conventional finance which completely astounded me at the time. Given the most recent events of this year, the ramifications have finally come home to roost.
The first was an almost off-the-cuff remark by Athanassakos that “all short term debt eventually becomes long term debt”. Being a child of working-class European immigrants, this seemed batshit to me. A prescription for doom. I can’t remember if I mentioned it at the time but I did write it up on an old blog, that debt used to be something you actually paid off.
I referenced a passage from an finance textbook I had from the 40’s, which emphasized the importance of implementing a plan for liquidating debt at the moment it was incurred:
Any corporation, private or governmental, that wishes to provide for a sound and equitable continuity of its business must take steps towards the systematic retirement of debt immediately after it has been incurred. Postponement of all payment for property or priviledges by those who presently enjoy their benefits is calculated to bring uncomfortable consequences to them or those who succeed them.
What happened? August 15th, 1971 happened. The closing of gold convertibility (temporarily) and the birth of the post-Bretton Woods era. From that moment on, debt became perpetual and it had to grow in size. That also meant that interest rates would trend down to the zero bound, and once they got there, they’d effectively be stuck there forever.
The other epiphany from the course was when Dr. Athanassakos was teaching us some intricacies about calculating WACC (cost-of-capital) he referenced the risk-free-rate of interest (textbooks of the day were still using 6%, if you can believe that) and this time I asked, also off-the-cuff (although I believed it on the inside) “What happens when the risk-free-rate is set by an instrument that is no longer risk free?”
He asked me what I meant and I stammered something about unsustainable debt levels, monetary expansion and what if someday the US dollar isn’t regarded as safe enough to be the world reserve currency anymore. Dr. Athanassakos was polite about being dismissive, but I remember getting weird looks from my classmates. From then on I was the class clown.
In hindsight, this institutionalized credulity was understandable. At the time US M2 was only $8T and it had taken an entire decade to double to $16T right before COVID hit.
The situation looks a bit more pronounced when you look at the Fed balance sheet:
So maybe I was a little early on the call that this was all headed for uncharted territory.
Bitcoin had been invented by then, but I was still three years away from clueing into it.
Q1 2022 and the End of Trust
When Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, it was an instant in time that forever changed the global monetary order. It commenced the Post-Bretton Woods Era. One where there were no hard-backed national currencies, they would henceforth all float and jockey for position against each other (in many cases, actually incentivized to devalue themselves).
By Q1 2022 I had of course, fully drank the Bitcoin Kool-Aid and continue to do so. In fact, things have changed so radically in the last six weeks that I am now leaning further toward Bitcoin maximalism, where I wasn’t before. Further, where before I was highly skeptical that Bitcoin would ever become a reserve currency, the way I see it now, it’s a lock.
What happened over the past few weeks was nothing less than the end of the Post Bretton Woods era. That’s not me calling it, others have already done that. I’m agreeing with it. Until fairly recently, the end of the USD’s global reserve currency status simply wasn’t something spoken about in polite company. Policy makers have, through their actions, mainstreamed the idea. The risk now is of being unaware that the monetary regime that has been in place for the past fifty years just ended.
Trudeau deputy PM: “Financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order [if the person supports the truckers]. In doing so, they will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith.” pic.twitter.com/DFzWxkL0dL
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 14, 2022
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(This was the foreshock of the end of the global monetary order)
The moment the Post-Bretton Woods currency era ended.
In the past I viewed Bitcoin as an emergent global “Notgeld”, a German term for “emergency money” that emerged during the Weimer Hyperinflation. As I’d written previously, every hyperinflationary event has its notgeld, whether it’s prepaid phone and gas cards in Zimbabwe, cities printing their own scrip, Venezuelans wrapping gold flakes in worthless Trillion Bolivar banknotes, there’s no end to the ingenuity (and desperation) employed.
My theory was that in an oncoming era where all global currencies were going to hyperinflate simultaneously, Bitcoin would emerge as the global notgeld. And then, I thought, afterwards some kind of global monetary reset would occur. That would probably be some kind of SDR against a basket of hard assets, including gold, but I never imagined that Bitcoin would be a component of that basket.
(To be clear: I still thought Bitcoin would remain important and desirable, especially as a counter-balance against CBDCs that would be inflicted upon the wealthless underclass of the world. But I didn’t think that governments globally would admit a currency that nobody could control to the inner circle.)
Now, all of that has changed
Thanks to Trudeau and Freeland setting precedent that a so-called Western G7 democracy can seize its citizens’ bank accounts with no due process and no appeal for the crime of demanding the reinstatement of their civil rights.
Thanks to the US government seizing the foreign reserves of another country (Afghanistan), not to freeze them until such time as democracy returns, but to actually redistribute them to their own citizens. Those funds were the savings of ordinary Afghan citizens who live under the Taliban, not as part of them.
And finally, thanks to the widespread weaponization of the SWIFT payment system against Russia, the seizure of Russia’s foreign reserves (approximately 100X the amount of Afghanistan’s), not to mention Russia’s implementation of capital controls against its own citizens (again, the ordinary citizens coming up on the short end of the stick).
We have experienced a rapid sequence of events that have forever altered the monetary, financial landscape globally, to wit:
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Citizens can’t trust their own governments to protect their property rights, and
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Governments can no longer trust each other to respect each other’s currency reserves
What we have here is the realization that absolutely no one can be trusted as a third-party intermediary for capital. There is really only one alternative to this situation: that is the mass adoption of a trustless, frictionless digital bearer instrument that can be accessed by everybody, everywhere, no matter what.
And that is Bitcoin.
The original idea of hyperbitcoinization was defined as:
“the inflection point at which Bitcoin becomes the default value system of the world. As more individuals and groups around the world realize the advantages of a borderless, censorship-resistant and natively digital system for transacting value, a critical mass of users will eventually fuel currency demonetization and the replacement of our world’s ingrained financial institutions and world powers with a more equitable, publicly-driven system.”
When I think of it, Bitcoin doesn’t necessarily need to achieve the status of being the default value system of the world. Whatever comes next, I’m sure it will include gold for example. But as I’ve always said, gold and Bitcoin bring different advantages to the same problem.
It’s Bitcoin’s unassailable mobility that make it such a necessary ingredient to the coming era of hard-backed and zero counter-party reserves. People wanting to fund resistance in Ukraine right now are sending Bitcoin, not gold. The Ukraine had already spirited their gold reserves out of the country during the 2014 invasion. (Hopefully they don’t wind up with a government the US dislikes, or those reserves will be gone.)
So while Bitcoin is now at the point where it can fund arming the resistance in The Ukraine, it’s been pointed out that contrary to the histrionics of some policy-makers, it is still too small to help a country like Russia to evade sanctions. That means in order to take its place among the new set of neutral reserve assets that are usable to sovereigns wanting to defend their wealth, things like Bitcoin (and gold) will have to reprice dramatically in fiat terms.
I made my call in 2010 and looked like a clown making it: the USD would not remain risk-free forever.
I’ll make another one now since I’m used to looking crazy: when Bitcoin does reprice into its role as a global reserve asset, we aren’t going to be thinking of it in terms of BTC anymore. We’re going to be obsessing over if/when/buts of USD/satoshi parity.
Welcome to the Post-Post-Bretton Woods era, where third party custody of your wealth is a gun pointed at your head.
Recall the old maxim about trust: once it’s gone, it can be near impossible to regain.
This is now true of the entire global financial system as well as the governments and institutions that prop it up.
* * *
The world is undergoing a monetary regime change. Get the Crypto Capitalist Manifesto free, when you join the Bombthrower mailing list or try our premium research service for crypto investors here.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 20:20 -
- Credit Agencies To Remove "Tens Of Billions Of Dollars" In Medical Debt From Reports
Credit Agencies To Remove “Tens Of Billions Of Dollars” In Medical Debt From Reports
It may not be student loan cancellations, but it’s good news for other debt-laden consumers looking for relief from tarnished credit reports.
Some of the largest credit reporting agencies are going to be removing “tens of billions of dollars” in medical debt from consumers’ credit reports, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.
The change is expected to take place this summer, with Equifax, Experian and TransUnion all participating. About 70% of all medical debt is expected to be removed from credit reports, even debts in collections, as a result of the change.
The agencies said: “This is an important step to support consumers in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. These changes reflect our ongoing commitment to helping facilitate access to fair and affordable credit for all consumers.”
In addition to new, unpaid debts not making their way onto credit reports for a full year after being sent to collections, debts that were previously in collection and have been paid will also be removed from credit reports. Normally, they could stay on reports for up to 7 years, the report says.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has helped catalyze the change, saying in March that it was going to “hold credit-reporting firms accountable for not taking enough action against companies that report erroneous medical debts.”
A TransUnion spokesperson told the WSJ: “As the CFPB is our primary regulator, we have continual engagement with them on a variety of issues.”
Unpaid medical debts of less than $500 will also be removed from credit reports.
The CFPB says that, currently, $88 billion in medical bills is spread across 43 million credit reports.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 20:00 - Joe Biden's 'Transition Away From The Oil Industry' Is Strangling America's Economy
Joe Biden’s ‘Transition Away From The Oil Industry’ Is Strangling America’s Economy
Authored by Levi A. Russell via RealClear Energy (emphasis ours),
The root causes of the economic upheaval most Americans are experiencing right now are the subject of much discussion lately. Is it the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Is it Biden’s closing of the Keystone XL pipeline? Is it the absurd energy policies of the EU? Certainly there is plenty of blame to go around, but the reality is that all of this started in October of 2020. Back then, Trump and Biden were going head to head in debates leading up to the November election. Biden famously stated “I would transition away from the oil industry.”
(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) That statement was a clear signal to energy producers in this country that Biden’s eventual ascent to the presidency would bring unprecedented uncertainty for at least the next four years. Never willing to let a crisis go to waste, the Biden administration went straight to work dismantling the future of our oil and gas refining capacity. His statement in October of 2020 made it clear that his administration would use the massive increase in government control precipitated by the pandemic to massively curtail energy production not in the distant future, but here and now.
Though oil production has rebounded to some extent from the demand-driven crash in 2020, refining and drilling are still well below pre-pandemic levels. The regulatory uncertainty imposed on traditional energy production is simply too great. Biden can complain that these companies aren’t throwing money away to save his poll numbers, but a lifetime politician like him is in no place to criticize those who provide essential goods and services to the American public. Biden’s insistence that his policies have no role in the pain Americans feel right now should fall on deaf ears.
So just how severe is this pain? Carl Quintanilla of CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” shared this graph in a tweet on March 8th in an apparent attempt to put a damper on concerns about gasoline prices. Quintanilla states that the graph represents “gasoline costs, as consumer’s share of wallet” but that’s not entirely correct. For one, the graph clearly states that it takes account of other energy products and that it is computed as a share of “all consumer spending.”
His intended point is obvious enough: Americans shouldn’t complain about high gas prices because, as a share of total spending, gasoline is very low by historical standards. Quintanilla’s comment sounds like the author of the graph added up all the money spent on the various things we buy and compared the dollars spent on fuel to the total. That’s not the case.
A much better representation of the impact on Americans’ wallets would include information about the astronomical inflation we’ve seen in other essential products Americans buy. It would also have a concrete measure of the “wallet” Quintanilla mentions.
The graph below uses data on average production and non-supervisory hourly wages over the past ten years as a baseline gross monthly income. The most recent data available indicates that the average wage for such workers is $26.94 per hour. I assumed that the household drove about 250 miles a week in a car with 20 miles per gallon average fuel efficiency. The blue line shows monthly gasoline expense based on these assumptions using data on conventional gasoline prices. So without regard to income and other expenses Americans have to cover, we are paying about the same now as we were during the high gas price era of Obama’s second term: just under $200 per month.
But what about the total household budget? Haven’t wages risen over the past ten years, making the increased expense less onerous? Production and non-supervisory wages have risen steadily from 2012 to 2022 to the tune of about 3.75% per year. Dividing the monthly gasoline expense by gross monthly income, we get the red line. During the Trump administration, gasoline as a share of income was right around 3.25% of the budget, according to my simple calculations. In 2021, it began to rise again and currently sits as high as it has been for the past 6 years.
Those who are sympathetic to Quintanilla’s point might say that we have validated the graph in his tweet, that American’s aren’t as bad off as many claim. However, this analysis misses the rising cost of nearly everything else in Americans’ household budgets. Starting in mid-2021, prices of staple goods began to skyrocket. The most recent report shows that, compared to this time last year, food and beverage prices rose 7.6%, durable goods prices (such as appliances and cars) rose 18.7%, and overall energy prices rose 25.6%.
Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. While the Federal Reserve contemplates decreases in the money supply to deal with the money component, the Biden administration’s regulatory chaos continues to restrict our ability to produce the things Americans need. Blaming inflation on the Ukraine-Russia conflict, which is also partly his fault, does nothing to alleviate the stranglehold Biden has on our economy.
Levi A. Russell, PhD, is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the School of Business at the University of Kansas.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 19:40 - Egg Prices Soar As Highly Pathogenic Bird Flu Spreads Ahead Of Easter
Egg Prices Soar As Highly Pathogenic Bird Flu Spreads Ahead Of Easter
Add eggs to the growing list of food prices rising at grocery stores. The reason is a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) spreading across the US.
Bloomberg reports HPAI has been detected in commercial poultry operations, backyard farms, and wild flocks up and down the East Coast and across the Midwest since Jan. 26.
The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has monitored the spread rippling through the US. Standard procedures for farms where HPAI has been detected are cull infected flocks. Last week, APHIS said 2.8 million chickens and turkeys died in one month from the virus. At least one million birds were recently culled at a poultry farm in Iowa.
Karyn Rispoli, a poultry market analyst at commodity researcher Urner Barry, warns egg prices are beginning to rise due to lost production. She said peak demand for eggs is underway as Easter fast approaches, pushing prices even higher.
HPAI spreading to more farms, thus triggering more cullings, risks future supply disruptions. As wholesale prices increase, consumers are expected to notice rising egg prices, just as inflation soars to four-decade highs.
Urner Barry data shows wholesale eggs jumped 10 cents to $1.60 a dozen Wednesday, the most significant daily gain since the early days of the virus pandemic. The five-year average for wholesale eggs is around $1.44.
John Brunnquell, CEO of producer Egg Innovations, said prices would continue rising in the coming weeks, and consumers will notice.
“Bidding remains very strong among different egg companies, and so you’re going to see significantly higher” prices at grocery stores, Brunnquell said.
Since the HPAI spread is recent, there’s no telling if it will abate anytime soon. The last outbreak, in 2015, resulted in the culling of 50 million laying hens across 15 states, pushing retail Grade A Egg prices to nearly $3 a dozen. Prices are currently at $2.
Retail prices are at the highest in five years for this time of year.
The largest concern is the spread of HPAI as wild flocks migrate across the country. Even before the emergence of the virus, the 2015 culling has resulted in declines in egg-laying chickens.
“When you layer that on top of that what’s going on with avian influenza, and the precedent of 2015, the impact on the market could be material,” Stephens analyst Ben Bienvenu warned.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 19:20 - Ethereum 2.0 'Merge' Imminent After Successful Test, "Will Lay To Rest" Energy Concerns
Ethereum 2.0 ‘Merge’ Imminent After Successful Test, “Will Lay To Rest” Energy Concerns
With over $30 billion dollars at stake (locked into Ethereum’s proof-of-stake chain), Kiln – an important test for Ethereum 2.0 – just finished and puts the blockchain closer than ever before to the “merge.”
“It’s hard to tell right now what it is,” Tim Beiko, an Ethereum developer, told Fortune.
But “Kiln is, we expect, the last new testnet created solely for the purpose of testing the ‘merge.’ Kiln tried to replicate what will happen [during the ‘merge’] as closely as possible.”
The highly anticipated “merge” is the mechanism that will shift Ethereum from a proof-of-work model to proof of stake.
As Fortune’s Taylor Locke notes, the Kiln testnet proves the “merge” is possible, as Kiln launched under proof of work on Monday and transitioned to a Beacon Chain running proof of stake on Tuesday.
And while crypotoi broadly speaking has rallied this week, Ethereum has accelerate dramatically after Tuesday’s initial tests…
The Ethereum Foundation writes:
“This merge signals the culmination of six years of research and development in Ethereum and will result in a more secure network, predictable block times, and a 99.98%+ reduction in power use when it is released on mainnet later in 2022.”
However, as CoinTelegraph reports, it appears not everything went according to plan during testing.
According to Kiln Explorer, there were several errors relating to contract creation. In a follow-up tweet, Beiko said a client was not producing blocks consistently, though “the network is stable, with >2/3rd of validators correctly finalizing.”
Once it’s executed on the mainnet, Ethereum 2.0, now rebranded the “Consensus Layer,” will be alive and kicking.
ConsenSys CEO and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin is still confident that the next era of Ethereum will arrive within the next few months (“by Q2 or possibly slipping into Q3” of this year).
“The merge is happening, surprisingly, on that same timeframe,” said Lubin during an interview with Decrypt.
“So my estimate stays the same. We have a team working strongly, heavily on it.”
“The merge will lay to rest proof-of-work, will lay to rest Ethereum’s carbon or energy footprint problem, that all goes away,” Lubin said at Camp Ethereal.
“Orders of magnitude less expensive, energetically. And another exciting thing about about moving to proof-of-stake is that proof-of-work requires a lot of issuance of ether in order to incentivize these people with heavy infrastructure, to lend their resources and validate transactions on the network. And so if you have very light infrastructure, then you can issue much less ether per block that’s constructed.”
As a reminder, under the new mechanism, Ethereum validators, like PoW miners, are rewarded for ensuring the network is processing correct transactions. Right now, this reward pays out 5.54% in ETH to stakers, according to data pulled from Staking Rewards.
However, if validators get caught adding fraudulent transactions to the Ethereum blockchain, they get penalized. This penalty is monetary and gets drawn from the 32 Ethereum needed to stake in the first place in order to become a validator.
Bitcoin also uses a PoW mechanism and has caught global criticism for its enormous energy usage. There are no immediate plans to change this.
“This is a major milestone and marks Ethereum’s readiness for full proof of stake,” a Beacon Chain community consultant known as Superphiz tweeted on Monday.
“The merge will cut our energy footprint by 99.98%.”
The ‘merge’ comes nine years after Vitalik Buterin dreamed up Ethereum as a way to leverage the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin for all sorts of uses beyond currency.
But, as TIME reports this week, the Russian-born Canadian has some warnings.
“Crypto itself has a lot of dystopian potential if implemented wrong,”
Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects.
But he acknowledges that his vision for the transformative power of Ethereum is at risk of being overtaken by greed, worrying about the dangers to overeager investors, the soaring transaction fees, and the shameless displays of wealth that have come to dominate public perception of crypto. “The peril is you have these $3 million monkeys and it becomes a different kind of gambling,” he says, referring to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, an überpopular NFT collection of garish primate cartoons that has become a digital-age status symbol for millionaires including Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, and which have traded for more than $1 million a pop. “There definitely are lots of people that are just buying yachts and Lambos.”
Above all, he wants the platform to be a counterweight to authoritarian governments and to upend Silicon Valley’s stranglehold over our digital lives, and with “Consensus Layer”, the arguments against this are fading fast.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 18:40 - Democrats Sue To Disqualify 3 GOP Congressmen From 2022 Ballot, Alleging Role In Insurrection, Election Manipulation
Democrats Sue To Disqualify 3 GOP Congressmen From 2022 Ballot, Alleging Role In Insurrection, Election Manipulation
Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
Democratic Party activists in Wisconsin have filed a suit in federal court arguing that a pro-Trump senator and two pro-Trump congressmen should be barred from office for speaking out on 2020 election irregularities and allegedly attempting to manipulate the congressional certification of the presidential election results.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) speaks at the start of a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on the governments response to the CCP virus outbreak in Washington on March 5, 2020. (Samuel Corum/Getty Images) The Wisconsin Republican lawmakers targeted by the suit are two-term Sen. Ron Johnson, two-term Rep. Tom Tiffany, and freshman Rep. Scott Fitzgerald. All are seeking reelection in November.
The suit claims the lawmakers cannot serve in Congress because the disqualification clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment forbids it. That rarely invoked constitutional provision was enacted in the wake of the Civil War to keep former Confederates out of Congress.
Johnson dismissed the lawsuit, telling The Epoch Times it is “total nonsense.”
“Democrats have ignored the Summer 2020 riots and relentlessly used January 6th [2021] as a political cudgel,” Johnson said in an emailed statement. “Now, they’ve used January 6th to file a frivolous lawsuit against me, similar to the one dismissed by a court last week.”
The lawsuit claims the lawmakers “used their public positions of authority to illegally foment an atmosphere meant to intimidate and pressure Vice President [Mike] Pence and Congress to take actions inconsistent with the facts and with their duties under the Electoral Count Act and the U.S. Constitution.”
The lawmakers used “their powers as public officials and their respective bully pulpits to undermine public trust in the outcome of the election and to enable a criminal scheme to institute fraudulent electors (in Wisconsin and elsewhere) to manufacture a constitutional crisis on January 6, 2021, over how to count the electoral ballots.”
The legal action claims the lawmakers illegally pressured Pence, in his role as presiding officer at the joint session of Congress certifying the 2020 electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021, to “unilaterally reject the legitimate electoral votes of Wisconsin and six other states for the Biden–Harris ticket.”
On Jan. 6, 2021, there was a security breach at the U.S. Capitol in which supporters of then-President Donald Trump delayed the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election results for several hours. Democrats and some Republicans characterize the disturbance, from which some elected officials took cover, as an insurrection or coup attempt aimed at overthrowing the U.S. government, a claim that has been adamantly denied by Trump and his supporters.
Democrats have attempted to use the disqualification clause to take two other sitting federal lawmakers off the 2022 ballot for their pro-Trump activities. While the challenges to Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) have both failed, a ruling in the Cawthorn case is under appeal.
The 80-page legal complaint (pdf) in the case at hand, Stencil v. Johnson, court file 2:22-cv-305, was filed March 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Nancy A. Stencil is one of 10 plaintiffs, all of whom are registered Wisconsin voters.
According to the complaint, the lawmakers “engaged in overt acts in furtherance of a conspiracy meant to foment public distrust in the outcome of the 2020 election, undermine the rule of law, and assist an insurrection against the United States with the illegal goal of reversing the results of the election that made Joseph R. Biden the 46th President of the United States.”
The three lawmakers’ “falsehoods … about the integrity of Wisconsin’s election procedures began even before citizens were allowed to cast their ballots in the 2020 Presidential Election and continued long after their lies were disproven.” The lawmakers “repeatedly proclaimed lies about the election and its results, and those lies increased in frequency and intensity as January 6, 2021, approached.”
Fitzgerald also is accused in the complaint of supporting an alternate slate of Trump electors. He allegedly procured a room for “ten fraudulent electors from Wisconsin [who] met at the State Capitol on December 14, 2020, the date designated by law” for electoral votes to be cast, the complaint states.
One of the plaintiffs’ lawyers told The Epoch Times the lawsuit isn’t frivolous.
“Lawsuits are made up of facts and legal claims,” attorney Joseph S. Goode said by email.
“The judge overseeing this case gets to decide how the law applies to the facts as our adversarial system provides. Every fact in our pleading is based on matters of public record. We look forward to litigating the case to fruition.”
The legal challenge is being underwritten by the Minocqua Brewing Company Super PAC. In a March 13 statement on the left-wing political action committee’s website, founder Kirk Bangstad estimates the lawsuit “could cost $300,000 to fight over the next six months.”
Bangstad is also the owner of the Minocqua Brewing Co., makers of “progressive beers” such as Biden Beer, Bernie Brew, AOC IPA, and Filibuster Ale.
“This lawsuit is BY FAR the biggest thing we’ve ever done, but it’s also the most important and 100% central to our mission of getting rid of Wisconsin’s traitors,” he wrote.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 18:20 - China Eases Shenzhen Lockdown To Allow Manufacturing To Resume
China Eases Shenzhen Lockdown To Allow Manufacturing To Resume
Following yesterday’s revelation that the CCP – apparently worried about the economic backlash from its latest round of lockdowns (which had affected more than 50M people at the peak) – was moving to scale back COVID restrictions that had impacted manufacturing and shipping, the SCMP reported Friday that China’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen had lifted restrictions in five districts, saying the COVID outbreak is now mostly under control, as President Xi and the CCP pledged to take steps to support businesses in areas that are still under lockdown.
Shenzhen is the largest (and economically the most consequential) of the Chinese cities under lockdown.
You will find more infographics at StatistaShenzhen reported 69 symptomatic cases and 36 asymptomatic cases on Thursday. The cases were mainly found among people in quarantine and places under restrictions. Nationwide, China logged more than 4,100 local infections for the day, which is higher than levels from a week ago, but lower than the two-year peak of 5,000+ cases recorded earlier this week.
The SCMP quoted one female worker at an office in one of Shenzhen’s industrial districts said that she had been allowed to return to the office, and that restrictions on movement in the area had been lifted.
A resident of Guangming, Shenzhen’s northwestern industrial district, said life and work is back to normal since she has been able to return to her office after working from home for four days. She noted that she still has to scan a QR code to enter her office building and participate in mass testing.
Of course, apart from firms offering essential public services – and those ensuring daily supplies are delivered to Shenzhen and neighboring Hong Kong – all other companies will need to follow the work-from-home policy or suspend operations.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reports that, despite the order to ease the lockdown measures, queues of trucks have started to form at container terminals in Shenzhen as the lockdown measures continue to hamper the transportation of goods. Shipping line Hapag-Lloyd issued a customer advisory Thursday. The slowdown potentially impacted 13 container vessels at the port of Yantian, which were potentially affected by factory shutdowns and reduced availability of truck drivers as of Wednesday.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 18:00 - Lawyer For Mother Of Hunter Biden's Daughter Says He Expects President's Son To Be Indicted
Lawyer For Mother Of Hunter Biden’s Daughter Says He Expects President’s Son To Be Indicted
The past few weeks have been tough for Hunter Biden and, by extension, the rest of the Biden family. On March 1, news broke that Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner and friend Devon Archer was sentenced to a year in federal prison for defrauding a Native American tribe. Then just yesterday, the New York Times published an investigation revealing that although the younger Biden had paid his outstanding tax liability – which was reportedly greater than $1 million, and which required him to take out a loan to pay it off – a federal investigation into his failure to pay taxes on his earnings from overseas has continued.
Much lower in the NYT story, America’s “paper of record” mentioned the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that was reportedly abandoned at a computer repair shop, and subsequently became the heart of a NY Post story published shortly before the 2020 election (which was subsequently ignored by the MSM because of unfounded rumors that the materials had been stolen by Russian hackers, or that the laptop itself was some kind of plant). It didn’t only mention the laptop, but also confirmed that it was authentic. We previously reported on how the NYT sued to obtain copies of emails mentioning Biden and his exploits allegedly gleaned from Romanian embassy officials.
And in the latest blow to the reputation of the president’s perennially troubled son, a lawyer for the mother of Hunter Biden’s 3-year-old daughter (who was born out of wedlock to a woman who allegedly slept with the younger Biden while working as an exotic dancer) said during an interview with CNBC that he expects the younger Biden “to be indicted” for tax fraud.
Attorney Clint Lancaster told CNBC that his client, Lunden Roberts, had recently testified in Delaware before a federal grand jury in the criminal investigation into the 52-year-old presidential scion. The lawyer based his commentary on “what I saw” in Biden’s financial records.
Lancaster said he and Roberts were interviewed by an assistant U.S. attorney, an FBI agent and an IRS agent — “one that carries a badge and gun” — more than a year ago about Biden in Little Rock, Ark., where Lancaster practices law.
“I expect him to be indicted,” the lawyer said about Biden. “Just based on what I saw in his financial records, I would be surprised if he’s not indicted.”
Lancaster later added that neither he nor his client want Hunter Biden to go to jail.
“It’s not my goal, much to the unhappiness of many people in the Republican Party,” said Lancaster, a supporter of former President Donald Trump who in late 2020 worked on a legal challenge to results that showed Biden had won the state of Wisconsin that year.
He also confirmed that the younger Biden hadn’t visited his 3-year-old daughter with Roberts, “which is sad because the baby looks like him, with blonde hair.” He also explained that he had come into possession of a vast trove of the younger Biden’s financial records as part of his work on Roberts’ child-support suit. When asked about the number of records, Lancaster said it was around “10 gigs of data”.
“Oh, hell, it was a bunch,” said Lancaster when asked how many records there were related to Hunter Biden’s finances. The documents were part of the case file for an Arkansas court child-support lawsuit that Roberts filed against Biden in 2019 in connection with their daughter.
“They’re all in electronic form,” Lancaster said. “I would estimate it was anywhere from 10 gigs of data.”
“I saw a lot of information” that is “problematic” for Biden, he said.
Finally, Lancaster told CNBC that his client hadn’t received immunity before testifying because she hadn’t committed any crimes. The NYT on Thursday reported that Roberts had been questioned about the provenance of the child support payments she had received from Biden. Prosecutors were apparently investigating whether the same corporate entity from which she received the payments was also used by Biden to receive payments from Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company from which he received a salary of $50K per month just for sitting on its board.
Given all the information on the investigation that’s just come to light, we wouldn’t be surprised if the grand jury hearing the evidence is soon asked to vote on whether federal charges should be brought against the younger Biden. His father, the president, has already recused himself from the case as his DoJ has continued with the investigation. If charges are brought and Hunter Biden is convicted (or pleads guilty), his father would then have the option of pardoning him. From this vantage point, it’s not too difficult to imagine a scenario where Biden pardons his son after deciding not to seek another term in office.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 17:44 - Florida Governor Announces Additional $289 Million To 'Improve Student Achievement And Close Learning Gaps'
Florida Governor Announces Additional $289 Million To ‘Improve Student Achievement And Close Learning Gaps’
Authored by Patricia Tolson via The Epoch Times,
During a 10:30 a.m. press conference at the City of Hialeah Educational Academy in Hialeah, Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced an additional $289 million will be set aside for “programs that will improve student achievement and close learning gaps.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a press conference at the Miami Dade College’s North Campus in Miami, Fla., on Jan. 26, 2022. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images) One day after DeSantis signed SB 1048—a bill that transitions from Florida Standards Assessments testing into progress monitoring—and two days after the Florida Senate passed a record-breaking $112.1 billion state budget proposal, DeSantis announced a fully-funded $289 million program that will provide children with opportunities to seek career options outside of academic disciplines by offering certification programs in high-demand, high-skilled career fields such as law enforcement, nursing, and fire rescue. These are the career fields that suffered personnel losses during lockdowns imposed due to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus. Another Florida education program, STEM, guides children toward careers in “science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”
DeSantis said “there’s a huge, huge demand” in nursing and anyone going into the field is going “to have a lot of opportunities as they get beyond school.”
According to DeSantis, the new $289 million education and career program includes $105 million for “after school, weekend and summer learning camps that will help struggling students catch up.” Another $47 million will be available to purchase curriculum that falls in line with Florida’s new standards in English, math, civics, and Holocaust education. DeSantis said another $50 million is earmarked for reading intervention and professional development for reading coaches, citing how “early literacy is the key.”
“If you have kids at third grade that are reading up to grade level, those kids are likely going to be fine” and “have a pathway to college, if that’s what they want to do,” DeSantis said. But if a child “is deficient by third grade,” their future opportunities diminish.
As The Epoch Times reported Jan. 2, America’s education system is failing as the goals for maintaining high academic standards are being replaced with a focus on social constructs like critical race theory and social-emotional learning. Recent government data shows the average fourth grader has only a 41 percent proficiency level in mathematics. By the eighth grade, that proficiency level drops to 34 percent. By the twelfth grade, the average American student has a proficiency level of only 24 percent in math.
STEM programs will receive $44 million, an additional $22.5 million will fund programs to help parents reinforce what’s being taught in classrooms at home, and another $5 million will help establish regional mental health resiliency teams to support districts with delivering services to students.
“This is an example of really meeting needs that exist in a really big way,” DeSantis said.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/18/2022 – 17:40
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